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At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. 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," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened 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 own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "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 best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, 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

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.