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Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists 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." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people 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 accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

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 possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged 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 grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards 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 did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed 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, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. 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 European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, 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 drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have 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 realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe 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.