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Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. However he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, 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 did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news 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 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 TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, 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 change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.