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On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless regime across four decades. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, 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. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable 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 started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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 television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation 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 ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic 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 believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.