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Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. But he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally 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

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

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 victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged 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 ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution 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 outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. 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 drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.