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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a brutal dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, 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 shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. 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 supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources 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 deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief 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. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, 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 skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.