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At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

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 victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

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 "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

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 medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck 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.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining 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 Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.