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On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not 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. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible 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, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

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 never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, 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 placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? 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. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. 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 produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

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 regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.