Miguel Primo de Rivera forces. Alfonso XIII suspended the monarchy on 14 April 1931, leaving the royal family in Madrid. The act ushered in the Second Republic. Two years later Primo de Rivera's eldest son, José Antonio, founded the Falange, a Spanish fascist party. Both José Antonio and his brother Fernando were arrested in March 1936 by the republic, and were executed in Alicante prison by Republican forces once the Spanish Civil War began in July 1936. The Nationalists led by Francisco Franco won the Civil War and established a far more authoritarian regime. By that time, many Spaniards regarded Primo de Rivera's relatively
José Antonio Primo de Rivera no personal ideology. At the end of the war in 1939, the mortal remains of Primo de Rivera were carried on Falangist shoulders from Alicante to Madrid and provisionally interred at El Escorial. In 1959, his mortal remains were exhumed and re-interred in the gargantuan basilica of the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid. The postwar cult of personality had two ubiquitous icons. The first, a funereal slab placed on the external wall of many churches and cathedrals which bore the crowning inscription, "Caídos por Dios y por España" ("Fallen for God and for Spain"), followed by a list of