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On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. 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, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour 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 allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, 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 United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade 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 iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. 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 pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.