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On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 allies, protested 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 afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God 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 ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, 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, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication 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 issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.