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Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "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. As he drove 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped 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, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, 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 cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, 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 therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.