At first sight, few suspected that Francisco Franco might become a strongman capable of imposing a brutal dictatorship across four decades. He was a short, squeaky voiced army officer with a shaky grasp on non-military matters and zero charisma. Yet he did exactly that, before dying of natural causes in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago this week.

Even today, Franco serves as a warning that outward mediocrity is no barrier to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. Franco’s ambition was underpinned by an iron will, a glib indifference to violence and unbounded self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the newly buoyant far right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a beloved saviour from communism. They are wrong, but dictators do not emerge from nowhere.

“Some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny,” French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the year after Franco’s death: “either to exercise it themselves or – much more mysteriously – to submit to it.” Franco believed the same: what people really wanted was to see and feel themselves governed, he said.

Of course, if Franco had been genuinely popular, 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 shot 20,000 people 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 blamed foreigners. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a........

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