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On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit 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 truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, 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 still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters 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 bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before 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 money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian 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 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.