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At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. But he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded 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. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some 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 second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible 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 incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe 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 central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch 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 dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign 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 versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.