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On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was supported 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 United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions 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 threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome 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. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

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", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, 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 media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.