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On the surface, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

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 half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" 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 reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked 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. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad 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 millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, 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 sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting 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 with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.