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At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards 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 founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

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

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.