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At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought 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 need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. 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 foolish concepts – from founding a new empire 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 government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.