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Initially, not many expected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman able to enforcing a brutal dictatorship for 40 years. He appeared as a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a poor understanding of civilian affairs and little personal appeal. But he did exactly that, before succumbing to natural causes in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Cautionary Tale of Outward Mediocrity

To this day, Franco serves as a caution that superficial averageness is no barrier to the extremely driven. Beneath the unremarkable exterior lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an iron will, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

Those who praise and defend him – among them on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the United States and the UK – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but instead a cherished rescuer from communism. This is incorrect, but dictators do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who actively want authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel noted the following year Franco's death: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." He thought the same: the true desire of people was to experience being ruled.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 coup against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the subsequent civil conflict. He would not have shot 20,000 people later.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to make Spain great again. 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, leftist ideas, communism, and his strange obsession, Freemasonry.

A Calculated, Brutal Conflict

His war was intentionally prolonged and brutal in occupied areas, alongside a ruthless elimination of opponents in an attempt to "cleanse" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose bodily autonomy, children, employment and possessions were cut, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was adopted. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We possess all necessities," 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. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, people begged at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, complained that a impressive exterior hid the ghastly truth. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the second world war, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he demanded a permanent rule in charge. A UK diplomat complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a absence of clear doctrine, saved him. When the cold war started, he burnished his anti-communist credentials and the United States restored his reputation.

As a result, 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 drawn into a southern European economic boom that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

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 did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards docile, compliant and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a strict, propaganda-based press law, and made sure generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and memory-erasing Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

He also treated as children Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The most frightening aspect of his heritage was that so many believed him.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

When that fear-driven consensus finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he reverted to forceful control. Aggressive law enforcement, abuse, execution teams and even that ancient killing method, the garrote, returned. This method saw a iron band placed around a convict's throat and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a European administration on its own citizens, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon learning 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 television … "

The main feeling in reaction to Franco's demise was anxiety. Ultimately, what occurs after the figure at the center of a long-standing autocracy passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised three years of reforms that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a dynamic, disputatious 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 laborers who fought continually 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 autocrat's heritage.

And therein lies a issue. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Danger of Ignorance

During the promotion of the local version of the book, 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 secondary educators were still avoiding the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that almost one in five young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what the Franco era was really about.