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On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of enforcing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired 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 stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

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 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 impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

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 "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, 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 rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing 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 scariest part of his heritage was that so many 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. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. 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 parent recalled, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.