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At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But 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

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "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 truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. 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 scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer 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 reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.