Months after the start of the Civil War in July 1936, Franco emerged as the dominant rebel military leader and was proclaimed head of state on 1 October 1936, ruling a dictatorship over the territory controlled by the Nationalist faction.

The 1937 Unification Decree, which merged all parties supporting the rebel side, led to Nationalist Spain becoming a single-party regime under the FET y de las JONS.

Reforms were implemented in the 1950s and Spain abandoned autarky, reassigned authority from the Falangist movement, which had been prone to isolationism, to a new breed of economists, the technocrats of Opus Dei.

The Francoists took control of Spain through a comprehensive and methodical war of attrition (guerra de desgaste) which involved the imprisonment and executions of Spaniards found guilty of supporting the values promoted by the Republic: regional autonomy, liberal or social democracy, free elections, socialist leanings, and women's rights, including the vote.

[note 1] This changed with the Cold War that soon followed the end of hostilities in 1945, in the face of which Franco's strong anti-communism naturally tilted its regime to ally with the United States.

Franco was to be succeeded by Luis Carrero Blanco as Prime Minister with the intention of continuing the Francoist regime, but those hopes ended with his 1973 assassination by the Basque separatist group ETA.

By delaying the issue of republic versus monarchy for his 36-year dictatorship and by refusing to take up the throne himself in 1947, Franco sought to antagonise neither the monarchical Carlists (who preferred the restoration of a Bourbon) nor the republican "old shirts" (original Falangists).

[24] The Air Force and Navy also grew in numbers and in budgets to 35,000 airmen and 25,000 sailors by 1945, although for fiscal reasons Franco had to restrain attempts by both services to undertake dramatic expansions.

[citation needed] Most country towns and rural areas were patrolled by pairs of the Guardia Civil, a military police for civilians, which functioned as a chief means of social control.

The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) trade unions were outlawed and replaced in 1940 by the corporatist Sindicato Vertical.

The fueros were kept in the third Basque province, Alava, and also in Navarre, a former kingdom during the Middle Ages and the cradle of the Carlists, possibly due to the region's support during the Civil War.

Additionally, the popularisation of the compulsory national educational system and the development of modern mass media, both controlled by the state and exclusively in Spanish, reduced the competency of speakers of Basque, Catalan and Galician.

According to historian Julian Casanova, "the symbiosis of religion, fatherland and Caudillo" saw the Church assume great political responsibilities, "a hegemony and monopoly beyond its wildest dreams" and it played "a central role in policing the country's citizens".

[47] The Law of Political Responsibility of February 1939 turned the Church into an extralegal body of investigation as parishes were granted policing powers equal to those of local government officials and leaders of the Falange.

According to historian Julian Casanova, "the reports that have survived reveal a clergy that was bitter because of the violent anti-clericalism and the unacceptable level of secularisation that Spanish society had reached during the republican years" and the law of 1939 made the priests investigators of peoples' ideological and political pasts.

[49] The poet Carlos Barral recorded that in his family "any allusion to republican relatives was scrupulously avoided; everyone took part in the enthusiasm for the new era and wrapped themselves in the folds of religiosity".

[55] The orphaned children of "Reds" were taught in orphanages run by priests and nuns that "their parents had committed great sins that they could help expiate, for which many were incited to serve the Church".

Indeed, although his formal titles were Jefe del Estado (Head of State) and Generalísimo de los Ejércitos Españoles (Generalissimo of the Spanish Armies), he was referred to as Caudillo of Spain, by the Grace of God.

[58] The Franco regime's embrace of National Catholicism (nacionalcatolicismo) as part of its ideological identity meant that the Catholic Church, which traditionally supported the social subordination of women, had preeminence in all aspects of public and private life in Spain.

[59] Francoism professed a devotion to the traditional role of a woman in society; that is, being a loving daughter and sister to her parents and brothers, being a faithful wife to her husband, and residing with her family.

Since Franco had relied on thousands of North African soldiers, anti-Islamic sentiment "was played down but the centuries-old myth of the Moorish threat lay at the base of the construction of the "communist menace" as a modern-day Eastern plague".

It was inspired by the ideas of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who thought that class struggle would be ended by grouping together workers and owners according to corporative principles.

[83] The policy was carried out by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (INC), created in 1939 with the goal of agricultural modernisation by means of the creation of irrigated lands, improvements in agrarian technology and training and the installment of settlers.

Concurrent with the absence of social reforms and the economic power shift, a tide of mass emigration commenced to European countries and to a lesser extent to South America.

As recently as 2006, the BBC reported that Maciej Giertych, an MEP of the right-wing League of Polish Families, had expressed admiration for Franco's stature who he believed had "guaranteed the maintenance of traditional values in Europe".

[91] Additionally, the Permanent Commission of the European Parliament "firmly" condemned in a resolution unanimously adopted in March 2006 the "multiple and serious violations" of human rights committed in Spain under the Francoist regime from 1939 to 1975.

[92][93] The resolution was at the initiative of the MEP Leo Brincat and of the historian Luis María de Puig and is the first international official condemnation of the repression enacted by Franco's regime.

In 2008, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory initiated a systematic search for mass graves of people executed during Franco's regime, a move supported since the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party's victory during the 2004 elections by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's government.

The Historical Memory Law (Ley de Memoria Histórica) was passed in 2007[94] as an attempt to enforce official recognition of the crimes committed against civilians during Franco's rule and to organise under state supervision the search for mass graves.

Después pasó treinta y dos años evolucionando como un sistema autoritario "posfascista", aunque no consiguió eliminar completamente todos los vestigios residuales del fascismo.40°31′17″N 03°46′30″W / 40.52139°N 3.77500°W / 40.52139; -3.77500