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Initially, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. 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, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency 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 starvation, 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 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 supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, 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 United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped 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, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers 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 believed 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 press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.