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At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle 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 unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth 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 subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

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 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. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought 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 television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.