1. The Civil War ended organized resistance to the Glorioso Movimiento Nacional, as the insurgent side styled itself, but it left Spain exhausted materially and psychologically. Having lived for three years in a state of hypertension, keyed up by wartime propaganda, worried over the fate of loved ones, Spaniards on one side and the other fell into a state of shock. Those who had been in the Republican zone suffered in addition from prolonged malnutrition. Day-to-day living and recovering from the destruction became overwhelming problems. Roads were in ruin from military use, bombing, and lack of repair, bridges were missing, and automobiles and trucks old and lacking spare parts. Rolling stock on the railroads was worn out; rail traffic in 1941 was at the level of 1911, and did not pass the prewar high until 1952. Both sides had received military supplies from abroad during the war; now Spain needed outside help to rebuild its economy and its health. But outside help could not come, for Europe was at war and soon the whole world would be.

Spain also lacked productive manpower. A hundred thousand young men had died fighting. Nearly half a million people, soldiers, civil servants, Republican sympathizers, and their families, had fled the country, most of them to France, where they were crowded into makeshift camps. The majority of the intellectual elite had favored the Republic, and many of them had left, both writers and technicians. Sixty percent of all university professors had been killed in the war or had emigrated.

The war had intensified the hatreds present before it began and [212] turned Spaniards into two irreconcilable peoples. Hatred and fear infected the partisans of Franco, who felt the insecurity of conquerors in an alien country. The supporters of the Republic, especially those who had lost relatives or jobs or property, were alienated from all the new Spain stood for. While few of them desired further bloodshed, most harbored hopes that deliverance would come from abroad. The more indomitable Republicans did not feel the war had ended, they saw the surrender only as another in a long series of defeats. When the Allies had destroyed Hitler and Mussolini they would surely turn on Franco.

Nor did the victors attempt to bind up the wounds of the country. A calculated reign of terror began, aimed at punishing and cowing those who had opposed the Movimiento. Before Madrid surrendered Franco had pledged that those who had committed no crimes would not be punished, but a law of February 9, 1939 declared all persons who had engaged in subversion or opposed the Movimiento even by a "serious passiveness" to be criminals. Franco interned the Republican soldiers in camps where many nearly starved to death awaiting court martial for military rebellion. Members of labor syndicates and of political parties of the Popular Front were also subject to trial. Freemasonry and Communism were considered the most heinous crimes of all.

Perhaps one million persons went to prison. Simple soldiers were eventually freed, but thousands upon thousands of men were condemned to death and executed outside Madrid, Barcelona, and other cities. Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, visiting Spain in the summer of 1939, reported 200 to 250 executions per day in Madrid, 150 in Barcelona, 80 in Seville. The executions continued at a sustained rate through 1941 and tapered off during the next decade. Jackson's careful attempt to estimate the total number of death sentences reached the figure 200,000, equal in number to the executions carried out by the Nationalists during the heat of the war. Hundreds of thousands of others were condemned to life imprisonment or to sentences of many years' duration, which they could reduce in half by performing hard labor, usually on roads and public works. A large proportion died of disease or malnutrition before their sentences expired. Even after release from prison, many ex-Republicans found themselves "civilly incapacitated," that is without legal rights, unable to hold a job or to enjoy social security, forced to live outside the law, relying on the generosity of friends. To all these people official statements applied the epithet "rojo" (red) indiscriminately.

At the end of the war some ex-soldiers and others fled to the mountains, especially in Andalusia, where they took up a life of outlaws and bandits, reminiscent of the nineteenth century. To hold them down and pacify the country, Franco strengthened the Civil Guard. It mounted machine guns at major crossroads, and the famous parejas [213] (pairs) of armed civil guards patrolled the highways more conspicuously than ever. The republic's Assault Guard disappeared from the cities, to be replaced by a similar body called the Armed Police, made up of tough veterans. Meanwhile the army was kept up and garrisoned outside Madrid and other cities, ready to crush any sign of an uprising. The most efficient arm of the government was its secret police, centered in the menacing building of "Gobernación" on the Puerta del Sol of Madrid. The building reputedly held files of all persons known or suspected of having disloyal points of view. Spain resembled a conquered land, where the conquerors retained their control by armed might.

2. During the course of the war, Franco had created an authoritarian state with the reins in his hands. The insurgent generals had proclaimed him Generalísimo and Head of State on October 1, 1936. The regular army provided normal channels of authority for its supreme commander, and the officers proved to be loyal and devoted. Control of the state required implementation, however, for the title "Jefe del Estado" was new. The Constitution of the Republic had divided executive power between the president and the ministry headed by the prime minister, the former selected by popularly elected deputies, the latter appointed by the president but needing confirmation by the Cortes. Policy-making was the province of the ministry. The situation had been similar for one hundred years, except that there had been a hereditary king in place of an elected president. Only Primo de Rivera had had a position resembling that of Franco, but he had Alfonso XIII over him. Franco's title was unique, not only in Spain but in Europe. Mussolini and Hitler had come to power through parliamentary channels. Mussolini, like Primo, had a king, and Hitler at first had a president.

Franco moved hesitantly. On the day he became Head of State he established a "Technical Junta of the State," which was an embryo ministry consisting of heads of commissions, some of them civilians (foreign affairs for example), others generals. They were responsible only to him. Since the revolt had been directed at the parliamentary system, Franco did not reestablish the Cortes. The need for traditional political parties disappeared. Those on the Republican side were declared abolished at the outset of the war, and the others withered for lack of raison d'etre. Lerroux and the Radicals had been disgraced in 1935. Gil Robles was abroad when the war began and he hardly returned to Spain until after 1950. His party, Popular Action, dissolved itself in February 1937, as did the pro-monarchist Renovation Española that Calvo Sotelo had headed.

On the other hand, Franco could not ignore the existence of the [214] Falange and the Carlist Traditionalists, for both parties had armed forces fighting under him. They stood for vastly different programs: the one Catholic, monarchist, traditional, the other socialistic, anticlerical, quasi-fascist. Neither group had a leader of stature. Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera had fallen before a Republican firing squad, while the last male descendant of the first Don Carlos had just died in Vienna at eighty-seven, leaving the Carlists groping for a valid pretender. Acting upon the recommendation of his brother-in-law, Ramon Serrano Suner, Franco decided to regroup the Falange and the Traditionalists into a single party with himself at its head, however incongrous the whole scheme might appear. By creating a civilian political organization, he could avoid the appearance of being only a military dictator. A decree of April 19, 1937 merged the two organizations into a body to be known as the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS (the Juntas de Ofensiva National Sindicalista, or JONS, had joined the Falange in 1934). "This organization, intermediary between society and state, has for its principal mission to communicate to the state the feelings of the people and to transmit to the people the thought of the state, through the political-moral virtues of service, hierarchy, and brotherhood," the decree stated.⁽¹⁾ It left no room for any other political party. It declared the Head of State to be National Head of the Falange, the title borne earlier by Jose Antonio, and commander-in-chief of its militias, that is the fighting forces of the Falangists and Carlists. Within the Falange some left-wing militants led by Manuel Hedilla, a close associate of Jos6 Antonio, attempted to prevent Franco's seizure of the party. The gesture was futile, and Hedilla received a sentence of life imprisonment. At the same time the Carlist leader Manuel Fal Conde had to flee to Portugal to save his skin, after publicly calling for an immediate restoration of the monarchy. Neither party was to be happy in this marriage of convenience.

On January 30, 1938 Franco finally established a regular ministry. It drew on the main groups of his supporters, Carlist and Alfonsist monarchists, Falangists, and military. Only three of its eleven members were generals. The leading figure was the minister of gobernación. Serrano Suner, a strong partisan of the Falange. The Falange seemed the most powerful force in the state, but Franco was already demonstrating an ability to balance one group against another. Of those that had supported the rising, three were becoming the main pillars of the new regime: the army, the church, and the Falange. By taking control of the army and the Falange into his hands and letting no group obtain commanding influence, Franco maintained authority for himself. By the end of the war he had indeed become undisputed Jefe del Estado and, as he was also called, Caudillo.

[215] Having united the Carlists and the Falange into the only legal party, Franco proceeded to formulate a policy for Spain that incorporated the ideals of both, incompatible though they were. From the Carlists he took over a glorification of Spain's past and an emphasis on its Catholicism. Conveniently, the Falange had already adopted as its symbol the yoke and arrows of Ferdinand and Isabel. Franco infused his speeches with the theme that, like those two great monarchs, he was uniting Spain, suppressing anarchy, and driving out the heretics. Official pronouncements declared the Movimiento to be the third war in Spanish history in favor of unity and religion (the first was the Reconquest, the second the Carlist War in the nineteenth century). Besides the Carlists, the church hierarchy had placed its full authority behind the Nationalist cause. Since Franco was devoted to the church, dedication of Spain to the Catholic faith became a cardinal feature of the regime. Mass was said regularly in the army, often in the open air, prelates were conspicuous at public functions, civil marriage and divorce were abolished, the crucifix returned to the classroom, and the Jesuits were restored to their property and position.

To the official Catholicism of the state Franco joined the social ideals of the Falange. Capitalist exploitation of workers was to give way to a society in which each group would work for the good of the whole and receive its due. Society was to be hierarchical and moral. On March 9, 1938 Franco proclaimed the first "fundamental law" of the state, the Fuero del Trabajo or Labor Charter (fuero was a suitably traditional term). Spelling out the social policy of the regime, it declared that all Spaniards had the duty to work, and in return the state had the "mission" to guarantee the right to work. (One is reminded that the Constitution of 1931 had established a "Republic of workers of all categories.") The Fuero condemned capitalism as a liberal doctrine and materialism as Marxist. Without being specific, it called for adequate wages to support family life, a limit on the hours of work, paid vacations for all workers, and rest on Sunday and holidays. But it declared treasonous any actions taken to disturb production--a euphemism for strikes. While industry was to remain in private hands and small producers were guaranteed protection, the Fuero declared managers and owners responsible for the welfare of their employees. In agriculture it promised higher wages, protection from foreclosures, and eventual distribution of private plots to all families. It specified that the various productive sectors of the economy would be incorporated into vertical syndicates to which both owners and workers would belong, on the pattern already introduced by Primo de Rivera. Directors of the syndicates would "necessarily" be members of the Falange, and the state would implement its economic policies through the syndicates. In this way Franco made the Falange his instrument for running the economy and policing labor. On paper he had joined the social aims of the [216] Republicans and Socialists to the Falange ideal of hierarchy and authority. It remained to be seen how the Fuero would work in practice. To celebrate the victory, the regime carried out a symbolic pageant in the fall of 1939. The Falange exhumed the body of their founder, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, from his burial place beside the sea in Alicante and transferred it to the Escorial in the hills above Madrid. Members of different local units carried the casket on their shoulders in one continuous funeral procession of five hundred kilometers, which lasted ten days and nights, halting only to change the men honored with the task. At the Escorial a solemn military and religious ceremony laid the body to rest before the high altar at which Philip II had worshiped, above the crypt where the kings of Spain lie buried. On the tomb were placed monumental wreaths sent by Hitler and Mussolini. The anniversary of Jose Antonio's execution, November 20, would henceforth be a national festival. Meanwhile, on the outside walls of churches throughout Spain the name "Jose Antonio" was painted, above those of the local men who had died "for God and for country," almost as if he were a saint. Thus tradition, religion, monarchy, and twentieth-century national syndicalist ideology were drawn together in pageantry and public life.

3. The authoritarian state took shape as the war progressed. By and large Franco kept the traditional administrative structure, but he eliminated the local election of officials introduced by the Republic. Behind the lines military authority gave way progressively to civilian rule with appointed provincial civil governors and municipal alcaldes. There was a strict investigation of civil servants and high officials to remove any suspected of Republican sympathies who had escaped the early purges. (Those who passed muster were so few that sometimes army officers had to be assigned to civilian posts. The civil governor of Malaga, for instance, was an army captain.)

In April 1938 the government established regular censorship of the press. The text of newspapers and books had to be approved in advance; furthermore, authors and editors remained liable to prosecution if what they published turned out later to be offensive. Understandable in wartime, censorship would continue until after 1960.

The army, Falange, and monarchists had never been sympathetic to the federalist aspect of the Republican constitution. On April 5, 1938 Franco abolished the Catalan statute of 1932 with its provisions for an autonomous government, the Generalitat. Subsequent decrees prohibited the use of the Catalan language in school, in government, or in the press, and abolished all laws passed by the Generalitat. After the defeat of France by Hitler in 1940, Franco obtained from the head of the [217] French state, General Petain, the extradition of Lluis Companys, president of Catalonia during the Civil War, and executed him for military rebellion, the most notorious case of Franco's vengeance against his Republican adversaries. Henceforth Castilians and docile Catalans would hold the offices of civil governors, captain general, and alcaldes of the major cities of Catalonia, while the Catalan people would be barred from reading their language in the press, hearing it on the radio, or using it in the classroom or even the playing fields. The Basques too, who had set up a virtually independent government during the Civil War, Catholic and conservative, which fought for the Republic because it desired autonomy, saw it disappear, along with the public use of the Basque language. The new Spain would be unitary--"Una, Grande, Libre" was its motto, and the first term had been accomplished on the surface if not in the hearts of Basques and Catalans.

The greatest structural innovation in Franco's state was the single political party, the Falange, and the syndicates under its control. Neither was a new concept, for they existed in other authoritarian regimes and had been anticipated in Spain by General Primo de Rivera in his Union Patriótica and corporations. Through a tight hierarchy, the Falange gave obedience to the Head of State. The Jefe Nacional (National Head) of the Falange, Franco, appointed the jefes provinciales, who appointed the jefes locales, who controlled the local units. Franco also appointed the National Council of the Falange. The structure thus paralleled the civil government and administration, and not entirely by accident government and Falange officials were often the same person. By 1941 civil governors were in practice also the provincial heads of the Falange. Since all army officers had been made members of the Falange and at times also were civil officials, the military, the state bureaucracy, and the single party became closely intertwined.

The Falange developed various auxiliary bodies. During the war several young Falangists, dismayed at Franco's taming of their party, proposed to create a youth organization, a Frente de Juventudes. They saw it as a radical, uncorrupted body, patterned after the prewar youth movements. The proposal horrified army officers and the new leaders of the party. Franco finally approved the Frente late in 1940, but only after it had been reworked into a safe organization, useful in regimenting young Spaniards. For the next twenty years, its Falanges Juveniles could be seen drilling in parks and fields, dressed in the blue shirt of the Falange and red beret of the Carlists.

Much more constructive was the women's auxiliary of the Falange, the Sección Femenina, which was founded in 1934 by Jose Antonio's sister Pilar and has since been directed by her. With Franco's support it expanded rapidly during the war, and by its end had half a million members. It helped administer the Auxilio Social, another Falange institution whose main job was to feed starving poor, especially [218] children. Young unmarried women were required to serve the state for six months, and many went into the Auxilio Social. By 1939 Auxilio Social was feeding nearly a million people, mostly in conquered cities like Barcelona, and was remarkable for its impartiality between friend and foe. In a world where corruption and favoritism were rampant, Pilar Primo de Rivera offered a model of generous service to society.

None of the activities of the Falange compared in importance with its monopoly of the syndicates. It was some time, however, before the ambitious structure promised by the Fuero del Trabajo took on life. Before the war almost all organized workers were in the socialist UGT or anarchist CNT. Both of these were labor associations, aimed at combatting employers and government to obtain their objectives. The Falange had founded some "national syndicates," but it organized workingmen and employers in separate syndicates. Although the Republic's jurados mixtos had brought together representatives of labor and management to settle disputes, no one had joined the two in the same syndicate.

The Falange's syndicate for university students, the SEU, the only one that achieved any success before the war, was revived in 1937 and two years later all other student groups were abolished. Before other syndicates could materialize, decisions had to be taken about their nature and purpose. Many committed Falangists of prewar days, who were known as "old shirts" in contrast to those who joined under Franco, wanted to establish syndicates that would effectively fight for workers' rights. The proposal was frightening to other sectors of Franco's following, the army and industrialists, which conceived of the syndicates as a means to implement state control of the proletariat. Franco's first ministry, set up in January 1938, included a Minister of Syndical Organization and Action, a new office. To fill it Franco appointed Pedro Gonzalez Bueno, a Falangist old shirt and one of the authors of the Fuero del Trabajo. For a year Gonzalez Bueno worked to establish the syndicates, but both he and his office disappeared from the ministry in August 1939 without anything positive having been accomplished. The task went next to the first man Franco selected for National Delegate of the Syndicates, the highest office in their organization. This was Gerardo Salvador Merino, another old shirt, appointed in September 1939. He was strongly committed to creating a militant workers' organization, but he tried to move cautiously and not alarm the opponents of such a program. In January 1940 Franco issued a Law of Sindical Unity which prohibited any labor or management associations except those of the Falange. Merino worked to give concrete reality to the syndicates. A decree of June 1941 finally confirmed his efforts by dividing the economic life of the country into twenty-three spheres, each with a syndicate. Already, however, influential people were anxious over the potential strength and the aims [219] of his organization. High army officers especially distrusted Salvador Merino's intentions after he included several thousand workers in a military parade on March 31, 1940 in Madrid celebrating the first anniversary of the victory. The generals prevailed upon Franco to dismiss him in July. With him vanished the dream of the old shirts of establishing syndicates to represent proletarian desires. In the next years the skeleton he had created took on flesh, with compulsory membership for all workers and employers and a vast bureaucracy of appointed officers, loyal and subservient members of the Falange. The syndicates served the state to collect insurance premiums, distribute social welfare, regiment the workers, and inform the authorities of any who might voice dangerous ideas.

The years from 1938 to 1941 saw the Falange at the peak of its authority. During these years the person with most apparent influence on Franco was his brother-in-law, Serrano Suner, who was minister of gobernación. He was an admirer of the German and Italian regimes and hoped to see Spain fashion a similar political and economic structure. The Falange was his chosen instrument for the task. He was responsible for uniting the Carlists to the original body, and he could have become party secretary, but he preferred to see a member with more seniority in the job while he accepted for himself that of Press and Propaganda Chief of the Falange. With his support the Falange became a mammoth organization with thousands of jobs for loyal supporters and dazzling white uniforms that stood out at all public functions.

Even in its heyday, however, the party never obtained a position of command. Insofar as policy was made by anyone besides Franco, it was done by the ministry, and in the ministry the Falange had few voices. The army and state bureaucracy had more authority than the Falange hierarchy. Franco was authoritarian but not doctrinaire. He sympathized with his officers and trusted them, while the Falangist old shirts represented an alien world to him. He sincerely wished to improve Spain, but he had no mind for social revolution, even of the controlled variety envisaged by committed Falangists. He found the Falange a useful facade for his dictatorship, but he would never grant it independent authority. Time and again his attitude was to frustrate the old-shirt Falangists who recalled the enthusiastic idealism of Jose Antonio.

4. In France, it has been noted, while one revolution after another has altered the political regime, the administration has continued intact, with the same functionaries performing the same tasks from one government to the next. A comparable statement can be made about [220] Spain. While functionaries have been purged along with regimes, especially in 1939, the objectives of the governments have remained surprisingly constant beneath the appearance of radical alterations. The physical and social realities of the country in the long run have determined policy more than the clashing ideologies. Primo de Rivera continued the plans of the parliamentary monarchy. The Republic picked up many of them. Now Franco was to carry on the projects of the Republic, and of the regimes before it, however much he might wrap them in a different ideological mantle.

Republican social legislation had concentrated on agriculture, but its troubled life had prevented noteworthy achievements. The failure had been instrumental in the Republican defeat in the war. Franco had the canny insight to realize the need to keep the peasants on his side, although his outlook and the nature of his support meant he would not, like Republicans and Socialists, attack the position of the large landowners directly. For a long time, his government's efforts resulted less in improving the life of peasants and agricultural workers than of bringing them under state authority.

In August 1938 Franco created a National Wheat Service to manage the marketing of grain. Farmers were required to sell their grain harvests directly to the service at fixed prices, while the service distributed wheat to bakers and other consumers. It established prices and administered bread rationing, which became necessary when Franco had to feed the cities after the end of the war. The decree creating the service described it as a measure to protect peasants from exploitation by grain speculators; what it did was to bring production and distribution of Spain's most vital foodstuff under government control.

As soon as the war was over, the government developed plans for rural reconstruction. From the outset it saw the problem as primarily one of increasing production through the extension of irrigation and the resettlement of farmers, ideas that were centuries old. In October 1939 it established a National Institute of Colonization. In an endeavor that recalled the colonies of Charles III in the eighteenth century, the Institute projected new settlements to open up undeveloped areas. The first ones were built in the forties to replace towns like Brunete that had been destroyed in the war. For the rest, the Institute accomplished little else in this decade, partly because of lack of funds and partly because it did not develop a coherent program. Meanwhile the ministry of public works laboriously pushed ahead plans inherited from earlier eras for the construction of dams. Throughout the forties the capacity of Spain's dams increased gradually. From 3.9 billion cubic meters in 1940 (about 140 billion cubic feet), it rose to 6.7 billion in 1954, not quite double in fifteen years.

The government, like the Republic before it, also worked about [221] the destruction of Spain's forests. In 1940 60 percent of the regions officially labeled forests were without trees and half the remainder were depleted. The state forestry service undertook a program of "forest re-population" (repoblación forested), but little was done until it drew up an overall plan in 1951.

The Falange, through the syndicates, was mainly responsible for the beginnings of a different kind of agricultural reform. A law of 1942 provided the necessary regulations for founding cooperatives. Under it the syndicates initiated industrial, consumer, and agricultural cooperatives, but their only marked success came in the last field. By 1948 half the members and five sixths of the capital involved in cooperatives were in agriculture. The most important were the National Rice Cooperative, which, like the National Wheat Service, monopolized the entire Spanish output, and cooperative wine cellars and olive oil factories. These rural cooperatives were bound together by the National Union of Rural Cooperatives. The National Union created a chain of cajas rurales, rural banks, one of whose main purposes was to offer farmers credit for improvement and the purchase of machinery. In 1948 there were three hundred cajas.

The revolution of 1936 behind the Republican lines had featured cooperatives. A revival of the movement now offered the Falange the solace of appearing to encourage socialistic objectives in what had remained an essentially capitalist economy. Cooperatives would have significant repercussions after 1950, but in the forties they had little effect. On the whole the decade was one of stagnation for agriculture. Despite the National Wheat Service, wheat production was only 70 percent of that under the Republic. Harvests suffered from a lack of fertilizers going back to the beginning of the war. Plans for agricultural reform existed more on paper than in fact. The government's resources were extremely limited, and it chose to use what it had first of all to industrialize the nation.

The government early decided to run Spain as a planned autarky, hoping to free its economy from dependence on foreign countries. To make the country self-sufficient, it determined to build up industry. The man largely responsible for this decision was Juan Antonio Suanzes, a childhood friend of Franco. Before the war he had been an engineer, a naval officer, and an industrial entrepreneur. During the war he became one of Franco's most trusted advisers and was his first minister of industry in 1938. Following Suanzes' advice, in 1941 Franco established an agency called the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI) to foster and finance industrial growth. Suanzes became its director and remained at its head until 1963. For two decades he was the most powerful individual in the Spanish economy.

The INI had unique characteristics. It was an executive agency, that is, it was directly responsible to the Head of State rather than to [222] any ministry. It received a handsome government budget which it used to invest in those corporations it chose to establish or support for the good of the national economy. In theory, the INI would sell its stock and get out when a corporation was able to stand alone, except in cases of vital national interest. In fact over the next decades it had great difficulty in abandoning any of its chosen enterprises, some of which never became profitable. Private industrialists and bankers resented it, arguing that its proteges enjoyed an unfair competitive advantage. Creation of the INI meant that the limited government subsidies and scarce investment capital flowed into those sectors and geographical regions that the state decided to favor. Franco's government did not attack private property, but it created a vast organization to direct industrial development and compete with those enterprises that did not enjoy its favor.

The INI supported industries in a variety of fields. In 1957 it had a controlling interest in almost fifty firms, which among them dominated critical sectors of the economy. Mostly they were basic industries prerequisite to the development of production in the consumer goods field. It helped industries of cellulose products, cement, chemicals, , aluminum, naval construction, and merchant shipping. It took over and has since held all stock in the Spanish national airline, Iberia. Its greatest undertaking was the Empresa National Siderúrgica, S. A., founded in 1950, established to build a modern steel plant to bring Spain abreast of current methods of world steel production. The plant was located at Aviles, a coastal town in Asturias. It involved a tremendous investment of capital over the next decade, to the outrage of the private Basque steel firms, but by 1960 banks which had an interest in the older plants were beginning to place capital in the Aviles corporation.

One of the objectives of the regime, which derived partly from the nationalism of the Falange, was to eliminate foreign influence in the Spanish economy. Franco understood well enough the importance of keeping on the good side of foreign investors, and he did not harm those already present. However, his government early placed a limit of 25 percent on the share of stock in new enterprises that could be owned by foreigners. Near the end of the war, when he needed arms to conquer Catalonia, he succumbed to Hitler's pressure and allowed Germans to obtain controlling interest in three major mining companies. But the limit on foreign investment in Spanish corporations remained the rule.

There was one industry that Franco decided to nationalize, even though foreigners would be hurt in the process. This was the railroads. The war had damaged them seriously. Roadbeds and bridges had been blown up, and rolling stock was worn out or destroyed. The companies had insufficient capital to rebuild them without asking help [223] from abroad, and World War II prevented foreign investors from coming to their aid even if they had wanted to. Primo de Rivera had considered nationalizing the railroads as he did petroleum distribution, but he let them be. Franco's government studied the problem for two years, then in 1941 it took over all wide-gauge railroads as state property (some local narrow-gauge railroads remained in private hands). To run them, it created a state organization entitled Red Nacional de los Ferrocarriles Españoles (National Network of Spanish Railroads), or RENFE. The decree compensated the former owners with state bonds, what amounted to legalized confiscation so far as foreign stockholders were concerned. It freed Spanish railroads after a hundred years from foreign exploitation, but the fear of reprisals hung on. In 1948 the administration of the RENFE was divided into seven geographic zones different from those of the former companies, thus rendering virtually impossible any restitution of property to them.

5. The Republic had dedicated itself more than anything to educational reform, confident that good schools could eliminate the dead hand of the past. Understandably, Franco's reaction was most violent in this sector. His government began at once to extirpate Republican influences and make the schools serve the new state. Almost the first act of the Nationalist forces after occupying Madrid was to close the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, accused of nurturing the spirit that had animated the Republic. The semi-official bodies associated with it also disappeared, the Junta para Ampliation de Estudios and the Institutos Escuela. University students had been among the keenest devotees of the Republic, and their organization, the FUE, had become militantly Marxist. It was abolished, and in its place all students were required to join the Falange's SEU. At all levels teachers were screened to eliminate those suspected of Republican, Marxist, and anticlerical beliefs.

The guiding figure of the educational program was Jose Ibanez Martin, minister of education from 1939 to 1951. A one-time supporter of Primo de Rivera and a CEDA deputy under the Republic, he was strongly Catholic in outlook. Under his aegis, Catholic doctrine replaced the hated beliefs of the Republicans as the basis of educational philosophy, along with nationalist doctrines of the Falange in a modest second place. The government made religion a required and central subject at all levels of schooling. It gave active encouragement to the schools of the religious orders, which the Republic had tried to close. The Republic had established coeducation at all levels. A Law of Primary Education of 1945 declared school attendance obligatory from six to twelve years of age, with free education available in state schools, [224] but prohibited join classes for boys and girls, except where the state could not yet afford to provide the necessary teachers and buildings to separate the sexes.

This law made universal elementary education the objective of the new regime, as it had been the Republic's (and indeed every government's since 1856). Since the schools of the religious orders could never handle all the children of Spain, the law was an implicit promise to continue the Republic's school-building program, which the war had halted. However, in the forties the promise remained on paper, for there were no funds for so massive an undertaking. According to official figures, by 1950 about 8000 new elementary schoolrooms had been built, adding 16 percent to the number at the end of the Republic. (The Republic had built about 10,000 rooms in five years.)⁽²⁾

Franco chose instead to concentrate on the University of Madrid, where improvement was less costly and results more conspicuous. The Ciudad Universitaria housing the university had been one of the prides of the Republic. The war had destroyed it, for the most bitter battle for Madrid took place in its grounds and buildings northwest of the city. Almost at once the government undertook to rebuild it. Reconstruction began in 1940 with generous budgets. Three years later the Caudillo dedicated the new building of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, and in 1945 that of the Faculty of Science. By 1950 few wartime scars remained. The regime was so proud of the university that it continued active construction for the next two decades and in the sixties crowned the Ciudad Universitaria with a massive triumphal arch as its gateway from Madrid.

Besides the instructional buildings, the government projected new residences for university students, which were a definite need. Before the war there had been only the famous Residencia de Estudiantes and a Residencia de Señoritas. In 1942 the regime introduced a new form of student housing called colegios mayores, a name taken from collegial residences located at the main universities before the nineteenth century. Run by the religious orders, they had dominated the university politics, but Charles III weakened them in the name of enlightenment and they had died out. Their revival now seemed to evoke the days of traditional Spain, although in form the new ones resembled more the residential colleges of Anglo-Saxon countries. Students would live in them and attend classes in the university. However, the objective went further than to provide adequate housing. The Residencia de Estudiantes had spread the ideals of the Institución Libre; the colegios mayores offered a structure within which to provide religious and political supervision and indoctrination. Being new, [225] they could be molded by the forces in control of Spain. By 1950 ten were in operation in the country, mostly in converted buildings. Many were built thereafter, some sponsored by religious orders, others by the Falange through the SEU, but most were run by the state. Taking students out of rooming houses and providing for communal living, they revolutionized university life. They made it easier to supervise the students, but they also brought them together where they could share their grievances and formulate opposition to the regime.

Ibanez Martin had long opposed the Institución Libre and was determined to root out its influence. Nowhere, however, was Franco's heritage from recent regimes more evident than in the means Ibanez Martin chose to accomplish this aim; for beneath the new ideology the old forms reappeared. Besides the university, the other great educational achievement of the early part of the century had been the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas. Through it the influence of the Institución had penetrated the official world. Franco decreed its death, but on November 24, 1939 a law established a Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Superior Council of Scientific Research) to be an autonomous entity under nominal supervision of the minister of education. It moved into the buildings of the former Junta. Nearby, the Residencia de Estudiantes, no longer needed for students, became the Residencia del Consejo Superior, to house its personnel and visitors. Next door were the buildings of the Instituto Escuela, also declared defunct. The Consejo took them over and operated them as a new instituto (secondary school), christened Ramiro de Maeztu, after a conservative essayist assassinated by workers in 1936. It became the model and pride of official secondary education, as the Instituto Escuela had been in its day.

The activities of the Consejo Superior were divided among eight patronatos, covering subjects from chemistry and biology to history and theology. Ibanez Martin dedicated it to "stripping our culture of its past servility to foreign models," and to bringing that culture in line with "our religion and our science."⁽³⁾ Its emblem was the arbor scientiae, which depicted all forms of knowledge as branches of the same tree, the unity of Truth, a modern version of the medieval view of knowledge and science.

Ibanez Martin found ready support for his war on the Instituci6n in a new group being formed within the church. It owed its life to an Argonese priest named Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer. After taking orders in 1925, he went to Madrid, where he entered the circles of Catholic Action and right-wing university groups. Here he learned to hate the Institucionistas. After the outbreak of the Civil War he fled [226] to Burgos and organized a following dedicated to rooting out the evil influences of the Institución and strengthening the Catholic faith in Spain. He wrote a book entitled Camino (The Road), which he published in 1939, calling on Catholics to gird themselves to fight for their faith. It reflected the passions of the Civil War, urging its readers to become commanders or disciplined followers in a crusade for religion. But it also told them to strive for material and professional success the better to be able to influence others. At some point Escriva conceived of founding a religious order dedicated to these objectives. He called it Opus Dei and dated its origin in 1928, although one investigator has been able to find no mention of it in any publication before 1939, which is the date when Escriva began to transform his small group of associates into a formal order.⁽⁴⁾ In 1941 the bishop of Madrid recognized Opus Dei as a diocesan association.

Five years later Escriva's society had grown so far as to attract foreign members, and he went to Rome. In 1947 Pope Pius XII created a category of "secular institutes" within the Catholic Church and established Opus Dei as the first such institute. Since its founding, Escriva has been its president general. It has never published its statutes or made known its membership except for its highest officers, with the result that information about it is mostly secondhand and an air of mystery envelopes it. Both priests and laymen (and women) can be members, but the lay members are by far the most numerous.

Escriva was in awe of intellectuals, and he gave them preeminence in the order. The highest rank, the numeraries, could only be reached after advanced philosophic and theological studies and taking a university degree at the doctorate level. The numeraries formed a small elite within the order, normally living in its houses. Below them were the oblates, who came from a lower social and educational background, lived in their own families, and worked like ordinary people. Both these groups took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, like members of the older religious orders, but they did so in private and continued to wear ordinary clothes. Probably the largest number of members were neither of these, but the supernumeraries, who might be married, have families, and outwardly lead normal lives, but otherwise accepted the vows and rules of the order.

Opus Dei was essentially an association of dedicated laymen under the direction of priestly members. They performed God's work by seeking success in their chosen professions and thus helping extend the influence of the church into places where it had long been in decline. Through their associations within the order many advanced rapidly in their personal careers and enjoyed high economic rewards that seemed [227] out of keeping with their vow of poverty. By 1950 Opus Dei had branches in various countries, and since then its fortunes have continued to prosper. Like the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, it has sought to achieve its aims primarily by infiltrating social, political, and intellectual elites; but it differs from older religious orders in that most of its members lead ordinary lives and may never divulge their membership.

Nowhere has the success of Opus Dei equaled that in Spain. Here the destruction of scholarly institutions and the flight of intellectual leaders at the end of the war left a vacuum easily exploited by an aggressive movement of its kind. Its fortune was made when Ibanez Martin appointed Escriva's closest collaborator, Jose Maria Albareda, head of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Albareda's position in the virtually autonomous Consejo allowed him to reward members and sympathizers of Opus with university fellowships and research grants and thus to attract promising young scholars into its fold. When the Consejo founded an official journal called Arbor, its editor was Rafael Calvo Serer, who in time became the main theorist of Opus Dei in Spain.

From the Consejo the influence of Opus spread to the universities and other seats of learning. New legislation under Franco empowered the minister of education to appoint the members of the juries which judged the public competitions or oposiciones for university chairs. Ibanez Martin's sympathy for Opus led him to name juries which selected its candidates, often, it was said, passing over more competent scholars. Opus concentrated on obtaining the chairs of history and philosophy. (Calvo Serer won a chair of philosophy at Madrid.) It also used the religious exercises of the colegios mayores to extend its influence to university students. After 1950 it would found its own colegios. A professor of history, Vicente Rodriguez Casado, of Opus, became president of the Ateneo de Madrid, once a liberal stronghold. Within a decade Opus Dei had moved into the official institutions of letters and science more effectively than the Institucionistas had before the war.

By the end of the forties not only enemies of the regime but friends as well began to fear and suspect the new order. The obvious favoritism in fellowship and university appointments angered those students who could not bring themselves to join Opus Dei. (They referred cynically to the oposiciones as "opusiciones.") It clashed with the Falange, which remained chauvinist and intellectually isolationist, while Opus worked to open contacts with the outside world, especially the Catholic powers of Europe: France, West Germany, and Italy. Even traditional Catholic groups like Catholic Action and the Jesuits felt their noses out of joint. The true extent of its power became a much mooted question, for the secrecy of its membership encouraged wild speculation. Many [228] observers felt it was becoming the strongest force in Franco's Spain. However, its only undisputed conquest was the Consejo Superior, and it appears never to have captured more than one quarter of the university faculties. Many who joined it to obtain a position later dropped out. Spain's culture has long been sympathetic to belief in the machinations of secret societies. While there is no question that Opus Dei became powerful, especially after 1950, its enemies magnified its unity and strength beyond plausible reality. In popular fancy it came to replace the Jesuits and Masons as the occult power running the country.

Ibanez Martin's attempt to re-create the structures inspired by the Institution was involuntary recognition of the vision of Giner de los Ríos. It proved easier to rebaptize Giner's institutions than to breathe new life into them. The result of the campaign to remake Spain's intellectual world was mediocrity. The university faculties, the work of the Consejo Superior, the articles in Arbor, remained dull and second rate, a great falling off from the twenties and thirties. The demand for ideological conformity and rampant favoritism meant that true intellectual creativity went into other areas. Most inellectual leaders of the previous decades were dead or absent, and the official orthodoxy was not conducive to attracting their disciples who were still in Spain. The old ideals of the Institution found echoes in the Falange's youth movement, which encouraged sports and outdoor life. They were stronger in the Falange's Section Femenina, which took up the labor of collecting and preserving popular songs, dances, and costumes. But even more, the spark of Giner lived on in private hearths and hearts, which shut themselves off from the new official Spain to remain true to their loyalties. Some sent their children to the schools maintained in Spain by the French, British, and German governments. Few publicized their views in the forties, but one of Giner's pupils, Jimena Menendez Pidal, daughter of the great medievalists whose stature kept him above reprisals, founded a small school in Madrid to continue the Instituci6n's educational philosophy. Within the limits of the law, her Colegio Estudio taught Giner's "positive tolerance" of all viewpoints to the children of his followers. Confined at first to a building offered by an American foundation, it moved in the late sixties into an edifice of its own, an architecturally exciting structure facing the sierras north of the city. The school's alumni made it possible, for by then they were reaching top positions in all fields of endeavor. The hated seed had not been extirpated.

6. With Europe at war in the early forties and again divided shortly after the peace by the iron curtain that fell between East and West, [229] Franco's regime was no more independent than the Republic had been from the impact of international developments. Since the Nationalists owed their victory to German and Italian help, many anticipated Spain's entrance into the Second World War on the Axis side. Franco kept his own counsel, however, and guided his nation acutely around the maelstrom. At the outbreak of the war, he declared Spain's neutrality. Although he recognized his debt to Hitler and Mussolini, Spain was in no position to enter a new war. After the fall of France in June 1940, Franco's principal adviser, Serrano Suner, encouraged cooperation with Germany and Italy, and Franco publicized Spain's friendship with them. In October 1940 he met Hitler at the Pyrenees, and in February 1941 Mussolini. The leaders discussed a joint effort in North Africa. Franco demurred, but he allowed German submarines to use Spanish ports. When Germany invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, Spain became a non-belligerent. Serrano Suner, who was now foreign minister organized the "Blue Division" of Spanish soldiers euphemistically called "volunteers" to fight on the Russan front, avenging Russia's aid to the Loyalists. This proved to be the high point of Franco's commitment to the Axis powers. Spain never entered the war, for Franco was determined to become no one's satellite.

In 1942 Franco's policies began to reflect the turning tide in Europe. The United States entered the war at the end of 1941, and in 1942 British and American troops landed in French North Africa. Franco began to doubt an Axis victory, and he took steps to propitiate the Allied powers, although both countries assured him they had no hostile intentions. He dropped Serrano Suner from the cabinet on September 3, 1942. Serrano had been the Caudillo's closest adviser. He was both pro-Axis and pro-Falange, and his disappearance from Franco's councils signified a major change in the orientation of the regime. On July 17, 1942, six years after the generals' rebellion, Franco proclaimed the second fundamental law of the state--the first was the Fuero del Trabajo of 1938--a Law of the Cortes which revived that body in order to provide "the participation of the Spanish people in the tasks of the State." Most of the five hundred-odd Cortes deputies were to be ex offtcio: cabinet ministers, mayors of the provincial capitals and a representative from each province chosen by the municipal councils, rectors of the universities, and representatives of the leading educational, professional, and cultural associations, all of them directly or indirectly owing their position to the Head of State. In addition one hundred and fifty were to be representatives of the syndicates (and thus of the Falange), and fifty were to be personally named by the Head of State from among ecclesiastics, military officers, and others qualified by their "exceptional services to Spain." The Cortes could only approve legislation presented by the executive. Spain was no closer to a free parliamentary regime than it had been before, but [230] Franco had cast a sop to the Western democracies with a name that recalled freer ages.

Three years later Franco reacted to the Allied victory in Europe by issuing another fundamental law on July 17, 1945, the Fuero de los Españoles. Worked out by the Cortes and approved by the Head of State, it was ostensibly a declaration of rights, but it stressed the duties of Spaniards and the authoritarian structure of Spain more than the rights of citizens. The second article read, "All Spaniards owe faithful service to their country, loyalty to the Head of State, and obedience to the laws." The Fuero granted Spaniards the right to participate in public functions; not as individuals, however, but through their families, their municipalities, and their syndicates. It gave official protection to the Catholic religion and declared the family to be "the natural and fundamental institution of society,"⁽⁵⁾ and pronounced marriage indissoluble. Non-Catholic Spaniards would not be molested for their private religious beliefs (a promise the regime violated regularly in the next decades), but only Catholic ceremonies could be conducted in public (as under Cánovas). The Fuero de los Españoles incorporated various features of the 1938 Fuero del Trabajo: it guaranteed workers social security and a share in profits, and it made all economic activity subservient to the needs of the nation and the common welfare. It also promised Spaniards freedom of speech, "so long as they do not attack the fundamental principles of the state,"⁽⁶⁾ privacy of correspondence, guarantee of their homes from search, and presentation of charges against arrested persons within seventy-two hours. But the Fuero specifically stated that all these rights could be "temporarily suspended by the government" without specifying the length of "temporary" suspension or stating the reasons which might justify suspension. The Fuero was timed to win support of the victorious Allies, and many foreign observers were taken in by it. A keen American historian has called it "an ostensible guarantee of personal rights and immunities that Thomas Jefferson would himself have applauded."⁷ In fact it provided for an authoritarian, strongly religious political system with conditional rights for those who did not oppose the regime.

Franco made other gestures to impress the democracies in this year. A law reestablished elections for municipal councils. A third of the councilors were to be elected by the heads of families, a third by the syndicates, and a third by those two thirds combined. But alcaldes were still appointed by the state, as under the Moderado system. Franco also granted pardons to those in prison for minor crimes during the Civil War, and reduced the terms of others. He invited back the [231] refugees, and those who returned were not molested if they did not engage in political activities.

The fact was, Franco and his advisers were worried by the victory of the Allies over the Axis powers. Would they consider Franco another enemy, and force him out by diplomatic pressure or by aiding a Republican invasion of Spain? Many thought so inside and outside Spain. In the fall and winter 1945-46 Communist and anarchist guerrillas crossed the Pyrenees to attack the Spanish armed forces directly and foment a popular rising. Some got within one hundred kilometers of Madrid, but they failed in their mission, for they were unable to provoke a response and the Allies did not aid them.

Nevertheless, world opinion was generally opposed to the Franco regime, partly out of a sense of guilt for failure to aid the Republic. After 1945 both France and Great Britain had left-wing governments, and in the United States President Truman was no admirer of Franco. The three countries were attempting to work with Russia, and Russia pictured Franco as an unrepentant fascist. The conference of San Francisco that established the United Nations in 1945 adopted a resolution excluding Spain from the new world organization. In December 1946 the United Nations General Assembly resolved that all members recall their ambassadors from Madrid. The few powers with ambassadors there did so. In the same month France closed the Spanish border to commerce. These gestures indicated Spain's political and ideological isolation, but they did not help the opponents of Franco. The Republicans in exile were sadly divided, between Communists and non-Communists, between partisans of Negrin and of Prieto. There was no government in exile the Allies could unequivocably support even if they wanted to.

Franco continued in power. Judging carefully the tenor of the postwar world, he adopted two policies aimed to counteract his isolation. His first was to warn the world loudly of the Communist danger and point out Spain's role as what he called the first country successfully to crush the Communists. The second was to stress Spain's Catholicism and to seek ties with other Catholic countries. In July 1945 he formed a new ministry in which the role of the Falange declined in favor of representatives of Spain's Catholics. The leader of the lay society Catholic Action, Alberto Martin Artajo, became foreign minister. In the next years he worked to strengthen ties with Latin American countries through stressing the doctrine of Hispanidad--the spiritual and cultural unity of all Spanish-speaking peoples, which, Spaniards argued, the political separation of the nineteenth century had not destroyed. A doctrine kept alive through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in opposition to United States influence in Latin America, it now received official support through programs of cultural exchange.

[232] These policies would have their reward in the future. More immediately, Franco had to make his government look less arbitrary and less temporary. To this end, in July 1947 he proposed a fourth fundamental law, known as the Law of Succession. It declared Spain to be a "Catholic, social representative state . . . constituted as a monarchy." No king or future king was named (following his typical policy, Franco would not commit himself to the partisans of Alfonso XIII's son Juan or the Carlists), but the law confirmed Franco's position as the Jefe del Estado. It gave him authority to name the next king at his pleasure, and even to revoke his nomination later if he should wish to. The Cortes had to approve his decisions, but the Cortes as they existed could be only a rubber stamp. The law established a Council of Regency, consisting of the president of the Cortes (who would normally be a Falangist), the highest prelate of the Spanish church, and the highest military officer, in other words the leading representatives of the three pillars of the regime. Should Franco die before naming a king, the Council of Regency would meet with the ministry and the Council of the Realm, which the law also established to be a select body of advisers to the Head of State, and the three groups would together name Franco's successor as king or regent. No provision was made for another Head of State; Franco was sui generis. The law was submitted to a "referendum" which recalled Primo de Rivera's plebiscite. Over 90 percent of the 15 million voters said "yes." The whole undertaking was cleverly conceived. While appearing to reestablish the monarchy, Franco had legitimized his position as Head of State by popular suffrage, with the power to designate his successor. Spain became a monarchy on paper, but the future monarch became the creature of Franco. Yet the monarchists were in no position to protest openly, though for over twenty years Franco named no king.

Not Franco's legislation, but world developments, brought about Spain's eventual reentry into the family of nations. In the winter of 1946-47 the cold war began; in 1948 American airplanes saved West Berlin from a Soviet blockade. The next year, the United States, Canada, and the Western European democracies founded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Henceforth the confrontation between the United States and Russia became the overriding international issue. Communist North Korean troops invaded South Korea in June 1950 and the United States sent in an army. At once the specter of a Soviet attack on a demilitarized Western Europe while America was busy in the Orient haunted Western statesmen. The new atmosphere rapidly changed the international position of Spain. In May 1948 France had reopened the Spanish frontier. Spain, with its anti-Communist government and its strategic location controlling the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea while entrenched behind the wall of the Pyrenees, became more and more attractive to American military [233] planners. Franco's oft-repeated boast of being the only country to put down Communism began to find credulous listeners in North and South America, especially among Catholic leaders. In November 1950 a coalition of Latin American countries together with the United States obtained the repeal of the United Nations resolution to withdraw ambassadors from Spain. Spanish newspapers carried the exultant headline, "The blockade is broken!" A month later the United States announced a loan to Spain of 62.5 million dollars.

7. Spain's bill of good health arrived in a moment of need, for its domestic situation was becoming desperate. The critical factor was the failure of the economy to recover from the Civil War. Both internal and world conditions were at fault. The government's fear of allowing Spaniards free rein choked activities of every kind. Most of Spain's best trained personnel were in disfavor for their activities in the war. Highly qualified engineers, doctors, and other professionals whose abilities were vitally needed languished in secondary positions because of their political backgrounds. Censorship of the press and terror of being reported to the secret police prevented criticism of incompetence and disclosure of graft and dishonesty. The Second World War and the subsequent boycott also hampered recovery. The country was unable to import machinery and transportation equipment, needed in part to replace worn-out material. Furthermore Spain lacked foreign exchange. During the Second World War it built up its gold reserves by sales of minerals and other poducts to the warring nations, above all Germany, but this balance rapidly evaporated after 1945. Beginning in that year, a series of bad harvests due to drought and lack of fertilizers forced Spain to use its foreign exchange to buy grain. One example will illustrate the difficult situation. By 1950 the government had completed various dams for hydroelectric power and irrigation, but generators and other equipment were lacking. The drought years depleted the water in those dams that could produce electricity. Despite official figures showing a growth in electrical output since 1940 from 3.6 to 6.9 billion kilowatt hours, in 1950 Madrid had electricity only after seven in the evening, so that machinery in small shops could not be used during the day. In Barcelona textile factories could function only one day a week unless they could generate their own power. Yet under orders from the syndicates, employers were required to pay their workers in full for their regular hours.

The controlled economy so proudly introduced at the end of the war seemed created on purpose to prevent all classes from making a living. A major activity of the syndicates was to provide for the welfare of the workers through an extensive system of social insurance promised [234] in the Fuero of Labor. The trouble was that social security cost too much. An employer had to deduct so much from the wages of his workers to pay the syndicates for health, retirement, and other social insurance that it was impossible for workers to support a family on the take-home wages. To make matters worse, prices were going up. By 1948 the price index was five times its level in 1936, and for foodstuffs about ten times higher. Yet wages had only increased threefold. Even persons who considered themselves in the middle class were living near the subsistence level, and doing so only by holding two or three jobs at each of which they could work only a portion of the normal hours. The whole economy had become geared to subterfuge.

Two words that were on everyone's lips characterized the economic system: estraperlo, the black market, and enchufe, the connection. There were shortages of every type of commodity. Rationing of food, gasoline, and other scarce goods which had been instituted during the war was still in effect. The syndicates and professional associations controlled distribution. They determined how much of a product each store would get, which doctors would get supplies and desperately needed automobiles, and made other such decisions that could determine individual well-being or financial ruin. Such a system of controlled shortage lent itself to favoritism and corruption, and both were rampant. Supplies allotted by the government for housing projects were sold under cover by contractors to private builders at exorbitant prices; wheat bought from Argentina to alleviate the food shortage turned up in Italy. Farmers hid their harvests from the government wheat service to sell on the black market, and women openly offered bread on street corners at black-market prices while bakers were unable to supply the legal rations at the official prices which workers could afford. Poverty, undernourishment, and tuberculosis stalked the cities, yet many were migrating to them from the countryside seeking work. For lack of housing the poor lived in caves or in shacks, chabolas, which they built on the outskirts of cities from scraps of wood or stolen bricks. Above them the black market, bribes, and favoritism were producing a class of ostentatious new rich, drawing their income from illegal or immoral sources.

Under such conditions Spain was demoralized, discouraged, cynical, a country rife with misery and hatred held down by the fear of the army and the police. Former Loyalists, stigmatized publicly as "rojos," felt prisoners in an alien state, discriminated against in schools and jobs, scared of expressing their true thoughts even in the presence of their children lest they be unintentionally betrayed. Many who had favored the Nationalists in the war were now open critics. Within the church and the army, disenchantment was widespread. Falangist old shirts mourned the death of the Utopia they had fought for. Capitalists hated a controlled economy which kept them from making a profit unless they could bribe the proper officials. Agricultural conditions were [235] worse than ever, and the INI's industries were not prospering. On the left, a few die-hard young rebels had kept opposition alive within Spain, encouraged by the existence of Republican groups abroad. Small underground movements, one called the Socialist and Republican Libertarian Youth, another the left-wing student association FUE, which remained alive in spite of its official abolition, tried to proselytize among workers and students. They printed and distributed sheets denouncing the regime in 1946-47, but the police discovered them, and their leaders were sentenced to prison.

The acceptance of Franco in international society in 1950 was a mortal blow to the hopes of most Republican die-hards. Now indeed the Civil War seemed over, the Western powers had at last dealt the Republic its coup de grace. Yet organized opposition did not die. A dramatic expression of it occurred in the spring of 1951. Workers were excited by the Korean War and the possibility of a Russian invasion of Western Europe. Should the Russians reach the Pyrenees, they assured each other, "Uncle Whiskers," as they fondly called Stalin, would find Spain rising en masse to welcome his soldiers. In Barcelona pamphlets circulated clandestinely calling for a general strike. The strike took place on March 12. Possibly three hundred thousand workers left their jobs and many paraded down the main avenues. Next day civil guards and police took over the city, ending the strike. But now strikes spread to the Basque cities, where Catholic organizers took the lead. Since strikes were illegal, the government threatened strikers with loss of jobs and social security benefits. The opposition in Madrid decided on a safer way to demonstrate its strength. No one would buy in a store or ride public transportation for one day, May 22. The plan proved effective. Despite orders of the government to the Falange and government officials to ride buses and fill the stores, subways and markets remained empty. At sundown the streets leading to the workers' suburbs were crowded with men in blue overalls, the famous proletarian monos of the war years, carrying their lunch pails and walking long kilometers home in order to demonstrate their hatred of the regime. In workers' districts the boycott was perhaps 90 percent successful.

Twelve years after the end of the Civil War Spain remained deeply divided, and the opposition was once again ready to show itself. The balance sheet of official policies was negative, for they had failed to overcome the ravages of the war. Spain's international isolation was partly responsible, but mostly the inherent weakness of the regime. It had existed by crushing the forces that had threatened the established classes since the beginning of the century; in so doing it stifled the economy, for at mid-century the country could not get along without the help of these forces--technicians, intelligentsia, urban workers. Halfhearted attempts to placate them through the Fuero del Trabajo, the syndicates, and the official research of the Consejo Superior had [236] been vitiated by fear of the consequences if these efforts should get out of hand.

Beyond creating an authoritarian state and economic autarky, Franco's regime had followed no consistent policy. Except for his deep Catholicism, Franco was not doctrinaire. In the forties fear guided him and his advisers more than constructive thinking, for fear was not the monopoly of the vanquished. Fear of the forces defeated in the war maintained Spain as a police state, probably the cruellest regime it has ever known, with strict censorship, an enforced ideology, countless thousands in prison, and many of the best minds in disgrace. Fear of being discredited and weakened prevented the regime from unmasking wrongdoers among its partisans. Fear of falling into the hands of any of the groups supporting him led Franco to favor first one and then another and keep them all in a turmoil of uncertainty. Fear that foreign powers would decide to reestablish the Republic went far to determine the evolving image Franco presented through the fundamental laws.

In one sense this pragmatic response to the dangers besetting the regime had succeeded, for Franco was still in power. By 1951 things were beginning to change. Persons with good minds were beginning to forge ahead in industry, the professions, and government service, whatever their political background. But the workers' demonstrations of that spring revealed the bankruptcy of the official policies. Franco was in the most serious trouble he had known since the war, for it was now manifest that he had not mastered the forces of this century. He had, however, two major factors in his favor: the army and police remained loyal, preventing open organization of the opposition, and the United States had decided to seek Spanish friendship. Once again foreign developments were to be decisive in determining Spain's evolution.

1. Quoted in Broue and Temime, pp. 395-96.

2. Figures derived from data in Spain, Junta Interministerial Conmemoradora de los 25 Anos de Paz Española, El Gobierno informa: la education national (Madrid, 1964).

3. Dedication speech quoted in Jos6 Ibanez Martin, Diez anos de servicios a la cultura española (Madrid, 1950), p. 9.

4. Daniel Artigues, El Opus Dei en España, I, 1928-1957 (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1968), 16-25.

5. Article 22. 6 Article 12.

6. A. P. Whitaker, Spain and the Defense of the West (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961), p. 122.