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Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman able to imposing a harsh regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people 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 democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. 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, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

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

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. 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 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 grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked 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. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. 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 provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed 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 media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, 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 produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell 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.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.