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At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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 subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed 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 corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

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 triumphal journey 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 impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing 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.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. 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 memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect 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 regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. 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 produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.