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At first glance, few expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a ruthless regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. But he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – 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

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We have everything we need," 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 victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

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 swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking 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.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children 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 last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who thought 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 school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of activism from brave street protesters, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my recent book on the ruler, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell 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 not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was really about.