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Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal regime over 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. But he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.