A route of political modernization in the Francoist Spain. Cultural transferences and Catholicism in the generational itinerary of the university youth during the 1950s

Abstract

The fifties usually propose as a hinge decade in shaping a culture of opposition in the university milieu. That decade marks the exhaustion of the socialization frameworks of the dictatorship, as the student body begins to open up to new languages and attitudes deployed in the recovery of alternative political and social transformation projects. Catholicism acted as a footbridge, which started at the teaching of an intellectual criticism towards National Catholicism, which was willing to receive the pastoral and cultural innovations from European Catholicism. In this article, we will try to mark the line of learnings and transferences that had a bearing on the construction of an own Catholic identity in the university world. That helped to the development of new collective horizons, which would allow students to overcome the cultural stagnation and Franco’s authoritarianism. Therefore, we will use the spaces in which that dialogue was possible. We will pay special attention to the University Labor Service, which acted as a catalyst and radicalizer of the new tendencies of Catholicism. In this sense, we will highlight its role in the articulation of a new left in Spain, which was represented by the Popular Liberation Front. We can conclude that the innovations of French Catholicism had a relevant role in the development of those dynamics, opening the doors to the understanding of Spanish university youth transformation in a European context.