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At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh regime across four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

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 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 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 turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, 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, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat 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

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king 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, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version 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, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising 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 educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.