Пол Престон – Franco (страница 3)

Pilar Bahamonde tried to imbue her children with a determination to get on in life and to escape from their situation by study and hard work, a philosophy which seems to have taken root principally with her second son and her daughter Pilar. Nevertheless, all four of her surviving children were to be fearless and powerfully ambitious in one way or another. Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo was a liberal, sympathetic to freemasonry and critical of the Catholic Church. In contrast, Pilar Bahamonde was politically conservative and a deeply pious Catholic. Given the circumstances of his childhood, and the nature and ideas of his father, it is hardly surprising that an enduring and unsubtle Catholicism, sexual prurience and a hatred for liberalism and freemasonry should be part of the legacy which the young Franco was left by his mother.¹² What is more intriguing is the fact that his brothers followed in the footsteps of Don Nicolás rather than those of Doña Pilar. After her husband left, Doña Pilar always wore black. It seems too that, as Francisco witnessed her introspective piety becoming an effective shield against her misfortunes, he suppressed his own emotional vulnerability at the cost of developing a cold inner emptiness.

Doña Pilar’s unhappiness and stoical attempts to put a good face on her plight made it difficult for her to compensate her children for the behaviour of her husband. Each responded differently: Francisco identified with his mother, denying the need for his father’s approval which he longed for and never achieved. His hedonistic elder brother Nicolás grew up to be as pleasure-loving as his father, free with money and with women. His wild younger brother Ramón would be an irresponsible adventurer, famous for his exploits as an air-ace and notorious for his decadent private life in the 1920s and for a superficial involvement with both anarchism and freemasonry. Francisco was much more deeply attached to his mother than were either of his brothers. He regularly accompanied her to communion and was a pious child. He cried when he made his first communion. When on leave in El Ferrol, the adult Francisco would never fail to fulfil any religious duty for fear of upsetting his mother.^*13

It is impossible to say with any precision what effect the separation of his parents and the departure of his father had on Francisco, although there is surely some significance in the fact that one of the few remarks that he ever made on the subject of children was: ‘small children should never be separated from their parents. It is not good to let that happen. The child needs to have the security provided by the support of his parents and they should not forget that their children are their personal responsibility.’¹⁴ As Caudillo, Franco denied vehemently that there was anything abnormal in Don Nicolás’s relationship with his wife or his children. On one occasion, however, when given irrefutable evidence of his father’s pecadillos, his reaction was revealing. He snapped ‘Alright but they never diminished his paternal authority’.¹⁵ The difficulties of Franco’s relationship with his father were later reflected in various efforts to reconstruct it in an idealised way. In his diary of his first year in the Spanish Foreign Legion, he told a clearly apocryphal story in which can be discerned his own longings. A young officer in Morocco is crossing the street when a grizzled veteran soldier salutes him. The officer goes to return the salute, their eyes meet, they look at each other and embrace in tears. It is the officer’s long-lost father.¹⁶ It was a trial run for his autobiographical novel, Raza, in which he created the father he would rather have had as a naval hero of total moral rectitude. When his father died, he had the body seized and implicitly reinvented the second part of his life by having him buried with a pomp which, while in accord with military regulations, was hardly appropriate to the bohemianism of Don Nicolás’s final years. Franco’s own lifelong avoidance of drink, gambling and women bore testimony to a determination to create an existence which was the antithesis of his father’s life.

Franco would implacably reject all the things he associated with his father, from the pleasures of the flesh to the ideas of the Left. Franco’s repudiation of his father was matched by a deep identification with his mother, something which might perhaps be seen in many aspects of his personal style, a gentle manner, a soft voice, a propensity to weep, an enduring sense of deprivation. A tone of self-pitying resentment runs through his speeches as Caudillo, a continual echo of the hard-done-by little boy that he must have been, and was one of the motivating forces of his drive to greatness.

Two great political events of Franco’s early youth were to dominate his later development – the loss of Cuba in 1898 and the involvement of Spain in a costly colonial war in Morocco. Imperial disaster provoked civilian distrust of an incompetent Army and intensified military resentment of the political establishment and of civilian hostility to conscription. Throughout his life, Franco would remark on the profound effect that the 1898 ‘disaster’ had on him. In 1941, when he was near to declaring war on the Axis side, he declared ‘when we began our life, … we saw our childhood dominated by the contemptible incompetence of those men who abandoned half of the fatherland’s territory to foreigners’. He would see his greatest achievement as wiping out the shame of 1898.¹⁷

Francisco was five and a half when the great naval defeat at the hands of the United States occurred in Santiago de Cuba on 3 July 1898. Spain lost the remnants of her empire – Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Although it is highly unlikely that, at such an age, he was aware of what was happening, a disaster of that dimension could not but have a profound effect on a small naval garrison town like El Ferrol. Many of his school-friends lost relatives and wore mourning. Mutilated men were seen around the town for many years. More importantly, when he became a cadet in the Army, he went directly into an atmosphere which had festered since 1898. Defeat was attributed to the treachery of politicians who had sent naval and military forces into battle with inadequate resources. That it took the massively superior US forces three months to defeat the ramshackle Spanish fleet left Franco convinced that bravery was worth hundreds of tons of superior equipment.¹⁸

The defeat of 1898 had an immediate impact on Franco because of the consequent budget cuts. The Escuela de Administración Naval, the usual channel for boys of the Franco family into the Navy, was closed in 1901. It was decided that Nicolás and Francisco would prepare instead for the entrance examinations of the Cuerpo General de la Armada. They went to the local middle-class school, the Escuela del Sagrado Corazón. At this time, before his father abandoned the family home, Francisco was, according to contemporaries who saw him outside the family, a meticulous plodder, ‘good at drawing but otherwise quite average, quite ordinary. He was a nice lad, of a happy disposition, thoughtful; he took his time in answering questions but he was a playful lad.’¹⁹ He was of sickly appearance and so thin that his playmates nicknamed him cerillito (little match-stick). Within the family, his sister was struck by the extent to which Francisco emulated his mother’s quiet seriousness. He was an obedient, well-behaved and affectionate child, although timid, rather sad and uncommunicative. Then, as later, he had little spontaneity. He was very particular about his appearance, a trait that would follow him throughout his life. Even then he seemed older than his years and his obstinacy, astuteness and caution were evident. Among his closest childhood friends was his cousin Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde, who would be executed in Morocco in 1936, with Franco’s acquiescence.²⁰ As an adolescent, Francisco showed a normal interest in girls, favouring slim brunettes, mainly from among his sister’s schoolfriends. He wrote them poems and was mortified when they were shown to his sister.²¹

The loss of Cuba was to have serious domestic consequences. It hastened the rise of a regionalist movement in Catalonia and imbued Army officers with a determination to wipe away the ignominy of defeat through a colonial enterprise in Morocco. Catalan regionalism and the Moroccan adventure were to interract in an explosive manner. The demonstration in 1898 of Spain’s international impotence shook the faith of the Catalan élites in the central government. The Catalan economy had depended on the Cuban market and now the previously latent sense that Madrid was an incompetent and parasitical obstacle to Catalan dynamism found ever more vocal expression, above all in the appearance in early 1901 of the Catalanist party, the Lliga Regionalista.²² In the context of insecurity and humiliation provoked by the loss of Cuba, military anger at what was seen as as political betrayal during the war with the USA was compounded by the emergence of militant Catalanism, which soldiers perceived as an aggressive separatist threat to the unity of the Patria.²³