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On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

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

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.