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At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a harsh regime across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire 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 Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow 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 bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a 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 dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.