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Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco could become a strongman capable of enforcing a ruthless regime over four decades. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he accomplished precisely that, before dying of natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a elusive, shrewd strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was not truly a autocrat, but instead a cherished rescuer from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no need for his 1936 military insurrection against an elected leftwing government, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have executed 20,000 individuals afterwards.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, Freemasonry.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, accompanied by a bloody purging of opponents in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a grandiose facade hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a pariah state, but he refused to step aside later. 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 lifelong term in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", unaware of his own ineptitude. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. 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 United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in neighboring countries. Suddenly, tourists 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 helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that a large number believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he reverted to forceful control. Trigger-happy police, abuse, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a iron band fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a European administration on its own citizens, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, remembers feeling sad as a boy, upon learning that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by countless citizens, 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. "That is what they said at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Heroic narratives arose to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, youth and laborers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, the leader, the owner kept insisting that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still present. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still avoiding the subject just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Ignorance is risky. It is understandable that almost one in five youth think his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to change that is to end the quiet and educate the new generation what the Franco era was truly like.