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On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity 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 shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. 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, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

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 never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, 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 own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version 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 recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.