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On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal regime for 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities 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-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour 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, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.