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Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally 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 Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, 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 tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 Nazi officials 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 outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.