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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted 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 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 powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted 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 poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain 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.

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 triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system 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 begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

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, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre 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 public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. 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 dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.