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At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want 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." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, 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, offspring, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

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 southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved 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 begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, 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 tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed 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

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly 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 problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.