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At first glance, few believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," 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 same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked 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. When the cold war started, he polished 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 swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred 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. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

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

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.