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At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. 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 descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

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 central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, 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 legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, 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 died: "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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.