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Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless regime for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – 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 need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. 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 begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved 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 Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised 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

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical 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 best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

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