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At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. 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 external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, postponed, 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. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome 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. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, 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 producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.