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On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a brutal regime over 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

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

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. 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 German representatives in Spain, his supporters, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before 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 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 producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted 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

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, 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. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what occurs 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 culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.