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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime for four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, 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. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, 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 US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US 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, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, 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 making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar 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, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators 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 dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.