ABSTRACT
It would be wrong to see the assassination of Carrero Blanco as itself provoking the final crisis of the Franco regime. After all, the problems which were to be central to that crisis-labour militancy, Basque terrorism and divisions among the Francoist familieshad been present when Franco first promoted Carrero from Under-Secretary to the Presidency to Vice-President of the Council of Ministers in September 1967. Those problems had grown even more acute by the end of the 1960s when the Caudillo, after thirty years at the helm, began to place ever more weight on the shoulders of his dry-land admiral. The creeping historical obsolescence of Francoism was emphasized by the fact that the dwindling of the dictator’s own energies coincided with the rising tide of working-class and regionalist opposition and a less sympathetic international context.
