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At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco serves 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 fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth 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 elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products 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 the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained 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 anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, 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 snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "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. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually 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 autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.