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On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh regime over four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up 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 – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", 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 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. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking 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 foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting 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

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.