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On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

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 "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

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 ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed 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 child, 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 best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens 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 culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.