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At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: 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 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. 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 horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued 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 begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, 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

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. 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 last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner 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

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.