“Mostly true” is a pretty decent way of putting it. Certainly, the Basque Country and Catalonia could be accurately described as being generally opposed to the Franco regime. As your question implies though, it is impossible to speak so absolutely about any population – there were of course exceptions (not least because both regions had large numbers of immigrants from elsewhere in Spain), the picture varies a lot over time and even in later years when opposition is more hegemonic it’s an interesting question as to where minority support for the regime may have come from. I think research also points away from the simplistic, anti-regional narrative that paints Francoism as completely unable to tolerate linguistic and cultural expressions of regional identity. Rather, regional policy varied, and often had the aim of directing such expressions in ‘safe’ directions rather than suppressing them altogether. Of course, this didn’t always work very well...
As a starting point, each case is rather different. Although some research has cast doubt on the exceptionality of the Basque Country support for the Republic (the peaceful ‘oasis’ without anticlerical violence), Republican support in the region is still much more heavily associated with a relatively conservative support base motivated by nationalism rather than left-wing ideologies. That said, conservative support for the Republic was far from monolithic, and many Basque Catholics came out in support of the military uprising in 1936 on a pro-Catholic, anti-Bolshevik basis. One historian, Fernando Molina, estimated that a full third of Basques were for the uprising, with eight tercios formed of about 10,000 volunteers mobilising to join the coup. Moreover, Basque Catholic traditionalists tended to agree with Franco on quite a lot of subjects, and could therefore be celebrated without challenging the regime too deeply. The Basque Country was admired in Francoist circles as representing a sort of ‘primordial’ Spanishness – the rural, pious, virtuous peasantry that typified both the Basque self-imagining and the regime’s own ideal subjects.
Other seemingly integral symbols of Basque identity such as the Athletic de Bilbao football club, for instance, was elevated by the regime in the 1940s-50s (when they happened to be very good). Interestingly, Spain played the Soviet Union in Bilbao in the European Cup Final of 1964. Franco attended in person, and by all accounts was received enthusiastically by the local fans. Football was a ‘safe’ way to express regionalism, and one that was far from incompatible with Francoism, although this grew more difficult as the team became a symbol of Basque nationalism in the late 1960s and 1970s, similarly to Barca in a Catalan context. This was in the context of a growth in the power of a new generation of Basque nationalist narratives, based on retellings and refashioning of the civil war-era history and memory, with organisations such as ETA drawing on these narratives to justify their violent opposition to the regime.
In Catalonia, the civil war experience had been a lot more traumatic for significant sections of the population, as a result of more widespread anti-clerical and revolutionary violence (over a third of religious deaths, for instance, happened in Catalonia, representing maybe 30% of the local priesthood). The Catholic middle class and the Church, therefore, both supported the new Franco regime to some extent as a guarantee against social unrest and further political violence, even if not always completely wholeheartedly. The rebuilding of Catalan Catholicism was a project in which both state and Church would wholeheartedly cooperate. Yet equally, the need to maintain the Church’s remaining popular support – such as by offering services in Catalan – meant that the Catalan language could survive in this context. Indeed, the only legal use of the language up to the 1960s was in the Church.
Even political nationalism was not entirely divorced from the Franco regime. The Lliga Regionalista was the original home of conservative bourgeois Catalanism in the early twentieth century, although by the 1930s it was overtaken by the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, which could count on a wider social basis. While the ERC was a solidly Republican party, the Lliga identified with the Spanish right, and as such were a target for political violence on the outbreak of civil war – about 400 were killed in revolutionary violence or through popular tribunals after the July 1936 uprising. The active participation of some prominent Lliga figures, such as Joan Ventosa i Calvell, sealed their association with the regime, which limited their influence after the war’s end. Nonetheless, many of its constituents were initially far from hostile to the Franco regime. Andrew Dowling quotes one declaration made by ‘Catalan religious and bourgeois groups’ in 1940:
The day arrived when Catalonia, victim of its own mistakes, found itself shipwrecked in the abyss of a revolution whose only aim was to scorn and destroy it...Today, Catalonia redeemed gives itself with fervour...to the fruitful task of material and spiritual resurgence and says to Franco: You saved me from a death without resurrection.
Yet it’s worth noting that in both contexts, the initial support (or at least acceptance) of the regime found in certain circles dwindled over time, as new, powerful nationalist narratives emerged in both contexts. In Catalonia in particular, the regime’s institutional and class-based support was heavily undermined by new developments. The Catalan Catholic Church, thanks perhaps to its championing of Catalan culture in the 1940s and 1950s, had largely escaped the threat of popular anti-clericalism, and had even found a new place among the opponents of Francoism by the mid-1960s. The tactics of key opposition groups such as the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC, essentially the Catalan Communist Party), which had emerged as the leading left-wing opponents of Francoism in Catalonia, also allowed Catalan nationalism to become the basis of a very broad coalition that included the middle class. The illegal PSUC had noted the opportunities inherent to the creation of mass Catalanist organisations in the late 1950s onwards, which in turn helped spark a Francoist shift towards promoting ‘safe’ expressions of Catalan culture, such as by founding the Omnium Cultural, dominated by regime loyalists (who had often fought directly for Franco in the civil war) and who attempted to redirect Catalan national sentiments. But the PSUC was far more successful among actual Catalonians – although interestingly the regime’s efforts did result in an uptick of interest in Catalan culture among the immigrant populations of Barcelona. Combined with the PSUC’s traditional basis among the urban working-class, this laid the foundations for the unprecedented mobilisations of anti-Francoist activity in Catalonia in the 1970s.
Sources
Andrew Dowling, ‘The Reconstitution of Political Catalanism 1939–75’, International Journal of Iberian Studies 14:1 (2001), pp. 17-25.
-- ‘The Leading Role of the Party: Catalan Communism and the Franco Regime, 1939–1975’, European History Quarterly 43:3 (2013), pp. 489-507.
-- ‘For Christ and Catalonia: Catholic Catalanism and Nationalist Revival in Late Francoism’, Journal of Contemporary History 47:3 (2012), pp. 594-610.
Fernando Molina, ‘Lies of Our Fathers: Memory and Politics in the Basque Country Under the Franco Dictatorship, 1936-68’, Journal of Contemporary History49:2 (2014), pp. 296-319.
Alejandro Quiroga, ‘Spanish Fury: Football and National Identities under Franco’, European History Quarterly 45:3 (2015), pp. 506-29.