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On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – 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 rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, 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 mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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 best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," 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 happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.