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At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime for 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no 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 Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

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

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves 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 Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control 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 plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result 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. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States 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 Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm 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 state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat 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 historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly 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 forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.