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On the surface, not many expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, 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. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky 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 triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, 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 divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

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 primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. 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

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs 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 culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms 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 ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.