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On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded 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 United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" 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 property were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result 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 allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

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

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, 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 ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

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