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At first glance, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a strongman capable of imposing a ruthless regime for four decades. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a poor understanding of non-military matters and little personal appeal. But he achieved just that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, half a century ago this week.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco acts as a warning that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was fueled by an iron will, a glib indifference to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

Those who praise and defend him – including some on the resurgent far right in Spain, the US and the UK – continue to assert Franco was not truly a dictator, but instead a beloved rescuer from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

"Some important part of every society is made up of people who desire 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: the true desire of people 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 mighty empire having disappeared the century before. Franco wanted 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 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, alongside a ruthless elimination of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this contaminated Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose bodily autonomy, offspring, work and possessions were reduced, postponed, or transferred to male relatives.

Following a punitive win, Franco locked Spain into a corset of self-reliance and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of Jaén and Málaga, 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 grandiose facade hid the ghastly truth. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco turned Spain into a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside afterwards. Spaniards descended deeper into suffering.

Overconfidence and Political Revival

Franco's conviction that he was both divinely chosen and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador remarked that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", unaware of his own ineptitude. Luck, and a lack of any definable ideology, saved him. As the Cold War began, he polished his anti-communist credentials and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a disastrous economy was eventually rescued and forced to open up by the US and the IMF. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, tourists were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Numerous citizens still could not find work, but the money they sent home after moving abroad also helped.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

He gradually abandoned his most stupid ideas – from establishing a new realm to making synthetic gasoline with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards docile, obedient and politically apathetic. He devoted extensive resources in government intimidation from the 1936 takeover forward, deployed a rigid, Goebbels-inspired press law, and ensured that generations of Spaniards were educated in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac state-approved syllabus. As late as the 1970s, autonomous political groups, democratic voting and trade unions remained banned.

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

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, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the strangulation device, returned. This method saw a metal collar placed around a convict's throat and constricted until it broke their neck or cut off their air supply; it was being used by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a deeply critical Franco biographer, recalls experiencing sorrow as a boy, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that youngster was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed 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 school, in the media, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was fear. After all, what happens after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the monarch Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that culminated in a referendum on the democratic constitution that still holds today. The country continues as a vibrant, contentious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts arose to explain this. For the left, it was the result of activism from brave street protesters, students and laborers who fought continually with security forces. For the right, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the dictator’s legacy.

And therein lies a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out drafts of my recent book on the ruler, El Generalisimo, the proprietor kept insisting that his parent stated he had lived well under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the local version of the publication, I have also realised that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up amid quiet about the regime are still with us. University students inform me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is risky. It is not surprising that nearly 20% young people believe his dictatorship was good for Spain. The sole method to alter this is to end the quiet and teach the new generation what Francoism was truly like.