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On the surface, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result 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 southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials 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 pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat 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. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened 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, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation 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 recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.