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At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship over four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. 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 corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe 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 "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, 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 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 accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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 school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth 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 autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime 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 major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.