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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh regime over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want 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 yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued 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 begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped 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 tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

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 finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. 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, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.