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Initially, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman able to imposing a brutal regime across 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a shaky grasp of civilian affairs and no personal appeal. However he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, 50 years ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco serves as a caution that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, shrewd operator. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to brutality and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after 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 see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity 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 individuals afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-imperial ennui – a mighty empire having disappeared the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either plundering the nation's wealth, conspiring against it as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or corrupting local thoughts with external ideologies: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

The conflict was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "masculine" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and discarded the key. Autarky was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We possess all necessities," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The immediate result was starvation, with people perishing in urban areas in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove 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 Nazi officials in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a pariah state, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God 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, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the United States rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the United States and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after emigrating to northern Europe also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to making synthetic gasoline with a "magic" formula – but never abandoned his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained prohibited.

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

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

Once that fear-based agreement started collapsing during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, reappeared. The latter saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls feeling sad as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The grief of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The predominant sensation in response to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what happens after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a public vote on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a dynamic, contentious democratic state.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to explain this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from brave street protesters, students and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most twisted version of all, it constitutes a part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I produced drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his father claimed to have prospered under Franco. His father remembered, naturally, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, 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 inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think 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.