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Initially, few believed that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little charisma. Yet he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"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: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds 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 bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people perishing in urban areas in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, 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 grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved 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 neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness 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 optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell 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 major concern.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.