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Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought 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 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

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 drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method 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 own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer 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 main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well 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 issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. 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 understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.