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On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs 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

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were 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, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, 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 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 ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

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 regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. 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 stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, 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 prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "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 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 television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers 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% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.