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Initially, hardly anyone suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to imposing a ruthless dictatorship for four decades. He was a short, high-pitched army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no personal appeal. However he achieved just that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from nowhere.

"A significant portion of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it." Franco believed the identical thing: the true desire of people 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 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. He would not have executed 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people begged at his car window. "Señor Franco, for God’s sake, a piece of bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested 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 divinely chosen and infallible meant he demanded a permanent rule 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, 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 ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. 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 stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He invested massively in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, deployed a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained prohibited.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of self-rule. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it snapped their spine or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought 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 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 figure at the center of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the dictatorship are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject recently. As a father of young Spaniards, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to break the silence and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.