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On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

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 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

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

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

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 remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. 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 regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "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. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, 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 a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.