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On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

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 autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: 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 need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, 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 refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.