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Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime over four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, 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 subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either 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 strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour 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 allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

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 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. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe 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 "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band 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 population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives 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. 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 issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.