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At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless regime across 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection 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 later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. 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 perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped 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 docile, obedient and disengaged. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat 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 biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was fear. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. 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 major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.