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On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he did exactly that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

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

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – 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, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation 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 handed over to male relatives.

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

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect 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. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.