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On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal regime for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim 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 any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France 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: 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property 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. 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 immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads 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 constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, 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 distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.