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At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. 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," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. 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 external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

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

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour 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 supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen 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 incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.