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On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. 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

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted 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 need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a 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 dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.