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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness 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. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.