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At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no 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

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after 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 experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, 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 adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage 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, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed 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, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform 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 dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.