Пол Престон – Franco (страница 28)

During the campaign for the November 1933 elections, with the possibility that the Socialists might win and establish a government bent on sweeping reform, Franco, although busy and fulfilled in the Balearics, was pessimistic about the prospects for the armed forces. He talked to friends of leaving the Army and going into politics. According to Arrarás, rumours to this effect reached rightist circles in Madrid and he was visited in Palma by a messenger from the increasingly powerful Catholic authoritarian party, the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups). The envoy allegedly offered Franco inclusion as a candidate in both the CEDA’s Madrid list and in another provincial list in order to guarantee his election. He refused outright.⁹⁵ He did, however, vote for the CEDA in the elections.⁹⁶ With the Left divided and the anarchists abstaining, a series of local alliances between the Radicals and the CEDA ensured their victory. The Radicals got 104 deputies and the CEDA 115 to the Socialists’ 58 and the Left Republicans’ 38. The subsequent period of government by a coalition of the ever-more corrupt Radicals and the CEDA would see Franco come in from the cold, as he perceived his comfortable exile in the Balearics, and much nearer to the centre of political preferment.

^* This differs from the version given by Franco to his friend and biographer, Joaquín Arrarás. According to this version, Azaña said ‘I have re-read your extraordinary order to the cadets and I would like to believe that you did not think through what you wrote’, to which Franco claims to have replied, ‘Señor Ministro, I never write anything that I haven’t thought through beforehand’. Azaña’s version, written on the day, is altogether more plausible than that recounted by Franco six years later in the heat of the civil war. Joaquin Arrarás, Franco (Valladolid, 1937) p. 166.

^* He later claimed that he had gone to great lengths not to be photographed with the Prime Minister, pointing out that his superior, Major General Vera, took priority. Franco also said that, by using the pretext that Doña Carmen was unwell, he had avoided being present at a morning reception given on Sunday 19 September by the La Coruña Sporting Club for Azaña and his friend and host, Santiago Casares Quiroga, the Minister of the Interior, and a prominent gallego. There exist photographs of them together during the visit to the city, next to each other and certainly with Franco nearer to Azaña than was General Vera. Similarly, the local press of the time reported Franco’s presence at Azaña’s table at a much more lavish occasion than the morning function, a dinner given that same evening at the Hotel Atlántida, in La Coruña and again at another lunch on Wednesday 21 September. See the photograph in Xosé Ramón Barreiro Fernández, Historia contemporánea de Galicia 4 vols (La Coruña, 1982) II, p. 241.

IV

IN COMMAND

Franco and the Second Republic, 1934–1936

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