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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless regime across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term 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, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, 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 western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure 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 twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.