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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. But he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart 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, returned. 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

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising 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 young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.