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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

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. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. 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, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over 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 adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up 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. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure 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 Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.