Despite great advances in “history from below”, the rural world still represents only a small part of studies of the anti-Francoist movement in Spain. This has led to ignorance of the wide range of social responses to the regime that occurred in rural Spain. This article proposes to explain the dynamics of the rural world in relation to the anti-Francoist movement based on a case study of southern Catalonia. We analyze the social struggles arising from the “collapse of the peasant’s moral economy” while paying attention to the political learning process that these confrontations provided for rural workers. Far from being apathetic and demobilized, rural areas experienced a process of opposition comparable in many ways to that of large urban centres.