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At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal regime for 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

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 ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over 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. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, 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 always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, 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 swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part 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 violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising 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.