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At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning 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 glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, 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 subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, 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 begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded 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 absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect 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. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. 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.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.