Censorship and dissent under the Franco dictatorship

When Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died on November 20, 1975, the then-president of the Spanish government, Carlos Arias Navarro, delivered the news, teary-eyed with the famous phrase “Españoles, Franco ha muerto”: in English “Spaniards, Franco has died.”

As time stood still for many at that moment, Arias proceeded to read the deceased dictator’s 323-word-long final speech. In it, Franco expressed his gratitude for the collaboration on “the great undertaking” of making Spain “free”.

The 'free' Spain that Franco referred to, was, for many, a country of repression, sustained by a machinery of censorship and political violence, a past that Spain has not yet fully come to terms with despite laws like the one in Catalonia on historical memory.

A war on ideas

Francisco Franco came to power in 1936 by overthrowing the Republican government in a coup d’état which became the beginning of a three-year-long civil war. 

“The Spanish Civil War was not just a war to gain power, but a war that aimed to change the values and the ideas that were being created at the time,” says Jordi Mir Garcia, professor of humanities at the University of Pompeu Fabra. With this war, Franco's nationalist forces “wanted to ‘purify’ society,” he adds.

In the years leading up to the civil war, Spain had undergone huge social transformation, with women gaining the right to vote and various labor laws passed in 1931, after the 1930 proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. However, much of the progress was wiped out by the civil war and the subsequent 35-year rule of Franco.

A tool of control

To reverse the progress of the republican years, the regime used censorship as a powerful tool to control the information that came out in public, whether it was news, or parts of culture like movies, music, or theater, and to crush any resistance or dissent. 

“Censorship had different characteristics, whether it was artworks in a museum, movies seen in theaters, or in books or magazines,” explains Mir. “But the common denominator was that the regime did not allow messages that could be seen by large parts of society and that were critical of the regime itself.”

Censorship of women

Many women were also victims of censorship in the early years of the dictatorship, either because they were feminist thinkers or simply because they were women.

 “The feminist writers and female writers suffer from the repression because we go from a republic where women start to express themselves from their point of view,” explains Mir, adding that the war and the dictatorship “was a return to the age-old idea that the best women are those who don’t speak out in public, those who we know nothing about.”

Some of the female thinkers and artists were part of Las Sinsombrero, a Spanish female collective of artists and intellectuals with progressive ideas, were forced into exile when the civil war began, some never to return. Las Sinsombrero emerged from the Generation of 27, an avant-garde movement that included the Spanish writer and victim of the Franco regime, Federico Garcia Lorca.

Evolution of censorship

Although censorship was present throughout the Francoist dictatorship, it went through different stages.

When Franco came to power, censorship was “very controlling,” says Mir, and extended to everything that one wanted to show in public. The dogma then, according to Mir, was “‘Show me it first, and then I’ll authorize it or not.’”

With this system, artists learned what could and couldn’t get past the barriers of censorship, and in the latter part of the dictatorship, Francoist authorities relied more on the artists to censor themselves.

“There was no need to show your work beforehand,” Mir explains of the change. Instead, it would be censored after the fact, if it was decided that it didn’t conform to the rules. “When they tell an artist ‘Well, go ahead and create your art, but we may come get you” - and eventually they do come for you, that’s a mechanism of self-censorship.”

A change in appearance

The idea behind the shift, according to Mir, was to change the public perception of the regime both nationally and internationally: “There was a part of the regime that didn’t want to give the outside world the pleasure of calling it a censoring regime.”

Instead, the authorities would pick and choose what would get past the control - not solely on the basis of ideology, but instead on its importance and the likelihood of reaching a wide audience.

“It was much easier for the regime to authorize publishing a Catalan edition of communist philosopher Karl Marx instead of one in Spanish. And it was easier to approve an expensive edition than a popular edition at a lower price,” Mir says.

But even with this change, censorship was still prevalent until the dictator’s death and the end of the regime.

The artists would instead play with silence or a double meaning, according to Mir. “We can’t think that these authors were doing what they wanted to do, they were doing what they could in the place they were,” he stresses.

In the 1960s, however, various countercultural and anti-Francoist artistic movements began to flourish.

La Nova Cançó

In the late 50s and early 60s, la Nova Cançó, or the New Song in English, emerged in Catalonia. The movement sought to promote Catalan-language music at a time when it was forbidden to speak Catalan in public.

Lluís Llach was one of the prominent artists of la Nova Cançó who initially managed to circumvent censorship with his song ‘L’Estaca’ (‘The Stake’, in English), released in 1968. The song never explicitly mentioned the regime but instead used the metaphor of a stake that could fall if people worked together to tear it down to criticize the regime. It was censored and banned only after it had gained widespread popularity.

The song Què volen aquesta gent?, also from 1968, by Mallorcan singer Maria del Mar Bonet was another protest song banned by the regime, as it denounced the death of a 23-year-old student and Maoist at the hands of the Franco police.

Other singers, such as Joan Manuel Serrat indirectly protested the regime by refusing to sing in Spanish, when he was chosen to represent Spain in the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest with the song 'La La La'. Instead, he was replaced by the singer Massiel, who won the contest with the Spanish version.

L’Escola de Barcelona cinema school

In cinema, l’Escola de Barcelona appeared in the 60s. It was a group of experimental anti-Francoist Catalan filmmakers, led by director Joaquim Jordà and strongly influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague movement.

Largy self-financed, the movement wanted to break away from the Spanish film tradition, both in terms of movie themes and production.

“The themes were not explicitly critical of the regime, but a reflection of it, which allowed for different readings,” says Jordi Mir.

Although they did not reach a mainstream audience, some of them were censored when it was discovered that the movies had the intention of criticizing the regime and as a result, Jordà went into exile in Italy, tired of the censorship, in the late ‘60s.

Too underground to be censored

Although art was also subject to censorship some works of art managed to through the machine. One example was the Valencian art group Equipo Crónica, whose art was inspired by the Pop Art movement. Their most prominent work was an interpretation of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.

“Their works were explicitly critical of the regime and condemn the regime’s use of capital punishment,” explains Mir, adding that since their work didn’t reach millions of citizens but was displayed in relatively small spaces, it was not censored as much.

La Gauche Divine 

The late popular Barcelona photographer, Colita, did not have the same luck when her 1971 exhibition ‘La gauche qui rit’ [The Laughing Left] which portrayed Barcelona’s left-wing bourgeoisie, was shut down by the regime after only a couple of days because of its name referencing the left.

The group frequented the club Bocaccio in Barcelona’s Carrer Muntaner and was frequented by artists such as Joan Manuel Serrat and Maria del Mar Bonet, as well as members of the L’Escola de Barcelona.

Censorship today 

According to Jordi Mir Garcia, it’s important not to forget that artists are still censored today. “It’s possible that commercial censorship today is harsher than the censorship during Franco,” he says.

An example of what some might call censorship today is when art funding is denied or withdrawn.

In 2018, the Catalan singer Valtònyc was sentenced to prison for "glorifying terrorism" and "slander" for his song lyrics, which referred to the police and the King of Spain, a sentence that was denounced by Amnesty International. 

In June 2023, the Spanish theater group Teatro Defondo received funding to stage Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” in November of 2023. But after the election of far-right Vox in May, funding of the show was revoked citing the lack of funds.

In October of 2023, Barcelona became home to the Museum of Forbidden Art.

To learn more about the museum and the history of censorship during the Franco dictatorship, tune into the latest episode of our podcast Filling the Sink.