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Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. 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 Jaén and Málaga, 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 impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible 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 incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists 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 emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, 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 being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief 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 best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think 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.