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On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part 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 – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

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 subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, 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, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour 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 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 outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

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", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts 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.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. 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 scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, 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 produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.