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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

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, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, 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 labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered 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 book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.