The Franco Dictatorship
For 36 years General Franco rules as dictator, from the hunger and executions of the 1940s to the economic boom of the 1960s, until his death in 1975.
- Franco: A Biography — Paul Preston, HarperCollins (1993)
- The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain — Paul Preston, HarperPress (2012)
- Spain: A History — Raymond Carr (ed.), Oxford University Press (2000)
- The Spanish Republic and Civil War — Julián Casanova, Cambridge University Press (2010)
- Catalan Nationalism: Francoism, Transition and Democracy — Montserrat Guibernau, Routledge (2004)
Franco’s “New State” was built on victory, not reconciliation. Political parties other than the official Movimiento were banned, trade unions were replaced by state-run “vertical” syndicates, and hundreds of thousands passed through prisons and camps in the early 1940s, many as forced labourers. Executions continued for years. The 1940s are remembered as the años del hambre, the years of hunger, as the regime pursued economic self-sufficiency.
- The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain — Paul Preston, HarperPress (2012)
- Franco: A Biography — Paul Preston, HarperCollins (1993)
- The Spanish Republic and Civil War — Julián Casanova, Cambridge University Press (2010)
National Catholicism
The Church was restored to the centre of public life: it ran much of education, censored books and films, and blessed the regime as the victor of a “Crusade”. Divorce was abolished, and women lost the rights the Republic had given them; married women needed their husband’s permission to work, open a bank account or travel until reforms of the 1970s. The regime promoted a single Spanish identity and pushed Catalan, Basque and Galician out of schools, the press and official life.
- Franco: A Biography — Paul Preston, HarperCollins (1993)
- Spain: A History — Raymond Carr (ed.), Oxford University Press (2000)
- Catalan Nationalism: Francoism, Transition and Democracy — Montserrat Guibernau, Routledge (2004)
From isolation to boom
Franco sympathised with the Axis but kept Spain formally out of the Second World War, while sending the “Blue Division” of volunteers to fight the Soviet Union. After 1945 Spain was shunned, until the Cold War made Franco useful: in 1953 he signed a concordat with the Vatican and a deal letting the United States build military bases, and in 1955 Spain joined the UN. From 1959 technocrats liberalised the economy. Tourism, foreign investment and the remittances of emigrants working in France, Germany and Switzerland fuelled one of the fastest growth spurts in the world in the 1960s, the so-called “Spanish miracle”. Millions moved from the villages of the south and centre to Madrid, Barcelona and the Basque Country.
- Spain: A History — Raymond Carr (ed.), Oxford University Press (2000)
- Franco: A Biography — Paul Preston, HarperCollins (1993)
- A Concise History of Spain — William D. Phillips Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips, Cambridge University Press (2010)
Opposition and the end
By the late 1960s the regime faced strikes, student protests, a more critical Church after the Second Vatican Council, and armed opposition from ETA, which in 1973 assassinated Franco’s chosen prime minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. The regime still executed opponents: the last executions, of five men in September 1975, provoked protests across Europe. Franco died on 20 November 1975, having named Juan Carlos de Borbón as his successor as head of state.
- Franco: A Biography — Paul Preston, HarperCollins (1993)
- Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy — Paddy Woodworth, Yale University Press (2002)
- Juan Carlos of Spain: Self-Made Monarch — Charles Powell, Macmillan (1996)
Living with the legacy
Franco was buried in the vast basilica of the Valley of the Fallen, built in part by political prisoners. In 2019 his remains were exhumed and moved to a family tomb, and under the 2022 Democratic Memory Law the site was renamed Cuelgamuros and its purpose redefined. The same law declared the regime’s political trials illegitimate and made the state responsible for searching for the disappeared. Conservatives criticised the law as one-sided; for many victims’ families it came very late.
- Ley 20/2022, de 19 de octubre, de Memoria Democrática — Jefatura del Estado, Boletín Oficial del Estado (2022)
- Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting — Omar G. Encarnación, University of Pennsylvania Press (2014)
A criminal regime born of a coup, which murdered and imprisoned its opponents, crushed the regions and women's rights, and has never been properly judged.
- The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain — Paul Preston, HarperPress (2012)
- Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting — Omar G. Encarnación, University of Pennsylvania Press (2014)
A hard but necessary period that kept Spain out of the Second World War and communism, and built the modern economy and middle class that made democracy possible. A minority still holds this view, and some resent what they see as one-sided "memory" laws.
- Franco: A Biography — Paul Preston, HarperCollins (1993)
- Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past — Giles Tremlett, Faber & Faber (2006)
Why it matters today
Almost every Spanish family over a certain age has Franco-era memories: fear, hunger, emigration, the parish, or, for some, order and rising prosperity. The arguments over his tomb, the street names and the regime's victims are really arguments about who Spaniards are.