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Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, 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 second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of 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 US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, 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 most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.