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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were 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 strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling 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 grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number 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 defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.