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Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. 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 external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky 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 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. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives 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 declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", 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 rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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 media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition 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. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.