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At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "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 experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, 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 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. 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, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "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. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, 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 impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained 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 failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – 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 state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. 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 last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 media, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually 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 constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.