Many recent accounts of the transition to democracy in Spain have seen it as beginning with Franco's death. But this story shows that history is not quite this simple. What began in late 1975 was the relatively rapid abrogation of Francoist laws and the construction of a new legality which sealed the final phase of the democratic transformation of the Francoist State; but the transformation itself began much earlier with the slow stirring of the Spanish people and the progressive emergence of new forms of political organization which finally achieved a radical change in the balance of forces in Spanish civil society. The transition cannot be understood, therefore, without taking into account this process of transformation; and the key political question is not so much the merely tactical one of how so much political compromise could have been achieved in so little time, as the strategic one of how such extensive organization could take place despite the severe restrictions imposed by one of the most repressive of modern dictatorships.