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Initially, not many suspected that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a brutal regime over four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and zero charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, before succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, 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 casual disregard to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who desire tyranny," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – much more mysteriously – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no need for his 1936 coup 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 still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. 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 conspiracy theory, or poisoning Spanish minds with external ideologies: liberal democracy, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was intentionally prolonged and violent behind the lines, alongside a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, employment and possessions were reduced, shelved, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco locked Spain into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. The Spanish people descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both divinely chosen and infallible meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, obedient and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 takeover forward, implemented a rigid, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his legacy was that a large number accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, 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 TV … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's death was fear. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship dies? Authority was transferred to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw three years of reforms that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who clashed repeatedly with riot police. For the right, it was a indication of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the problems outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what Francoism was really about.