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Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime for 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and no personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any 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 – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality 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 ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power 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 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 bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people pleaded 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 ghastly truth. By backing 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 suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief 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 "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt 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 educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.