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At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime across 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"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 death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, 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. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred 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. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

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 UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm 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 foolish concepts – 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 government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years 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 fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed 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 school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding 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% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.