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At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal regime over four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, 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. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors 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 helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

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 central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.