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Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well 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 problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.