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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

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

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade 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.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, 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 optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.