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On the surface, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship across 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 people afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, shelved, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation 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

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a triumphal journey 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 impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials 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 swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted 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

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers 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 autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was really about.