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At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year 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 experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity 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 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents 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 rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, 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 embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad 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 "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.