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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year 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 experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, 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. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors 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 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 central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children 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

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; 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 deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

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