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On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh regime for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup 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.

Franco grabbed power 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 either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. 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. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 school, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, 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 recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.