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Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

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 elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – 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, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation 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.

Famine and Pariah Status

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 begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained 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 United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

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, 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 western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad 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 optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.