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Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship over four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped 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 docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect 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 final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, 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 ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students 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 dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.