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On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.