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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a harsh regime over four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "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 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour 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 allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.