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Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets 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 supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens 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 stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers 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 autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.