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At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

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. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance 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 direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside 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 lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. 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 founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.