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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. But he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning 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 unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: 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 need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "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 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter 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 being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king 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, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.