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Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

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

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. 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 emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

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 did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement 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 medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, 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, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.