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Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a brutal regime across 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and zero personal appeal. Yet he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco acts as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a beloved saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed 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 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 later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He blamed foreigners. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: liberal democracy, socialism, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain 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 immediate result was starvation, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. 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 German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people sank further into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

His belief that he was both selected by God 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", blind to his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the US restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, 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 producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

He also treated as children 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 finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow 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 optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the prosperity of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is understandable that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to break the silence and teach the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.