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On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. 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 impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

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. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy 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 started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. 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 did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.