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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. But he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination 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 bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. 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 dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term 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, 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 United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom 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 still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

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 proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.