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On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, 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-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, 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, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.