Читать книгу Franco - Paul Preston - Страница 9

AFTER THE vexations of the previous two years, the period of Centre-Right government, which came to be known by the Spanish Left as the bienio negro (two black years), moved Franco back into the sunlight. After what he perceived as the harsh persecution to which he and like-minded officers had been subjected by Azaña, the forty-two year-old general found himself lionized by politicians as he had not been since the Dictatorship. The reasons were obvious. He was the Army’s most celebrated young general of rightist views, and was untainted by collaboration with the Republic. His renewed celebrity and favour coincided with, and indeed to an extent fed upon, the bitter polarization of Spanish politics in this period.

The Right saw its success in the November 1933 elections as an opportunity to put the clock back on the attempted reforms of the previous nineteen months of Republican-Socialist coalition government. In a context of deepening economic crisis, with one in eight of the workforce unemployed nationally and one in five in the south, a series of governments bent on reversing reform could provoke only desperation and violence among the urban and rural working classes. Employers and landowners celebrated victory by slashing wages, cutting their work forces, in particular sacking union members, evicting tenants and raising rents. The labour legislation of the previous governments was simply ignored.

Within the Socialist movement, rank-and-file bitterness at losing the elections and outrage at the vicious offensive of the employers soon pushed the leadership into a tactic of revolutionary rhetoric in the vain hope of frightening the Right into restraining its aggression and pressuring the President of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, into calling new elections. In the long term, this tactic was to contribute to the feeling on the Right, and particularly within the high command of the Army, that strong authoritarian solutions were required to meet the threat from the Left.

Alcalá Zamora had not invited the sleek and pudgy CEDA leader, José María Gil Robles, to form a government despite the fact that the Catholic CEDA was the biggest party in the Cortes. The President suspected the immensely clever and energetic Gil Robles of planning to establish an authoritarian, corporative state and so turned instead to the cynical and corrupt Alejandro Lerroux, leader of the increasingly conservative Radicals, the second largest party. But Lerroux’s power-hungry Radicals were dependent on CEDA votes and became the puppets of Gil Robles. In return for introducing the harsh social policies sought by the CEDA’s wealthy backers, the Radicals were allowed to enjoy the spoils of office. The Socialists were angered by the corruption of the Radicals but the first working class protest came from the anarchists. With irresponsible naivety, a violent uprising was called for 8 December 1933. However, the government had been forewarned of the anarcho-syndicalists’ plans and quickly declared a state of emergency (Estado de alarma). Leaders of the CNT and the FAI were arrested, press censorship was imposed, and union buildings were closed down.

In traditionally anarchist areas – Aragón, the Rioja, Catalonia, the Levante, parts of Andalusia and Galicia – there were sporadic strikes, some trains were derailed and Civil Guard posts were attacked. After desultory skirmishes with the Civil Guard and the Assault Guards, the revolutionary movement was soon suppressed in Madrid, Barcelona and the provincial capitals of Andalusia, Alicante and Valencia. Throughout Aragón and in the regional capital, Zaragoza, however, the rising enjoyed a degree of success. Anarchist workers raised barricades, attacked public buildings, and engaged in armed combat with the forces of order. The government sent in several companies of the Army which, with the aid of tanks, took four days to crush the insurrection.¹ The movement reinforced the conviction of many of the more right-wing officers that, even with a conservative government in power, the Republic had to be overthrown.²

The difficulties experienced in the suppression of the revolt led, on 23 January 1933 to the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Manuel Rico Avello, who was packed off to Morocco as High Commissioner. He was replaced by Diego Martínez Barrio, the Minister of War, who was replaced in turn by the conservative Radical deputy for Badajoz and crony of Lerroux, Diego Hidalgo who knew more about the agrarian problem than about military questions.^* However, with engaging humility, he admitted his lack of military knowledge and his need for professional advice.³ He also set out to cultivate military sympathies for his party by softening the impact of some of the measures introduced by Azaña and reversing others.⁴ When the new Minister of War had been in post barely a week, at the beginning of February, Franco made his acquaintance in Madrid. Clearly impressed by the young general, at the end of March 1934, Hidalgo successfully placed before the cabinet a proposal for his promotion from Brigadier to Major-General (General de División), in which rank he was again the youngest in Spain.⁵ Hidalgo, expecting an effusive response, was dismayed by the cold and impersonal telegram which Franco sent him on receiving the news of his promotion. Reflecting on it later, Hidalgo commented, ‘I never ever saw him either joyful or depressed’.⁶

The relationship between Franco and Hidalgo was consolidated in June during a four-day visit made by the Minister to the Balearic Islands where Franco was Comandante General. Hidalgo was much taken by the general’s considerable capacity for work, his obsession with detail, his cool deliberation in resolving problems. One incident stuck in his mind. It was the Minister’s custom on visiting garrisons to request that the commanding officer celebrate his visit by releasing any soldier currently under arrest. Although there was only one prisoner, a captain, in Menorca, Franco refused, saying ‘if the Minister orders me I will do it; if he merely makes a request, no.’ When Hidalgo asked what crime could be so heinous, Franco replied that it was the worst that any officer could commit: he had slapped a soldier. It was a surprising remark from the officer who had had a soldier shot for refusing to eat his rations. Both incidents in fact showed his obsession with military discipline. Hidalgo was so impressed by Franco that, before leaving Palma de Mallorca, and contrary to military protocol, he invited him to join him as an adviser that September during military manoeuvres in the hills (montes) of León.⁷

As 1934 progressed, Franco became the favourite general of the Radicals just as, when the political atmosphere grew more conflictive after October, he was to become the general of the more aggressively right-wing CEDA. The favour of Hidalgo contrasted strongly with the treatment Franco perceived himself to have suffered at the hands of Azaña. Moreover, with the Radical government, backed in the Cortes by the CEDA, pursuing socially conservative policies and breaking the power of one union after another, the Republic began to seem altogether more acceptable to Franco. For many conservatives, ‘catastrophist’ solutions to Spain’s problems seemed for the moment less urgent. The extreme Right, however, remained unconvinced and so continued to prepare for violence. The most militant group on the ultra Right were the Carlists of the Traditionalist Communion, break-away royalists who had rejected the liberal heresy of the constitutional monarchists and advocated an earthly theocracy under the guidance of warrior priests. The Carlists were collecting arms and drilling in the north and the spring of 1934 saw Fal Conde, the movement’s secretary, recruiting volunteers in Andalusia. The Carlists, together with the fascist Falange Española, and the influential and wealthy ‘Alfonsists’, the conventional supporters of Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera, constituted the self-styled ‘catastrophist’ Right. They were so-called because of their determination to destroy the Republic by means of a cataclysm rather than by the more gradual legalist tactic favoured by the CEDA. Their plans for an uprising would eventually come to fruition in the summer of 1936.

On 31 March 1934, two Carlist representatives accompanied by the leader of the Alfonsist monarchist party, Renovación Española, Antonio Goicoechea, and General Barrera saw Mussolini in Rome. They signed a pact which promised money and arms for a rising.⁸ In May 1934, the monarchists’ most dynamic and charismatic leader, José Calvo Sotelo, was granted amnesty and returned to Spain after the three years’ exile suffered as he fled the ‘responsibilities’ campaign. Henceforth, the extreme rightist press, in addition to criticizing Gil Robles for alleged weakness, began to talk of the need to ‘conquer the State’ – a euphemism for the violent seizure of its apparatus, as the only certain way to guarantee a permanent authoritarian, corporative regime.

Although Franco was careful to distance himself from the generals who were part of monarchist conspiracies, he certainly shared some of their preoccupations. His ideas on political, social and economic issues were still influenced by the regular bulletins which had been receiving since 1928 from the Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale of Geneva. In the spring of 1934, he took out a new subscription at his own expense, writing to Geneva on 16 May expressing his admiration for ‘the great work which you carry out for the defence of nations from Communism’ and his ‘wish to co-operate, in our country, in your great effort’.⁹ An ultra-right-wing organization which now had contacts with Dr Goebbels’ Antikomintern, the Entente skilfully targeted and linked up influential people convinced of the need to prepare for the struggle against Communism, and supplied subscribers with reports which purported to expose plans for forthcoming Communist offensives. The many strikes which took place during 1934, when seen through the prism of the Entente’s publications, helped convince Franco that a major Communist assault on Spain was under way.¹⁰

If Franco was circumspect with regard to extreme Right monarchist conspirators, he had even less to do with the nascent fascist groups which were beginning to appear on the scene. Gil Robles’ youth movement, the Juventud de Acción Popular (JAP) held great fascist-style rallies were held at which Gil Robles was hailed with the cry ‘¡Jefe! ¡Jefe! ¡Jefe!’ (the Spanish equivalent of Duce) in the hope that he might start a ‘March on Madrid’ to seize power. However, the JAP was not taken seriously by the ‘catastrophist’ Right. Monarchist hopes focused rather more on the openly fascist group of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the Falange, as a potential source of shock troops against the Left. As a southern landowner, an aristocrat and eligible socialite, and above all as the son of the late dictator, José Antonio Primo de Rivera was a guarantee to the upper classes that Spanish fascism would not get out of their control in the way of its German and Italian equivalents. The Falange remained insignificant until 1936, important until then only for the role played by its political vandalism in screwing up the tension which would eventually erupt into the Civil War. José Antonio was a close friend of Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law, but despite Serrano’s efforts to bring them together, the cautious, hard-working general and the flamboyant playboy would never hit it off.

Indeed, during the first half of 1934, Franco’s interest in politics was minimal. In late February, his mother Pilar Bahamonde de Franco had decided to go on pilgrimage to Rome. Franco travelled to Madrid in order to escort her to Valencia to catch a boat to Italy. While in the capital, staying at the home of her daughter Pilar, she caught pneumonia. After an illness lasting about ten days, she died on 28 February, aged sixty-six. It is the unanimous affirmation of those close to him that the loss affected Francisco profoundly despite the fact that he had not lived with his mother for twenty-seven years. He had adored her.¹¹ Outside the family, he showed no signs of his bereavement. After her death, Franco rented a large apartment in Madrid where he and his wife regularly received the visits of other generals, prominent right-wing politicians, aristocrats and the elite of Oviedo when they passed through the capital. The most frequent recreations of Francisco and Carmen were visits to the cinema and to the flea-market (Rastro) in search of antiques, often accompanied by their favourite niece Pilar Jaraiz Franco.¹²

While Franco concerned himself with family and professional matters, the political temperature was rising throughout Spain. The Left was deeply sensitive to the development of fascism and was determined to avoid the fate of their Italian, German and Austrian counterparts. Encouraged by Gil Robles, the Radical Minister of the Interior Rafael Salazar Alonso was pursuing a policy of breaking the power of the Socialists in local administration and provoking the unions into suicidal strikes. The gradual demolition of the meagre Republican-Socialist achievements of 1931–1933 reached its culmination on 23 April with the amnesty of those accused of responsibilities for the crimes of the Dictatorship, like Calvo Sotelo, and those implicated in the coup of 10 August 1932, most notably Sanjurjo himself. Lerroux resigned in protest after Alcalá Zamora had hesitated before signing the amnesty bill. While Lerroux ran the government from the wings, one of his lieutenants, Ricardo Samper, took over as prime minister. Socialists and Republicans alike felt that the entire operation was a signal from the Radicals to the Army that officers could rise whenever they disliked the political situation.¹³ The Left was already suspicious of the government’s dependence on CEDA votes, because the monarchist Gil Robles refused to affirm his loyalty to the Republic.

Political tension grew throughout 1934. Successive Radical cabinets were incapable of allaying the suspicion that they were merely Gil Robles’ Trojan Horse. By repeatedly threatening to withdraw his support, Gil Robles provoked a series of cabinet crises as a result of which the Radical government took on an ever more rightist colouring. On each occasion, some of the remaining liberal elements of Lerroux’s party would be pushed into leaving it and its rump became progressively more dependent on CEDA whims. With Salazar Alonso provoking strikes throughout the spring and summer of 1934 and thereby picking off the most powerful unions one by one, the government widened its attacks on the Republic’s most loyal supporters and also began to mount an assault against the Basques and, even more so, the Catalans.

In Catalonia, the regional government or Generalitat was governed by a left Republican party, the Esquerra, under Luis Companys. In April, Companys had passed an agrarian reform, the Ley de Cultivos, to protect tenants from eviction by landowners. Although Madrid declared the reform unconstitutional, Companys went ahead and ratified it. Meanwhile, the government began to infringe the Basques’ tax privileges and, in an attempt to silence protest, forbade their municipal elections. Such high-handed centralism could only confirm the Left’s fears of the Republic’s rapid drift to the right. That anxiety was intensified by Salazar Alonso’s provocation and crushing defeat of a major national strike by the Socialist landworkers’ union during the summer. There were hundreds of arrests of trade union leaders and thousands of internal deportations, with peasants herded onto trucks and driven hundreds of miles from their homes to be left to make their way back without food or money. In the meantime, Army conscripts brought in the harvest. Workers’ societies were closed down and leftists on town councils forcibly replaced by government nominees. In the Spanish countryside, the clock was being put back to the 1920s.¹⁴

The vengeful policies pursued by the Radical governments and encouraged by the CEDA divided Spain. The Left saw fascism in every action of the Right; the Right, and many Army officers, smelt Communist-inspired revolution in every demonstration or strike. In the streets, there was sporadic shooting by Socialist and Falangist youths. The Government’s attacks on regional autonomy and the increasingly threatening attitude of the CEDA were driving sections of the Socialist movement to place their hopes in a revolutionary rising to forestall the inexorable destruction of the Republic. On the Right, there was a belief that, if the Socialists could be provoked into an insurrection, an excuse would be provided to crush them definitively. Gil Robles’ youth movement, the JAP, held a rally on 9 September at Covadonga in Asturias, the site of a battle in 732 considered to be the starting point for the long reconquest of Spain from the Moors. The symbolic association of the right-wing cause with the values of traditional Spain and the identification of the working class with the Moorish invaders was a skilful device that would help secure military sympathy. It foreshadowed the Francoist choreography of the Reconquista developed after 1936 with Franco himself cast as the medieval warrior king.

At the rally, Gil Robles spoke belligerently of the need to crush the ‘separatist rebellion’ of the Catalans and the Basque Nationalists.¹⁵ The wily Gil Robles – the politician on the Right with the greatest strategic vision – knew that the Left considered him a fascist and was determined to prevent the CEDA coming to power. He therefore pushed for the CEDA to join the government precisely in order to provoke a Socialist reaction. This is in fact what happened. CEDA ministers entered the cabinet; there was an uprising in Asturias and it was smashed by the Army.¹⁶ Gil Robles said later: ‘I asked myself this question: “I can give Spain three months of tranquillity if I do not enter the government. If we enter, will the revolution break out? Better that it do so before it is well prepared, before it defeats us.” This is what we did, we precipitated the movement, met it and implacably smashed it from within the government’.¹⁷

In September, Franco left the Balearics and travelled to the mainland to take up Diego Hidalgo’s invitation to join him as his personal technical adviser during the Army manoeuvres taking place in León at the end of the month under the direction of General Eduardo López Ochoa. Since López Ochoa had been part of the opposition against Primo de Rivera and was implicated in the December 1930 military rebellion, Franco regarded him with some hostility. It is possible that the large-scale military manoeuvres, planned in the late spring, were part of a wider project by Salazar Alonso, Hidalgo and Gil Robles to crush the Left. The manoeuvres were held in an area contiguous, and of nearly identical terrain, to Asturias where the final left-wing bid to block the CEDA’s passage to power was likely to come.¹⁸ In retrospect, it seems more than a coincidence that the Minister of War should have arranged for Franco to accompany him as his personal adviser on those manouevres and should then put him in charge of the repression of the revolutionary strike.

It is not clear why the Minister needed a ‘personal technical adviser’ when López Ochoa and other senior officers, including the Chief of the General Staff, were there under his orders. On the other hand, if the central concern was the ability of the Army to crush a left-wing action, Franco was more likely to give firm advice than López Ochoa or General Carlos Masquelet, the Chief of Staff. Franco’s first biographer, Joaquin Arrarás, claimed that when Hidalgo invited Franco to leave the Balearics and come to the mainland, ‘his real intention was to ensure that the general would be in Madrid at the Minister’s side during the hazardous days which were expected’.¹⁹ There can be no doubt that Hidalgo was aware of a possible left-wing insurrection. At the end of August, he had named General Fanjul to head an investigation into the loss of weapons from the state small-arms factories.²⁰ Then, in early September, when some members of the cabinet had been in favour of cancelling the manoeuvres, Hidalgo insisted that they go ahead precisely because of imminent left-wing threats. Three days before the manoeuvres began, Hidalgo ordered the Regiment no.3 from Oviedo which was to have taken part not to leave the Asturian capital again because he expected a revolutionary outbreak.²¹ Moreover, the astonishing speed with which Franco was later able to get the Spanish Legion from Africa to Asturias suggests some prior consideration of the problem.

On the Right, the readiness of the Army to deal with a likely leftist initiative was an issue of frequent discussion. Salazar Alonso raised it at cabinet meetings and in press interviews. At this time, secret contacts between the CEDA and senior military figures had provided assurances that the Army was confident of being able to crush any leftist uprising provoked by CEDA entry into the cabinet.²² Curiously, during the manoeuvres, José Antonio Primo de Rivera made an effort to cultivate a relationship with Franco. On the fringe of events, but clearly impressed by indications of Franco’s likely influence on what was about to happen, the Falange leader wrote him a frantic letter^* claiming that Socialist victory was imminent and equivalent to ‘a foreign invasion’ since France would seize the opportunity to annex Catalonia. It is indicative of Franco’s confidence in Diego Hidalgo at this time that he read José Antonio’s letter without interest and did not bother to reply.²³

Nevertheless, the political crisis was soon to absorb Franco totally. On 26 September, Gil Robles made his move and announced that the CEDA could no longer support a minority government. In dutiful response, Lerroux formed a new cabinet including three CEDA ministers. There was outrage among even conservative Republicans. The UGT called a general strike. In most parts of Spain, the prompt action of the government in declaring martial law and arresting the hesitant Socialist leaders guaranteed its failure.²⁴ In Barcelona events were more dramatic. Pushed by extreme Catalan nationalists, and alarmed by developments in Madrid, Companys proclaimed an independent state of Catalonia ‘within the Federal Republic of Spain’ in protest against what was seen as the betrayal of the Republic. It was a largely rhetorical gesture since the rebellion of the Generalitat was doomed when Companys refused to arm the workers. The futile defence of the short-lived Catalan Republic was undertaken by a small group of officers from the local security services. They were soon overwhelmed.²⁵ The only place where the Left’s protest was not easily brushed aside was in Asturias. There, the emergence of spontaneous rank-and-file revolutionary committees impelled the local Socialist leaders to go along with a movement organized jointly by the UGT, the CNT and, belatedly, the Communists, united in the Alianza Obrera (workers’ alliance).²⁶

During the September manoeuvres, Franco had asked the Minister for permission to visit Oviedo on family business before returning to the Balearics – Franco planned to sell some land belonging to his wife. However, before he could set off from Madrid, the Asturian revolutionary strike broke out. Diego Hidalgo decided that Franco should stay on at the Ministry as his personal adviser.²⁷ The situation worsened and, on 5 October, the Civil Governor of Asturias handed over control of the region to the military commander of Oviedo, Colonel Alfredo Navarro, who immediately declared martial law. At a tense cabinet meeting on 6 October, chaired by the President of the Republic Alcalá Zamora, it was decided to name General López Ochoa to command the troops sent to fight the revolutionary miners. The choice of López Ochoa for this difficult task reflected both his position as Inspector General del Ejército in the region and his reputation as a loyal republican and a freemason. López Ochoa later confided to the Socialist lawyer Juan-Simeón Vidarte that Alcalá Zamora had asked him to undertake the task precisely because he thereby hoped to keep bloodshed to a minimum. This created serious friction with Hidalgo, Salazar Alonso and the three new CEDA ministers who, urged on by Gil Robles, had been in favour of sending General Franco. They then tried unsuccessfully to have Franco named Chief of the General Staff instead of the more liberal incumbent, Masquelet, a friend of Azaña.²⁸

Although the proposal to put Franco formally in command of troops in Asturias was rejected by Alcalá Zamora, Diego Hidalgo informally put him in overall charge of operations. Franco thus received an intoxicating taste of unprecedented politico-military power. The Minister used his ‘adviser’ as an unofficial Chief of the General Staff, marginalising his own staff and slavishly signing the orders which Franco drew up.²⁹ In fact, the powers informally exercised by Franco went even further than might have been apparent at the time. The declaration by decree of martial law (estado de guerra) effectively transferred to the Ministry of War the responsibilities for law and order normally under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior. Diego Hidalgo’s total reliance on Franco effectively gave him control of the functions of both Ministries.³⁰ The Minister’s desire to have Franco by his side in Madrid is comprehensible. He admired him and Franco had specific knowledge of Asturias, its geography, communications and military organization. He had been stationed there, had taken part in the suppression of the general strike of 1917 and had been a regular visitor since marrying Carmen. Nevertheless, the particularly harsh manner in which Franco directed the repression from Madrid gave a stamp to the events in Asturias which they might not have had if control had been left to the permanent staff of the Ministry.

The idea that a soldier should exercise such responsibilities came naturally to Franco. It harked back to the central ideas on the role of the military in politics which he had absorbed during his years as a cadet in the Toledo Academy. It was a step back in the direction of the golden years of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. He took for granted the implicit recognition of his personal capacity and standing. All in all, it was to be a profoundly formative experience for him, deepening his messianic conviction that he was born to rule. He would try unsuccessfully to repeat it after the Popular Front election victory in February 1936 before doing so definitively in the course of the Civil War.

Hidalgo’s decision to use Franco derived also from his distrust, fuelled by Gil Robles, of both General Masquelet and other liberal officers in the Ministry of War who had been close to Azaña.³¹ At the time, the unusual appointment provoked criticisms from the under-secretary of the Ministry of War, General Luis Castelló.³² Franco’s approach to the events of Asturias was coloured by his conviction, fed by the material he received from the Entente Anticomuniste of Geneva, that the workers’ uprising had been ‘deliberately prepared by the agents of Moscow’ and that the Socialists ‘with technical instructions from the Communists, thought they were going to be able to install a dictatorship’.³³ That belief no doubt made it easier to use troops against Spanish civilians as if they were a foreign enemy.

In the telegraph room of the Ministry of War, Franco set up a small command unit consisting of himself, his cousin Pacón and two naval officers, Captain Francisco Moreno Fernández and Lieutenant-Commander Pablo Ruiz Marset. Having no official status, they worked in civilian clothes. For two weeks, they controlled the movement of the troops, ships and trains to be used in the operation of crushing the revolution. Franco even directed the naval artillery bombardments of the coast, using his telephone in Madrid as a link between the cruiser Libertad and the land forces in Gijón.³⁴ Uninhibited by the humanitarian considerations which made some of the more liberal senior officers hesitate to use the full weight of the armed forces against civilians, Franco regarded the problem before him with icy ruthlessness.

The rightist values to which he was devoted had as their central symbol the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. Yet, doubting the readiness of working class conscripts to fire on Spanish workers, and anxious not to encourage the spread of revolution by weakening garrisons elsewhere in the mainland, Franco had no qualms about shipping Moorish mercenaries to fight in Asturias, the only part of Spain where the crescent had never flown. There was no contradiction for him in using the Moors in the simple sense that he regarded left-wing workers with the same racialist contempt with which he had the tribesmen of the Rif. ‘This is a frontier war’, he commented to a journalist, ‘against socialism, Communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism’.³⁵ Two banderas of the Legion and two tabores of Regulares were sent to Asturias with unusual speed and efficiency.

When it became known that one of the officers in charge of the troops coming from Africa, Lieutenant-Colonel López Bravo, had expressed doubts as to whether they would fire on civilians, Franco recommended his immediate replacement. He placed his Academy contemporary and close friend Colonel Juan Yagüe in overall charge of the African troops. He also ordered the removal of the commander of the León Air Force base, his cousin and childhood friend, Major Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde, because he suspected that he sympathized with the miners and was ordering his pilots not to fire on the strikers in Oviedo. Almost immediately, Franco ordered the bombing and shelling of the working class districts of the mining towns. Some of the more liberal generals regarded such orders as excessively brutal.³⁶

The losses among women and children, along with the atrocities committed by Yagüe’s Moroccan units, contributed to the demoralization of the virtually unarmed revolutionaries. Yagüe sent an emissary to Madrid to complain to both Franco and Gil Robles about the humanitarian treatment given by López Ochoa to the miners. López Ochoa’s pact with the miners’ leader Belarmino Tomás permitted an orderly and bloodless surrender and so provoked Franco’s suspicions.³⁷ In contrast, Franco showed total confidence in Yagüe during the active hostilities, in the course of which a savage repression was carried out by the African troops. When Gijón and Oviedo were recaptured by government troops, summary executions of workers were carried out.³⁸

Thereafter, Franco also put his stamp on the political mopping up. After the miners surrendered, Hidalgo and Franco regarded their task as unfinished until all those involved had been arrested and punished. After Hidalgo ‘took advice’, presumably Franco’s, the police operations were entrusted to the notoriously violent Civil Guard Major Lisardo Doval who was appointed on 1 November ‘delegate of the Ministry of War for public order in the provinces of Asturias and León’. Doval was widely considered an expert on left-wing subversion in Asturias. His fame as a crusader against the Left had made him immensely popular among the upper and middle classes of the region. He was given special powers to by-pass any judicial control or other legal obstacles to his activities. As Franco knew he would, Doval carried out his task with a relish for brutality which provoked horror in the international press. It has been suggested that Franco was unaware of either Doval’s methods or his reputation as a torturer.³⁹ This is unlikely given that they had coincided as boys in El Ferrol, in the Infantry Academy at Toledo and in Asturias in 1917.

The right-wing press presented Franco, rather than López Ochoa, as the real victor over the revolutionaries and as the mastermind behind such a rapid success. Diego Hidalgo was unstinting in his praise for Franco’s value, military expertise and loyalty to the Republic and the rightist press began to refer to him as the ‘Saviour of the Republic’.⁴⁰ In fact, Franco’s handling of the crisis had been decisive and efficient but hardly brilliant. His tactics, however, were interesting in that they prefigured his methods during the Civil War. They had consisted essentially of building up local superiority to suffocate the enemy and, as the use of Yagüe and Doval indicated, sowing terror within the enemy ranks.⁴¹

After the victory over the Asturian rebels, Lerroux and Gil Robles agonized over the issue of death penalties for the revolutionaries in Asturias and the officers who had defended the short-lived Catalan Republic. The trials which would make most impact on Franco were those involving charges of military rebellion. On 12 October 1934, the officers who had supported the rebellion in Catalonia had been tried and sentenced to death. Sergeant Diego Vázquez, who had deserted to join the strikers in Asturias, was tried and sentenced to death on 3 January 1935.⁴² The bulk of the Right howled for vengeance but Alcalá Zamora favoured clemency and Lerroux was inclined to agree. Many on the Right wanted Gil Robles to withdraw CEDA support for the government if the death sentences were not carried out. He refused for fear of Alcalá Zamora giving power to a more liberal cabinet.

Franco, always rigidly in favour of the severest penalties for mutiny and of the strictest application of military justice, believed that Gil Robles was totally mistaken. He told the Italian Chargé d’Affaires, Geisser Celesia, ‘The victory is ours and not to apply exemplary punishments to the rebels, not to castigate energetically those who have encouraged the revolution and have caused so many casualties among the troops, would signify trampling on the just rights of the military class and encourage an early extremist response.’⁴³ The fact that pardons were eventually granted would contribute in 1936 to Franco’s decision to take part in the military uprising which opened the Civil War.

In 1934, however, Franco was hostile to any military intervention in politics. His part in suppressing the Asturian insurrection had left him satisfied that a conservative Republic ready to use his services could keep the Left at bay. Not all his comrades-in-arms shared his complacency. Fanjul and Goded were discussing with senior CEDA figures the possibility of a military coup to forestall the commutation of the death sentences. Gil Robles told them through an intermediary that the CEDA would not oppose a coup. It was agreed that they would consult other generals and the commanders of key garrisons to see if it might be possible ‘to put Alcalá Zamora over the frontier’. After checking with Franco and others, they concluded that they did not have the support necessary for a coup.⁴⁴

Franco exercised a similarly restraining influence over other would-be rebels. In late October, Jorge Vigón and Colonel Valentín Galarza believed that the moment had come to launch the military rising which they had been preparing since the autumn of 1932. Their plan was for the monarchist aviator, Juan Antonio Ansaldo, to fly to Portugal, pick up Sanjurjo and take him to the outskirts of Oviedo where he would link up with Yagüe. It was assumed that together Sanjurjo and Yagüe would easily persuade the bulk of the Army to join them in rebellion against the Republic. While the conspirators waited in the home of Pedro Saínz Rodríguez for the order to proceed, the journalist Juan Pujol arrived to say that he had spoken with Franco at the Ministry of War and Franco believed that it was not the right moment.⁴⁵ Enjoying considerable power and confident of his ability to use it decisively against the Left, he had no reason to want to risk his career in an ill-prepared coup. The fact that other prominent officers now deferred to his views, as they had not in 1932, was a measure of the dramatic increase in prestige bestowed upon him by the events in Asturias.

Although delighted with the repression of the Asturian rising, Gil Robles sought to strengthen his own political position and so he joined Calvo Sotelo in deriding the Radical government for weakness. Diego Hidalgo was one of the sacrificial victims.⁴⁶ Accordingly, from 16 November 1934 to 3 April 1935, the Prime Minister, Alejandro Lerroux, himself took over the Ministry of War. He awarded Franco the Gran Cruz de Mérito Militar and kept him in his extraordinary post of ministerial adviser until February 1935. Lerroux had intended to reward Franco by making him High Commissioner in Morocco but was prevented from doing so by the opposition of Alcalá Zamora.⁴⁷ Instead, he kept on the existing civilian High Commissioner, the conservative Republican Manuel Rico Avello, and made Franco Commander-in-Chief of the Spanish Armed Forces in Morocco.

Despite any disappointment that he might have felt at not being made High Commissioner, being an Africanista, Franco perceived the post of head of the African Army as a substantial reward for his work in repressing the revolution. As he put it himself, ‘the Moroccan Army constituted the most important military command’.⁴⁸ On arrival, he hastened to inform the Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale of his change of address.⁴⁹ Although he was to be there barely three months, it was a period which he enjoyed immensely. As Commander-in-Chief, he consolidated his existing influence within the armed forces in Morocco and established new and important contacts which were to facilitate his intervention at the beginning of the Civil War. His relationship with Rico Avello was similar in many respects to that which he had enjoyed with Diego Hidalgo. The High Commissioner, recognizing his own ignorance of Moroccan affairs, relied on Franco for advice of all kinds. Franco also established an excellent working relationship with the Chief of the General Staff of the Spanish forces in Morocco, Colonel Francisco Martín Moreno. This was to be crucial in 1936.⁵⁰

On the road to civil war, there could be no going back from the events of October 1934. The Asturian rising had frightened the middle and upper classes. Equally, the vengeful repression urged by the Right and carried out by the Radical-CEDA coalition convinced many on the Left that electoral disunity must never be risked again. The publicity given to Franco’s role in the military repression of the uprising ensured that thereafter he would be regarded as a potential saviour by the Right and as an enemy by the Left. Franco himself was to draw certain conclusions from the Asturian uprising. Convinced by the material received from Geneva that a Communist assault on Spain was being planned, he saw the events of October 1934 in those terms. He was determined that the Left should never be allowed to enjoy power even if won democratically.⁵¹

Nothing was done by successive conservative governments in the fifteen months after October 1934 to eliminate the hatreds aroused by the revolution itself or by its brutal repression. The CEDA claimed that it would remove the need for revolution by a programme of moderate land and tax reforms. Even if this claim was sincere in the mouths of the party’s few convinced social Catholics, the limited reforms proposed were blocked by right-wing intransigence from the majority. Thousands of political prisoners remained in jail; the Catalan autonomy statute was suspended and a vicious smear campaign was waged against Azaña in a vain effort to prove him guilty of preparing the Catalan revolution. Azaña was thereby converted into a symbol for all those who suffered from the repression.⁵²

The CEDA made a significant advance towards its goal of the legal introduction of an authoritarian corporative state on 6 May 1935 when five Cedistas, including the Jefe himself as Minister of War, entered a new cabinet under Lerroux. Gil Robles appointed known opponents of the regime to high positions – Franco was recalled from Morocco to become Chief of the General Staff; Goded became Inspector General and Director of the Air Force, and Fanjul became Under-Secretary of War. The President, Alcalá Zamora, was hostile to the appointment of Franco, regularly remarking that ‘young generals aspire to be fascist caudillos’. Eventually, threats of resignation from both Lerroux and Gil Robles overcame the President’s opposition.⁵³ There was a fierce rivalry and mutual dislike between Franco and Goded. Goded had wanted the job of Chief of the General Staff and was heard to comment bitterly that he awaited the failure of Franco.⁵⁴

Franco in mid-1935 was still some way from thinking in terms of military intervention against the Republic. Indeed, it would be wrong to assume that he spent much time thinking about overthrowing the Republic. As long as he had a posting which he considered to be appropriate to his merits, he was usually content to get on with his job in a professional manner. He had been extremely happy during his three months in Morocco and, while sad to leave an interesting job, he was thrilled by this even more important posting. In his new post, able to carry on the job which he had done in October, he can have felt little urge or need to rebel at this time. In any case, he remained deeply influenced by the failure of Sanjurjo’s coup of 10 August 1932. Moreover, given the ease of his relationship with Gil Robles, his day-to-day work gave him enormous satisfaction.⁵⁵

As Chief of Staff, Franco worked long hours to fulfil his central task which he saw as being to ‘correct the reforms of Azaña and return to the components of the armed forces the internal satisfaction which had been lost with the coming of the Republic’. He neglected his family, obsessively working until late at night, at weekends and on holidays.⁵⁶ Azaña’s revisions of promotions by merit were set aside. Many loyal Republican officers were purged and removed from their posts, because of their ‘undesirable ideology’. Others, of known hostility to the Republic, were reinstated and promoted. Emilio Mola was made General in command of Melilla and shortly afterwards head of military forces in Morocco. José Enrique Varela was promoted to general. Medals and promotions were distributed to those who had excelled in the repression of the October uprising.⁵⁷ Gil Robles and Franco had secretly brought Mola to Madrid to prepare detailed plans for the use of the colonial Army in mainland Spain in the event of further left-wing unrest.⁵⁸

Alcalá Zamora remained deeply suspicious of Gil Robles’ political motives in fostering the careers of anti-Republican officers and in trying to transfer control of the Civil Guard and the police from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of War. In some ways – regimental reorganization, motorization, equipment procurement – Gil Robles continued the reforms of Azaña.⁵⁹ The CEDA-Radical government was anxious for the Army to re-equip to ensure its efficacy in the event of having to face another left-wing rising. As Chief of Staff, Franco was involved in establishing contacts with arms manufacturers in Germany as part of the projected rearmament.⁶⁰ There can be little doubt that he enjoyed his new job as much as he had liked being Director of the Military Academy in Zaragoza. Despite the later deterioration of their relationship after 1936, he and Gil Robles worked well together in a spirit of co-operation and mutual admiration. Like Diego Hidalgo and Manuel Rico Avello, Gil Robles recognized his own ignorance in military affairs and was happy to leave Franco to get on with things. Franco looked back on his period as Chief of the General Staff with great satisfaction because his achievements facilitated the later Nationalist war effort.⁶¹

After earlier doubts, in the late summer of 1935, Franco made contact, through Colonel Valentín Galarza, with the Unión Militar Española, the extreme rightist conspiratorial organization run by his one-time subordinate Captain Bartolomé Barba Hernández. Galarza, who organized UME liaison between the various garrisons across the country, kept Franco informed about the morale and readiness of the organization’s members. In retrospect, Franco saw his approach to the UME as being to prevent it ‘organizing a premature coup along the lines of a nineteenth century pronunciamiento’.⁶² It is entirely in character that he would want any military action in which he might be involved to be fully prepared.

On 12 October 1935, Don Juan de Borbón, the son of Alfonso XIII, married in Rome. It was to be an excuse for monarchists, among them the plotters of Acción Española, such as José Calvo Sotelo, Jorge Vigón, Eugenio Vegas Latapie, Juan Antonio Ansaldo, to travel en masse to Italy. Franco was not among their number. Nevertheless, he did contribute to the wedding present given by the officers who had once been gentilhombres of Alfonso XIII.⁶³

Franco’s readiness to make contact with the UME reflected his concern at the fact that, despite the strength of the repression, the organized Left was growing in strength, unity and belligerence. The economic misery of large numbers of peasants and workers, the savage persecution of the October rebels and the attacks on Manuel Azaña combined to produce an atmosphere of solidarity among all sections of the Left. A series of gigantic mass meetings were addressed by Azaña in the second half of 1935 and the enthusiasm for unity shown by the hundreds of thousands who attended them helped clinch mass enthusiasm for what became the Popular Front.

The tiny Spanish Communist Party joined the Popular Front, an electoral coalition which, contrary to rightist propaganda and the material sent to Franco by the Entente contre la Troisième Internationale of Geneva, was not a Comintern creation but the revival of the 1931 Republican-Socialist coalition. The Left and centre Left joined together on the basis of a programme of amnesty for prisoners, of basic social and educational reform and trade union freedom. However, Comintern approval of the Popular Front strategy, ratified at its VII Congress on 2 August 1935, was used by the Entente to convince its subscribers, including Franco, that Moscow planned a revolution in Spain.⁶⁴

Gil Robles’ tactic of gradually breaking up successive Radical cabinets was overtaken in the autumn by the revelation of two massive financial scandals involving followers of Lerroux. In mid-September, Alcalá Zamora invited the dour conservative Republican, Joaquin Chapaprieta, to form a government. With the Radical Party on the verge of disintegration, Gil Robles provoked the resignation of Chapaprieta on 9 December in the belief that he would be asked to form a government. Alcalá Zamora, however, had no faith in Gil Robles’s commitment to the Republic. Instead, when he spoke with the President on 11 December, Gil Robles learned with rage that he was not being asked to be prime minister. Alcalá Zamora pointed out that the degree of government instability demonstrated the need for new elections. Gil Robles could hardly argue that it would now stop since he had provoked that instability in order to pave the way to firm government by himself. He had overplayed his hand. The President was so suspicious of Gil Robles that, throughout the subsequent political crisis, he had the Ministry of War surrounded by Civil Guards and the principal garrisons and airports placed under special vigilance.⁶⁵

The only choice now open to Gil Robles was to patch together some compromise which would enable the CEDA to avoid elections and thus carry on in the government or else arrange a coup d’état. He tried both options simultaneously. On the same evening a messenger was sent to Cambó, head of the Catalan Lliga, to ask him to join the CEDA and the Radicals in a coalition government. Cambó refused. Meanwhile, in the Ministry of War, Gil Robles was discussing the situation with Fanjul. Fanjul claimed enthusiastically that he and General Varela were prepared to bring the troops of the Madrid garrison onto the streets that very night to prevent the President from going through with his plans to dissolve the Cortes. There were plenty of officers only too willing to join them, especially if a coup had the blessing of the Minister of War and could therefore be seen as an order. However, Gil Robles was worried that such an action might fail, since it would certainly face the resistance of the Socialist and anarchist masses. Nevertheless, he told Fanjul that, if the Army felt that its duty lay in a coup, he would not stand in its way and, indeed, would do all that he could to maintain the continuity of government while it took place. Only practical doubts held him back and so he suggested that Fanjul check the opinion of Franco and other generals before making a definite decision. He then passed a sleepless night while Fanjul, Varela, Goded and Franco weighed up the chances of success. All were aware of the problem presented by the fact that there was every likelihood that the Civil Guard and the police would oppose a coup.⁶⁶

Calvo Sotelo, confined to bed with a fierce attack of sciatica, also sent Juan Antonio Ansaldo to see Franco, Goded and Fanjul to urge them to make a coup against the plans of Alcalá Zamora. Franco, however, convinced his comrades that, in the light of the strength of working class resistance during the Asturian events, the Army was not yet ready for a coup.⁶⁷ When the young monarchist plotter, the Conde de los Andes, telephoned Madrid from Biarritz to hear the details of the expected coup, Ansaldo replied ‘The usual generals, and especially the gallego, say that they cannot answer for their people and that the moment has not yet arrived’.⁶⁸ The government of Joaquin Chapaprieta was replaced by the interim cabinet of Manuel Portela Valladares. Thus, on 12 December, Gil Robles was obliged to abandon the Ministry of War with ‘infinite bitterness’. When the staff of the Ministry said goodbye to Gil Robles on 14 December, a tearful Franco made a short speech in which he declared ‘the Army has never felt itself better led than in this period.⁶⁹

In response to the move towards a more liberal cabinet, José Antonio Primo de Rivera sent his lieutenant Raimundo Fernández Cuesta to Toledo on 27 December with a wild proposal to Colonel José Moscardó, military governor and Director of the Escuela Central de Gimnasia (Central School of Physical Education) there. The suggestion was that several hundred Falangist militants would join the cadets in the Alcázar of Toledo to launch a coup. Common sense should have told Moscardó that it was a ridiculous idea. However, he felt that he could not make a decision without discussing it first with Franco. Leaving Fernández Cuesta waiting in Toledo, he drove to Madrid and consulted with the Chief of the General Staff who, as could have been foreseen, told him that the scheme was impracticable and badly timed.⁷⁰

Franco made it clear that he resented these initiatives from civilians as attempts to take advantage of the ‘most distinguished officers’ for their own partisan purposes. Moscardó was one of a number of officers, to whom he referred as ‘simplistic comrades’, who brought such proposals to him. He told them all that to precipitate matters was to guarantee failure. The job of the Army was to maintain its unity and discipline to be ready to intervene if and when the Republic proved itself totally unviable. What the Army could not do was to try to destroy the Republic before the population was ready.⁷¹ After Gil Robles was replaced as Minister of War by General Nicolás Molero, Franco was left as Chief of the General Staff. Like his predecessor, Molero was happy for Franco to get on with a job which he did well. Franco wrote to a friend on 14 January 1936, ‘I am still here in my post and I don’t think they’ll move me’. His contentment, along with his natural caution, may well have contributed to his inclination against conspiratorial adventures.⁷²

The elections were scheduled for 16 February 1936. Throughout January, rumours of a military coup involving Franco were so insistent that, late one night, the interim prime minister Manuel Portela Valladares sent the Director-General de Seguridad, Vicente Santiago, to the Ministry of War to see Franco and clarify the situation. The Chief of the General Staff was clearly still in the same cautious mood in which he had greeted Moscardó a few days earlier. Nevertheless, there was a double-edge in his reply. ‘The rumours are completely false; I am not conspiring and I will not conspire as long as there is no danger of Communism in Spain; and to put your mind at rest even more, I give you my word of honour, with all the guarantees that this carries between comrades in arms. While you are in the Dirección General de Seguridad, I have complete confidence that law and order, which is of such importance to all Spaniards and above all to the Army, will not be overthrown. Our job is to co-operate.’ The Director-General de Seguridad then said something which was uncannily prophetic: ‘If you and your comrades at any time feel that the circumstances which you mention come about and you are pushed to a rising, I dare say that if you don’t win in forty-eight hours there will follow misfortunes the like of which were never seen in Spain or in any revolution.’ Franco replied ‘We will not make the same mistake as Primo de Rivera in putting the Army in charge of the government’.⁷³ That Franco should discount the possibility of military government after a coup reflected his recent discussions with Goded and Fanjul about the plan to put Gil Robles in power, a plan rejected as unsafe.

Inevitably, the election campaign was fought in an atmosphere of violent struggle. In propaganda terms, the Right enjoyed an enormous advantage. Rightist electoral funds dramatically exceeded those of the poverty-stricken Left, although Franco was to remain convinced that the reverse was the case. He believed that the Left was awash with gold sent from Moscow and money stolen by the revolutionaries in October 1934.⁷⁴ Ten thousand posters and 50 million leaflets were printed for the CEDA. They presented the elections in terms of a life-or-death struggle between good and evil, survival and destruction. The Popular Front based its campaign on the threat of fascism and the need for an amnesty for the prisoners of October.

In fact, Franco was absent from Spain during part of the election campaign, attending the funeral of George V in London. He was chosen to attend because he was Chief of Staff and because he had once served in the Eighth Infantry Regiment of which the King of England was Honorary Colonel. He attended the funeral service at Westminster Abbey on Wednesday 28 January and, along with other foreign dignitaries, accompanied the coffin to its final resting place in St George’s Chapel, Windsor.⁷⁵ On the return journey by cross-channel ferry, Franco made some significant remarks to Major Antonio Barroso, the Spanish military attaché in Paris, who had accompanied him on the trip. He told Barroso that the Popular Front was the direct creation of the Comintern and was intended as a Trojan Horse to introduce Communism into Spain. He said that Mola and Goded were equally worried and everything now hinged on what the Popular Front did if it won the elections. The Army had to be ready to intervene if necessary.⁷⁶

The Chief of the General Staff returned to Madrid on 5 February. Franco’s instinctive caution was to the fore during a meeting that he held with José Antonio Primo de Rivera, at the home of Ramón Serrano Suñer’s father and brothers, just before the elections in mid-February. The leader of the Falange was obsessed with the need for a military intervention of surgical precision as a prelude to the creation of a national government to stop the slide into revolution. In fact, despite a seductive charm which made him the darling of Spanish high society, the young fascist leader had never attracted or impressed Franco, who, at this meeting, was evasive, rambling and cautious. Almost certainly, at the back of his mind was the madcap scheme which José Antonio Primo de Rivera had recently put to Colonel Moscardó. Franco was not about to become the accomplice in conspiracy of a young Falangist leader whom he did not respect and who had little popular support. Rather than get to the point of the meeting, he chatted aimlessly. José Antonio was deeply disillusioned and irritated, saying ‘my father for all his defects, for all his political disorientation, was something else altogether. He had humanity, decisiveness and nobility. But these people …’.⁷⁷

The elections held on 16 February resulted in a narrow victory for the Popular Front in terms of votes, but a massive triumph in terms of seats in the Cortes.⁷⁸ In the early hours of the morning of 17 February, as the first results were coming in, the popular enthusiasm of the masses was sending panic through right-wing circles. Franco and Gil Robles, in a co-ordinated fashion, worked tirelessly to hold back the decision of the ballot boxes. The main target of their efforts was the Prime Minister (who was also Minister of the Interior). Gil Robles and Franco both saw clearly that it was crucial to persuade him to stay on in order to ensure that the Civil Guard and the crack police units (the Guardias de Asalto) would not oppose the Army’s measures to reimpose ‘order’.

At about 3.15 a.m. on 17 February, Gil Robles presented himself at the Ministerio de la Gobernación and asked to see Portela. The CEDA leader was outraged to discover that Portela had gone to his rooms at the Hotel Palace. Portela was woken to be told that Gil Robles was waiting to see him. Three quarters of an hour later, the Prime Minister arrived. Gil Robles, claiming to speak in the name of all the forces of the right, told him that the Popular Front successes meant violence and anarchy and asked him to declare martial law. Portela replied that his job had been to preside over the elections and no more. He was, nevertheless, sufficiently convinced by Gil Robles to agree to declare a State of Alert (a stage prior to martial law) and to telephone Alcalá Zamora and ask him to authorize decrees suspending constitutional guarantees and imposing martial law.⁷⁹

At the same time, Gil Robles sent his private secretary, the Conde de Peña Castillo, to instruct his one-time aide Major Manuel Carrasco Verde to contact Franco. Carrasco was to inform Franco of what was happening and urge him to add his weight to Gil Robles’ pleas urging Portela not to resign and to bring in the Army. Carrasco woke the Chief of the General Staff at home with the message. Franco leapt to the unjustified conclusion that the election results were the first victory of the Comintern plan to take over Spain. Accordingly, he sent Carrasco to warn Colonel Galarza and instruct him to have key UME officers alerted in provincial garrisons. Franco then telephoned General Pozas, Director-General of the Civil Guard, an old Africanista who was nonetheless loyal to the Republic. He told Pozas that the results meant disorder and revolution. Franco proposed, in terms so guarded as to be almost incomprehensible, that Pozas join in an action to impose order. Pozas dismissed his fears and told him calmly that the crowds in the street were merely ‘the legitimate expression of republican joy’.

Disappointed by Pozas’s cool reception, Franco was driven by further news of crowds in the streets and sightings of clenched fist salutes to put pressure on the Minister of War, General Nicolás Molero. He visited him in his rooms and tried unsuccessfully to get him to seize the initiative and declare martial law. Finally convinced by Franco’s arguments about the Communist danger, Molero agreed to force Portela to call a cabinet meeting to discuss the declaration of martial law. Primed by Franco as to what to say, Molero rang Portela and a cabinet meeting was arranged for later that morning. Franco was convinced that the session was called because of his pressure on Molero although it is likely that a meeting would have been held anyway.⁸⁰

Franco decided that it was essential to get Portela to use his authority and order Pozas to use the Civil Guard against the populace. He approached their mutual friend, Natalio Rivas, to see if he could arrange a meeting. By mid-morning, Franco had managed to get an appointment to see Portela, but not until 7 p.m. In the meanwhile, at mid-day, the cabinet met, under the chairmanship of Alcalá Zamora, and declared, as Portela had promised Gil Robles, a State of Alert for eight days. It also approved, and the President signed, a decree of martial law to be kept in reserve and used as and when Portela judged necessary.⁸¹ Franco had gone to his office and been further alarmed by reports of minor incidents of disorder which arrived in the course of the morning. So he sent an emissary to General Pozas, asking him, rather more directly than some hours earlier, to use his men ‘to hold back the forces of the revolution’. Pozas again refused. General Molero was totally ineffective and Franco was virtually running the Ministry. He spoke to Generals Goded and Rodríguez del Barrio to see if the units under their command could be relied upon if necessary. Shortly after the cabinet meeting ended, Franco took it upon himself to try to put into action the blank decree of martial law, which Portela had been granted by the cabinet. Franco had learned of the existence of the decree from Molero who had been at the cabinet meeting.⁸²

Within minutes of being telephoned by Molero, Franco used the existence of the decree as a threadbare cloak of legality behind which to try to get local commanders to declare martial law. Franco was effectively trying to revert to the role that he had played during the Asturian crisis, assuming the de facto powers of both Minister of War and Minister of the Interior. In fact, the particular circumstances of October 1934 – a workers’ uprising, the formal declaration of martial law and the total confidence placed in him by the then Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, – did not now exist. The Chief of the General Staff had no business usurping the job of the Head of the Civil Guard. However, Franco followed his instincts and, in response to orders emanating from his office in the Ministry of War, martial law (estado de guerra) was actually declared in Zaragoza, Valencia, Oviedo and Alicante. Similar declarations were about to made in Huesca, Córdoba and Granada.⁸³ Too few local commanders responded, the majority replying that their officers would not support a movement if it had to be against the Civil Guard and the Assault Guards. When local Civil Guard commanders rang Madrid to check if it were true that martial law had been declared, Pozas assured them that it had not.⁸⁴ Franco’s initiative came to naught.

So, when Franco finally saw the Prime Minister in the evening, he was careful to play it both ways. In the most courteous terms, Franco told Portela that, in view of the dangers constituted by a possible Popular Front government, he offered him his support and that of the Army if he would stay in power. He made it clear that Portela’s agreement would remove the obstacle to an Army take-over most feared by the officer corps, the opposition of the police and the Civil Guard to military action. ‘The Army does not have the moral unity at this moment to undertake the task of saving Spain. Your intervention is necessary because you have authority over Pozas and can draw on the unlimited resources of the State, with the police at your orders.’ However, Franco spent much of the short interview shoring up his own personal position by trying to convince the Prime Minister that he personally was not involved in any kind of conspiracy. Franco told Portela’s political secretary, his nephew José Martí de Veses, that he was completely indifferent to politics and was concerned only with his military duties.⁸⁵

Despite Portela’s outright refusal to take up the offers of support from both Gil Robles and Franco, efforts to organise military intervention continued. The key issue remained the attitude of the Civil Guard. In the evening of 17 February, in an attempt to build on Franco’s efforts earlier in the day, General Goded tried to bring out the troops of the Montaña barracks in Madrid. However, the officers of that and other garrisons refused to rebel without a guarantee that the Civil Guard would not oppose them. It was believed in government circles that Franco was deeply involved in Goded’s initiative. Pozas, backed up by General Miguel Núñez de Prado, head of the police, was convinced that Franco was conspiring. However, they reassured Portela on the 18th with the words ‘the Civil Guard will oppose any coup attempt (militarada)’, and Pozas surrounded all suspect garrisons with detachments of the Civil Guard.⁸⁶ Just before midnight on the 18th, José Calvo Sotelo and the militant Carlist Joaquín Bau went to see Portela in the Hotel Palace and urged him to call on Franco, the officers of the Madrid military garrison and the Civil Guard to impose order.⁸⁷ All this activity around Portela and the failure of Goded justified Franco’s instinctive suspicions that the Army was not yet ready for a coup.

A last despairing effort was made by Gil Robles who secretly met Portela under some pine trees at the side of the road from Chamartín to Alcobendas on the outskirts of the capital at 8.30 a.m. on the morning of 19 February.⁸⁸ It was to no avail and the efforts of Gil Robles, Calvo Sotelo and Franco did not divert Portela and the rest of the cabinet from their determination to resign and, in all probability, frightened them into doing so with greater alacrity. At 10.30 a.m. on the morning of 19 February, they agreed to hand over power to Azaña immediately, instead of waiting for the opening of the Cortes. Before Portela could inform Alcalá Zamora of this decision, he was told that General Franco had been waiting for him for an hour since 2.30 p.m. at the Ministerio de la Gobernación. During that hour, Franco told Portela’s secretary that he was apolitical but that the threats to public order meant that the decree of martial law which Portela had in his pocket should be put into effect. Marti de Veses said that this would divide the Army. Franco replied confidently that the use of the Legion and the Regulares would hold the Army together. That remark confirmed again not only his readiness to use the colonial Army on mainland Spain, but also his conviction that it was essential to do so if the Left was to be decisively defeated. When he was admitted to the Prime Minister’s office, Franco did a repeat performance of his double game of the previous evening. He insisted on his own innocence of conspiracy but, aware of his failure with Pozas, again begged Portela not to resign. Portela could not be swayed from his decision which he communicated shortly afterwards to Alcalá Zamora.⁸⁹

To the chagrin of the Right and, indeed, to his own annoyance, Azaña was forced to accept power prematurely, in the late afternoon of 19 February. Franco may have covered his back effectively, but there can be little doubt that he had come nearer during the crisis of 17–19 February to engaging in a military coup than ever before. In the last resort, he had been prevented only by the determined attitude of Generals Pozas and Núñez de Prado. It was scarcely surprising under those circumstances that, when Azaña became prime minister again, Franco should be removed from his position at the head of the general staff. It was to be a major step in turning Franco’s latent resentments into outright aggression against the Republic.

^* Family responsibilities had obliged him to avoid military service in 1907 by the device of buying himself out. This, together with the fact that he was the author of a book on the Russian revolution, ensured that his appointment was greeted with trepidation on the Right.

^* Once more Ramón Serrano Suñer served as the intermediary between them, entrusting delivery of the letter to his brother José.