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At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh dictatorship for 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

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 plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised 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

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign 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 problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around 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 understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.