On December 20, 1973, Basque separatist organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) struck a potentially lethal blow against the Spanish dictatorship, assassinating Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco in Madrid. Carrero had long been Franco’s right-hand man, and the car bombing was a major logistical and ideological triumph for ETA. While up to that point it had concentrated its efforts in the Basque Country, this established its credentials as the most serious threat to the Franco regime. At the 2009 Hay Literature Festival in Segovia, British novelist Martin Amis argued that while there were few reasons to be grateful to ETA, this was one of them.

This was surely a controversial claim, but not a ridiculous one. Franco’s final passing in 1975 and the signing of the new democratic constitution in 1978 offer a comforting narrative of Spain’s transition to democracy. But we might better understand these events by looking at the successful bombing of a car carrying the only figure who had the political and intellectual clout that might plausibly have allowed Francoism to survive the death of its chief architect.