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On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. However he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, 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 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 burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US 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 coastal resorts 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

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter 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 being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center 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 referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.