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Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – 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 rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away 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 perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right 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. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, 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 heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck 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 historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, 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 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 death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.