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On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

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 elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "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. As he drove on a victory tour 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, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change 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 emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication 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 issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.