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At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by 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 obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

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 famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible 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 ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, 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 therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

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