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Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship for 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield 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 coup 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 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right 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 ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? 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 democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.