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On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, 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 adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. 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 compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists 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 emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

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 shared 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. 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 drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent 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 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 present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.