The first Francoism (1939–1959) was the first stage in the history of General Francisco Franco's dictatorship, between the end of the Spanish Civil War and the abandonment of the autarkic economic policy with the application of the Stabilization Plan of 1959, which gave way to the developmentalist Francoism or , which lasted until the death of the Generalissimo. This phase is characterized by scholars as the totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian and the fascist or quasi-fascist phase of the dictatorship. It is usually divided into three sub-stages: the first from 1939 to 1945, which corresponds to the Second World War and during which the Franco regime underwent a process of fascistization already begun during the civil war to resemble Nazi Germany and, above all, Fascist Italy, and which was aborted by the defeat of the Axis powers; the second sub-stage, from 1945 to 1950, was the most critical period in the history of the Franco dictatorship because of the international isolation and the opposition's offensive, but the "cosmetic" changes it introduced and above all the outbreak of the Cold War ended up reintegrating it into the anti-communist Western Bloc; the third stage, from 1951 to 1959, has also been called the hinge decade (in Spanish: decenio bisagra) for being an intermediate period between the stagnation of the "autarkic" 1940s and the "developmentalist" 1960s, and has also been characterized as the period of the "splendor of national Catholicism".
Franco's repression in the post-war period Repressive laws and number of victims At the end of the civil war there were 100,292 people in prisons, eight times the number in 1934, although this figure does not include the 400,000 or so soldiers of the Republican army who had been taken prisoner in the last weeks of the war. By the end of 1939 the figure had almost tripled to 270,719. Most of them served as free labor for the regime. In the following years the prison population decreased until it reached 54,072 at the end of 1944, although still far from the figures of the years before the civil war.
A decree issued by General Franco on June 9, 1939, established the reduction of prison years in exchange for work on certain projects. Thus were born in September the militarized penitentiary colonies, the most important of which was the one organized for the construction of the Valley of the Fallen, decreed on April 1, 1940, the first anniversary of Franco's victory in the civil war.
In the postwar period, military tribunals continued to be the main instrument of repression, since the state of war proclaimed by the National Defense Junta on July 28, 1936, was maintained until long after the end of the civil war (it was lifted on April 7, 1948). According to Stanley G. Payne, "the total number of political executions during the first six postwar years, 1939–1945, was at least 28,000", with the "bloodiest years" being 1939 and 1940. Borja de Riquer increases the figure to 45,000–50,000 executed in the entire postwar period.
To justify the repression, as soon as the war was over, the Report of the Commission on the illegitimacy of the powers acting on July 18, 1936 was made public, which had been commissioned by General Franco to twenty-two jurists in order to guarantee "that the July 18 Uprising had not been an uprising to change a political regime in force, but an action aimed at re-establishing the legitimacy that had been destroyed". The first argument he used was that the result of the Spanish general elections of 1936 had been falsified "in order to arbitrarily increase the seats of the left at the expense of the right".
The military jurisdiction was complemented by a special civil jurisdiction —courts were established in the most important regions and a National Court in Madrid— which would deal with the cases established in the Law of Political Responsibilities promulgated by General Franco on February 9, 1939, two months before the end of the war. The law automatically condemned all members of the Republican and left-wing parties who had supported the cause of the Republic, as well as all those who had supported the Republican side and even those who had shown "serious passivity" with respect to the Nationalist side. Membership in Freemasonry also meant immediate condemnation. The penalties established in the law ranged from six months to fifteen years in prison, along with penalties of restriction on professional activities, limitation of residence, banishment to the African colonies or house arrest. These penalties were complemented by economic sanctions ranging from fines to confiscation of property.
The Law of Political Responsibilities was completed with the Law for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism, so called because Freemasonry (a personal obsession of General Franco) was considered the instigator of the "subversion" that Spain had suffered and "communism" (a term that encompassed workers' organizations and parties of all tendencies) as the main enemy of Spain. "The first article of the law is sufficiently illustrative of the extraordinary punitive scope that was granted to its application" since "practically any heterodox conduct could fall within the scope of a repressive policy":It constitutes a figure of crime, punishable in accordance with the provisions of the present Law, to belong to Freemasonry, Communism and the other clandestine associations referred to in the following articles. The Government may add to said organizations such auxiliary branches or nuclei as it deems necessary and then apply to them the same provisions of this Law, duly accepted.The law was promulgated on March 1, 1940. In it "Freemasonry was directly accused of the loss of the American kingdoms, of the civil wars of the 19th century, of the fall of the Monarchy and of collaboration with communism for the establishment in Spain of the Soviet dictatorship". In addition, by virtue of the law "many Masons who were on probation, for lack of evidence of political activities, were again imprisoned, tried and sentenced". The persecution against Freemasonry had begun as soon as the war began, and at the end of the war the special anti-Masonic Information Service was created, whose agents for many years delivered reports and secret documents to General Franco.
Stanley Payne denies that the post-war repression constituted a program of "mass liquidation", although he recognizes that although "the cases were decided on an individual basis", "a general criterion was applied to them in terms of the level of responsibility in Republican political parties and trade union movements".
During his visit to Spain in October 1940, SS Chief Himmler was disconcerted by the magnitude of the repression that was still going on in Spain a year and a half after the end of the civil war. His visit coincided with the summary court martial against prominent Republican leaders, refugees in France, who had been handed over to Franco by the Gestapo (Julián Zugazagoitia, Francisco Cruz Salido, Teodomiro Menéndez, Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Carlos Montilla Escudero and Miguel Salvador; all except one, Menéndez, were condemned to death. A week earlier Lluís Companys had been condemned and executed and on November 9 it was the turn of Julián Zugazagoitia).
Exaltation of the victors and policy toward the vanquished Franco did not make any attempt at reconciliation with the defeated. "Never, in any way and under any circumstances, did Franco have the slightest doubt of the legitimacy of his victory: when he spoke of reconciliation, he always did so under the assumption that, abandoning resentments, all Spaniards could participate in the effects of that same victory". "The new Spanish State was a rigorous and punitive dictatorship, determined to carry out a political and cultural counterrevolution, to annul any sign of opposition and to establish a firm domination of the victorious side."
In an interview granted to journalist Manuel Aznar and published in the Diario Vasco on January 1, 1939, when the offensive in Catalonia had just begun, General Franco explained that the civil war had created "an excessively high number of crimes, which have to be purged so that those who committed them can be reintegrated into society. But not amnesty: " stubborn criminals" must not return. Repentance is the indispensable condition" and announced the establishment of means that would allow the rapid redemption of the condemned. This same idea that there would be no reconciliation with the defeated (because it would be "suicide") was repeated again on December 31, 1939, in his first radio message at the end of the year (a custom he would maintain throughout his dictatorship).
The pastoral of Cardinal Primate Isidro Gomá "Lessons of the war and duties of peace" published on August 8 in the bulletin of the archdiocese of Toledo was forbidden to be broadcast in the rest of the Church media and by the press because, among other reasons, it suggested the forgiveness of the defeated, which outraged Franco, who was determined to maintain "a spirit of combative triumphalism".
At the same time that reconciliation with the defeated was denied, the victors were exalted. On April 3, 1939, only two days after the end of the civil war with the broadcast of the , Radio Nacional de España broadcast a message from General Franco with the title "Commemoration of the Fallen" (which would also be known as the speech of the Three Alerts):Spaniards, alert. Peace is not a comfortable and cowardly rest in the face of History; the blood of those who fell does not consent to oblivion, sterility or betrayal.
Spaniards, alert. All the old partisan or sectarian banditries have ended forever; the righteousness of justice will never bend before privileged selfishness nor before criminal rebellion; love and the sword will maintain, with the victorious unity of command, the eternal Spanish unity.
Spaniards, be alert. Spain remains at war against any enemy from the interior or the exterior, perpetually faithful to its fallen, with God's favor, continues on the march, One, Great and Free, towards its unrenounceable destiny.At the beginning of 1941, the fascist Ernesto Giménez Caballero, one of the most prominent members of Franco's propaganda apparatus, made the following assessment of the victory in the civil war:For ten years, since the end of Primo de Rivera's government, the Spaniard had been demanding a single gift from heaven: Peace. Peace without shooting in the streets. Without blasphemies. Without angry faces. No excited masses. No assaulted banks. No workers' blood in the gutter. No insulted uniforms and cassocks. And that... has come. It has arrived in this year of 1941 —blessed— that is beginning.A decree of August 25, 1939 reserved 80 percent of the posts in the Administration —which experienced a rapid growth— for "combatants" of the "national side" and for civilians who had made special sacrifices for the "national" cause or had suffered the "red terror", as well as their relatives. In this way, "people with little training were incorporated, which resulted in high levels of incompetence and, perhaps, fostered the corruption that invaded the administration during the first year of peace".