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At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves 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 truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives 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 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 selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing 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, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

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 felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, 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 sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.