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At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime over four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves 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 casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, 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 afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into 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 selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, 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 US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. 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 stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, 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 outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students inform 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 huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.