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At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought 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 need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen 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", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, 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 southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad 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 never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre 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 referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.