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At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

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 stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

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 Jaén and Málaga, 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 horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised 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 emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.