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At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome 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 pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, 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 United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. 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 being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic 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 almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.