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At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity 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 afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

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. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number 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 reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.