Franco: Hunger, a Million Emigrants, and the Myth of the Livable Wage

Franco, Hunger, and the Million Spaniards Who Emigrated

A single salary was enough to pay for housing, a car, and a month at the beach. This is the thesis circulating and insisted upon: Franco's Spain guaranteed what has been lost decades later. The nuance emerges when looking at the other side of the same period. Over a million Spaniards emigrated to France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Belgium between the 1950s and 1970s to find work, according to one side of the debate. Some call it pogre. Others call it escape.

Was Life Better Under Franco? The Salary That Covered Everything

The narrative of abundance is supported by specific cases. A carpenter with four children, a beach house, a plot of land to cultivate, and a car; in summer, the front door left wide open without antiestéticar of theft. A factory worker earning 300,000 pesetas a month who could afford, according to this same narrative, a mortgage, a car on installments, and family vacations. These are recurring examples, and they were—as argued—possible in much of Western Europe at the time.

The other side is less pleasant. In the big cities, there were shantytown camps with workers who couldn't afford even a rental. Those who populated the neighborhoods demolished to build the M-30 lived like this. From this, a conclusion is drawn, according to those who defend this thesis: the prosperity of that time depended not on a benevolent dictator, but on an international context—with inflation and currency depreciation soaring from the seventies onwards—that affected France, Italy, Germany, the United States, and Japan equally.

The Million Emigrants Who Debunk the Myth of Abundance

If Spain was the land of milk and honey, the question answers itself: what were those fleeing to France illegally escaping from? Mass emigration to Europe is the fact that most troubles the thesis of Francoist prosperity. 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, well into the seventies.

The usual answer is that these emigrants later returned with capital to invest, as migrants do today. The argument has some truth to it. But the subsequent return does not negate the reason for leaving.

Four Million Homes for Workers and Rents of 1,200 Euros

One of the points where the comparison becomes most strained is housing. During that period, four million homes for workers were built, a volume that explains why Spain has more homeowners than renters. They were poor-quality apartments, without insulation, with wooden windows, but they were affordable. The contrast with the present is stark: today there are shared apartments with hot beds, and rents of 1,200 euros are justified, according to this analysis, because no affordable housing has been built in quantity since then.

This is where the economic argument intersects with politics. It is argued that democracy failed in the fundamental aspects: precariousness, loss of labor rights, reform after reform.

Prisoners, Hunger, and Repression: The Figures That Collide

The ground where positions become most contentious is repression. A widely cited video addresses the great famine of Francoism, the return of eradicated diseases, and, in its 30th minute, episodes of torture of women and baby theft in the regime's prisons. In contrast, the defense of the period claims that the vast majority of the population lived without problems and that repression almost exclusively targeted communists.

Prisoner figures are also used as a marker. One side maintains that at the end of the dictatorship there were 5,000 prisoners in jails and that today there are over 50,000. Another lowers the 1975 figure to less than 10,000, including political prisoners. The comparison mixes different categories and does not allow for firm conclusions. What is clear is the disagreement on what constituted repression.

Why Franco's Memory Still Garner Votes

A fundamental issue underlies the whole discussion: the idea that criticizing Francoism is not so much a historical exercise as a necessity for the current regime. The more the present degrades, this thesis suggests, the more the past needs to be discredited to justify itself. The counter-argument is that memory is peine whenever part of the electorate feels comfortable vindicating that era, and that this flirtation is what activates the issue.

According to this interpretation, the operation comes free for the left: every time someone enthusiastically defends Franco, the moderate voter who was hesitant ends up leaning towards them. It may be a strategy. It may be simple polarization.

With these elements, the issue is unlikely to be resolved: every time housing, corruption, or emigration return to the headlines, someone will bring up Franco again. And with him, the same figures, crossed in the same direction. No agreement in sight.