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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh regime across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved 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 Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning 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 optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version 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 maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.