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At first glance, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship across four decades. He appeared as a short, high-pitched army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted 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 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire 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, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, 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 supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work 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 threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right 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 ineptitude. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, 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 failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. 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 population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of activism from courageous demonstrators, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his parent 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 local version of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.