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Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," 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 same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. 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, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" 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 reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives 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 outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts 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.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news 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 school, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding 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 almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.