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Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However 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 warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, 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 executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. 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 foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. 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 supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing 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.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining 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 problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up 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 almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.