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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, 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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside 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 obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards 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 stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw 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.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined 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 skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.