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On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally 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 Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred 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 adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained 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 sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. 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 United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. 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 money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs 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 still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

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 father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.