Fifty years ago, on November 20, 1975, Francisco Franco, the last dictator of Western Europe, died in his bed. The coup leader had spent 39 years at the head of Spain, 27 years longer than Hitler in Germany and 16 years longer than Mussolini in Italy. A tyrant of the old school, he had built a "national-Catholic" regime turned towards the past. His trajectory teaches us about these seemingly unassuming but calculating leaders who never relinquish power and wield it through terror. Born at the end of the 19th century into a military family, Franco experienced an exceptional rise in the Spanish army, until the republican regime in 1931 put an end to his career. The Civil War would become his means of seizing all power and waging a crusade against the internal enemy, the "Reds." Unlike his allies Hitler and Mussolini, Franco's regime survived World War II, despite its participation in the fight against the USSR. The Francoist dictatorship was eventually accepted by the democracies in the 1950s. By what tricks and manipulations did he manage to maintain absolute power for nearly four decades?
