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At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal regime across 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either 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, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination 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 rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky 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 perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped 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 docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac 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 self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, 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 issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject 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 sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.