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At first glance, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally 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 Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. 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 1940 and 1945. 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, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, 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, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.