Franco

However, Hernández Saravia complained to a comrade that Azaña was too proud to listen to advice from anyone. Moreover, far from setting out to persecute monarchist officers, Azaña seems rather to have cultivated many of them, such as Sanjurjo or the monarchist General Enrique Ruiz Fornells whom he kept on as his under-secretary. Indeed, there were even some leftist officers who took retirement out of frustration at what they saw as Azaña’s complaisance with the old guard and the offensive and threatening language which Azaña was accused of using against the Army is difficult to find. Azaña, although firm in his dealings with officers, spoke of the Army in public in controlled and respectful terms.35

Franco was well known for his repugnance for day-to-day politics. His daily routine at the Military Academy was a full and absorbing one. Nevertheless, he was soon obliged to think about the changes that had taken place. The conservative newspapers which he read, ABC, La Época, La Correspondencia Militar, presented the Republic as responsible for Spain’s economic problems, mob violence, disrespect for the Army and anticlericalism. The press, and the material which he received and devoured from the Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale, portrayed the regime as a Trojan Horse for Communists and freemasons determined to unleash the Godless hordes of Moscow against Spain and all its great traditions.36 The challenges to military certainties constituted by Azaña’s reforms cannot have failed to provoke, at the very least, nostalgia for the monarchy. Similarly, news of the rash of church burnings which took place in Madrid, Málaga, Seville, Cádiz and Alicante on 11 May did not pass him by. The attacks were carried out largely by anarchists, provoked by the belief that the Church was at the heart of the most reactionary activities in Spain. Franco was probably unaware of accusations that the first fires were started with aviation spirit secured from Cuatro Vientos aerodrome by his brother Ramón. He cannot, however, have failed to learn of his brother’s published statement that ‘I contemplated with joy those magnificent flames as the expression of a people which wanted to free itself from clerical obscurantism’.37 In notes made for his projected memoirs, jotted down nearly thirty years after the event, Franco described the church burnings as the event which defined the Republic.38 That reflects not only his underlying Catholicism, but also the extent to which the Church and the Army were increasingly flung together as the self-perceived victims of Republican persecution.

However, more than for anything else that had happened since 14 April, Franco was to bear Azaña the deepest grudge of all for his order of 30 June 1931 closing the Academia General Militar de Zaragoza. The first news of it reached him while on manoeuvres in the Pyrenees. His initial reaction was disbelief. When it sank in, he was devastated. He had loved his work there and he would never forgive Azaña and the so-called ‘black cabinet’ for snatching it from him. He and other Africanistas believed that the Academy had been condemned to death merely because it was one of Primo de Rivera’s successes. He was also convinced that the ‘black cabinet’ wanted to bring him down because of their envy of his spectacular military career. In fact, Azaña’s decision was based on doubts about the efficacy of the kind of training imparted in the Academy and also on a belief that its cost was disproportionate at a time when he was trying to reduce military expenses. Franco controlled his distress with difficulty.39 He wrote to Sanjurjo hoping that he might be able to intercede with Azaña. Sanjurjo replied that he must resign himself to the closure. A few weeks later, Sanjurjo commented to Azaña that Franco was ‘like a child who has had a toy taken away from him’.40

Franco’s anger glimmered through the formalised rhetoric of his farewell speech which he made on the parade-ground at the Academy on 14 July 1931. He opened by commenting with regret that there would be no jura de bandera (swearing on the flag) since the laic Republic had abolished the oath. He then surveyed the achievements of the Academy under his direction, including the elimination of vice. He made much of the loyalty and duty that the cadets owed to the Patria and to the Army. He commented on discipline, saying that it ‘acquires its full value when thought counsels the contrary of what is being ordered, when the heart struggles to rise in inward rebellion against the orders received, when one knows that higher authority is in error and acting out of hand’. He made a rambling and convoluted, but nonetheless manifestly bitter, allusion to those who had been rewarded by the Republic for their disloyalty to the monarchy. He made an oblique reference to the Republican officers who held the key posts in Azaña’s Ministry of War as ‘a pernicious example within the Army of immorality and injustice’. His speech ended with the cry ‘¡Viva España!’.41 He was to comment proudly more than thirty years later ‘I never once shouted ‘¡Viva la República!’.42

After his speech, Franco returned to his office only to be called out several times to appear on the balcony to receive the frenetic applause of those present. When he said farewell to Pacón, who had worked with him as an instructor in tactics and weaponry and as his ADC, the future Caudillo was crying. He packed his things and travelled to his wife’s country house, La Piniella, at Llanera near Oviedo.43

The speech was published as Franco’s order of the day and reached Azaña. Azaña wrote in his diary two days later, ‘Speech by General Franco to the cadets of the Academia General on the occasion of the end of the course. Completely opposed to the Government, guarded attacks against his superiors; a case for immediate dismissal, if it were not the case that today he ceased to hold that command.’ As it was, Azaña limited himself to a formal reprimand (reprensión) in Franco’s service record for the speech to the cadets.44

Acutely jealous of his spotless military record, Franco’s resentment on being informed of this reprimand on 23 July may be imagined. Nevertheless, his concern for his career led him to swallow his pride and to write on the next day an ardent, if less than convincing, self-defence, in the form of a letter to the Chief of the General Staff of the V Military Division within whose jurisdiction the Academy lay. It requested him to pass on to the Minister of War, ‘my respectful complaint and my regret for the erroneous interpretation given to the ideas contained in the speech … which I endeavoured to limit to the purest military principles and essences which have been the norm of my entire military career; and equally my regret at his apparent assumption that there is something lukewarm or reserved about the loyal commitment that I have always given, without officious ostentation which is against my character, to the regime which the country has proclaimed, whose ensign hoisted in the central parade ground of the Academy flew over the military solemnities and whose national anthem closed the proceedings.’45

Azaña did not regard the obligatory flying of the Republican flag and the playing of the new national anthem as special merits and was not convinced. He seems to have believed that the once favourite soldier of the monarchy needed bringing down a peg or two. His contacts with Franco, in this letter and at a meeting in August, convinced him that he was sufficiently ambitious and time-serving to be easily bent to his purposes. In his basic assessment, Azaña was probably correct, but he seriously misjudged how easy it would be to act on it. If Azaña had given Franco the degree of preferment to which he had become accustomed under the monarchy, it was entirely possible that he might have become the darling of the Republic. As it was, Azaña’s policy towards Franco was to be altogether more restrained although, from the point of view of the Republican Minister of War, it was indeed generous. After losing the Academy, Franco was kept without a posting for nearly eight months which gave him time to devote to his reading of anti-Communist and anti-masonic literature but left him with only 80 per cent of his salary. Without a personal fortune, living in his wife’s house, his career apparently curtailed, Franco harboured considerable rancour for the Republican regime. Doña Carmen encouraged his bitterness.46

Throughout the summer of 1931, Army officers fumed at both the military reforms and at what they saw as the anarchy and disorder constituted by a number of strikes involving the anarchosyndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo in Seville and Barcelona.47 Given the discontent occasioned by Azaña’s reforms and the monarchist quest for praetorian champions to overthrow the Republic, there were well-founded rumours of possible military conspiracy. The names of Generals Emilio Barrera and Luis Orgaz were the most often cited and they were both briefly put under house arrest in mid-June. Eventually, in September, after evidence of further monarchist plots, Azaña would have Orgaz exiled to the Canary Islands. Azaña was convinced by reports reaching the Ministry that Franco was conspiring with Orgaz and regarded him as the more fearsome of the two (‘el más temible’).48 As the summer wore on, Azaña continued to believe that he was on the fringe of some kind of plot. In reports on contacts between Franco’s friend, the militantly right-wing Colonel José Enrique Varela, and the powerful hard-line monarchist boss of Cádiz, Ramón de Carranza, the names of Franco and Orgaz had been mentioned. The Minister wrote in his diary ‘Franco is the only one to be feared’, a tribute to his reputation for seriousness and efficiency. Azaña gave instructions that Franco’s activities be monitored. In consequence, when he visited Madrid in mid-August, the Director-General of Security, Angel Galarza, had him under the surveillance of three policemen.49

On 20 August, during his stay in Madrid, Franco visited the Ministry of War and spoke with the under-secretary who reminded him that he was obliged to call on the Minister. He returned on the following day. Azaña criticized his farewell speech to the Academy in Zaragoza. Franco had to swallow the criticism but Azaña was not fooled, writing later in his diary ‘he tries to seem frank but all rather hypocritically’. Azaña warned him, somewhat patronizingly, not to be carried away by his friends and admirers. Franco made protests of his loyalty, although he admitted that monarchist enemies of the Republic had been seeking him out, and seized the opportunity to inform the Minister that the closure of the Academy had been a grave error. When Azaña hinted that he would like to make use of Franco’s services, the young general commented with an ironic smile ‘and to use my services, they have me followed everywhere by a police car! They will have seen that I don’t go anywhere.’ An embarrassed Azaña had the surveillance lifted.50

The hypocritical Franco of Azaña’s account is entirely consistent with the document which he had submitted in defence of his speech at the closure of the Academy.* Azaña was rather condescending towards Franco, confident that he could bring him to heel.51 It is likely that his miscalculations about Franco derived in part from an assumption that he was as manipulable as his brother Ramón for whom Azaña, who knew him well, felt only impatience and contempt.

At the beginning of May, Franco had been refused permission to act as defender of Berenguer. In fact, the Consejo Supremo del Ejército had annulled the warrant against Berenguer soon afterwards and the Tribunal Supremo ordered the release of Mola on 3 July. However, the issue of ‘responsibilities’ remained deeply divisive, with moderate members of the government, including Azaña, keen to play it down. After a venomous debate, on 26 August, the Cortes empowered the ‘Responsibilities Commission’ to investigate political and adminstrative offences in Morocco, the repression in Catalonia between 1919 and 1923, Primo de Rivera’s 1923 coup, the Dictatorships of Primo and Berenguer and the Jaca court martial.52 To the fury of Azaña, who rightly believed that the Commission was dangerously damaging to the Republic, a number of aged generals who had participated in Primo’s Military Directory were arrested at the beginning of September.53

The hostility of some officers and the doubts of the many about the direction the Republic was taking were intensified by the bitter debate over the proposed new constitution which took place between mid-August and the end of the year. Its laic clauses, particularly those which aimed to break the clerical stranglehold on education, provoked hysterical press reaction on the Right. The determination of the Republican and Socialist majority in the Cortes to push these clauses through provoked the resignation of the two most prominent deeply Catholic members of the government, the conservative prime minister Niceto Alcalá Zamora and his Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura Gamazo. Azaña became prime minister. The right-wing press screamed that ‘the very existence of Spain is threatened’.54

Apocalyptic accounts in the right-wing press of anarchy and the implications of the constitutional proposals, together with the continuing determination of the Republican Left to press ahead with the ‘responsibilities’ issue, intensified the fears of Army officers. In the eyes of most of them, some senior generals were being accused of rebellion when all they had done was to put a stop to anarchy in 1923 while others, Berenguer and Fernández de Heredia, were being tried for dealing with the mutiny of Jaca. As the then Captain-General of Aragón, Fernández de Heredia was the man who had signed the death sentences. Posters, books and even a play by Rafael Alberti, Fermín Galán, glorified ‘the martyrs of the Repúblic’. Ramón Franco dedicated his book Madrid bajo las bombas (Madrid beneath the bombs) to ‘the martyrs for freedom, Captains Galán and García Hernández, assassinated on Sunday 14 December 1930 by Spanish reaction incarnated in the monarchy of Alfonso XIII and his government, presided by General Dámaso Berenguer’. The beatification of Galán and García Hernández was something which infuriated all but committed Republicans in the officer corps. Franco was especially outraged that the Republic appeared to be applying double standards in trying to eradicate unsound promotions granted during the 1920s at the same time as pursuing favouritism towards those who had collaborated in its establishment. Ironically, Ramón Franco had been appointed Director-General de Aeronáutica. Franco’s brother abused his position to participate in anarchist conspiracies against the Republic, lost his post and was only saved from a prison sentence by his election as a parliamentary deputy for Barcelona and by the solidarity of his masonic colleagues.55

When the Responsibilities Commission began to gather evidence for the forthcoming trial of those involved in the executions after the Jaca uprising, Franco appeared as a witness. In the course of his cross-examination on 17 December 1931, Franco’s answers were dry and to the point. He reminded the court that the code of military justice permitted summary executions to take place without the prior approval of the civilian authorities. However, when asked if he wished to add anything to his statement, he revealingly went on to defend military justice as ‘a juridical and a military necessity, by which military offences, of a purely military nature, and committed by soldiers, are judged by persons militarily prepared for the task’. Accordingly, he declared that, since the members of the Commission had no military experience, they were not competent to judge what had happened at the Jaca court martial.

When proceedings recommenced on the following day, Franco effectively lined himself against one of the cherished myths of the Republic by stating that Galán and García Hernández had committed a military offence, dismissing the central premiss of the Commission that they had carried out a political rebellion against an illegitimate regime. Franco declared ‘receiving in sacred trust the arms of the nation and the lives of its citizens, it would be criminal in any age and in any situation for those who wear a uniform to use those arms against the nation or against the state which gave us them. The discipline of the Army, its very existence and the health of the state demand of us soldiers the bitter disappointments of having to apply a rigid law’.56 Although carefully ringed around by declarations of respect for parliamentary sovereignty, it was implicitly a statement that he regarded the defence of the monarchy by the Army in December 1930 to have been legitimate, a view contrary to those held by many in authority in the Republic. His views on the canonization of the Jaca rebels could also easily be deduced from the statement. However, in its implications about a disciplined acceptance of the Republic, his statement was entirely consistent with both his order of the day on 15 April and his farewell speech at the Academy. It may therefore be taken as further evidence that, unlike hotheads such as Orgaz, he was still far from turning his discontent into active rebellion. After a protracted ordeal, both Berenguer and Fernández de Heredia were found innocent by the Tribunal Supremo in 1935.57

Franco’s obscure declarations of disciplined loyalty were some distance from the enthusiastic commitment which might have gained him official favour. After the loss of the Academy, the questioning of his promotions, and the working class unrest highlighted by the right-wing press, Franco’s attitude to the Republic could hardly be other than one of suspicion and hostility. It is not surprising that he had to wait some considerable time before he got a posting, but it was an indication both of his professional merits and of Azaña’s recognition of them that, on 5 February 1932, he was posted to La Coruña as Commander of the XV Brigada de Infantería de Galicia, where he arrived at the end of the month. The local press greeted his arrival with the headline ‘A Caudillo of the Tercio’ and praised not only his bravery and military skill but also ‘his noble gifts as a correct and dignified gentleman’. He again took Pacón with him as his ADC. He was delighted to be in La Coruña, near to his mother, whom he visited every weekend.58

That Azaña believed that he was treating Franco well may be deduced from the fact that the posting saved the young general from the consequences of a decree published in March 1932 establishing the obligatory retirement of those who had spent more than six months without a posting. The appointment came only a few days before the end of the period after which Franco would have had to go into the reserve and he must have suffered considerable anxiety during the months of waiting. Azaña had deliberately kept him in a state of limbo as a punishment for the farewell speech to the Military Academy and to tame the arrogance of the soldier seen as the golden boy of the monarchy.59 In fact, by the point at which he posted Franco to La Coruña, Azaña seems to have decided that he had learned his lesson and might now be recruited to the new regime. Knowing Ramón Franco well, Azaña seemed again to be judging his older brother in the same terms. If that was so, it reflected an under-estimate of Franco’s capacity for resentment. Rather than reacting with gratitude and loyalty as Azaña had hoped, Franco harboured a grudge against him for the rest of his life.

Before their next meeting seven months later, a major crisis in civilian-military relations had occurred, and been resolved. It took the form of a military uprising in August 1932, the origins of which went back to the end of 1931. At that time, in the course of an otherwise peaceful general strike of landworkers in the province of Badajoz in Extremadura, there was bloodshed involving the Civil Guard in Castilblanco, a remote village in the heart of the arid zone known as the Siberia extremeña. Like most of the area, Castilblanco suffered high unemployment. On 30 and 31 December, the workers of the village held peaceful demonstrations. As they were dispersing to their homes, the alcalde (mayor) panicked and instructed the local four-man Civil Guard unit to intervene to break up the crowd. After some scuffling, a Civil Guard opened fire killing one man and wounding two others. In response, the villagers set upon the four guards, beating them to death with stones and knives.60 There was an outcry in the right-wing press and the Republican-Socialist government headed by Azaña was accused of inciting the landless labourers against the Civil Guard. Sanjurjo visited Castilblanco, in his capacity as Director-General of the Civil Guard, and blamed the outrage on the extreme leftist Socialist deputy for Badajoz, Margarita Nelken. In a revealing association of the working class and the Moors, he declared that during the collapse of Melilla, even at Monte Arruit, he had not seen similar atrocities. He also demanded justice for the Civil Guard.61 It was part of a process whereby the military was being convinced that the Republic signified disorder and anarchy. No issue was more indicative of the social abyss which divided Spain. For the Right, the Civil Guard was the beloved benemérita, the guardian of the social order; for the Left, it was a brutal and irresponsible Army of occupation at the service of the rich.

While the country was still reeling from the horror of Castilblanco, there occurred another tragedy. In the village of Arnedo in the province of Logroño in northern Castile, some of the employees of the local shoe factory had been sacked for belonging to the socialist trade union, the Unión General de Trabajadores. During a protest meeting, the Civil Guard, with no apparent provocation, opened fire killing four women, a child and a worker as well as wounding thirty other by-standers, some of whom died in the course of the next few days. In the light of the remarks made by General Sanjurjo after Castilblanco, it was difficult for the incident not to be seen as an act of revenge.62 Azaña reluctantly bowed to pressure in the left-wing press and by left-wing deputies in the Cortes to remove Sanjurjo from the command of the Civil Guard and transfer him to the less important post of head of the Carabineros, the frontier and customs police.63 On 5 February 1932, in the batch of postings which sent Franco to Galicia, Sanjurjo was replaced as Director of the Civil Guard by General Miguel Cabanellas.64

Under any circumstances, Sanjurjo would have objected to losing the post of Director-General of the Civil Guard. In the context of the leftist campaign against him, his removal was interpreted by the right-wing press, and by himself, as an outrage and a further blow in favour of anarchy. Many on the Right began to see Sanjurjo as a possible saviour and encouraged him to think about overthrowing the Republic. The Castilblanco and Arnedo incidents had wiped away Sanjurjo’s original sin in the eyes of the extreme Right, his failure to act on behalf of the monarchy in April 1931. Now he was seen as the most likely guarantor of law and order, something which was transmuted in rightist propaganda into the defence of ‘the eternal essences of Spain’. Throughout 1932, as the agrarian reform statute and the Catalan autonomy statute painfully passed through the Cortes, the Right would grow ever more furious at what it perceived as assaults on property rights and national unity. Across Spain, petitions in favour of Sanjurjo were signed by many Army officers, although not by Franco. Several efforts were made to push Sanjurjo towards a coup d’état and he began to plot against the Republic.

General Emilio Barrera informed the Italian Ambassador Ercole Durini di Monzo in February that a movement to ‘oppose bolshevism and restore order’ could count on widespread military support including that of Generals Goded and Sanjurjo.65 Lerroux, who was determined to see Azaña’s Left Republican-Socialist coalition evicted from power, was in contact with Sanjurjo. They were united in resenting the presence of the Socialists in the government and talked about a possible coup.66 Any military conspiracy would have benefited enormously from the participation of Franco. However, he kept his distance out of innate caution when faced with an ill-prepared and highly questionable coup attempt. He distrusted Sanjurjo and had no reason to risk everything when he could continue to exercise his chosen profession within the Republic.