Official commemoration in 1964 of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Franco's victory depicted 1939 as ‘Year Zero’ by conspicuously comparing the era ‘before’, compressed into a series of images of the Second Republic, with that which came after, crystallised as an epoch of peace and prosperity. Regime legitimacy continued to emanate from the civil war (a ‘necessary’ war, in the official view) and denigration of democracy and the Republic. The quarter-century since the end of the civil war was thus seen as a uniquely ‘compact’ and ‘homogeneous’ period of ‘respect for authority and of political calm’, the significance of which would be difficult to explain ‘to a foreigner’. The 1960s saw an uneasy convergence of socio-economic imperatives, various strands of monarchist opposition, and the political interests of the regime around technocratic change which did not discard the past, but identified certain ‘facts’, acceptable to reforming insiders and, at the same time, surmountable, ‘making them unrepeatable’. New forward-looking myths, founded on the idea of the war as a ‘fratricidal conflict’ (a war between brothers) and of an ‘economic miracle’, replaced symbols and memories encapsulated in the crusade narrative.