Paul Preston - Franco

The fall of the Dictator disappointed Franco but little more: he was oblivious to the implicit threat to the monarchy itself. Among Franco’s staff, the artillerymen and engineers were understandably pleased by Primo’s demise. However, Franco ensured that the demise of Primo would provoke no public clashes in the Academy between junteros and Africanistas by imposing an iron ban on speaking about politics. 98 By withdrawing his confidence from Primo, the King also lost the loyalty of General Sanjurjo, now Director-General of the Civil Guard. Franco did not blame the King for the fall of the Dictatorship. In any case, he was the object of special attention, not to say flattery, from Alfonso XIII. On 4 June 1929, in a solemn ceremony in the Madrid Retiro, the King had personally presented him with the Medalla Militar which he had won in 1925. 99 On 5 June 1930, Alfonso XIII visited the Academy and three days later Franco took the entire body of cadets to the capital to take part in the swearing of the flag by the Madrid garrison. Led by Franco on a prancing horse, they headed the parade, to the wild applause of those present. On the following day, the cadets took the guard at the Royal Palace and Franco appeared on the balcony with the King. The crowd on that day included several hundred members of the Juventud Monárquica (monarchist youth), who would soon form the élite of the conservative extreme right during the Republic. 100

Accordingly, it was a cause of the greatest embarrassment to Franco that his brother Ramón had moved into the orbit of the republican opposition to the regime. From the later part of 1929, their relations became very strained. Franco had been annoyed and embarrassed in July 1924 when Ramón had married Carmen Díaz Guisasola without seeking the King’s permission. 101 The breach between his brother and the King had been forgotten in the wake of his Atlantic crossing in 1926. However, Ramón’s ever more frantic efforts to repeat that success had ended in disgrace. The reasons for his fall from grace were complex. In the summer of 1929, to boost the domestic aircraft industry, the Spanish government agreed to sponsor an attempt by Ramón to cross the North Atlantic in a Dornier Super Wal flying boat built under licence in Spain. Because of doubts about the reliability of the Spanish aeroplane, Ramón used a German-built one bought in Italy, fraudulently switching the registration markings. The flight was a disaster: the aircraft was blown off course near the Azores, and it and the crew were lost for days and only found at the end of June after a massive and immensely costly search involving the Spanish, British and Italian navies. 102 When he was found, there was widespread rejoicing and a tearful General Franco was publicly embraced by an equally lacrimose General Primo de Rivera. 103 Franco led a massive demonstration to the British Embassy in Madrid to express thanks for the role of the Royal Navy. 104 It then emerged that the planes had been switched and rumours began to circulate that Ramón had been promised a fabulous sum of money if he broke the world seaplane distance record flying a German aircraft. Colonel Alfredo Kindelán, the head of Military Aviation, was furious and had Ramón expelled from the Air Force on 31 July 1929. Thereafter, he moved rapidly to the left, became a freemason and got involved in anarcho-syndicalist conspiracies aimed at bringing down the monarchy. 105

After this disgrace, Ramón’s relations with his brother were virtually non-existent and were reduced to letters; patronizing, sententious, though ultimately kindly ones from Franco, mischievously disrespectful ones from Ramón. On 8 April 1930, Franco wrote a long letter to Ramón revealing of his loyalty both to his family and to the established order. In an effort to head off his brother’s demise, Franco warned him that his activities within the Army, inciting garrisons and officers to rebel, were known to the authorities. Regarding the Berenguer regime as entirely legal, Franco was worried that his brother was risking the loss of his prestige and his good name. He appealed to him to think of ‘the great sorrow that such things cause Mamá, a sorrow which the rest of us share’ and ended fondly, ‘Your brother loves and embraces you, Paco’. 106

Its tone of tolerant restraint is remarkable given that, in Francisco’s eyes, Ramón’s behaviour would not only bring dishonour on the family but also possibly impede his own chances of advancement. There is also a typical readiness to attribute the lowest motives to Ramón’s revolutionary friends while assuming that Ramón himself is free of such baseness. The letter also revealed a political naïvety in Franco’s suggestion that the dictatorship of General Berenguer was more legal than that of Primo de Rivera. Ramón was not slow to comment on that in his reply on 12 April. Ramón was shocked by what he called his brother’s ‘healthy advice’ and ‘vain bourgeois counsels’ and invited him to step down from his ‘little general’s throne’. He also took the opportunity to comment that the education being given the cadets in Zaragoza would ensure that they would be bad citizens. 107

Engrossed in his work at the Zaragoza military academy, Franco paid little attention to the rising tide of political agitation in 1930 except in so far as it involved his brother. The anti-monarchical movement was growing with labour unrest intensifying by the day. A broad front of Socialists, middle class Republicans, Basque and Catalan regionalists and renegade monarchists who, repelled by the mistakes of the King, had become conservative republicans, joined together in mid-August 1930. United by the so-called Pact of San Sebastián, they established a provisional government-in-waiting which began to plot the downfall of the monarchy. 108 Ramón Franco was an important element in the republican conspiracies. In late 1930, watched by agents of the Dirección General de Seguridad, he was travelling around Spain liaising with other conspirators, trying to buy arms and organizing the making of bombs. 109 General Emilio Mola, now Director-General de Seguridad, had taken the decision to arrest him but, as an admirer of his heroic exploits and as a friend of Franco, he decided to give Ramón a last chance to avoid the consequences of his activities. Mola asked Franco to try to persuade his brother to desist. Although he agreed to try, Franco showed no optimism that he might succeed but he was immensely faithful to the family and still felt a protective loyalty towards his madcap brother. He visited Madrid and they dined together on 10 October but Ramón remained committed to the planned republican rising. Mola then had Ramón brought in for questioning on the evening of 11 October and detained in military prison on the following morning. Mola again called Franco in and informed him of the charges against his brother which included bomb-making, gun-smuggling and involvement in the attempted murder of a monarchist aviator, the Duque de Esmera. Franco and Mola hoped to use these charges to frighten Ramón into abandoning his revolutionary activities: Franco visited his brother in his cell and recited them to him. This merely provoked him into escaping from prison on 25 November. Thereafter, he took part, with General Queipo de Llano, in the revolutionary movement of mid-December 1930. Both Ramón’s escape and his participation in the events of December would cause Franco intense chagrin both as an officer and as a monarchist. 110

Having failed in his efforts to make his brother see sense, Francisco returned hastily to Zaragoza where he had to receive the visit of a French delegation led by André Maginot. On 19 October, Maginot presented Franco with the Légion d’Honneur for his part in the Alhucemas landing. On his return to France, he declared that the Zaragoza Academy was the most modern of its kind in the world. 111 Maginot’s ideas of modernity had yet to be put to the test by the armies of the Third Reich.