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At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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 subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, 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 dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad 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 "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.