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At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either 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 Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm 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 making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted 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.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian 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 felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was truly like.