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Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal regime across 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. However he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up 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 – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by 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 subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.