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On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally 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 outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: 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 need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, 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 still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. 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. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens 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 foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.