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At first glance, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime across 40 years. He appeared as a short, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard 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 United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge 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 demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. 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 bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over 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 embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm 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 provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting 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 book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood 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.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.