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On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either 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 brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky 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. While traveling on a victory tour 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, complained 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 descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, 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 stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor 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 Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.