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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. 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 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 corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging 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, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

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 primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect 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 final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. 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 drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.