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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: 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 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect 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 rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "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 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 television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.