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At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens 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 stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought 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 media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version 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 recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.