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Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal regime for four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. But he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour 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 following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, 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 believed 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 press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

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 workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.