A sibling of interwar Europe's other fascist regimes, Franco's Spain survived them all, growing to a feeble old age in an era of liberal democracy. This book looks beyond the mythology surrounding the origins of Franco's dictatorship to provide a critical overview of the regime as a whole. All phases of this history are covered: the dictatorship's emergence out of a bloody uprising against a democratic government; the "high period" of Francoism with all its poverty, hunger, and fear, as followed by a complex time of change and economic growth; and the final demise of Franco's reign amid open...