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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. But he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" 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 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 embraced. International investment and products 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 triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

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 central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees 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 major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.