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Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: 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 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and property were cut, postponed, or handed over 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 shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.