Пол Престон – Franco (страница 16)
The Dictatorship was also a period in which Franco experienced further inflation of his ego. On the evening of 3 February 1926, his fellow cadets of the fourteenth intake (
In the course of the next few days, Franco would receive many telegrams from the local authorities of El Ferrol recounting the acts of homage mounted for his mother. On Sunday 7 February, bands played, firework displays were organized and ships in the bay sounded their horns. The town turned out to acclaim the historic flight by Ramón, who was still in Argentina, although Franco was not forgotten in the endless tributes made to Doña Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade. 12 February was declared a holiday in El Ferrol in honour of both brothers. The streets of the town were illuminated and a Te Deum was sung in the Church of San Julián to celebrate their achievements. The plaque was unveiled in the calle María. Messages of congratulation to Doña Pilar for both her sons arrived from the
The adulation was largely directed at Ramón, but there is no reason to believe that Franco was resentful at seeing the black sheep of the family suddenly converted into a national hero. The adulation of his brother as a twentieth century Christopher Columbus may, however, have inspired Franco’s later efforts to present himself as a modern-day El Cid. Franco always had an intense loyalty to his family and, over the years, was to use his own position to help and protect Ramón from the consequences of his wilder actions. In any case, his own triumphs and popularity were sufficient in frequency and intensity for him not to need to feel envy. At Easter 1926, during the Corpus Christi procession at Madrid’s San Jerónimo Church, he commanded the troops which lined the streets and escorted the host. As the legendary hero of Africa, he was the object of the admiring attention of the upper class
On 14 September 1926, Franco’s first and only child María del Carmen was born in Oviedo where Carmen had gone to be with her dying father.60 The new arrival was to become the focus of his emotional life. Years later, he was to say ‘when Carmen was born, I thought that I would go mad with joy. I would have liked to have had more children but it was not to be’.61 There have been insistent rumours that Carmen was not really Francisco’s daughter but was adopted, and that the father may have been his promiscuous brother Ramón. There is no evidence to support this theory, which seems to have arisen entirely from the fact that there are no known photographs of Carmen Polo noticeably pregnant and from Ramón’s notorious sexual adventurism.62 Franco’s sister, Pilar, went out of her way in her memoirs to make a point of saying that she saw Carmen Polo pregnant although her dates are wrong by two years.63
The posting to Madrid began a period in which Franco had plenty of spare time. Rather than make the lives of his colonels a misery by frequent surprise inspections, he left them to get on with running their own barracks, a pattern that he would later follow with his ministers. He rented an apartment on the elegant Castellana avenue and enjoyed a busy social life. He regularly met military friends from Africa and the Toledo Academy at the regular social gatherings or
At this stage of his life, as later, Franco had little interest in day-to-day politics. None the less, he began to think that ultimately he might play a political role of some kind. The popular acclaim which he had received after Alhucemas, the rapidity of his promotions, and the company which he now kept in Madrid, all pushed him to take for granted his own importance as a national figure. As he put it in retrospect ‘I was, as a result of my age and my prestige, called to render the highest services to the nation’. The Army’s apparent political success under Primo de Rivera may also have increased his tendency to dream of higher things for himself. He claimed later that, in preparation for his transcendental tasks, and taking advantage of the fact that his command in Madrid left him with very little to do, he began to read books on contemporary Spanish history and political economy.67 How much reading he did is impossible to say; his books were lost in Madrid in 1936 when his flat was ransacked by anarchists. Certainly, neither his speeches nor his own writings indicate any significant insight into history or economics.
Given his propensity to chat, he probably talked rather than read about economics. As he claimed later, he started at this time ‘with some frequency to visit the manager of the Banco de Bilbao, where Carmen had a few savings (
His reading and his
The economic difficulties discussed at this lunch were not the only problems besetting the Dictatorship. The military was deeply divided and some sections of the Army were turning against the regime. Franco was paradoxically to be the beneficiary of one of the most serious errors made by the Dictator in this regard. Primo de Rivera was anxious to reform the antiquated structures of the Spanish Army and in particular to slim down the inflated officer corps. His ideal was a small professional Army but, as a result of the reversal of his original policy of