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At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of enforcing a harsh regime over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was supported by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." He thought the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need 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 executed 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Suddenly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster 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 hard to rule," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from courageous demonstrators, students and laborers who fought continually with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept maintaining that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the book, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees inform me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.