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Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

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. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

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

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors 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 moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted 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 feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? 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 dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.