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Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire 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 corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted 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 transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey 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 grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar 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 western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship 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 still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism 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 constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems 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 major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.