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On the surface, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. However he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, 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. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

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 contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God 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", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster 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 media, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, 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 oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.