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On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime over four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared 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 corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", 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 US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

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 central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. 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 self-rule. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar 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, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "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 television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around 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 almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.