LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Franco: Civil War
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After the war Franco came under considerable pressure to restore the monarchy. In 1947 Franco announced a referendum to establish his position. The vote confirmed him as lifetime regent. The following year, Juan Carlos, the future king, began his education at the age of ten under Franco's supervision.
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Franco wanted to follow a family tradition by pursuing a career in the navy, but government cutbacks in the size of the naval officer corps pushed him in another direction. At age 14, he gained admission to Spain's premier military institution, the Infantry Academy at Toledo. For the next three years Franco acquired the skills then considered essential to a Spanish officer; apart from fencing, riding, and shooting, he spent long hours in the classroom absorbing the lessons of war theorists such as Prussian Karl von Clausewitz. Upon graduating in 1910, the 17-year-old Franco received his commission as a second lieutenant.
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Franco's legacy is still particularly poorly perceived in Catalonia and the Basque Country. The Basque Country and Catalonia were among the regions that offered the strongest resistance to Franco in the Civil War, but one of the strongest to his support during this regime. Franco dissolved the autonomy granted by the Spanish Republic to these two regions and to Galicia. Franco abolished the centuries-old fiscal privileges and autonomy in two of the three Basque provinces: Guipuzcoa and Biscay, but kept them for Alava.
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For the first few months of the war Franco's real opponent was not so much the Government as the trade unions. As soon as the rising broke out the organized town workers replied by calling a general strike and then by demanding - and, after a struggle, getting - arms from the public arsenals. If they had not acted spontaneously and more or less independently it is quite conceivable that Franco would never have been resisted.
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Franco grew up during a time when his country was experiencing a series of major crises. Foremost among them was Spain’s humiliating defeat in the Spanish-American War (1898). As a result, Spain lost the remnants of its once-global empire, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Such a profound blow to national pride prompted many Spaniards to blame the government for Spain’s rapid decline in world prestige.
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Above all, Franco endeavored to remove all vestiges of parliamentary democracy, which he perceived to be alien to Spanish political traditions. He outlawed political parties, blaming them for the chaotic conditions that had preceded the Civil War. He eliminated universal suffrage and severely limited the freedoms of expression and association; he viewed criticism of the regime as treason.
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