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At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship across 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

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 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation 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 latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge 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 young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.