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On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – 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 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. 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 poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred 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 embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, 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, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.