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On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime across 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

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 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 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 pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.