Paul Preston - Franco

During the Civil War, officers who had trained at the Academy under Franco remembered him as a martinet who had laid traps for unwary cadets. In the streets of Zaragoza, he would pretend to be looking in shop windows to catch those who tried to get past without saluting their Director. As they went on, they would be called back by Franco’s soft, high, feared, voice. Remembering the nightly activities of his own contemporaries at Toledo, he insisted that all cadets carry at least one condom while walking in the city. Occasionally, he would stop them in the street and demand to see their protective equipment. There were strict penalties for those unable to produce it. 88 In his farewell speech to the Academy in 1931, he listed among the great patriotic achievements of his time in the post the elimination of venereal disease among the cadets through ‘vigilance and prophylaxis’. 89 His pride in that achievement was reflected when, in 1936, he boasted to his English teacher that he had ‘put down vice ruthlessly’ among the cadets at Zaragoza. * 90

Franco’s period at the Academy was viewed in retrospect as a triumph by Africanistas and other right-wing Army officers and a disaster by liberal and left-wing officers. His brother Ramón wrote to him to complain of the ‘troglodytic education’ imparted there. For the distinguished Africanista , General Emilio Mola, in contrast, it was the peak of excellence. 91 The Academy’s regulations demanded that the teaching staff be chosen on the basis of méritos de guerra , irrespective of the subject being taught. Accordingly, the teaching staff was dominated by Africanista friends of Franco, most of whom had been brutalized by their experiences in a pitiless colonial war and were noted more for their ideological rigidity than for their intellectual attainments. Of 79 teachers, 34 were infantrymen and 11 from the Legion. The assistant director of the Academy was Colonel Miguel Campins, a good friend and comrade in arms from Africa who had been with him at the battle of Alhucemas. A highly competent professional, Campins elaborated the training programme at the Academy. 92 The other senior members of staff included Emilio Esteban-Infantes, later to be involved in the attempted Sanjurjo coup of 1932; Bartolomé Barba-Hernández, who was to be, on the eve of the Civil War, leader of the conspiratorial organization Unión Militar Española; and Franco’s lifelong close friend Camilo Alonso Vega, later to be a dour Minister of the Interior. Virtually without exception, the Academy’s teachers were to play prominent roles in the military uprising of 1936. With such men on the staff, the Academy concentrated on inculcating the ruthless arrogance of the Foreign Legion, the idea that the Army was the supreme arbiter of the nation’s political destiny and a sense of discipline and blind obedience. A high proportion of the officers who passed through the Academy were later to be involved in the Falange. An even higher proportion fought on the Nationalist side during the Civil War. 93

During his period at the head of the Military Academy, Franco developed the dejar hacer (turning a blind eye) style of delegation which was to be taken to extremes when he was Head of State. Those of the teaching staff who did not pull their weight were not punished but nor were they favoured. Those who had an enthusiasm or a speciality were allowed full initiative in that area – the instructor who liked football delegated to coach the team, the one who liked gardening given control of the Academy gardens, the amateur photographer put in charge of the dark room. Of the lazy or incompetent, Franco would simply comment ‘ A Fulano, no le veo la gracia ’ (I don’t see what So-and-So has going for him) but would never reprimand those who did not pull their weight ( arrimar el hombro – a favourite phrase of Franco’s).

Franco’s arrival in Zaragoza provoked considerable popular attention. The Academy, the Director and his senior staff became a major focus of local social life and Franco indulged his penchant for socializing and for interminable late-night after-dinner tertulias with military friends and minor aristocrats. Encouraged by Doña Carmen, he began to mix with the dominant families of the local establishment. It perhaps reflected Franco’s own small-town and lower middle class origins that he always preferred provincial social life, in Oviedo, Ceuta or Zaragoza, to that of Madrid. 94 Even so, contemporary photographs of Franco in evening dress or lounge suit show him significantly less at ease than when in uniform. He was happier hunting. Far from his African exertions, he turned increasingly to hunting for exercise, pleasure and, it may be supposed, as an outlet for his aggression.

It was during his period in Zaragoza that Franco began to intensify his anti-Communist and authoritarian ideas. Shortly before leaving Madrid for Zaragoza, he had been given, along with several other young officers, a subscription to a journal of anti-Comintern affairs from Geneva, the Bulletin de L’Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale. The Entente, founded by the Swiss rightist Théodore Aubert and the White Russian emigré Georges Lodygensky, was vehemently anti-Bolshevik and praised the achievements of fascism and military dictatorships as bulwarks against Communism. An emissary from the Entente, Colonel Odier, visited Madrid and arranged with General Primo de Rivera for several subscriptions to be purchased by the Ministry of War and to be distributed to a few key officers. 95 It clinched what was to be a lifelong obsession with anti-Communism. It also played its part in the transition of Franco from the adventurous soldier of the 1920s to the suspicious and conservative general of the 1930s. Receiving the bulletin uninterruptedly until 1936, he came to see the Communist threat everywhere and to believe that the entire Spanish Left was wittingly or unwittingly working in the interests of the Comintern. In 1965, Franco revealed to both Brian Crozier and George Hills the influence that the Entente had had over him. He told Hills that the Entente had alerted him to the need to be ready for the flank attack from the invisible (Communist) enemy. Indeed, he left Crozier with the impression that his acquaintance with its work was an event in his life equal in importance in its impact on him to the birth of Nenuca. 96

Another influence in Franco’s life was initiated as a result of an invitation in the spring of 1929 to the German Army’s General Infantry Academy in Dresden. He was thrilled by the organization and discipline of the German Army. On his return, he made it clear to his cousin Pacón that he had been especially impressed by the Academy’s cult of reverence for the regiments which had achieved the great German military triumphs of the recent past. He was particularly sympathetic to German efforts to break free of the shackles of the Versailles Treaty. 97 It was the beginning of a love affair which would intensify during the Civil War, reach its peak in 1940, and not begin to die until 1945.

The Dictatorship fell on 30 January 1930. The bluff Primo de Rivera had ruled by a form of personal improvisation which had ensured that he would bear the blame for the regime’s failures. By 1930, there was barely a section of Spanish society which he had not estranged. He had offended Catalan industrialists both by his anti-Catalanism and because of the rise in raw material prices in the wake of the collapse in value of the peseta. He had outraged landowners by trying to introduce paternalist labour legislation for land-workers. The Socialist Unión General Trabajadores had supported him as long as public works projects had kept up levels of employment. With the coming of the slump, many Socialists had allied with the banned anarcho-syndicalist union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, in opposition. Most damagingly, the divisions in the Army provoked by Primo’s promotions policy were instrumental in the Captains-General and the King withdrawing support for the regime. Unlike most twentieth century dictators, Primo withdrew quietly once he had recognised that his support had disappeared. He went into exile in Paris where he died on 16 March 1930. A return to the pre-1923 constitutional system was impossible, not least because the King could no longer count on the loyalty of the old monarchist political élite which he had so irresponsibly abandoned in favour of Primo. Alfonso XIII was forced to seek another general. His choice of General Dámaso Berenguer, irrevocably associated with the disaster of Annual, infuriated the Left. For nearly a year, Berenguer’s mild dictatorship, the so-called Dictablanda , would flounder along in search of formula for a return to the constitutional monarchy. A combination of working class agitation fuelled by the economic depression, military sedition provoked by Primo’s policies, and republican conspiracy ensured Berenguer’s eventual failure.