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At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by 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 obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. 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 southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped 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 docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version 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 high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.