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On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. 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 compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children 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 final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell 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 understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.