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On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. 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-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were 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, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," 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. As he drove on a victory tour 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 German representatives 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 outcast nation, 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 insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States 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 swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. 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 printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.