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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime across four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

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 "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, 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 immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy 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 last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.