Пол Престон – Franco (страница 2)

The Caudillo remains an enigma. Because of the distance that Franco so assiduously built around himself through deliberate obfuscations and silences, we can be sure only of his actions, and, provided they are judiciously evaluated, of the opinions and accounts of those who worked with him. This book is an attempt to observe him more accurately and in more detail than ever before. Unlike many books on Franco, it is not a history of twentieth-century Spain nor an analysis of every aspect of the dictatorship, but rather a close study of the man. Through memoirs and interviews, his collaborators have provided ample material and there are copious despatches by foreign diplomats who dealt with him face-to-face and reported on his activities. Franco’s own writings, his speeches – in which he often held a kind of dialogue with himself – and his recently published papers also constitute a rich, if not easy, source for the biographer. They are the instrument of his own obfuscations but they also provide remarkable insight into his own self-perception.

By use of these sources, it is possible to follow Franco closely as he became successively a conspirator, Generalísimo of the military rebels of 1936 and Caudillo of the victorious Nationalists. Several myths do not survive a comprehensive investigation of his survival of the Second World War and the Cold War and of his devious dealings with Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower. Equally striking is the picture which emerges of his passage from the active dictator of the 1950s to the somnolent figurehead of his last days. By following him step by step and day by day, a more accurate and convincing picture can emerge than has hitherto been current. Indeed, only by such an exhaustive examination can the enigma of the elusive Franco begin to be resolved.

I

THE MAKING OF A HERO

1892–1922

FRANCISCO FRANCO BAHAMONDE was born at 12.30 a.m. on 4 December 1892 in the calle Frutos Saavedra 108, known locally as the calle María, in El Ferrol in the remote north-western region of Galicia. He was christened Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo on 17 December in the nearby military parish church of San Francisco.^*

At the time, El Ferrol, an inward-looking and still walled town, was a small naval base with a population of twenty thousand. The Franco family had lived there since the early eighteenth century and had a tradition of work in the intendencia naval (pay corps/administration).^†1 Franco’s grandfather, Francisco Franco Vietti, was Intendente Ordenador de la Marina (naval paymaster) with a rank equivalent to brigadier general in the Army. He had married Hermenegilda Salgado-Araujo, with whom he had two children. The first, Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo, the father of the future Caudillo, was born on 22 November 1855, his sister Hermenegilda on 1 December 1856.

Nicolás followed his father into the administrative branch of the Spanish navy in which, after fifty years service, he rose to be Intendente-General, a rank also equivalent to brigadier general. As a young man, stationed first in Cuba then in the Philippines, Nicolás acquired a reputation for fast living.^‡ On 24 May 1890, when he was nearly thirty-five, Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo married the twenty-four year-old María del Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade in the Church of San Francisco in El Ferrol. She was the pious daughter of Ladislao Bahamonde Ortega, commissar of naval equipment at the port. The union of this free-thinking bon viveur with the conservative, moralistic Pilar was not a success. Nevertheless, they had five children, of whom Nicolás was the first, Francisco the second, followed by Paz, Pilar and Ramón.^*2

Franco’s family had been concerned for over a century with the administration of the naval base in El Ferrol. When Franco was born, the town was remote and isolated, separated from La Coruña by a twelve-mile steamer journey to the south across the bay or by forty miles of poor, and in bad weather, often impassable, road. La Coruña was in turn 375 miles, or two days by bone-shaking railway, from Madrid. El Ferrol was hardly a cosmopolitan place. It was a town of rigid social hierarchies in which the privileged caste consisted of naval officers and their families. Naval administrators or merchant navy officers were considered to be of a lower category. Social barriers cut the lower middle-class Franco family off from ‘proper’ naval officers since the administration corps was regarded as inferior to the sea-going Navy, or Cuerpo General. The idea of a heroic family naval tradition, so carefully nurtured by Franco himself in later life, was an aspiration rather than a reality. That can be perceived in Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo’s determination that his sons become ‘real’ naval officers.

Partly because a naval commission was a common ambition among the Ferrolano middle class and because of his father’s job, Francisco developed an interest in things of the sea. As a child he played pirates in the harbour with the gangplanks of the ferries and rowed in the tranquil waters of the virtually enclosed ría (firth or fjord) of El Ferrol.³ As an adolescent, he tried to join the Navy. His two primary schools, the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón and the Colegio de la Marina, both specialised in preparing children for the Navy entrance examinations.⁴ Nicolás Franco Bahamonde did manage to fulfil his father’s expectations, but Francisco’s naval ambitions were to be thwarted. His failure to enter the navy would weigh heavily on him. In Salamanca during the Civil War, it was common knowledge that to please him or deflect his anger it was always worth trying to change the subject to naval matters.⁵ As Caudillo, he spent as much time as he could aboard his yacht Azor, wore an admiral’s uniform at every opportunity and, when visiting coastal cities, liked to arrive from the sea on board a warship.

His childhood was dominated by the efforts of his mother to cope with the overbearing severity and later the constant absences of his father, the shadow of whose infidelities hung over the home. He was brought up by Doña Pilar in an atmosphere of piety and stifling provincial lower middle class gentility. Marriage had only briefly diminished the number and length of Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo’s card games and drinking sessions at the officers’ club. After the birth of his daughter Paz, in 1898, Nicolás had returned to his bachelor habits. The distress that this caused his wife was compounded by the death of Paz in 1903, after an undiagnosed illness lasting four months. Pilar Bahamonde was devastated.⁶ Nicolás Franco was, at home, a bad-tempered authoritarian who easily lost control of himself if contradicted. His daughter Pilar described him as running the house like a general, although she also claimed that he beat his sons no more than was the norm at the time, a double-edged claim which leaves it difficult to evaluate the scale and intensity of his violence. The young Nicolás bore the brunt of his anger and Ramón also carried a deep resentment of his father and his uncontrolled violence all through his life. Until Nicolás Franco left home in 1907, his children and his wife were often the victims of his frequent rages.

Francisco was too well-behaved, too much of a ‘little old man’ (niño mayor), in his sister’s phrase, to arouse his father’s anger with any frequency. Nevertheless, Pilar recounts the deep sulk that came over him whenever he was cuffed unjustly by his father.⁷ Unable to win his father’s acceptance and affection, Francisco seems to have turned in on himself. He was a lonely child, withdrawn to the point of icy detachment. A story is told that when he was aged about eight, Pilar heated a long needle until the tip was red-hot and pressed it onto his wrist. Allegedly, gritting his teeth as his flesh burnt, he said only ‘how shocking the way burnt flesh smells’.⁸ Within the family, Francisco was long overshadowed by his two brothers, Nicolás and Ramón, who were extroverts and took after their father. Nicolás, who became a naval engineer, was the father’s favourite. Interviewed in the press in 1926, Franco père dismissed as unremarkable the achievements of his two younger sons, Francisco as commander of the Foreign Legion and Ramón who had become the first man to fly the south Atlantic.⁹ Even in later life, when Francisco was Head of State, his father, when asked about ‘his son’, would perversely talk about Nicolás or sometimes Ramón. Only when pressed would Don Nicolás talk about the person he called ‘my other son’.

In total contrast to her despotic husband, Pilar Bahamonde was a gentle, kindly and serene woman. She responded to the humiliations suffered at the hands of the gambling and philandering Nicolás by presenting to the world a facade of quiet dignity and religious piety that hid her shame and the economic difficulties she had to face. That is not to say that the family suffered privations, since she received financial help from her father, Ladislao Bahamonde Ortega, who lived with her after the death of his wife, and also from her husband. Nevertheless, once her husband established residence in Madrid from 1907, what Pilar Bahamonde received from him must necessarily have been limited. There was always a maid in the house, but some sacrifices were required to keep up appearances. Sending all four children to private schools put a strain on the family economy. It has been suggested, although strenuously denied by the family, that she had to take in lodgers.¹⁰ Despite these difficulties, her kindness extended to her relations and she helped to bring up the seven younger children of her brother-in-law Hermenegildo Franco.¹¹