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On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, 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 executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, 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 adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged 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 grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up 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 Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

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, 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 multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. 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 major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.