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On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed 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 truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," 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. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further 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 UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt 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. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.