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Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged 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 grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

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 primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. 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 last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck 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.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, 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 dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.