Пол Престон – Franco (страница 25)
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,
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
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.