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On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed 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 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed 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 corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

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 horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

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 did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. 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 cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred 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.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, 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 issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe 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.