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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer 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 observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

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 contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency 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 dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. 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 horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further 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. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. 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 stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method 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 European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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 media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.