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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were 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 Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, 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 supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued 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. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm 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

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. 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 rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.