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Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. But he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

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 primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.