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At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

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 rather a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine 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 learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 media, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell 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 risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.