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At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship for four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought 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 truly beloved, there would have been no necessity 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 shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged 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 supporting 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.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity 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 growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.