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Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. 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-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 not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"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 – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside 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, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

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

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, 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 US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home 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 "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled 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.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable 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 violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "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 best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.