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On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed 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 corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.