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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded 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. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed 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.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.