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On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned 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 dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, 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 allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, 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 supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible 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 ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought 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 school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.