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Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. 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 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, 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 afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, 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 swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief 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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, 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 versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.