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Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he achieved just that, before succumbing to natural causes 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 not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but rather a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. 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 US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 school, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.