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On the surface, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

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 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 vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. 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, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God 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", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance 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 young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.