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The Spanish Civil War brought the Franco Regime to power and an abrupt change, through repressive dictatorship, to Spanish society. A single-party state, featuring a fascist-inspired system of vertical syndicates, was designed by Franco as an ''organic'' alternative to supposed ''inorganic'' marxist and liberal-capitalist political models. Under Franco, all power rested in the dictator's hands and a program of ideological mobilization was effected through propaganda organizations that targeted youth, university students, and women. All of the rights accorded women under the Republic were rescinded and pronatalist policies were promulgated. Trade union activities outside the vertical syndicates were extinguished, strict press censorship was instituted, and autonomous regional structures of the Republic dismantled. The regime also outlawed the public use of Catalan in the professions, in education, and in the arts. Expressions of Basque nationalism and culture were likewise forbidden.

In the first ten years of the Franco regime, real wages and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell to levels as low as 50 percent of those obtained before the war. Everywhere economic misery was the order of the day with rationing remaining in effect throughout the 1940s. The Franco regime's policy of economic autarky sharply limited the prospects of recovery. Only after the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 did the regime begin to distance itself from fascist rhetoric. It was not until 1957 that Franco embraced an alternative to the fascist ideal of national economic independence and replaced Falangist advisors with neoliberal technocrats committed to economic modernization. The technocrats' 1959 Stabilization Plan, after an initial recessionary period, bore fruit in a spectacular economic recovery extending from 1961 to 1973, the so-called ''economic miracle.'' During those years Spain's industrial sector grew dramatically and the Gross National Product (GNP) per capita more than doubled, partly funded by a booming tourist industry that brought cultural revolution as well as hard currency. Spain moved quickly in the 1960s to participate in the general expansion of consumer society that was taking place across Western Europe. Moreover, the economic boom led to broad social changes, from the transformation of peasant into farmer in the north to the exodus of landless laborers from the rural south.

Such changes had not come about without pressure on the regime. Though Franco normalized relations with the west in the 1950s by playing its anticommunist Cold War card, the Catholic Church began to distance itself from the regime and even defend the Catalans and Basques against linguistic and more generalized cultural repression. Censorship was eased somewhat in the early 1960s and pro-consumerist policies were designed to dampen student and worker unrest. Still, opposition to the regime built, and clandestine political and trade unionist activities spread widely. Political imprisonment and violations of human rights in Spain remained common throughout the final decades of the dictatorship. . . .

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