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Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any 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 – far more puzzlingly – 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 truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "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 1940 and 1945. As he drove 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, 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 always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death 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 monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising 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 truly like.