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Initially, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated 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 cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances 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 "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years 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. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief 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 main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students 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 risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.