I was skiing this weekend-and met some Spanish girls on the lift (they were muito hott!). I was chatting with them, and Spain seems like a pretty wild place these days, you can do pretty much what you want. So, what was the country like during the time of Franco? (1936-1976)? I get the impression that people didn’t do much on Sundays-except go to church. Anybody have personal reminisces to share?
Nava will along shortly.
Let’s see no divorce. No bikinis (allowing tourists to wear them was a liberalization). Catholicism was the state religion. A much more fragmented country, not so much traveling from one place to another, much poorer. In fact poverty would (I guess) what most would have struck a visitor from other European countries. The words “old fashioned” and “backwards” come to mind.
Although I wasn’t there, according to Wikipedia things were pretty tightly controlled by the government. General Franco was a facist dictator, so I think that tells you something…
All cultural activities were subject to censorship, and many were plainly forbidden on various grounds (political or moral). Despite Franco being himself Galician, in accordance with his nationalist principles, only Spanish was recognized as an official language of the country, although millions of the country’s citizens also had other native languages, such as Catalan, Basque or Galician. The use of these languages was discouraged, and most public uses were forbidden. This cultural policy was initially very strict, but relaxed with time, most notably after 1960. Still, even after 1960, all government, notarial, legal and commercial documents were drawn up exclusively in Spanish and any written in other languages were deemed null and void.
I haven’t heard an update lately, but he’s still dead, right?
Well, the most shocking (to my young mind) moment of my trip to Spain in 1985 (note ten years after Franco died), was riding in a car with 3 Spanish young people recently graduated from college. We were laughing and talking loudly as 5 young people in a car on a sunny day might, we drove-at a reasonable rate of speed no one was drunk no speeding or dangerous antics-around a curve and saw 3-4 Guardia National police in their distinctive hats just standing on the side of the road. Not pulling anyone over, just standing there. It was like someone pulled the plug right out of the socket. All the Spaniards in the car went silent, sat straight ahead, the driver concentrated on the road, it was really really spooky. Now note that the people I was with had been talking about the changes sweeping the country and how things were much better than before and how Spain was waking up. And then splat. Still gives me chills to realize what it must have been like for those young people to have to grow up like that. Everything I have heard since has Spain a wonderful place to live and visit. But Franco’s shadow stretched for a long way even years after he died.
Without getting into the substance of the question let me add some thoughts and perspective.
Spain underwent phenomenal change in those 40 years so it makes no sense to try to summarize them in a few phrases. The Spain of 1940 was very different from the Spain of 1950 which was very different from the Spain of 1960 which, in turn, was very different from the Spain of 1970.
People like to simplify and summarize to a point where all you get is a distorted caricature. Slaves were all always miserable, people in China are all exploited, women in the 50s were all unhappy about not being able to work out of the house, etc. The truth is that life changes in many ways but also the basic human needs for prosperity, happiness, family, etc. mostly remain the same. Men liked to go to soccer games just like they do today. They liked to spend time with their friends, just like today. Mentality was different and they might talk about different things with different ponts of view but to describe Spain or China or Iraq as a place where everybody is unhappy and suffering due to political oppression is just silly. Yes, Spain was more conservative but so was all the rest of the world even if not as much as Spain. It was also much poorer but so was the UK which came out of WWII totally destroyed, like most of Europe.
The problem with movies which depict a certain period is that they exagerate everything. A movie about Franco’s Spain would necessarily have political repression and such things which probably in reality affected a tiny minority of the population in real life but that is what you want to depict because that is what distinguishes that time. And then people come away thinking that is all there was when in reality that was a small part of those times.
I once knew a man who traveled on business a lot in Spain during the Franco years, and he told me that, although it was not a very free country, it was certainly a very safe country for travelers. Nobody ever mugged a tourist or a foreigner, to hear him tell it.
And I bet the trains ran on time, too.
Weirdly, Portugal was even more screwy than Spain under their old regime. (Not that I was in Lisbon then, but repeating the accounts of friends.)
Something like that. :rolleyes: As I hope I implied, he had a limited perspective on things.
I was an American teenager living in Spain during Franco’s last few years. He may have been dying all that time, but his iron-fist machinery was still in place.
We were extremely cautious around la Guardia Civil. If they felt you were offensive in any way, they had the power to take you into custody indefinitely or use their shiny weapons on you.
From my teen perspective, I remember being annoyed that Franco would not allow rock bands into the country to perform. He wasn’t keen on degenerate outside influences.
I remember how very Catholic things were. (It was even illegal to get your pets neutered.) Strict religion has always been handy in keeping the masses in line.
I lived on the southern coast, not terribly far from touristy areas, so we did run around in bikinis, in appropriate areas. It was a lovely place to be a foreign teenager. You could go to a bar or cafe, have drinks and tapas, and chitchat for hours with everyone. It felt relatively safe, and you could drink!
Television programming was very limited, consisting mostly of bullfights, soccer, and, bizarrely, dubbed Kojak and Columbo.
A lot of people were kept in poverty and ignorance, also handy tools of a dictator. That said, I also constantly met incredibly smart, passionate, fun-loving Spaniards. I’m not surprised at how drastically things changed, beyond what you’d expect over time, even though it used to feel like such an old-fashioned time capsule of a country.
Anecdotal:
I traveled in Spain in 1972. It was a very repressed and undeveloped place. When you entered the country your luggage was searched. Yet, you could travel there, unlike the Soviet countries. Read “The Drifters” by James Michener.
Going back 30 years later I was amazed at how developed it was, particularly along Costa Del Sol. Condominium and apartments everywhere, highways, golf courses, hotels, it is a totally changed place.
For better or for worse, the country has been transformed a result of getting rid of the repression.
waves to Paul and sailor while looking around for Red Fury
My grandmother was born in 1913. A few years back, something on the news prompted her to get this look of deep thought, turn to my mother (born 1940) and say “you know, I had a much, much more free and merry youth than you did.” Grandma’s dating time took place under the Republic: divorce and free love (lots of Anarchists in Barcelona) were in the air. Mom’s were in the late 50s and in provincial, Carlista Pamplona: a girl over age 14 whose knees showed would have caused a scandal.
My paternal grandparents (she a yong lady from Bilbao, he a gentleman from Pamplona) were slightly older than the maternal ones, but, being in Pamplona, the most daring thing they’d done before marriage was a few kisses on the cheek. Abuelita could count them and recount every occasion in which they took place. The backwardness of morality under Franco was, in many ways, an attempt to impose this particular brand of morals on everybody.
A friend of Mom’s of a similar age to her once told us about going to confession (weekly, before High Mass, and remember this was pre-Vatican II so Comunnion implied a lot of fasting time, unlike now) and confessing that her boyfriend of one year had kissed her… and not even on the cheek, on the mouth! The priest asked “with or without tongue?” Well, it would never have occurred to them to use the tongue, but hey, the next kiss was with! So she claims that going to confession is good for your sex life, ayup. Them priests give you ideas!
While the official morality under Franco and pre-touristic boom was Pamplona-style, the reality varied a lot. Mom went to vacation at her aunt’s in Asturias in 1955 and there were three horrible scandals in the valley that year:
- these two sisters from out of town, who had every single guy after them (not because Mom and her younger sister were doing anything, just because they were “foreign fish” and if they got pregnant any guy responsible would be able to claim innocence) but refused to put out,
- a girl who got married to an outsider without him having sampled the goods,
- another girl who got pregnant after 12 years of not going to Mass (girls stopped going when they got a bf, as they were fornicating but not regretful, therefore there was no point to confession but…; men didn’t go to Mass), the bf claimed it couldn’t be his, she walked into the only bar (which hadn’t been stepped on by female feet in decades) and demanded to know whether the reason he was so sure was that he had been cheating her of his seed or was he claiming to be “a hollow bull” and yes, they did get married.
The standard procedure in that village was to get married only after the cow was pregnant, in their words.
There was hunger during the post-war years (Spain never had a Marshall plan, logically); my mother’s family used to get eggs and poultry from the village cousins and sell them in the black market; there was a lot of migration to cities; there were new villages founded in order to populate underpopulated areas; the schools that had been closed by the Republic (one of their dumbest moves: forbid priests and nuns from teaching, without enough secular replacements at hand, in a country where the immense majority of teachers were priests or nuns); until the treaty that allowed NATO (“the Americans”) to use bases in Spain, blaming any poverty on the foreign countries “who ostracized us” was the easiest thing for the government to do. The economic aid brought by those bases and by the partial end of the ostracism jumpstarted the economy; the town where I grew up got its first industrial factory (ie, not preserves or some such) in 1965 and that stopped migration to bigger towns pretty much dead in its tracks, not just for my town but for the small villages around it as well.
The 60s also saw the creation of many “barrios” (no negative connotation) created by priests who obtained or donated land, obtained materials, and started cooperatives to build housing for the cooperativists: my home town has one such, which was built and populated by people from the old town, they moved from middle-ages houses with no plumbing to modern ones with electricity and plumbing and glass on the windows, and learned trades along the way (people knew how to lay bricks and some carpentry, but not plumbing or electricity, when they started). My flat in a village is in another one of those areas, in that case the “target people” were farmers who’d been isolated until then and moved to the village: this couldn’t have been possible before tractors.
There was linguistic repression in that all schooling was in Spanish and all government paperwork was in Spanish; there was grumbling about people recording new songs in Catalan or Basque (old songs had always been fine) but there was also people who took offense when Joan Manuel Serrat (who’d always sung in Catalan and had refused to go to Eurovision unless they let him sing in Catalan) released a record in Spanish (Mediterráneo) - as he says “I’m Catalan and I’m Spanish, I’m bilingual and some songs come out in one language and some in the other.”
Like sailor says, it’s a complex picture. My memories are vague (I was 7 when he died), I remember directly my father’s family arguing politics (Carlistas, on Franco’s side during the was but they didn’t like him); I remember hearing Catalan and seeing signs in Catalan when we went to visit my mother’s (the first word I learned in Catalan was “papallona”, butterfly, the name of a restauran near my grandparents’); I remember the book fair in Barcelona being a big deal because there were books in Catalan and there was tension about it.
Sometimes I go to a “country in development” and recognize things I saw in Spain in the 70s; mostly that attitude of hope mixed with fear of hoping, you know?
That snark is totally out of place and I am guessing it was posted by someone who knows nothing about Spain at that time and just felt like adding a jab because nothing good should be allowed to be said about a dictatorship.
The fact is that Spain was extremely safe and that, while many people disagreed with the lack of political liberties, most people liked the safety and security and considered the situation in other countries like the USA (as reported by the media which would always pick on these things) as chaotic and unsafe. The press would routinely have news of Franco inaugurating some public works and something bad happenning abroad. Man is robbed and stabbed in a crowded New York street and dies on the sidewalk with people walking around him and nobody helps him. That kind of thing was just unthinkable in Franco’s Spain.
A joke of the time tells of a man who is detained under suspicion of being subversive because he goes around saying things abroad are not so bad. The policeman asks him how he know this and the man responds that he has personally travelled to New York and other places and seen it with his own eyes. The cop, menacingly says “you need to travel less and read the news more” (Menos viajar y más leer la prensa).
The police were very much in control, for good and for bad. But the fact is that unless you were politically active against the regime (and by the 70s many people were) or you had commited a crime, you were safe. The police only needed to control a very small number of people.
They searched your luggage when you travelled? Let us put that in perspective. Travel was much more controlled everywhere at that time and customs were also more controlling in all other European countries but never in history has there been anything coming even close to the control the US government has today. Never. Ever. Franco could not have dreamed of anything like that. Of course, he didn’t have the computers which the USA has today.
Again, the police were respected and could be intimidating but plenty of foreign students did pranks and did not get into any trouble where a spaniard would have gotten into trouble. Foreigners were mostly left alone unless they were serious criminals. Like happens today in many strict countries like Cuba or China foreigners are given a lot of leeway that nationals do not get.
Let us not forget that post WWII all countries were different than what they are today. It makes no sense to compare Spain at that time with anything but other European countries and even that has to be put in context.
A good book which describes Spain around 1970 is Iberia by Michener and I recommend it to anyone with interest in the subject. It also has some rudiments of Spanish history etc. for context.
^
Thanks for information. If I may, how is Franco viewed today?
Many young people have no idea who he was and most guess he lived much earlier, like the 19th century. The ignorance about recent Spanish history among young people is just astounding.
The official stance of the present (Socialist) government is that Franco was evil incarnate, an illegal and illegitimate usurper, and nothing good can be said about him. Laws have been passed outlawing any streets or monuments named after anyone in that regime. It is ridiculous but there is along tradition of this in Spain. The first thing a government does is rename the streets. I remember years ago someone proposing in jest that they leave the name of the street the same and change an adjective so that the street “Glorious General Franco” would be renamed “Evil General Franco” but at least people would not have to learn new names.
The pendulum has swung all the way to the other extreme and the view is that Franco, singlehandedly, personally oppressed every single Spanish person and family.
Of course, there is plenty of academic literature where one can find more accurate and balanced views but that is for minorities.
I remember flicking through a booklet on Franco in the university library, while waiting for a woman to arrive (a romantic liason of sorts 
). Being a university library, some students had inevitably scrawled the usual anti-fascist remarks here and there. But it wasn’t until I read something about the negative histories that had been suggested by Republicans that I twigged it was written during Franco’s reign.
Sailor,
thanks for the description. It is wonderful to hear a more balanced view of events. Certainly Franco was a dictator. And equally certain he led his country for many years and did so without any external force propping him up. Many people in Spain were satisfied with the trade-off Franco demanded. People went to sporting events, church and work. Life went on. Hearing about that is vital to anyone who needs to understand how countries live. My experiences in Spain were entirely positive. That one instance I described was noteworthy for being so unusual. And it wasn’t a bad experience-the police were fine-just my interpretation of what was going on was so striking to me. The young people in the car didn’t want to talk about it, once we were past they cheered up and everyone was fine.
Iron fist in the 70s? You have no idea then what the 40s and 50s were like. By the end of the 60s it was being called “dictablanda” instead of “dictadura”.
That is an exageration. No foreign student was ever taken into custody indefinitely or, much less, shot for being offensive in any way.
True.
Oh, come on! Why on earth would it be illegal to get your pets neutered? This is just not true and makes no sense anyway. Animals were neutered all the time. The regime was high on law, order, stability, etc. but they were not deranged maniacs and in many ways were more down to earth than some aspects of American life today. There were posters encouraging women to breast feed and the posters showed an actual women, her actual breast and an actual baby. Try that in America today.
Yup. Still very much of that remains.
Yup. Black and white. Color I believe started a bit after Franco’s death.
Kept? Nonsense. Spain saw a rate of economic develoment in those years which it had never seen in its history and a solid middle class emerged which did not exist until then. The fact that not everyone instantly came out of poverty does not mean they were deliberately kept like that. Unless you are the kind of person who believes poor people in America are also deliberately kept poor by the powers that be.
Those years created a middle class which was better educated and who developed Spain into what it later became.
Said by my Republican grandfather to my Carlista Dad, during the late 70s and early 80s when all of a sudden “nobody had fought for him:” “you know, your Dad must have been Superman, cos him and Paco Rana(1) single-handedly beat all thirty million of us!”
Dad, deadpan: “and my Uncle Javier. He died in the war, so he never got a chance to claim he wasn’t there.”
“Ah, so that’s why I remember more than one red beret (2) attacking my tank! Your Dad, and your uncle!”
When the recent “Law of Historic Memory” was being prepared, some guy made the mistake of going to see Gramps “to prepare a meeting of those brave folks who volunteered to defend the Glorious Republic!” Gramps called him several Pitworthy names and informed him that “I never volunteered, I had done my service and was told I had to ‘volunteer’ or be shot, so [deleted for this is not the Pit]” - another one of the distortions that have been commited for the last 30 years is making it sound as if the Republic and the “Red” Army were paragons of liberty and nobility, while the “Nationals” were the worst thing ever. It’s as absurd to paint one side as “rainbows and fluffy carnations” and the other as “nettles and pain” as it is to do it the other way round.
(1): Frank the Frog, a nickname given to Franco when he was in the news every week inaugurating a new reservoir or canal.
(2): Carlistas. You may see at some point these pretty pictures of Carlista uniforms: don’t believe them. In general, all they could afford was a red beret. Basque Nationalists use red berets too, which could have led to some serious confusion if those two sides had happened to be against each other in a battle, but they weren’t.