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At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime across 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. 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 horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, 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 coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical 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 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 response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

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

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence 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.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.