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On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed 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 school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, 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 versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.