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On the surface, not many suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer 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 authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "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 Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war 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 obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier 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 emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared 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. "That is what they said 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 decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the Spanish edition 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 subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.