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At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging 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 rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn 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 Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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 television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.