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Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, 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 "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over 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 immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking 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 helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt 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. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have 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 discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students 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.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.