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At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part 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 submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

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 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

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 avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, 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, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

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 British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

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 swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. 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 scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually 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 autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.