After Primo's dictatorship ended in January 1930, the king asked General Dámaso Berenguer to form a new government, based on the constitution of 1876, in an attempt to reestablish the constitutional monarchy. Berenguer had served as the military high commissioner at the time of the disastrous battle of Anual in 1921. His appointment to head the government signaled the king's continuing support for the army, but it can hardly have inspired confidence in the country as a whole. In a play on words that is typical of Spanish political humor, Berenguer's government was dubbed the “dictablanda” or “soft dictatorship,” as opposed to the hard dictatorship (dictadura/dicta-dura) under Primo. Berenguer lasted just over a year in office, during which the republican opposition organized support. In the Pact of San Sebastián in August 1930, republican leaders joined with Catalan nationalists and the Socialist Party (PSOE) to plan a provisional government after the ouster of the monarchy. Military leaders sympathetic to the republican cause staged an uprising in Jaca (Aragon) in December 1930. After forces loyal to King Alfonso put down the rising, the king ordered its leaders executed, creating martyrs – military martyrs – for the republican opposition.
The king dismissed General Berenguer in February 1931 and replaced him with Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar, no doubt hoping that the navy leadership would prove more steadfast than the army had been. Aznar called elections for municipal officials on April 12, 1931 – the first elections under the 1876 constitution since 1923. In Spain's largest cities, republican candidates won a majority of the votes, although their victory was not a landslide. Nonetheless, the king knew all too well what the vote portended. Joyous republicans took to the streets to celebrate the victory, and their leaders proclaimed Spain a republic on April 14, announcing a provisional government under the leadership of Niceto Alcalá Zamora. When army leaders made clear that they would no longer support King Alfonso, on the night of April 14 he simply left Spain without abdicating, as his grandmother Isabel II had done in 1868. Queen Victoria Eugenia also went into exile – separately from her husband. Their marriage had become increasingly strained over the years, not least because of the king's numerous extramarital affairs.
The Second Republic – dubbed “the Pretty Girl” (“la niña bonita”) by its supporters – faced distrust and charges of illegitimacy by its detractors from the outset. The provisional government had not been elected by a national mandate, but had simply decreed a republic as a result of municipal elections. It would be months before its leaders put in place the machinery to legitimize its authority. In the interim, Alcalá Zamora's provisional government nonetheless moved swiftly to establish the tenor of the new regime. From April 14 to June 28, 1931, the government issued decrees touching on a wide range of issues, including land reform and the relationship of the government to the army and the Roman Catholic Church. On June 28, 1931, Spaniards went to the polls to elect representatives to a Cortes that would prepare a new constitution. The task was finished on December 10 of that year but the Cortes continued to sit as a legislature for the next two years – in other words, far exceeding their electoral mandate. To their enemies, that provided additional evidence of the illegality of the republic.
Alcalá Zamora had resigned as Prime Minister in October 1931, when the Cortes enacted legislation to place church financing and religious orders under state control. Although the majority in the Cortes justified this action as necessary for good management, the church hierarchy and its supporters viewed it as an attack and a gratuitous insult. Manuel Azaña took on the role of Prime Minister and therefore of the head of government. Under the new constitution, Alcalá Zamora became the President, technically the head of state, but with a largely ceremonial role.
Azaña, a lawyer and intellectual with a long résumé in politics but never an office-holder, had a coherent and ambitious vision for the new republican Spain. In addition to separating church and state, he aimed at no less than the resolution of conflicts that had bedeviled Spanish politicians for a century. The solutions he favored fell generally on the left of the republican political spectrum. One problem was that the army had grown too large and costly for a country at peace and with almost no overseas responsibilities. To reduce the top-heavy command structure, Azaña's government provided incentives for early retirement. Many – perhaps most – of those who accepted the offer were confirmed republicans. Many of the officers who remained in their posts, it is fair to say, were willing to support the republic only so long as it appeared able to govern.
The Azaña government also addressed the problem of land reform, moving toward expropriating unproductive private holdings and redistributing them to land-hungry peasants. The government also implemented an ambitious program of investment in irrigation and fertilizing schemes, aiming to make Spanish agriculture both more equitable and more productive. The programs got off to a slow start but huge numbers of peasants nonetheless welcomed the initiatives, finally seeing a chance to realize their dreams of landholding. Azaña's government also gained the loyalty of Catalonia and the Basque provinces by ceding power over many functions of government to local authorities. These included finance, education, social policy, and the maintenance of public order, satisfying long-standing demands by regional political leaders.
From the outset, the Second Republic worked toward the ambitious goal of transforming Spanish society. Two key elements in the government's program were the provision of subsidies for the construction of schools and the extension of literate culture into the remotest corners of rural Spain. By the end of 1932, the Education Minister could boast that nearly 10,000 new schools had been built, and more than 15,000 teachers had applied for government-sponsored courses to improve their knowledge and teaching skills. Idealistic university students and others, as well as theatre troupes such as the poet Federico García Lorca's “La Barraca,” brought examples of high culture to small, isolated towns. They also brought examples of popular modern entertainment such as silent films. Overall, the government's goal was not simply to raise the cultural level of the masses, but to make them more politically aware and less resistant to change.
The maintenance of public order proved to be the thorniest problem faced by the Second Republic, as disgruntled factions of both right and left decided to test the government's authority. In December 1931, an anarchist uprising at Castilblanco (Badajoz) challenged the republic from the left. In August 1932 army officers under General Sanjurjo issued a proclamation against the republic. The army as a whole, however, remained loyal to the republic and put down Sanjurjo's challenge on the right just as it had put down the anarchist uprising on the left. The army also crushed another leftist rising at Casas Viejas in January 1933. Although Azaña's government, with the army's support, withstood these challenges, his administration was clearly losing the confidence of the public by the end of summer 1933. Azaña and his government resigned on September 12 of that year. When no alternative leader was able to form a government, Diego Martínez Barrio agreed to form a caretaker government to prepare for new elections.
Spanish voters went to the polls again on November 19, and this time they voted for a government to the right of center in the republican spectrum. As the new Prime Minister, Alejandro Lerroux formed a coalition government aiming to reverse much of the legislation passed under Azaña's leadership. By doing so, he hoped to keep conservative forces from moving outside the political process, but without fatally alienating forces on the left. If he succeeded, he could bolster the image of the Spanish Republic as an effective parliamentary system, in which both left and right had a place, but he faced a very difficult task. Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany in the first months of 1933 and was rapidly undermining German democracy. Elsewhere in Europe as well, extralegal movements on both right and left were destabilizing parliamentary governments, their support fueled by the spreading effects of the global collapse of financial markets and the resultant economic depression.
Even before the 1933 election in Spain, forces on the right had gathered strength. Monarchists, of course, were opposed to the republic on principle. Antonio Goicoechea organized one monarchist group – Spanish Renewal (Renovación Española) – early in 1933. Lerroux's government lifted the ban on another monarchist group in April 1934: José Calvo Sotelo's Spanish Action (Acción Española), which was the remnant of Primo de Rivera's Patriotic Union. Primo's eldest son, named José Antonio, organized the Spanish Falange (Falange Española) in October 1933 in conscious imitation of fascist movements elsewhere. The Falange merged early in 1934 with a right-wing labor organization known as the Committees of the National Syndicalist Offensive (Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista, or JONS). Their strong advocacy of labor justice, coupled with José Antonio's effective rhetoric, gained the growing movement widespread support on the right, outside government circles. In the army, leaders skeptical of the republic found a voice in the Spanish Military Union (Unión Militar Española), founded late in 1933, one of whose leaders was General Emilio Mola.
Christian Democrats had helped to put Lerroux in power, but they did not form part of his coalition until October 1, 1934, when three members of CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas) joined the government. To republicans on the left, this was an intolerable sign that Lerroux had caved in to conservative pressure. In response, the socialists called a general strike on October 5, hoping to bring down the government. Miners in Asturias launched their strike on October 4, and an armed coalition of socialists, communists, and anarchists briefly captured the city of Oviedo, posing the most serious challenge yet to Lerroux's government. In Catalonia, Lluis Companys proclaimed the “Republic of Catalonia within the Federal Republic of Spain” on October 6, using the occasion of the general strike to push for regional autonomy. The government called upon army leaders to put down all of these rebellious actions, which they did. The chief military commander in Barcelona, General Domingo Batet, remained cool-headed and restored order with a minimum of fuss. Elsewhere, the army dealt harshly with the rebels, particularly in Asturias, where Francisco Franco, the youngest general in the Spanish army, led a force of soldiers from Spanish Morocco and foreign legionnaires from North Africa. The leaders of the diverse uprisings ended up in prison.
Leftist politicians of all stripes saw the repression as a reason to join forces against Lerroux's government, even though the republican left, and especially the socialists, could hardly deny their role in provoking that repression. In the summer of 1935, a coalition of Spanish socialists and communists formed a Popular Front movement, coinciding with, and reinforced by, the program of the seventh Congress of the Comintern. They pledged to work together at the next election to shift the government back to the left. As Lerroux's ability to govern steadily weakened, his Minister of Agriculture, Manuel Giménez Fernández, nonetheless carried out more land redistribution than in the previous three and a half years of the republic combined, an ironic development. A financial scandal involving members of Lerroux's inner circle in late October accomplished what the leftist uprisings had failed to do. The government fell, and a caretaker replacement organized new elections for February 16, 1936.
Given the constitutional structure of the republic, a small shift in the popular vote could mean a substantial change in the composition of the Cortes. Individuals ran as part of a slate of candidates; the winning slate in any given locality then sent 80 percent of that locality's delegates to the Cortes, regardless of the margin of victory in the elections. That assured the new government of a workable majority in the legislature, but it did not necessarily reflect the popular vote. On February 16, 1936, the Popular Front coalition of republicans, socialists, and communists won control of the government, even though they garnered less than 50 percent of the vote nationwide. As the coalition leaders had agreed before the election, Manuel Azaña then formed a government solely of republicans, in part to counter fears of a radical change in policy.
The early actions of Azaña's new government did little to counter such fears. Less than a week after the election, the government granted amnesty to everyone involved in the uprisings of 1934. The government also supported regional movements toward autonomy by sponsoring plebiscites on the issue in Galicia and the Basque provinces. The suspicion that the government might willingly dismantle the country alarmed leaders on the right, particularly those outside the political process and in the army.
Meanwhile, maneuvers within the Cortes aimed to put more authority into fewer hands, to ensure that the coalition would be able to govern. The socialist leader, Indalecio Prieto, organized a vote to oust Niceto Alcalá Zamora as President of the Republic, the post he had held since 1931. Azaña replaced him as President, and a friend of Azaña's, the Galician Santiago Casares Quiroga, took over as Prime Minister. The net result of this cynical maneuver was to restrict the ruling coalition to a small group of republicans and socialists, which weakened support for the government within the Cortes as a whole.
Even worse, despite its legal authority, the new government could not keep order. Wildcat strikes, open clashes between leftist and rightist gangs in Spain's large cities, and sporadic attacks on churches and members of the clergy continued through the spring and early summer of 1936. In an attempt to disable the Falange, the government had arrested José Antonio Primo de Rivera in March, and moved him from Madrid to Alicante in June, where he would pose less of a threat.
The republic's security forces, the Assault Guards, could do little to quell the violence, and the government did not trust the traditional forces of order, the army and the Civil Guard, to move against rightist disturbances. Street violence in the cities continued unabated, and the government seemed powerless to stop it. In the countryside, legally sanctioned confiscations of unused land gave way to extralegal takeovers by bands of armed peasants, and landowners suspected that the republican government had no interest in stopping them.
In the army, a small group of determined plotters organized support for a military coup, claiming the necessity to defend the nation from the possibility of disintegration and the effects of incompetent civilian rule. General Mola led the plotters and planned very carefully, to avoid repeating the failure of similar plots in the 1920s and early 1930s. Several key commanders joined the plot, but Francisco Franco, then posted in the Canary Islands, cautiously held back as planning continued and rumors circulated that a military coup was imminent. The chaos in Madrid reached a critical point in the second week of July. On the evening of July 12, right-wing assassins killed José Castillo, a lieutenant in the Republican Assault Guards. After midnight, the left had its revenge. During a sweep of possible suspects for Castillo's murder, a contingent of the Assault Guards arrested José Calvo Sotelo, the leader of Acción Española. By morning, his bullet-riddled body had been dumped at the entrance to a local cemetery. With Calvo Sotelo dead, and José Antonio jailed in Alicante, there were no civilian right-wing leaders of sufficient stature to replace them. The army plotters decided that their moment had arrived.
With Franco at last committed to the plot, the rebellion began in Morocco at 5 p.m. on Friday, July 17. Mola proclaimed the overthrow of the Popular Front in Spain the next day. Similar proclamations in the past, dating back to 1820, had succeeded almost immediately, when the governments had caved in. Casares Quiroga was not willing to do that. Instead, he resigned on the evening of July 18. Diego Martínez Barrio took over as Prime Minister and tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with the rebels. He could not trust the armed forces to defend the government, but he was not willing to arm the citizenry to fight the rebellion. He resigned as well. José Giral, a university professor of chemistry, became Prime Minister on July 19 and ordered state arsenals to hand out arms to the various militias associated with workers’ unions and political parties. What began as a military rebellion thus became a civil war, and all over Spain militants and ordinary citizens alike took sides.
It is not an exaggeration to say that all of the anger, frustration, class antagonism, and other corrosive forces that had eaten away at Spanish society for at least a century spilled over into the conflict, making the Spanish Civil War one of the worst internal confrontations in European history. Individuals defined their true loyalties based on religious adherence or rejection, political ideology, economic class, occupation, family history, or a combination of factors. Many citizens, however, had little choice but to adapt to the side that held control of the town or region where they lived. Others fled the control of one side in order to fight for the other, risking their lives in the process. Like civil wars everywhere, the Spanish Civil War shattered families and communities. Neighbors turned on each other through sincere conviction, fear, personal animosity, ambition, cowardice, or any number of other motives. Alongside the suppressed resentments and hatreds of the past, the civil war created a new set of horrors to remember.
The war continued for nearly three years, exacting an enormous toll on the people of Spain. The rebels were a well-organized military force, with most of the army on their side. Nonetheless, the republican government controlled the resources of the state and most of the navy, and could claim moral superiority in the international community. It was not clear at the outset which side had the better chance to succeed. The rebels immediately captured about one-third of the country, with strongholds in Seville in the south, Old Castile and Galicia in the north and northwest, and Navarre and Zaragoza in the northeast. The republican government held Madrid and nearly all of central Spain, from Extremadura to the Mediterranean coast. In the first four months of the war, the rebels, dubbed the nationalists, launched assaults in every direction, gaining much ground. They were not able to capture Madrid, however, despite a fierce offensive in early November 1936. The fiery speeches of Dolores Ibárruri, dubbed “La Pasionaria” (the passion flower), inspired the defenders of the capital. In addition, volunteers from elsewhere in Europe and from America came to Spain to aid the republican cause, contributing to the successful defense of Madrid. These International Brigades, named for heroes in their own national histories, also bolstered the image of the republic as a bastion of democratic freedom against the fascist threat exemplified by the nationalists.
The democratic governments in Europe and the United States also recognized that threat but hoped to avoid having the Spanish conflict spill over into a wider confrontation. Great Britain and France sponsored a non-intervention movement in the summer of 1936, monitored by a committee in London, and twenty-seven states eventually signed up, pledging not to aid either side. The signatories included fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, though it is clear that their adherence was nothing more than a smokescreen to mask more or less open support for the nationalists. German and Italian planes had already carried troops from Morocco to Spain at the start of the rebellion. The United States passed its own Act of Neutrality on May 1, 1937, but private companies such as the Texas Company (later Texaco) continued to sell petroleum products to the nationalists. Similarly, private companies elsewhere followed their economic interests, supplying one side or the other with munitions and other war material, as long as the buyers had the cash to pay for them.
Alone among the democracies, Mexico under President Lázaro Cárdenas openly sent aid to the republic. The other international ally of the republic was the USSR under Josef Stalin, and his support aimed less to aid the Spanish republic than to protect the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Russian aid began to arrive in the form of arms and advisers in early October 1936, and they helped to arrange the recruitment and organization of the International Brigades. Eventually, Russia would send about 2,000 men to Spain in the first two years of the war, about half of them as combatants and the rest as political operatives. In return, the republic sent all the gold in the Bank of Spain to Moscow in November 1936, both for safekeeping and to pay for the Russian aid.
After the rebels failed to capture Madrid in the fall of 1936, they turned their attention elsewhere. Nationalist forces pushed across the south from Seville to Málaga by February 1937, and launched a major offensive in the north in the spring and summer of 1937. General Franco, by then head of the nationalist forces, had received major reinforcements in the spring of 1937, when Mussolini sent thousands of Italian soldiers to his aid, after their successful conquest of Ethiopia. Called “volunteers” to avoid violating the non-intervention pact, the Italian forces suffered heavy casualties at the battle of Guadalajara in March 1937, where, ironically, some of their opponents were true volunteers on the republican side. During the civil war as a whole, Mussolini would eventually send some 120,000 troops to Spain, and their dead and wounded would number at least 50,000. Germany sent 20,000–30,000 troops in all, but rotated them in and out through the Condor Legion of the German air force. By so doing, Hitler could provide combat experience for as many men as possible without committing them all at the same time.
A crucial turning point in the northern offensive came in April 1937, with the bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica by the Condor Legion. Several planes from the Italian air force also participated in the raid. The town of around 5,000 inhabitants held a munitions factory and a strategic bridge on the way to Bilbao; it also held enormous historical significance for the Basque population. The great oak tree of Guernica was a powerful symbol of Basque identity and aspirations to autonomous rule. The incendiary bombs launched against Guernica on the afternoon of April 26 destroyed 70 percent of the town and killed some 250 people – about 5 percent of the population. The bridge, the munitions factory, and the oak tree remained standing, as the nationalists had requested. In the face of international outrage at the bombing, as well as among his own Carlist and Basque supporters, General Franco long denied publicly that he had known about it in advance, much less requested it. Nonetheless, historians eventually turned up overwhelming evidence proving his responsibility for the raid.
Franco's nationalist troops captured Bilbao in June 1937, Santander in August, and Gijón in October. The bombing of Guernica, designed to weaken resistance to the nationalist offensive in the north, succeeded in that aim. Bilbao surrendered without a fight, and historians have discovered persuasive evidence that the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) secretly cooperated with the nationalists and with Italian forces in the north to expedite the nationalist victory and thus prevent further damage to their region. The PNV betrayal of the republic that had granted the Basques autonomous rule illustrates the complicated nature of the Spanish Civil War. Outsiders could define the conflict in simple terms of nationalist versus republican or fascism versus democratic freedom. Insiders experienced the surreal complexity of hatreds and multilayered loyalties and animosities. True believers on both sides might set aside their doubts in favor of a united front against the enemy. Honest men and women had to face the unvarnished anguish of their situation, as their country tore itself apart.
Republican forces continually lost ground to the nationalists in 1938, despite several determined campaigns. The nationalists pushed eastward across central Spain, reaching the Mediterranean in mid-April south of Barcelona, isolating Catalonia from the corridor linking Madrid with Valencia. Republican forces launched a major counter-offensive from July to November, known as the battle of the Ebro. In the middle of this crucial juncture for the republic, Soviet aid ceased. Great Britain under Neville Chamberlain had sanctioned the Nazi takeover of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in September 1938. Stalin knew that it was only a matter of time before he would have to face German aggression as well. By withdrawing his support for the Spanish republic, he hoped to postpone that eventuality by adhering to the non-intervention pact and removing a source of irritation to Hitler.
After breaking the republican resistance along the Ebro, the nationalists were able to conquer Catalonia between late December 1938 and late February 1939, at which point Great Britain and France recognized General Franco as the leader of Spain. The civil war was all but over. Despite a desperate resistance in Madrid by the remnants of the republican government, nationalist troops entered the capital at the end of March. The United States recognized the Franco government on April 1, 1939, a month after Britain and France had done so.
The timetable of military actions in the Spanish Civil War tells only part of the story, however. While Spanish and foreign troops fought on the battlefields, another set of struggles took place in the country at large. At the beginning of the military revolt, civilians ended up willy-nilly on one side or the other, few of them having the luxury of making a conscious choice. Thereafter, both sides worked to mobilize civilian support in the areas under their control. For the nationalists, this meant organizing a stable, effective government that would end the turmoil associated with the republic. General Franco's background as an astute military leader stood him in good stead as he established control, first over territory, and then over the citizenry in that territory. A few days after the rising on July 18, 1936, a Committee of National Defense met in Burgos and transferred power to Franco, both over the military forces and as head of the government that the nationalists had proclaimed. By October, he had gone beyond that mandate to sign himself the head of state. He organized a military government and consciously drew the various strands of anti-republican sentiment into his hands.
Most of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church supported the uprising from the beginning, after the hostile treatment they had faced under the republic. All but two of the Spanish bishops signed a letter in July 1937 that defined the uprising as a modern crusade against godlessness. Nonetheless, a sizeable number of priests in the Basque areas aligned themselves with the movement for autonomy, and therefore with the republic. For Franco, the autonomy movements in the Basque areas and Catalonia were anathema. He defined the state as an indivisible unit and called upon the patriotism of the citizenry to support it and to resist outside influence, especially from the communist government of the Soviet Union.
Instead of the divisive and chaotic squabbles typical of parliamentary politics, Franco promised an orderly and effective government under a single party representing all legitimate interest groups. José Antonio Primo de Rivera had been killed by republican forces in Alicante on November 20, 1936. That gave Franco the opportunity to make José Antonio's movement the centerpiece of his government. Under its aegis, supporters could hope for the revolution promised by José Antonio – social justice, fair wages, and, above all, an orderly state in which to live one's life. In a brilliant stroke, Franco put José Antonio's sister, Pilar Primo de Rivera, in charge of the Feminine Section of the Falange. Under her direction, women dedicated to Franco and his goals became a formidable force in Spanish society, distributing food, caring for the wounded, and organizing women all over Spain in support of the nationalist cause. When the most radical of the Falangists – the so-called “Old Shirts” – rebelled against the takeover of their movement, Franco crushed them and executed their leader, Manuel Hedilla.
Next, Franco solidified his support among the Carlists, incorporating them and turning the Spanish Falange and Labor Movement (FE y de las JONS) into the Traditionalist Spanish Falange and Labor Movement (FET y de las JONS). By April 1937, most of the elements of the new government were in place, defined by the promulgation of the Twenty-Seven Points of the Falange. Although the government's program of social justice aimed to appeal to the masses, Franco made clear that it would be centrally organized and implemented. The army, both old and new recruits, would fight the war, and the Falange would administer the country and organize support behind the lines. That formula proved to be remarkably effective for the nationalist cause as a whole.
The republican side also espoused social reform; indeed, many of the republic's most notable achievements aimed to give power to the powerless, land to the landless, and social justice to all. During the civil war, however, the aspirations unleashed by the republic proved to be divisive rather than unifying. Movements for regional autonomy clashed with the need for coordinated resistance to the rebellion. Workers’ demands for freedom and higher wages clashed with the exigencies of wartime production. Even worse, the most radical elements in the labor movement were opposed to the bourgeois republic on principle. These and other internal struggles on the republican side helped to ensure the nationalist victory.
The republican governments during the civil war lurched from crisis to crisis, trying to reconcile a set of irreconcilable objectives. The regional autonomy granted to Basques and Catalans worked against republican unity; to rescind it would lose their support altogether. The promise of social revolution had won the loyalty of many factions on the left. Nonetheless, to win the war required a postponement of those promises, at the risk of alienating many of the republic's most fervent supporters. Had the republican side promoted a true social revolution, however, the bourgeois democracies would surely have given up on non-intervention. With every new crisis, and the accumulation of bad news from the battlefield, the leadership of the republic shifted toward individuals who seemed to have the willpower necessary to fight the war.
The government of José Giral, composed only of republicans, lasted only until September 4, 1936, gutted by its inability to overcome the military rebellion. Francisco Largo Caballero, a labor leader from the UGT, then formed a predominantly socialist government, which supported social revolution as a means to ensure the loyalty of Spanish workers. Although republicans continued to participate in Largo's government, some of them were uneasy with the shift to the left. Anarchists from the CNT entered the government on November 4, 1936, and two days later the government left Madrid for the relative security of Valencia, as the nationalist offensive pounded the western defenses of the city. Although General José Miaja and the Madrid Defense Committee, supported by the International Brigades, held off the nationalists, the government of the republic remained in Valencia, and communists joined a government for the first time in Western Europe.
The following spring, the city of Barcelona erupted in an attempted social revolution, which lasted most of the first week in May 1937. The CNT, which virtually controlled Aragon, and the revolutionary Marxist militia known as the POUM, led the rebellion, which turned the streets of Barcelona into an internal war zone, far from the battle lines between nationalists and republicans. The English radical writer George Orwell had come to Spain to fight for the POUM, exhilarated by the purity of their cause. He lived through the rebellion in Barcelona and later chronicled his bitter downward spiral into disillusionment, fear, and despair in Homage to Catalonia. Nonetheless, it is doubtful that he ever really understood what was going on.
Largo Caballero had little choice but to crush the rebellion in Barcelona, alienating most of the republic's most loyal supporters. Socialists, communists, and republicans then united to vote Largo out of power on May 15, with the communists taking the lead. Ironically, the Communist Party of Spain, which had more than 1 million members by then, was far less radical than some other leftist factions. Its leaders were against collectivizing agriculture and other revolutionary actions, arguing that it was more important in the short term to mount an efficient war effort.
On May 17, Juan Negrín, a socialist who enjoyed communist support, formed a new government, dedicated above all to winning the war. He moved quickly against the leftist groups responsible for the rebellion in Barcelona, arresting the leaders of the POUM in mid-June. One of those leaders, Andrés Nin, died in government custody, undercutting the moral authority that justified the purge. On August 11, Negrín disbanded the CNT-controlled Council of Aragon and its revolutionary communes. Four days later, the government created a new intelligence agency called the SIM (Servicio de Investigación Militar), dedicated to identifying traitors to the republic, on both the left and the right.
In the peculiar context of the times, Negrín's government looked more moderate than many alternatives, because it favored central control and a postponement of revolution in aid of the war effort. Unquestionably, however, Negrín was pro-USSR and pro-communist. Moreover, to retain Soviet support, he often acceded to Russian pressure, either direct or channeled through the PCE. In the Soviet Union, Stalin was in the process of purging his own supporters at the same time, and news of those purges eroded support for Negrín's government among many sectors of the Spanish left.
As his support declined, Negrín dug in his heels. In October 1937 he crushed the revolutionary faction of the UGT and sent Largo Caballero to prison, after ousting him as the head of the union. Shortly thereafter, the anarchists left the government. Negrín moved the headquarters of the republic from Valencia to Barcelona at the end of October, as his support continued to erode. In April 1938, Indalecio Prieto, the last moderate socialist in the government, resigned, in opposition to the growing Russian influence over Negrín. In August 1938, the last remaining republicans also resigned – the Basque Manuel Irujo and the Catalan Artemio Aiguade. Thereafter, Negrín presided over a cabinet that was predominantly communist, with a minority of left-wing socialists. When the Soviet Union ended its support for the republic in September 1938, the Negrín government stood alone as nationalist forces closed in.
The government fled across the Pyrenees to France on February 6, 1939, a week before Franco closed the frontier. The day after Britain and France recognized the Franco government on February 27, Manuel Azaña, still President of the Republic, resigned. Negrín went back to Valencia, determined to continue the fight, appointing communists to most positions of command. Desperate to separate the republican cause from Negrín and the communists, in Madrid Colonel Segismundo Casado launched an uprising against the government on March 5, supported by factions of the republican army and civilian leaders such as Julián Besteiro of the PSOE. At the same time, they tried to negotiate terms with the nationalists. Franco, by then approaching Madrid from the west, had every reason to applaud the internal war among the republicans, but he had no reason to accept anything less than their unconditional surrender.
The war took a terrible toll. In 1930, Spain had a population of 23.7 million; in 1940, the number stood at 25.9 million, but those figures hide the horrors of the war and its aftermath. At least half a million Spaniards died between 1936 and 1943. According to one careful estimate, about 100,000 of those deaths occurred in battle. The rest were due to air raids (10,000), disease and malnutrition (50,000), and executions and reprisals on both sides. In the republican zones, militants killed some 20,000 people for political reasons, among them about 6,800 priests, 1,000 Civil Guards, and 2,000 members of the Falange. The rest were ordinary citizens of various political stripes, left as well as right.
In the nationalist zones, the toll was far higher, but, with rare exceptions, the nationalists targeted only enemies on the other side of the struggle. In addition to summary executions during the war, a Tribunal of Political Responsibilities had already begun to identify more “enemies of Spain” as Franco's troops entered Madrid in late March 1939. From 1939 to 1943, an estimated 200,000 republican prisoners died, some by execution, others from disease. It is not clear if a republican victory would have been any more merciful to its enemies. The great tragedy on the republican side was that they sometimes killed their own as well, leaving a legacy of bitterness and recrimination that continues into the present.
For three decades after the end of the Spanish Civil War, a sense of helplessness fueled the internal divisions on the left. That is how long the victor in that war, General Francisco Franco, held power in Spain. Although the Western democracies recognized him as a dictator, none would move against him. Inside Spain, substantial portions of the citizenry agreed with the aims of his regime. Even those who hated him and nearly everything he represented – at least in retrospect – did not want another civil war. It is necessary to understand how the regime functioned to appreciate its extraordinary longevity.
Franco himself, born in 1892, was not a prepossessing individual, though he distinguished himself early in his army career for personal bravery in the Moroccan wars and for an innate ability to command. By the time the military rebellion broke out in July 1936, Franco had become the youngest general in any of the European armed forces – in fact, the youngest general since Napoleon. After he took control of the uprising, he developed a set of positions that would define his regime. National unity served as the keystone of the structure, in which divisive politics had no place. In fact, Franco saw democracy, socialism, anarchism, communism, and even freemasonry as foreign movements alien to the authentic character of Spain. Instead of political parties, his dictatorship fostered citizen identity through families and local communities, the Roman Catholic Church, and the workplace. The regime respected the rights of private property and favored capitalism, although, as we shall see, it dabbled in state management of the economy as a matter of necessity.
For most of Franco's long dictatorship, the secretary-general of the Falange supervised the administration of the country. Syndicates, encompassing both workers and employers, replaced labor unions of all stripes, governed by the Work Charter (Fuero del trabajo) of 1938. In January 1940, Franco gave the Falange control of the syndicates as well, by the Law of Syndical Unity. By the Law of the Cortes in 1942, he reestablished the Cortes as an advisory body, clearly subservient to the interests of the regime. Franco served as both head of state and head of government, advised by a Council of Ministers, and the Cortes reverted to the passive role it had held under the Bourbon monarchy of the eighteenth century.
Although some historians argue that Franco was as much a fascist as Mussolini or Hitler, he clearly lacked the charisma to build a cult of personality around himself, even had he wished to do so. Above all, he was a military officer, an anti-communist, and – he would later claim – a monarchist. He often described his regime as an “organic democracy,” adopting a traditional term but stripping it of its traditional meaning. Political scientists, while recognizing the regime as a dictatorship, struggled to fit it into the standard mold of totalitarian dictatorships such as those of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In 1964, the political scientist Juan Linz defined a new category, the authoritarian regime, to characterize Spain. Scholars since then have adopted the phrase to describe other modern regimes as well.
Several characteristics define the authoritarian regime. Unlike totalitarian states, Franco's regime did not try to foster active citizen participation in controlled political activities. There were few mass rallies, and, once the regime was established, it aimed at passive acquiescence on the part of the citizenry, rather than active participation. Moreover, the regime devoted few resources toward policing thought. Instead, the leadership relied on the power of traditional institutions to maintain social stability and to shape succeeding generations.
The Roman Catholic Church formed the cornerstone of the regime's traditional structure. After the hammering that the established church had suffered, arguably since the nineteenth century, the hierarchy was happy to accept the role of a staunch ally of General Franco. The regime also supported other traditional forces such as the military establishment; the nobility; the Carlists; and the economic elites in agriculture, industry, and banking. Individuals in these institutions were generally free to pursue their own interests, as long as they did not oppose the regime. Together with the family, the church, and the labor syndicates, these traditional institutions provided social and economic stability, and thus passive acquiescence toward the regime, even on the part of its enemies.
Within the regime, Franco tolerated and even encouraged various interest groups to compete for attention and support. Unlike a totalitarian state, in which such internal conflict tends to be rare or spasmodic, the competing voices in the Franco regime allowed it to change in response to changing conditions, but never so abruptly as to destabilize the structure as a whole. Moreover, the internal competition ensured that no one cadre of leaders could ever become a threat to Franco's control. That, of course, is the same principle that effective monarchs had used in the past, from Fernando and Isabel in the fifteenth century to Carlos III in the eighteenth.
The entry paths into the elite of the Franco regime were fairly open, varied, and unpredictable. In other words, aspiring leaders did not have to belong to the Falange or enter the army in order to succeed. Most of the men who rose to the top had law degrees. Others were educators, or had trained in economics or other technical fields. If Franco decided that he needed their expertise, he appointed them to positions of authority and supported them as long as they were successful.
Overall, unlike totalitarian states, the regime did not worry about the travels of ordinary citizens, as long as they did not oppose the regime openly. They could move from place to place, or emigrate, if they saw fit, without meeting government opposition. In fact, as the population grew, the regime actively encouraged temporary or permanent emigration as a way to relieve pressure on the economy and to provide a source of outside income. This was one of the most striking differences between totalitarian regimes and the authoritarian regime defined by Juan Linz.
Overall, Linz proposed that the plurality and tolerated opposition of an authoritarian regime made it more flexible than a democracy or a totalitarian regime, neither of which can change much without losing their essential character. An authoritarian regime, according to Linz, could shift either toward democracy or toward totalitarianism without seriously disrupting the structure of the state. As we shall see, his analysis predicted and helped to explain how Spain could shift almost seamlessly to democracy after Franco's death.
The regime went through several phases over its four decades in power, decades marked outside Spain by the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War. The Second World War began just five months after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Whereas Franco owed his victory in part to the aid from Germany and Italy, he was appalled by Hitler's non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939, and Spain was in no shape to join the larger conflict. Instead, at the start of the war, Franco adopted an official policy of neutrality, though his actions betrayed a pro-Axis stance. The only part of Hitler's aims that really interested him, however, was the offensive against the Soviet Union, which he enthusiastically supported, sending the so-called “Blue Division” of Spanish soldiers to fight alongside the German army on the eastern front. Although Hitler kept pressing Franco for access through Spain to attack Gibraltar, Franco held him off. At a meeting of the two dictators in a railroad car on the French border in 1940, Franco famously kept Hitler waiting while he took a nap after lunch. He did agree, however, to sell the rights to Spanish tungsten – a crucial war material – to Germany.
Sometime in 1942, Franco realized that Germany might not win the war and began to shift his support away from the Axis. He started permitting Allied fliers shot down in France and elsewhere to travel through Spain to Portugal. Franco also gave orders to issue Spanish passports to Jews in Salonika, arguing that they were descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century. He pressured Hitler to let them leave with their wealth and evidently saw no value in the Nazi push to exterminate them. In Eastern Europe, Spanish consulates also issued passports to Jews trying to escape the Nazis, and Franco allowed those who arrived in Spain to travel on freely to Portugal, where they could find transport to the western hemisphere. Although these actions displeased Hitler, he did nothing to stop them, as he still hoped that Franco would openly join his cause. The Allies also hoped to win Spain to their side.
As for Franco, though neutrality seemed the only practical course for Spain during the war, he knew that policy risked alienating both sides. Suspecting that Spain would be isolated once the war ended, he implemented a policy of autarky – total economic self-sufficiency. Despite his slide toward the Allies from 1942 on, Franco had guessed right. The founding members of the United Nations barred Spain from membership in 1945, even as it admitted a long list of states with similarly dubious credentials. Many politicians in Europe and the United States despised Franco as one of the last dictators to survive the war. They favored measures that might cause the regime to fall; some even argued for an invasion of Spain in 1945–6, spurred on by the pleas of republicans in exile. However, Europe was exhausted, and the United States had no stomach for a continuation of the combat. Efforts by guerrilla fighters to go back into Spain failed as well. Franco stayed in power, and Spaniards of all political beliefs suffered for it. Ironically, the international quarantine of Spain by the Western democracies may actually have bolstered support for the regime among Spaniards, especially as Franco moved to redefine his government.
In an attempt to align Spain with the Christian Democratic governments of postwar Western Europe, Franco abandoned the remnants of fascist rhetoric and leadership and allied more closely with a lay organization, Acción Católica. He also issued a constitution in 1945, known as the “Charter of the Spanish People” (Fuero de los Españoles), which emphasized the human rights of the citizenry, though not political rights. None of this had much effect on the international community, though it may have persuaded some Spaniards that the regime was loosening up. The harsh repression after the civil war eased off in 1943, as any remaining opposition had been eliminated or co-opted. Nonetheless, any overt resistance to the regime ran up against a rigid legal structure that punished seemingly minor acts with imprisonment.
Franco redefined his regime as a monarchy without a monarch in 1947, promising that the monarchy would return after his death. Spaniards validated the change with a plebiscite, but that did not end the regime's isolation. That same year, the United States barred Spain from aid under the Marshall Plan, designed to rebuild the shattered economies of Europe, including the former Axis powers. Spaniards had hoped to share in that aid, and their exclusion was another humiliating reminder of their isolation. They felt abandoned by the rest of the world. Only Argentina, under the populist dictator Juan Perón, offered aid, in the tangible form of shiploads of Argentine beef and wheat. Autarky probably intensified Spain's economic problems in the 1940s, especially for agriculture, as skeptical farmers reduced production in response to price ceilings. The National Institute for Industry (INI) had greater success, developing national industries to replace foreign imports.
By the end of the 1940s, the international community began to realize that the Franco regime was likely to remain in power. Spain was peaceful and stable politically, with a population that had grown to over 28 million. Although several hundred thousand republican Spaniards lived in exile, they were scattered throughout the rest of Europe and the western hemisphere. Moreover, like the Second Republic in its day, they represented diverse and mutually hostile factions. They did not offer a viable alternative to Franco.
During the 1950s, the Cold War that pitted the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and its allies provided an opening for Francoist Spain to reenter the international political system. As a staunch anti-communist, Franco began to look more appealing to the anti-Soviet bloc, and Franco used this appeal to his advantage. The regime negotiated a new Concordat with the Vatican in 1953, which gave Franco a good deal of control over the Roman Catholic Church in Spain. That same year, the United States, under the leadership of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, signed a bilateral treaty with Spain, the Pact of Madrid, which provided for a series of three United States air bases on Spanish soil, in exchange for promises of American financial and military aid. One base was located at Torrejón de Ardoz near Madrid; another at Zaragoza (Aragon) in the northeast; and the third at Morón de la Frontera near Seville in the southwest. A purpose-built petroleum pipeline guaranteed a fuel supply for the aircraft. Under the terms of the pact, the United States was also able to establish a small naval base at Rota on the Atlantic coast near Cádiz. For the remainder of the Cold War, these facilities provided an extremely important link in anti-Soviet defense planning for the United States. Spain, after more than a decade of isolation, gained a grudging acceptance by the Western democracies, illustrated by the startling image of President Eisenhower embracing Franco on an official visit to Spain.
In material terms, the bilateral treaty provided funds needed to rebuild the Spanish economy, but the regime had to spend most of those funds in the United States, mainly on military equipment. Critics of the Franco regime, both inside and outside Spain, viewed the treaty as a humiliation. In their judgment, the country gained little more than the ability to purchase outmoded military equipment in return for ceding control of part of its national territory. Mindful of the criticism, Franco tried to limit the visibility and the influence of the American presence in Spain. In general, the regime preferred that only married Catholics serve tours of duty in Spain, and they could not wear their uniforms outside the bases. In subsequent renewals of the pact, Spain negotiated better terms, but both sides saw advantages in continuing the arrangement.
The implementation of the bases pact was followed by other marks of acceptance. By the late 1950s, Spain was part of a growing list of international organizations, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations. During the 1950s as well, a dialogue on the pace and nature of change began within the regime, with some bureaucrats arguing for thoroughgoing reforms. Dionisio Ridruejo emerged as the main spokesman for a range of critics who had supported Franco during the civil war but subsequently turned against the regime. Little came of these internal debates at first, and those who criticized official policy openly found themselves excluded from power. Nonetheless, the discussions began.
The most serious challenge to the regime came from the economy. Although autarky had been relaxed, the regime still aimed to foster economic independence rather than collaboration with other countries. To bolster both economic and social stability, the regime also continued to laud traditional rural life and social values, and to enhance the agrarian economy with ambitious irrigation schemes and a modest attempt to reclaim and redistribute unused property. Even so, the rural population continued to drift toward the larger towns and cities of Spain. By 1960, some 56 percent of the population lived in municipalities with 10,000 or more inhabitants, an increase of 7 percent since 1940.
In the industrial sphere, the regime supported full employment and job security, as well as encouraging excess workers to seek employment outside Spain. By the late 1950s, despite some success, the Spanish economy still lagged far behind many of its European neighbors while nonetheless experiencing growing inflation, despite a shortage of money. Spain's exclusion from the European Common Market in 1957 dampened any hopes for an immediate improvement in the situation.
To confront the economic challenge, the Franco regime carried out a major socioeconomic transformation, beginning with the Stabilization Plan of 1959 to stop inflation. With a population of 30.4 million people in 1960, Spain had to modernize the way it did business, and that required infusions of capital. However, a report by the World Bank in 1962 said that Spain would not be creditworthy unless it took fundamental steps to change the economy and provide greater opportunities for foreign investment.
The World Bank report goaded the regime into further action. In a major cabinet shake-up, Franco appointed a large group of trained economists and other technocrats to institute the necessary changes in a national development plan. Some of the most prominent of these new men, such as Laureano López Rodó, belonged to a lay Catholic organization called Opus Dei (“Work of God”). Founded by the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer in 1928, Opus Dei defines itself as a lay prelature that promotes economic progress for the benefit of individuals and society as a whole. Its most visible members tend to be highly educated, especially in fields related to the law, business, and government. Although the organization claims to be largely apolitical, it is fair to say that its members are conservative, and critics on the left of the political spectrum have long viewed Opus Dei as a conspiratorial, sinister force. There is general agreement, however, that the experts appointed by Franco opened the Spanish economy to foreign investment, and that this helped to spur rapid economic growth in the 1960s.
Laureano López Rodó, the architect of several successive economic plans, emphasized industry rather than agriculture, recognizing that industrial growth would generate more jobs. The government defined a number of cities as industrial “growth poles,” including some that already had substantial industry but needed encouragement to grow, and others where the government planned to establish new industries. Valladolid and Salamanca in north-central Castile, and Huelva in Andalusia were among the cities designated as growth poles. The government's efforts to reduce traditional regional disparities had measurable success, even as economic leaders such as Madrid, Catalonia, and the Basque region continued to dominate industrial production.
With government investment in industry, the out-migration of excess rural workers, and the increased mechanization of agriculture, Spain experienced a sharp drop in the rural population, a marker of advanced economies. Half the population in 1940 was rural; less than one-quarter was rural by 1975, and most of that change occurred in the period after 1960. This signaled the growth of industry and solved the age-old problem of land-hunger in rural Spain. In other words, as agriculture was mechanized and became productive enough to require less labor, and as workers found jobs outside agriculture, the issue of land redistribution became irrelevant. As Spain moved to establish a free-market system, the regime applied for admission into the Common Market, filing its first application in 1962. Although Spain would not be allowed to join that body for more than two decades, the government had made a long-term commitment to modernize the economy and join the rest of Europe.
During the 1960s, tourism emerged as a major source of foreign exchange for the Spanish economy, and the government worked hard to promote Spain as an attractive destination, particularly in the sun-starved countries of Northern Europe. Year by year, increasing numbers of tourists flocked to Spanish beach resorts, bringing their customs and attitudes with them. To Spaniards used to the moralistic constraints of the Franco regime, those customs were shocking and titillating at the same time. Despite the best efforts of the government to limit the social impact of tourism, many segments of Spanish society used the example set by foreign tourists to press for change. Foreign scholars also flowed into Spain in considerable numbers from the 1960s onward. Some of them had to face the disapproval of their colleagues at home for seeming to provide further legitimacy for the regime. On the other hand, the flow of scholars into Francoist Spain probably strengthened the growing pressure for change within Spanish society.
Social change often brings demands for political change in its wake, and the Franco regime worked hard to keep any such demands within acceptable limits, in part by making minor changes in the structure and functioning of the government. In 1962, Franco approved the creation of the post of vice-president of the Council of Ministers, an assistant head of government. More importantly, in 1966 the regime abolished prior censorship of the press. Before, government censors had to approve virtually all publications, as well as films, plays, and other cultural productions. After the 1966 law, if the government did not approve of something that was published, it simply confiscated the publication. Because publishers suffered a substantial loss of revenue when that happened, they tried to avoid openly provoking the regime, even as they tested the limits of government tolerance. Overall, the tentative political changes of the early 1960s marked a step forward in opening up the regime, but they hardly satisfied the growing chorus of demands for greater changes.
The Spanish economy enjoyed enormous growth during the 1960s as it opened to the world. In the period 1960–73, Spain had the fastest rate of growth in the Western world, far higher than its European neighbors. Critics argue that this “economic miracle” only reflected the prior backwardness of the economy, but the growth was nonetheless impressive. Through it all, the government kept a wary finger on the pulse of Spanish society, attentive to the potential for unrest that might accompany economic changes, either good or bad. The Institute of Public Opinion carried out numerous polls about diverse aspects of Spanish life, while sociologists, historians, and other academics carried out independent research on a wide range of topics that had political implications, such as rural-to-urban migration. The government both sponsored and facilitated such research, whether or not its authors were associated with the regime. In that way, those in power could gauge the effects of their policies, including potential political demands.
Adding to the pressure for change in the 1960s, underground opposition to the Franco regime's unchanging political structure grew as society and the economy rapidly evolved. The Communist Party of Spain (PCE) played a key role in that opposition, under the leadership of Santiago Carrillo, who became the party's secretary-general in 1960. The PCE faced problems, however. Not only did it remain illegal in Spain, along with all other traditional political parties, but it faced opposition from within. On the right of the PCE, a pro-Soviet faction led by Enrique Líster emerged in 1968 and, on the left, Trotskyites and Maoists opposed the relatively moderate stance of Carrillo's leadership. Other leftist parties emerged as well, all of them clandestine but well known to the government. In the peculiar political atmosphere of Spain in the late 1960s, the leadership of a wide range of opposition parties met openly in social settings such as the bar of the Hotel Suecia behind the Cortes building. As long as they observed the letter of the law regarding associations, the government left them alone.
In the late 1960s as well, students and faculty at Spain's major universities, in particular the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, followed the lead of their counterparts in France and the United States in demanding major educational reforms. Although they succeeded in changing the university, they were unable to use that success as a template for social revolution in general, as many of them wished to do.
The government removed labor syndicates from the control of the Falange, and passed a law in 1958 that allowed limited collective bargaining. As a result, Laborers’ Commissions (Comisiones Obreras), or CCOO, bargained for affiliated workers and organized a series of de facto strikes, acting as unions in all but name. Nonetheless, the regime refused to make the commissions autonomous, despite demands from international labor organizations and the European Common Market. Led by Marcelino Camacho, the CCOO workers also grew increasingly restive during the 1960s, and, in the interests of social peace, the regime often accommodated the workers’ demands, as long as they remained outside the political sphere. Although Camacho was a communist and a member of the Comintern, he denied it until the late 1970s. One of the remaining leftist heroines of the civil war, Dolores Ibárruri, in exile in Moscow, was also a member of the Comintern, though she too denied it. By remaining circumspect, leaders of the Spanish left, both inside and outside Spain, could work for the improvement of workers’ lives with the tacit compliance of the regime.
Although Spanish industrial production rose rapidly in the 1960s, the economy had a limited capacity to absorb new workers from the countryside. Consequently, the Franco regime encouraged and facilitated worker emigration to the more developed parts of Western Europe and abroad. The government even arranged subsidized trains to bring Spanish workers home for vacations, well aware that the temporary out-migration provided a safety valve against unrest at home. The workers sent money back to their families in Spain and thus directly contributed to the growth of the home economy.
By the late 1960s, Franco and his regime had confounded critics by their longevity, but Franco at least could not last forever. Age and infirmity, particularly Parkinson's disease, had rendered him a seemingly frail and stiff shadow of the man who had taken power in 1936. His regime therefore attempted to prepare for a perpetuation of Francoism without Franco, instituting minor changes to the legal and governmental system aimed at deflecting demands for more thoroughgoing changes. A new set of fundamental laws – in effect, a new constitution – passed through the Cortes in 1966, ratified by a referendum in January 1967. The government then passed three important laws to implement key provisions in the new constitution. One law allowed non-Catholic groups to operate in the open, rather than in private. Another law provided for the election of one-fifth of the deputies to the Cortes, rather than having the whole body appointed. And a third law reduced the role of the Falange in government and renamed its remnant as an amorphous “Movement.” Although these changes, together with the 1966 removal of prior restraint on the press, fell far short of the democratic freedoms demanded by the clandestine opposition, the regime hoped that they would be sufficient to defuse open unrest.
To a certain extent, they succeeded, but, ironically, the continuing economic progress sponsored by the regime also continued to spawn demands for social and political change. Industrial production in Spain rose 7.9 percent a year between 1959 and 1972, a phenomenal record surpassed only by Japan. One stunning success story involved the workers’ cooperative enterprise founded in 1956 at Mondragón in the Basque region. Starting with twenty-three workers, the Mondragón project grew and prospered to become a model of worker-controlled industry and social services. With both conventional and unconventional enterprises, Spanish exports of manufactured goods rose to 78 percent of total output by 1975. Foreign investment flowed into Spain through huge banking consortia that held enormous economic power. Tourism also brought in vast sums of foreign capital. Although scholars debate about the role that government planning played in the growth of the Spanish economy, that growth itself is well documented and undoubtedly increased the pressure for reform.
During the late 1960s, various opposition forces escalated their demands, coinciding with widespread protest movements in the democratic West, and terrorism by Palestinians in the Middle East and the Irish Republican Army in the United Kingdom. In Spain, the terrorist group known as ETA began a campaign of assassinations and bombings to press for the independence of the Basque provinces in the north of the country. ETA's audacious challenge to the government served as a catalyst for other opposition, even as the vast majority of Spaniards decried the violence. Even the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, long allied with the most conservative forces in Spanish society, moved deliberately away from the Franco regime, following the progressive social decrees of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). Both directly and indirectly, priests and some members of the church hierarchy in Spain supported the opposition.
In a further attempt to preserve the regime into the future, on July 21, 1969, Franco named Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón to succeed him, finally fulfilling his 1947 promise to restore the monarchy. Laureano López Rodó, the Opus Dei government leader, and Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, a trusted confidant of Franco, had worked together to persuade Franco that the decision was necessary. Opposition leaders scarcely knew what to make of this move, though Franco had been grooming the prince as his presumed successor for more than two decades. To strict monarchists, Juan Carlos's father Don Juan was the only legitimate monarch. Diehard Carlists favored their pretender. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the majority of conservative Spaniards welcomed the nomination of Juan Carlos as their future king.
The leftist opposition did not. They viewed Juan Carlos as a puppet of Franco and a passive figurehead for the continuation of the regime. Although the official press had reported myriad details about his military training during his teenage years, his marriage to Princess Sofía of Greece in 1962, and their growing family, the Spanish public knew very little about him as a person. In the aftermath of his nomination by Franco, jokes circulated that his nickname as king would be “Juan Carlos the Brief,” assuming that the military would overthrow him at the first opportunity. In monarchist circles, many favored his father Don Juan instead of the untested prince. During the final years of the Franco regime, these and other stories and rumors flew around opposition circles.
During those final years, the regime confronted crisis after crisis, trying to keep a lid on opposition movements. By 1970, the Spanish population had grown to some 34 million, and it is fair to say that at least half of them opposed the regime. In December 1970, the trial of a group of ETA members accused of terrorist acts brought the opposition into the public eye. Despite warnings from the international community, a military court in Burgos condemned six of the sixteen accused to death, although they were not executed, pending judicial appeals. Franco later commuted their sentences. Regardless of the actual guilt or innocence of the accused, the trial galvanized a tactical coalition of Catholic clergy, students, workers, communists, socialists, and “left” Christian Democrats to press for civil and political rights denied by the Franco regime.
Faced with this widespread opposition, in the early 1970s the regime did not resort to the repressive measures employed in earlier decades, though scholars argue about the reason for that restraint. Some point to external pressure and Spain's perennial application for admission to the European Common Market, which required democracy, civil liberties, and an autonomous labor movement. Others, notably the distinguished historian Juan Pablo Fusi, called this reluctance to use force “the bad conscience of the regime,” giving the crisis an internal rather than an external cause. According to Fusi, those in charge of the government in 1970 either lacked the will to employ repressive tactics or judged them counterproductive, given the changed conditions both inside and outside Spain. Moreover, the oil crisis in Europe and the United States in 1973 led to a reduction in the number of Spanish workers employed abroad and in the ability of the Spanish economy to employ the returnees. Thus, fears of economic instability may have added to the government's decision to respond to protests with restraint.
Several events in 1973 marked a critical juncture in the leadership and direction of the Franco regime. In June, Franco appointed Admiral Carrero Blanco as president of the Council of Ministers, and therefore as the effective head of the government. In other words, for the first time since 1936, the aging dictator no longer simultaneously held the positions of head of state and head of government. The change was necessary, given that Prince Juan Carlos would become head of state after Franco's death. Nonetheless, opposition forces drew the unmistakable conclusion that Carrero Blanco's appointment meant a perpetuation of the regime. That same year, a financial scandal involving members of Opus Dei in the government forced Laureano López Rodó out of power. As the architect of Spain's economic resurgence, he had enjoyed enormous prestige; the economic downturn of 1973, his dismissal, and the discrediting of his Opus Dei associates, cast the competence of the leadership into doubt.
The most stunning blow to Franco's hopes for the future occurred on December 20, 1973, when ETA terrorists assassinated Admiral Carrero Blanco. They accomplished this by relying on the admiral's regular habits and digging a tunnel underneath the street where his official vehicle always passed after he attended mass. The explosion blew the admiral, his car, and his chauffeur so high that pieces of the car lodged several stories up in the walls of an adjacent apartment building. As appalling as the act was, it gave hope to the various opposition groups that it was possible to act against the regime, despite the vigilance of the security forces.
Franco appointed Carlos Arias Navarro to succeed Carrero as president of the Council of Ministers. Arias dismissed the last of the Opus Dei technocrats from the Council and otherwise tried to run the country in a situation that was increasingly fraught. When Franco fell seriously ill in 1974, the government functioned well, which encouraged many Spaniards to hope that the transition after Franco's death would be smooth. Nonetheless, Spanish newspapers and magazines carried numerous articles about “Who's Who in the Military,” as if preparing for another military coup once Franco finally disappeared from the scene. Coincidentally, Portugal went through a chaotic transition to democracy in 1973–4, following its largely bloodless ouster of the successor to Antonio Salazar, the long-term Portuguese dictator. By implication, Portugal's experience served as an example of how not to shift toward an open, democratic society. In Spain, the government was well aware of the breadth and depth of the forces pushing for change. An extraordinary series of public opinion polls and sociological studies made that quite clear to the regime.
Matters reached a critical point in the fall of 1975, as the Council of Ministers reviewed eleven death sentences earlier handed down to Basque terrorists in military trials. The council commuted six sentences and confirmed the other five, carrying out the executions on September 27, 1975. Whether or not those executed were guilty as charged, in the international community the executions confirmed long-standing hatred of the Franco regime and produced an explosion of horror and outrage. With Spain cast as an international pariah once again, Franco entered his final agony. Doctors kept his failing body alive on machines for more than a month, providing material for tasteless humor on television in the United States. When his family faced the inevitable, doctors disconnected the machines, and Franco died on November 20, 1975, after nearly four decades in power. Two days later, his designated successor took the oath of office as Juan Carlos I, promising to uphold the constitution. No one knew what would happen next, but it is fair to say that most Spaniards were apprehensive about what the future might bring.
This poster, produced by the Communist Party of Spain, urges voters to choose the affiliated parties of the Popular Front in the elections of 1936. It portrays class struggle with the image of a working-class mother, held back by the forces of religion, the privileged classes, and capitalism.
The Falange Party also appealed to class and gender to consolidate public support in the aftermath of military victory. Denying the class struggle propounded by the left, this poster portrays young women from the upper and lower classes united in the youth organizations of the Falange.
