What Was the Franco Regime?

Carme Molinero assesses the character of the Franco regime. The emergence of this dictatorship should be situated within a context of intense social and political conflict: the European Civil War. The Franco regime built a new type of state which drew on a counter-revolutionary tradition, which accrued enormous powers in one individual and where the Falange was not simply some decorative aspect to the whole. National Catholicism was also central to the regime and it was two currents, Catholicism and the Falange, which sought alternative mechanisms for legitimation. It was the Catholic sector that led the economic changes of the late 1950s. These reforms in the economy came about after disastrous economic policies post-1939, where Spain fell behind all of its European neighbours, in spite of (mostly) non-participation in the Second World War. The hoped-for strategy of the economic reformists, providing a new social basis for the regime, failed in many aspects. The latter phase of the dictatorship witnessed spiralling social and political protest.