In the interior of Spain the first two organizations of the defeated side to reorganize were the CNT and the PCE, even though the conditions in which they did so were harsh: "an environment marked by hunger and disease, with thousands of people in prison or awaiting execution, while others made the traces of their Republican past disappear to avoid arrest and where the majority of the population depended for their subsistence on the straperlo, thus increasing their vulnerability towards the pressures of the state".

Some of its members were arrested by the police, who had obtained the files of the communist youth organization, being accused without any proof of having been preparing an attack against General Franco for the Victory Parade to be held on May 19, so a military court sentenced them to death and they were shot.

[23] But in the spring of 1942 the Libertarian Movement in exile experienced a serious crisis with the outbreak of latent tensions since the end of the war between the "collaborationists" led by Juan García Oliver and Aurelio Fernández, and the "apolitical" who supported the Paris-based national council presided over by Germinal Esgleas and Federica Montseny.

[33] The operation devised by Jesús Monzón and his political and military advisors consisted of a frontal attack on the border defenses of the Pyrenees to establish several bridgeheads of "liberated Spain", which was to provoke a popular insurrection throughout the country.

[35] The operation began between October 3 and 7 with the invasion of the Roncal Valley,[36] followed a week later by the incursion into the sector between Hendaye and Saint Jean-Pied-de-Port, in the Basque Country, but in both cases the guerrillas encountered strong resistance and ended up retreating a few days later.

[37] On October 17 the main attack began in the Aran Valley by a force of 3,000 to 4,000 guerrillas under the command of Vicente Lopez Tovar, but they also had to retreat,[38] and only a small number managed to save the siege and integrate into the maquis groups operating in the interior of Spain.

[44] Thus, during the last months of 1944, the three members of the ANFD national committee maintained contacts with the monarchist generals Aranda, Kindelán, Saliquet and Alfonso de Orleáns y Borbón, all of them convinced that Franco's regime would not survive the defeat of the Axis powers.

The final failure of these attempts was due above all to the wave of arrests carried out by Franco's police at the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, which led to the imprisonment of the leaders of the ANFD, the national committee of the Libertarian Movement and the executive of the PSOE, as well as prominent monarchist politicians who had maintained contacts with them.

[46] The month after the founding of the ANFD, Martinez Barrio announced in Mexico the convocation of a meeting of the Republican Courts, the first since the end of the civil war, for January 10, 1945, with the objective of creating a National Council of the Spanish Republic.

In fact, on March 10, 1945, President Roosevelt informed his ambassador in Madrid Norman Armour that "our victory over Germany will entail the extermination of Nazism and related ideologies" and therefore "there is no place in the United Nations for a government founded on the principles of fascism".

[57] In December 1941, after the German failure in the capture of Moscow and the entry of the United States into the war due to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor —which was congratulated by the Spanish government through a telegram to Tokyo—, the royalist generals again put pressure on Generalissimo Franco at the meeting of the Army Council held on the 15th.

[57] On November 11, 1942, only two days after the beginning of the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria, Juan de Borbón, legitimate heir to the Spanish Crown after the abdication and death of his father King Alfonso XIII, expressed for the first time publicly his aspiration to occupy the throne and began to distance himself from the Franco regime, which until then he had supported.

Around the same time a monarchist committee was formed, made up of Alfonso García Valdecasas, Germiniano Carrascal, Joan Ventosa i Calvell, Manuel González Hontoria and José María Oriol, representing the sector of the Traditionalist Communion headed by the Count of Rodezno.

In it he stated that the Francoist regime "is fundamentally incompatible with the present circumstances being created in the world", that is to say, with the Allied victory, for which reason he asked Franco to make way for the "traditional Monarchy" since only it "can be an instrument of peace and harmony to reconcile the Spanish people".

[90] However, the break with the Franco regime was not total, since in August Eugenio Vegas Latapié, representing Don Juan, traveled incognito to Madrid where he met with Luis Carrero Blanco, the Caudillo's right-hand man, although no agreement was reached.

Nevertheless, monarchist pressure increased when in February 1946 Don Juan moved his official residence from Lausanne to Estoril (near Lisbon) and received a letter of welcome signed by 458 members of the Spanish elite, including two former ministers, which caused Franco deep concern and he said: "it is a declaration of war".

[96] The Estoril Manifesto denounced that the law tried to "convert a "personal dictatorship" into a "lifetime" and to disguise "with the glorious mantle of the Monarchy a regime of pure governmental arbitrariness", and affirmed the "supreme principle of legitimacy" that fell on Don Juan and "the imprescriptible rights of sovereignty that the providence of God has willed to come to converge" in him.

[104] The interview had been promoted by collaborationist monarchists, such as the Duke of Sotomayor and Julio Danvila, and the general was accompanied by the Infante Jaime de Borbón, Don Juan's older brother, "perhaps as a reminder that there were changes in the struggle for the restoration of the Monarchy".

The discussions had begun under the auspices of the British Labor government, specifically Ernest Bevin, Foreign Office Secretary, who had brought together Gil Robles and Prieto in London on October 17, 1946, to promote the transition to democracy in Spain.

At first the reaction of the police was weak (the civil governor would be replaced as a result) and the captain general of Catalonia, the royalist Juan Bautista Sánchez refused to take the troops out on the streets, although during the following days measures of force were applied and the workers returned to their occupations.

Thus, in the plenary session of the Central Committee of the PCE held in Prague in August 1956, which also supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the new policy of National Reconciliation was approved, which sought understanding with all the anti-Franco forces regardless of which side they had fought on in the Civil War.

[126][127] The area that caused the most discomfort in the regime and in Franco himself was the appearance of Catholic sectors that opposed Francoism, a phenomenon that was due both to the generational change in the clergy and in the Spanish followers and to the new pastoral and democratizing course of the Second Vatican Council.

[145] It was precisely these left-wing workers' organizations that were the target of Franco's repression, and it was the case of the communist leader Julián Grimau, executed in April 1963 for alleged crimes committed during the civil war, that raised the largest wave of protests throughout Europe.

[153] For their part, students and interim university professors (PNNs) continued to endure the scourge of police interventions, administrative sanctions, government arrests and assaults by the new extreme right-wing groups tolerated by the authorities (Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey, Fuerza Nueva,...).

Likewise, the "Burgos trial" was a new milestone in the estrangement between the Catholic Church and Francoism, since it led to a joint pastoral by the bishops of San Sebastian and Bilbao criticizing the death penalty and the fact that the accused were tried by military jurisdiction, and a pronouncement by the Spanish Episcopal Conference in favor of clemency and due process of law.

The rapid assumption of power by Vice-president Torcuato Fernández Miranda, in the face of Franco's stunned reaction to the news, prevented extreme measures from being taken by the "ultra" sectors of the regime and the Army was not mobilized —at the end of the funeral there was an attempt of aggression against Cardinal Tarancón who had officiated the ceremony—.

And only a few days later, on March 2, the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich, accused of the death of a policeman, was executed by garrotte (together with el polaco Heinz Chez), in spite of protest demonstrations harshly repressed by the police and requests for clemency from all over the world.

[179][180] Terrorist activity increased, both by ETA —18 fatalities in 1974 and 14 in 1975— and by the FRAP —three attacks in 1975 resulting in death—, which in turn intensified the repression, leading to the approval in August 1975 of a decree-law "for the prevention and prosecution of the crimes of terrorism and subversion against social peace and personal security" which revalidated the military jurisdiction as in the early Franco regime.

[181] In application of the anti-terrorist legislation, between August 29 and September 17, 1975, three ETA and eight FRAP militants were court-martialed and sentenced to death,[182] which provoked an important popular response and rejection abroad, as well as requests for clemency from the main European political leaders —including Pope Paul VI—-.

[182] For its part, the Permanent Commission of the Episcopal Conference made public a document in which, after condemning terrorism, it stated that "repressive measures are not enough" and that "the loyal position of political opposition or criticism of the government... cannot be legitimately considered as a criminal act".