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Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup 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 later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. 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 started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar 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 youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought 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 school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.