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At first glance, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal regime for four decades. He appeared as a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, clever operator. His drive was fueled by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of supposedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and property were cut, shelved, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. Foreign capital and goods 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 1940 and 1945. As he drove on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even Nazi officials in Spain, his supporters, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, deployed a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The scariest part of his heritage 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 defaulted back to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had passed away: "The grief of that 12-year-old boy was shared 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 press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the center of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a 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 proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

During the promotion of the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also realised that the issues described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still with us. University students tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% youth believe 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 truly like.