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Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal regime over 40 years. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every 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 – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, 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 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

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 southern regions, 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, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, 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 regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.