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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded 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 autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

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 "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded 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 ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated 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 accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies 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 economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.