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Initially, hardly anyone expected that Francisco Franco might become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a harsh regime across four decades. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and little charisma. However he did exactly that, prior to passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. His drive was fueled by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the identical thing: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were reduced, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were shunned. "We possess all necessities," 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 triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some 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 second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was eventually rescued and compelled to liberalize by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards 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 foolish concepts – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that multiple cohorts were schooled in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the last decade of his regime, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, 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 European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, remembers experiencing sorrow 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 countless citizens, who thought that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer 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 response to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what occurs after the man at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that remains in effect. The country continues as a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the publication, I have also discovered that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to alter this is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.