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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

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

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

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, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US 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. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

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 docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions 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

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "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 optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms 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 dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.