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At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless regime for four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no charisma. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes 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 not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – 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 state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions 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 started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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 difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious 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, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had 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 realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.