Historians have tended to regard the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1936-1975) as an exceptional regime within a 20th century Spanish perspective: hence the comparisons with contemporary external political experiences in Europe, such as Italian Fascism or German National-Socialism, especially as Mussolini and Hitler both helped Franco to power. However, the author considers that such a perspective can be chronologically distorting, as the major model for Franco, as both a positive and a negative guide, was the previous Spanish military dictatorship - officially termed la Dictadura - under general Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-1930). The article attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of such an approach, as opposed to foreign analogies.