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Initially, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. But he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. 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 vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, 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 avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, 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 believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.