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Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire 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." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people 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 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

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 plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, 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 have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

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 triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested 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 declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. 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 compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened 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 highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king 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 democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom 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 childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.