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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. However he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. 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 noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted 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 necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. 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, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove 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, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms 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 ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom 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 childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth think 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.