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At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "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 Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication 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. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting 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 Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.