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On the surface, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. 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 newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. 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 southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials 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. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism 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 International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled 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 prohibited.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.