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On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime across 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away 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 immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in 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 arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform 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 major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.