Franco: Hunger, Emigration and the Myth of Prosperity

Franco, Hunger and the Million Spaniards Who Left

A single salary was enough to pay for housing, a car and a month at the beach. This is the thesis circulating in this debate: Franco’s Spain guaranteed what has been lost decades later. The nuance appears when looking at the other side of the same period. More than a million Spaniards emigrated to France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium between the fifties and seventies to find work, according to one side of the debate. Some call it pogre. Others call it flight.

Did people live better under Franco? The salary that covered everything

The narrative of abundance relies on specific cases. A carpenter with four children, a beach apartment, a plot for cultivation and a car; in summer, the front door wide open without antiestéticar of theft. A factory worker earning 300,000 pesetas a month who could afford a mortgage, an installment car and family holidays, according to this account. These are examples repeated across Western Europe at the time.

The other side is less friendly. In big cities there were shantytowns with workers who couldn’t afford rent. Those who lived in neighborhoods demolished for the M-30 ring road lived like this. From this comes a conclusion by defenders of this thesis: well-being then didn’t depend on a benevolent dictator, but on an international context—with inflation and currency depreciation skyrocketing from the seventies—that affected France, Italy, Germany, the US and Japan equally.

The million migrants that debunk the legend of abundance

If dogs were tied with sausages in Spain, the question answers itself: what were those crossing illegally to France fleeing from? Mass migration to Europe is the data most uncomfortable for the Francoist welfare thesis. And not just abroad: within the country, impoverished people from the rest of Spain moved to the Basque Country and Catalonia, the few truly industrialized areas, until well into the seventies.

The usual answer is that these migrants returned later with capital to invest, as today’s immigrants do here. The argument has some truth. But subsequent return doesn’t cancel out the reason for leaving.

Four million homes for workers and the 1,200 euro rent

One of the points where comparison gets tensest is housing. During that period four million homes for workers were built, a volume explaining why Spain has more owners than tenants. They were bad apartments, no insulation, wooden windows, but affordable. The contrast with the present is stark: today there are shared flats with hot beds, and the 1,200 euro rent is justified, according to this analysis, because no one has built affordable housing in quantity since then.

Here economic arguments cross with politics. It is claimed democracy failed fundamentally: precarity, loss of labor rights, reform after reform.

Prisoners, hunger and repression: crossed figures

The terrain where positions get harshest is repression. A widely cited video addresses the great famine of Francoism, the return of eradicated diseases and, at minute 30, episodes of torture of women and baby theft in regime prisons. Against this, defenders argue the vast majority lived without problems and repression targeted almost only communists.

Prisoner figures are also used as markers. One side claims there were 5,000 prisoners at the end of the dictatorship and over 50,000 today. Another lowers the 1975 figure to under 10,000, including political prisoners. The comparison mixes different categories and allows no clear conclusion. What remains clear is disagreement on what counted as repression.

Why Francoist memory still yields votes

A deeper issue lingers: the idea that criticizing Francoism is more a need of the current regime than historical exercise. As the present degrades, this thesis says, discrediting the past becomes necessary for justification. The counter-reply is that memory reopens whenever part of the electorate feels comfortable claiming it, activating the issue.

According to this reading, the operation costs the left nothing: every time someone enthusiastically defends Franco, the moderate voter hesitating ends up deciding. It might be strategy. It might be simple polarization.

With these elements, it’s predictable the issue won’t close: whenever housing, corruption or migration hit headlines, someone will bring Franco back into the conversation. And with him, the same figures, crossed in the same direction. No agreement in sight.