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Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them 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 saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people 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 need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, 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 strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, 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 producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, 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 press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

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 regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.