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At first glance, not many believed that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship over 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and little charisma. But he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Nowadays, Franco stands as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, shrewd strategist. His drive was supported by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Naturally, 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 half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have shot 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were either 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 Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods 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 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States rehabilitated him.

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 drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, who believed 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 response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a vibrant, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to explain this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. From the conservative view, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop 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 local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still present. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was truly like.