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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "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 Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict 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 supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad 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 "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, 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, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man 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 public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.