Franco

That Sanjurjo was not prepared to risk a bloodbath on behalf of Alfonso XIII reflected the fact that he had personal reasons for feeling resentment towards the King. He felt that he had been snubbed by the King for marrying beneath his rank and he had not forgiven Alfonso XIII for failing to stand by Primo de Rivera in January 1930.3 Sanjurjo’s reluctance to defend his King may also have reflected two conversations that he had with Alejandro Lerroux in February and April 1931, during which the Republican leader had tried to persuade him to ensure the benevolent neutrality of the Civil Guard during a change of regime. Sanjurjo informed the Director-General of Security, General Mola, of the first of these meetings and assured him that he had not agreed to Lerroux’s request.4 His subsequent actions during the crisis of 12, 13 and 14 April, together with the favourable treatment which he received afterwards from the new regime, were to lead Franco to suspect that perhaps Sanjurjo had been bought by Lerroux and betrayed the monarchy.

Franco was unaware of what Sanjurjo was saying to the cabinet ministers on 12 April, but he was in telephone contact with Millán Astray and other generals. He considered marching on Madrid with the cadets from the Academia but refrained from doing so after a telephone conversation with Millán Astray at 11.00 a.m. on the morning of 13 April.5 Millán Astray asked him if he thought that the King should fight to keep his throne. Franco replied that everything depended on the attitude of the Civil Guard. For the next five and a half years, the stance of the Civil Guard would be Franco’s first concern in thinking about any kind of military intervention in politics. Most of the Spanish Army, apart from its Moroccan contingent, was made up of untried conscripts. Franco was always to be intensely aware of the problems of using them against the hardened professionals of the Civil Guard. Now, Millán Astray told Franco that Sanjurjo had confided in him that the Civil Guard could not be relied upon and that Alfonso XIII therefore had no choice but to leave Spain. Franco commented that, in view of what Sanjurjo said, he too thought that the King should go.6

Franco had also been greatly influenced by the telegram that Berenguer sent in the early hours of 13 April to the Captains-General of Spain. The Captains-General in command of the eight military regions into which the country was divided were effectively viceroys. In the telegram, Berenguer instructed them to keep calm, maintain the discipline of the men under their command and ensure that no acts of violence impede ‘the logical course that the supreme national will imposes on the destinies of the Fatherland’.7 Berenguer’s attitude derived from his own pessimism about Army morale. He believed that some Army officers were simply blasé about the danger to the monarchy. More seriously, he suspected that many others were indifferent and even hostile to its fate in the wake of the divisions created in the 1920s. Nevertheless, despite his telegram and his own inner misgivings, on the morning of 14 April, out of loyalty to the monarchy, Berenguer told the King that the Army was ready to overturn the result of the elections. Alfonso XIII refused.8 Shortly after Berenguer’s interview with the King, Millán Astray told Berenguer about his conversation with the Director of the Zaragoza Academy on the previous day repeating, as ‘an opinion which has to be taken into account’, Franco’s view that the King had no choice but to leave.9

The King decided to leave Spain but not to abdicate, in the hope that his followers might be able to engineer a situation in which he would be begged to return. Power was assumed on 14 April 1931 by the Provisional Government whose membership had been agreed in August 1930 by the Republicans and Socialists who had made the Pact of San Sebastián. Although led by Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a conservative Catholic landowner from Córdoba who had once been a Minister under the King, the Provisional Government was dominated by Socialists and centre and left Republicans committed to sweeping reform.

In a number of ways in the first week of the Republic, Franco displayed unmistakably, if guardedly, a repugnance for the new regime and a lingering loyalty to the old. There was nothing unusual in his feeling such loyalty – a majority of Army officers were monarchists and would have been unlikely to change their convictions overnight. Franco was ambitious but took discipline and hierarchy very seriously. On 15 April, he issued an order to the cadets, in which he announced the establishment of the Republic and insisted on rigid discipline: ‘If discipline and total obedience to orders have been the invariable practice in this Centre, they are even more necessary today when the Army is obliged, with serenity and unity, to sacrifice its thoughts and its ideology for the good of the nation and the tranquility of the Patria.’10 It was not difficult to decipher the hidden meaning: Army officers must grit their teeth and overcome their natural repugnance towards the new regime.

For a week, the red and gold monarchist flag continued to fly over the Academia. The Captain-General of Aragón, Enrique Fernández de Heredia, had been instructed by the Provisional Government to raise the Republican tricolour throughout the region. With the military headquarters in Zaragoza surrounded by hostile crowds demanding that Cacahuete (peanut), as the vegetarian Fernández de Heredia was known, fly the Republican flag, he refused. At midnight on 14 April, the new Minister of War, Manuel Azaña, ordered him to hand over command of the region to the military governor of Zaragoza, Agustín Gómez Morato, who was considered loyal to the Republican cause and who, indeed, was to be imprisoned by the Nationalists in July 1936 for opposing the military rebellion in Morocco. Gómez Morato undertook the substitution and telephoned all units in Aragón to order them to do the same. At the Military Academy, Franco informed his superior that changes of insignia could be ordered only in writing. It was not until after 20 April when the new Captain-General of the region, General Leopoldo Ruiz Trillo, had signed an order to the effect that the Republican flag should be flown, that Franco ordered the monarchist ensign struck.11

In 1962, Franco wrote a partisan and confused interpretation of the fall of the monarchy in his draft memoirs in which he blamed the guardians of the monarchist fortress for opening the gates to the enemy. The enemy consisted of a group of ‘historic republicans, freemasons, separatists and socialists’. The freemasons were ‘atheistic traitors in exile, delinquents, swindlers, men who betrayed their wives’.12 The narrowness of his interpretation is striking in several ways. Franco’s admiration for the dictatorship is understandable. His assumption that the King had not contravened the constitution in acquiescing in a military coup d’état in 1923 and that the situation in April 1931 was therefore one of constitutional legality was clearly the view of a soldier who never questioned the Army’s right to rule. The clear implication is that the monarchy should, and but for Sanjurjo and the Civil Guard could, have been defended by force in April 1931, which was certainly not his view at the time. Franco conveniently forgot his own ruthless pragmatism. The mistake having been made by others, he had made the best of a bad job and got on with his career.

Nonetheless, the flag incident suggested that Franco was sufficiently affected by the fall of the monarchy to want to establish some distance between himself and the Republic. It was not a question of outright indiscipline nor is it plausible that he was trying well in advance to build up credit with conservative political circles. In keeping the monarchist flag flying, Franco was advertising the fact that, unlike some officers who had been part of, or at least in touch with, the Republican opposition, he could not be considered as in any way tainted by disloyalty to the monarchy. Perhaps even more than from the pro-Republican officers whom he despised anyway, he was marking distance between himself and his brother Ramón who had been one of the most notorious military traitors to the King. Francisco clearly saw his own position as altogether more praiseworthy than that of General Sanjurjo whom he later came to regard, with Berenguer, as responsible for the fall of the monarchy.13 However, he would not permit his regret at the fall of the monarchy to stand in the way of his career. As military monarchism went, Franco’s pragmatic stance was a long way from, for instance, that of the founder of the Spanish Air Force, General Kindelán, who went into voluntary exile on 17 April rather than live under the Republic.14 Nonetheless, Franco felt great repugnance for those officers who had opposed the monarchy and were rewarded by being given important posts under the Republic. On 17 April, General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano became Captain-General of Madrid, General Eduardo López Ochoa of Barcelona and General Miguel Cabanellas of Seville. All three would play crucial roles in Franco’s later career and he never trusted any of them.

It was perhaps with these promotions in mind that, on 18 April, Franco wrote a letter to the Director of ABC, the Marqués de Luca de Tena. The monarchist ABC was the most influential newspaper on the Right in Spain. The issue of that morning had published his photograph alongside a news item that he was about to go to Morocco as High Commissioner, the most coveted post in the Army and one which was, at the time, the peak of Franco’s ambition. The basis of the item was a suggestion by Miguel Maura, the Minister of the Interior, to Manuel Azaña, the Minister of War, that Franco be appointed to the post. It would have been a sensible way of buying his loyalty. In fact, the plum Moroccan job was given to General Sanjurjo, who held it briefly in conjunction with the headship of the Civil Guard – such preferment no doubt feeding Franco’s suspicions that Sanjurjo was being paid off for his treachery. The ostensible objective of Franco’s letter was to request that the newspaper publish a correction but it was another gesture aimed at establishing his distance from Spain’s new rulers. In convoluted and ambiguous language, he denied that he had been offered any appointment and asserted that ‘I could not accept any such post unless I was ordered to do so. To accept such a post might be interpreted in some circles as suggesting that there had been some prior understanding on my part with the regime which has just been installed or else apathy or indifference in the fulfilment of my duties’.15 That Franco believed that he needed to make his position clear in the leading conservative daily reflects both his ambition and his sense of himself as a public figure. Having clarified his loyalty to the monarchy, he then went on to mend his fences with the Republican authorities by proclaiming his respect for the ‘national sovereignty’, a reflection of his cautious pragmatism and of the flexibility of his ambitions.

The limits of military loyalty were to be severely tried under the Republic. The new Minister of War, Azaña, had studied military politics and was determined to remedy the technical deficiencies of the Spanish Army and to curtail its readiness to intervene in politics. Azaña was an austere and brilliantly penetrating intellectual who, despite laudable intentions, was impatient of Army sensibilities and set about his task without feeling the need to massage the collective military ego. The Army which he found on taking up his post was under-resourced and over-manned, with a grossly disproportionate officer corps. Equipment was obsolete and inadequate and there was neither ammunition nor fuel enough for exercises and manoeuvres. Azaña wished to reduce the Army to a size commensurate with the nation’s economic possibilities to increase its efficiency and to eradicate the threat of militarism from Spanish politics. Even those officers who approved of these aims were uneasy about a decimation of the officer corps. Nevertheless, implemented with discretion, Azaña’s objectives might have found some support within the Army. However, conflict was almost inevitable. Azaña and the government in which he served were determined to eliminate where possible the irregularities of the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. There were those, Franco foremost among them, who admired the Dictatorship and had been promoted by it. They could not view with equanimity any assault on its works. Secondly, Azaña was inclined to be influenced by, and to reward the efforts of, those sections of the Army which were most loyal to the Republic. That necessarily meant military opponents of the Dictatorship, who were junteros and largely artillerymen. That in turn infuriated the Africanistas who had opposed the junteros since 1917.16

The many measures which Azaña promulgated in the first months of the Republic divided the Army and were seized upon by the rightist press in order to generate the idea that the military, along with the Church, was being singled out for persecution by the new regime. That was a distortion of Azaña’s intentions. By a decree of 22 April 1931, Army officers were required to take an oath of loyalty (promesa de fidelidad) to the Republic just as previously they had to the monarchy. It did not matter what an officer’s inner convictions were and no mechanism was set up to purge or investigate those who were monarchists. According to the decree, to stay in the ranks, an officer simply had to make the promise ‘to serve the Republic well and faithfully, obey its laws and defend it by arms’. In the case of those who refused to give the promise, it was to be assumed that they wished to leave the service. Most officers had no difficulty about making the promise. For many, it was probably a routine formula without special significance and was made by many whose real convictions were anti-Republican.17 After all, few had felt bound by their oath of loyalty to the monarchy to spring to its defence on 14 April. On the other hand, although a reasonable demand on the part of the new Minister and the new regime, the oath could easily be perceived by the more partisan officers as an outrageous imposition. Adept at manipulating the military mentality, the right-wing press generated the impression that those whose convictions prevented them swearing the oath were being hounded penniless out of the Army.18 In fact, those who opted not to swear were considered members of the reserve and were to receive their pay accordingly.

A prominent right-wing general, Joaquín Fanjul, retrospectively summed up the feelings of many officers: ‘When the Republic came into being, it placed many officers in a dilemma: respect it and undertake formally to defend it or else leave the service. The formula was rather humiliating, offspring as it was of the person who conceived it. I thought about it for four days, and finally I offered up my humiliation to my Patria and I signed as did most of my comrades.’19 In so far as Franco was forced to decide between his profession and his convictions in April 1931, he opted, understandably and without any apparent difficulty, for his profession. Franco was a more sinuous and pragmatic individual than Fanjul as was shown by a conversation which he had in 1931 with an artilleryman of his acquaintance, General Reguera, who had retired under the terms of the Azaña law. ‘I believe that you have committed a mistake,’ said Franco. ‘The Army cannot lose its senior officers just for the sake of it at times as difficult as these.’ When Reguera explained the disgust he felt at ‘serving those people and their dishcloth of a flag’, Franco replied ‘It’s a pity that you and others like you are leaving the service precisely when you could be of most use to Spain and are leaving the way clear to those whom we all know who would do anything to climb a few rungs of the ladder. Those of us who have stayed on will have a bad time, but I believe that by staying we can do much more to avoid what neither you nor I want to happen than if we had just packed up and gone home’.20

On 25 April, the announcement was made of the decree which came to be known as the Ley Azaña. It offered voluntary retirement on full pay to all members of the officer corps, a generous and expensive way of trying to reduce its size. However, the decree stated that after thirty days, any officer who was surplus to requirements but had not opted for the scheme would lose his commission without compensation. This caused massive resentment and further encouragement of the belief, again fomented by the rightist press, that the Army was being persecuted by the Republic. Since the threat was never carried out, its announcement was a gratuitously damaging error on the part of Azaña or his ministerial advisers.

As soon as the decree was made public, the most alarmist rumours were spread about unemployment and even exile for officers who were not enthusiastic Republicans.21 A large number accepted, rather more than one third of the total, and as many as two thirds among those colonels who had no hope of ever being promoted to general.22 Franco of course did not. He was visited by a group of officers from the Academy who asked his advice on how to respond to the new law. His reply gave a revealing insight into his notion that the Army was the ultimate arbiter of Spain’s political destinies. He said that a soldier served Spain and not a particular regime and that, now more than ever, Spain needed the Army to have officers who were real patriots.23 At the very least, Franco was keeping his options open.

Like many officers, Franco found his relationship with the new regime subject to constant frictions. Before April was out, he became embroiled in the so-called ‘responsibilities’ issue. General Berenguer had been arrested on 17 April, for alleged offences committed in Africa, as Prime Minister and later as Minister of War during the summary trial and execution of Galán and García Hernández.24 General Mola was arrested on 21 April for his work as Director-General of Security under Berenguer.25 These arrests were part of a symbolic purge of significant figures of the monarchy which did the nascent Republic far more harm than good. The issue of ‘responsibilities’ harked back to the Annual disaster and the role played in it by royal interference, military incompetence and the deference of politicians towards the Army. It was popularly believed that the military coup of 1923 had been carried out in order to protect the King from the findings of the ‘Responsibilities Commission’ set up in 1921. Accordingly, the issue was still festering. To the ‘responsibilities’ contracted by Army officers and monarchist politicians before 1923 the Republican movement had added the acts of political and fiscal abuse and corruption carried out during the Dictatorship and after. The greatest of these was considered to be the execution of Galán and García Hernández. With the Dictator dead and the King in exile, it was inevitable that Berenguer would be an early target of Republican wrath.

The campaign ‘for responsibilities’ helped keep popular Republican fervour at boiling point in the early months of the Regime but at a high price in the long term. In fact, relatively few individuals were imprisoned or fled into exile but the ‘responsibilities’ issue created a myth of a vindictive and implacable Republic, and increased the fears and resentments of powerful figures of the old regime, inducing them to see the threat posed by the Republic as greater than it really was.26 In the eyes of officers like Franco, Berenguer was being tried unjustly for his part in a war to which they had devoted their lives, and for following military regulations in court-martialling Galán and García Hernández. Far from being heroes and martyrs, they were simply mutineers. Mola was a hero of the African war who, as Director-General of Security, had merely been doing his job of controlling subversion. What enraged Franco and many other Africanistas was that officers whom they considered courageous and competent were being persecuted while those who had plotted against the Dictator were being rewarded with the favour of the new regime. The ‘responsibilities’ trials were to provide the Africanistas with a further excuse for their instinctive hostility to the Republic. Franco would move more circumspectly along this road than many others like Luis Orgaz, Manuel Goded, Fanjul and Mola, but he would make the journey all the same. Like them, he came to see the officers who received the preferment of the Republic as lackeys of freemasonry and Communism, weaklings who pandered to the mob.

In this context, Franco had an ambiguous attitude towards Berenguer. Although he approved of his actions in connection with the Jaca rising, he would soon come to question his failure to fight for the monarchy in April 1931. Moreover, he harboured considerable personal resentment towards Berenguer. Having informed Franco in 1930 that he was going to promote him to General de División (Major-General), Berenguer had then realised that his friend General León was about to reach the age at which he should have passed into the reserve. To avoid this, and on the grounds that Franco had plenty of time before him, Berenguer gave the promotion instead to León.27 It is thus slightly surprising that, at the end of April, Franco agreed to act as defender in Berenguer’s court martial. Along with Pacón Franco Salgado-Araujo, his ADC, he visited Madrid on 1 May and interviewed Berenguer in his cell on the following day. On 3 May, Franco was informed that the Minister of War refused authorization for him to act on behalf of Berenguer on the grounds that he was resident outside the military region in which the trial was taking place.28 It was the beginning of the mutual distrust which would characterize the momentous relationship between Franco and Azaña. It was during the trip to Madrid that Franco’s attitude to Sanjurjo began to sour. His friend Natalio Rivas told him about Sanjurjo’s interview with Lerroux on 13 April. Franco concluded that some offer of future preferment had been made which accounted for Sanjurjo’s failure to mobilize the Civil Guard in defence of the King.29

Franco’s latent hostility to the Republic was brought nearer to the surface with Azaña’s military reforms. In particular, he was appalled by the abolition of the eight historic military regions which were no longer to be called Capitanías Generales but were converted into ‘organic divisions’ under the command of a Major-General who would have no legal powers over civilians. The viceregal jurisdictional powers held by the old Captains-General were eliminated and the rank of Lieutenant-General was deemed unnecessary and was also suppressed.30 These measures were a break with historic tradition: they removed the Army’s jurisdiction over public order. They also wiped out the possibility for Franco of reaching the pinnacles of the rank of Lieutenant-General and the post of Captain-General. He would reverse both measures in 1939. However, he was hardly less taken aback by Azaña’s decree of 3 June 1931 for the so-called revisión de ascensos (review of promotions) whereby some of the promotions on merit given during the Moroccan wars were to be re-examined. It reflected the government’s determination to wipe away the legacy of the Dictatorship – in this case to reverse some of the arbitrary promotions made by Primo de Rivera. The announcement raised the spectre that, if all of those promoted during the Dictadura were to be affected, Goded, Orgaz and Franco would go back to being colonels, and many other senior Africanistas would be demoted. Since the commission carrying out the revision would not report for more than eighteen months, it was to be at best an irritation, at worst a gnawing anxiety for those affected. Nearly one thousand officers expected to be involved, although in the event only half that number had their cases examined.31

The right-wing press and specialist military newspapers mounted a ferocious campaign alleging that Azaña’s declared intention was to ‘triturar el Ejército’ (crush the Army).32 Azaña never made any such remark, although it has become a commonplace that he did. He made a speech in Valencia on 7 June in which he praised the Army warmly and declared his determination to triturar the power of the corrupt bosses who dominated local politics, the caciques in the same way as he had dismantled ‘other lesser threats to the Republic’. This was twisted into the notorious phrase.33 To the fury of the Africanistas, it was rumoured that Azaña was being advised by a group of Republican officers known among his rightist opponents as the ‘black cabinet’. The abolition of promotion by merit reflected the commitment of the artillery to promotion only by strict seniority. Azaña’s informal military advisers included artillery officers, such as Majors Juan Hernández Saravia and Arturo Menéndez López, and consisted largely of junteros who had taken part in the movement against the Dictatorship and the Monarchy. Franco regarded these officers as contemptible. There was ill feeling elsewhere in the officer corps that, instead of using the most senior Major-Generals, Azaña should listen to such relatively junior men.34