From Franco's victory parade and the Years of Hunger through Hendaye and the Blue Division, the United Nations' condemnation and the Pact of Madrid, the loss of Morocco, the Stabilisation Plan and the economic miracle of the 1960s, the rise of ETA and the Burgos Trial, the assassination of Carrero Blanco, to the last executions of the regime, the Green March, and the death of the Caudillo in November 1975. Slide across thirty-six years when one man ruled, and a peasant nation became a modern European state.
On 1 April the Caudillo declares the war over. On 19 May, two hundred thousand victorious troops march down the Castellana of Madrid before Franco on a tribune of laurel and oak — the great rite of Nationalist Spain. The dictatorship is in place; the long repression begins.
From Franco's victory parade and the Years of Hunger through Hendaye and the Blue Division, the United Nations' condemnation and the Pact of Madrid, the loss of Morocco, the Stabilisation Plan and the economic miracle of the 1960s, the rise of ETA and the Burgos Trial, the assassination of Carrero Blanco, to the last executions of the regime, the Green March, and the death of the Caudillo in November 1975. Slide across thirty-six years when one man ruled, and a peasant nation became a modern European state.
On 1 April the Caudillo declares the war over. On 19 May, two hundred thousand victorious troops march down the Castellana of Madrid before Franco on a tribune of laurel and oak — the great rite of Nationalist Spain. The dictatorship is in place; the long repression begins.
On 23 October at the railway station of Hendaye on the French border, Franco meets Hitler for nine hours and refuses to commit Spain to the war on terms Berlin can afford. Behind him, autarky and rationing plunge the country into the Años del Hambre — the Years of Hunger.
On 12 December the General Assembly resolves that the Franco regime is a fascist holdover, recommends the withdrawal of ambassadors, and bars Spain from the specialised agencies of the new United Nations. Spain stands alone in western Europe; only Portugal, Ireland, the Vatican, and Argentina keep envoys in Madrid.
On 27 August the United States and Spain sign the Pact of Madrid, opening four great American bases — Torrejón, Zaragoza, Morón, Rota — in exchange for economic and military aid. On the same day, a Concordat with the Vatican consecrates the National-Catholic order at home.
On 7 April, by joint Franco-Spanish agreement with Mohammed V, Spain renounces the protectorate over northern Morocco — twenty-eight thousand square kilometres and a million subjects. The colonial holdings that had defined the regime's military caste begin to dissolve.
On 21 July, on the urging of IMF economists and the technocrats of Opus Dei in the cabinet, Spain devalues the peseta and opens to foreign trade and investment. On 31 July, a group of young Basque nationalists in Bilbao announces the founding of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna — ETA, Basque Country and Liberty.
On 20 April, after a court-martial closed to the public and over the personal protest of Pope John XXIII and the Italian, French, and British governments, the Communist leader Julián Grimau is shot in the back at Carabanchel for crimes alleged to have been committed during the Civil War.
Manuel Fraga's Press Law of 18 March abolishes prior censorship in favour of post-publication 'consequences', and the Spanish press — Cuadernos para el Diálogo, Triunfo, the new Madrid — opens a measure of public debate for the first time since 1939. Tourism reaches sixteen million visitors a year; rural Spain emigrates to the cities and to northern Europe.
On 22 July, by Organic Law, the Cortes ratifies Franco's nomination of the thirty-one-year-old Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón — grandson of Alfonso XIII — as future king. Don Juan, Juan Carlos's father, denounces the move from his exile in Estoril; the Falangist 'bunker' is no happier.
In December, sixteen Basque militants of ETA — six of them facing the death penalty — are tried before a military court in Burgos for the killing of the police inspector Melitón Manzanas. Protests sweep western Europe; Franco, after a fortnight of agitation, commutes the death sentences on Christmas Eve.
On 20 December, an ETA commando in Madrid detonates eighty kilos of explosive in a tunnel beneath the Calle Claudio Coello and blows the car of the prime minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, over a five-storey building. Franco loses his designated political heir; the regime loses its centre of gravity.
On 27 September, five anti-Franco militants — three of the FRAP and two of ETA — are garrotted or shot at Carabanchel, Burgos, and Barcelona, despite worldwide pleas from Pope Paul VI and fifteen European governments. In early November, three hundred and fifty thousand unarmed Moroccans cross into the Spanish Sahara — Hassan II's Green March — while Franco lies dying.
At 4.40 in the morning of 20 November, Francisco Franco Bahamonde dies at his hospital bed in El Pardo, after a five-week struggle with peritonitis and Parkinson's disease. He is eighty-two years old; he has ruled Spain for thirty-six years.