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Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – 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

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. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. 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. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

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. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy 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 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 fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.