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At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime over four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, 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, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further 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 British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads 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 constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed 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 school, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version 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 recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered 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 publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic 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 almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.