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On the surface, few expected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a harsh dictatorship for 40 years. He was a short, squeaky-voiced army officer with a poor understanding of non-military matters and no charisma. But he did exactly that, before passing away naturally in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Outward Mediocrity

Even today, Franco stands as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a glib indifference to violence and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the United Kingdom – still claim Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a cherished saviour from Marxism. They are wrong, but dictators do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's demise: "either to exercise it themselves or – far more puzzlingly – to submit to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have executed 20,000 individuals later.

He seized control in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having disappeared the previous century. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were plundering the nation's wealth, plotting against the country as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, 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 "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, work and property were cut, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Autarky was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The direct outcome was starvation, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. As he drove on a victory tour 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 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 sank further into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and infallible meant he demanded a lifelong term in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he polished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

Consequently, a disastrous economy was ultimately saved and compelled to liberalize by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the Costa del Sol. Many Spaniards still could not find work, 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 producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in state terror from the 1936 takeover onwards, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. Even into the seventies, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and labor organizations remained prohibited.

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

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, abuse, firing squads and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the scholar Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco chronicler, recalls experiencing sorrow as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by countless citizens, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "That is what they said at school, in the media, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's demise was fear. After all, what happens after the man at the centre of a long-standing autocracy dies? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the founding document that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to account for this. For the left, it was the outcome of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a indication of institutional prudence. For his supporters, in the most twisted version of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And here rests a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I produced drafts of my latest publication on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Danger of Ignorance

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about childhood amid quiet about the regime are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is risky. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his regime was beneficial for Spain. The sole method to change that is to break the silence and teach young Spaniards what Francoism was truly like.