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On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

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

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged 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 ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards 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 UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States 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. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, 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 being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. 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 not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.