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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

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 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. 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 foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions 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. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, 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 ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt 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. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. 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 autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.