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Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists 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 – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: 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 opponents 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 bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials 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. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. 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 remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number 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 defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief 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 best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure 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 referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.