Paul Preston - Franco

Helpless before the rising numbers of strikes and deaf to the background hum of military conspiracy stood the minority government. Only Republicans sat in the Cabinet, because Largo Caballero refused to let Socialists join a coalition. He pinned his hopes on two naive scenarios: either the Republicans would quickly find themselves incapable of implementing their own reform programme and have to make way for an exclusively Socialist cabinet or else there would be a fascist coup which would be crushed by popular revolution. In May, Largo used his immense influence inside the Socialist leadership to prevent the formation of a government by the more realistic Prieto. As long as Azaña was prime minister, authority could be maintained. However, in order to put together an even stronger team, Azaña and Prieto plotted to remove the more conservative Alcalá Zamora from the presidency. Azaña would become president and Prieto take over as prime minister. The first part of the plan worked but not the second as a result of Largo Caballero’s opposition and Prieto’s failure to fight it. The consequences were catastrophic. The last chance of avoiding civil war was missed. Spain lost a shrewd and strong prime minister, and, to make matters worse, on assuming the presidency, Azaña increasingly withdrew from active politics. The new Prime Minister, Santiago Casares Quiroga, suffering from tuberculosis, was incapable of generating the determination and energy required in the circumstances.

Unemployment was rocketing and the election results had dramatically raised the expectations of workers in both town and countryside. To the outrage of employers, trade unionists sacked in the aftermath of the Asturian events were forcibly reinstated. There were sporadic land seizures as frustrated peasants took into their own hands the implementation of the new government’s commitment to rapid reform. What most alarmed the landlords was that labourers whom they expected to be servile were assertively determined not to be cheated out of reform as they had between 1931 and 1933. Many landowners withdrew to Seville or Madrid, or even to Biarritz or Paris, where they enthusiastically joined, financed, or merely awaited news of, ultra-rightist plots against the Republic.

Under the energetic leadership of General Mola, the plot was developing fast. It was more thoroughly prepared than any previous effort, taking full account of the lesson of the Sanjurjada of 10 August 1932 that casual pronunciamientos could not work where the Civil Guard was in opposition and where the proletariat was ready to use the weapon of the general strike. The tall bespectacled Mola, as ‘ El Director ’, having learnt plenty of police procedure during his time as Director-General of Security in 1930–1931, took to conspiracy with gusto. Brave and of adventurous spirit, he enjoyed the danger. 27 Pamplona was an excellent place from which to direct the conspiracy, being the headquarters of the most militant group of the ultra-Right, the Carlists. 28 Mola had plenty of willing and competent assistants. Through Valentín Galarza, known among the plotters as ‘the technician’ ( el técnico ), the right-wing conspiratorial organization, Unión Militar Española, was at his disposal. He drew up his first directive in April, ‘The objective, the methods and the itineraries’. In it, aware of the deficiencies of the preparations of Sanjurjada , he specified in detail the need for a complex civilian support network and above all for political terror: ‘the action must be violent in the extreme in order to crush the strong and well-organized enemy as soon as possible. All leaders of political parties, societies or unions not committed to the Movement will be imprisoned and exemplary punishments administered to such individuals in order to strangle movements of rebellion or strikes’. 29

In the middle of May, Mola was visited secretly by a Lieutenant-Colonel Seguí of the general staff of the African Army, who informed him that the garrisons of Morocco were ready to rise. Among the Africanista officers, Mola relied on Yagüe as the most tireless in the preparation of the rising in Morocco. In May too, Mola was in contact with a group of generals who would each play a crucial role in the Civil War: the brutal Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, head of the Carabineros (the Spanish frontier guards), the austere monarchist Alfredo Kindelán, the key link with conspirators in the Air Force and the easy-going Miguel Cabanellas, head of the Zaragoza military division. 30 Franco was fully informed through Galarza. As part of the post-1939 propaganda effort to wipe away the memory of Franco’s minimal participation in the preparations, it was claimed that he carried on a twice-weekly correspondence with Galarza. These thirty coded letters have never been traced. 31 In fact, Franco was anything but enthusiastic, commenting to the optimistically headstrong Orgaz, who had been banished to the Canary Islands in the early spring, ‘You are really mistaken. It’s going to be immensely difficult and very bloody. We haven’t got much of an army, the intervention of the Civil Guard is looking doubtful and many officers will side with the constituted power, some because it’s easier, others because of their convictions. Nobody should forget that the soldier who rebels against the constituted power can never turn back, never surrender, for he will be shot without a second thought’. 32 At the end of May, Gil Robles complained to the American journalist H. Edward Knoblaugh that Franco had refused to head the coup, allegedly saying ‘not all the water in the Manzanares could wash out the stain of such a move’. Discounting the choice of a less than torrential river, this and other remarks suggest that the experience of the Sanjurjada of 1932 was on his mind. 33 Not to be able to turn around or change his mind must have been Franco’s idea of hell.

With the conspiracy developing rapidly, Franco’s caution was stoking up the impatience of his Africanista friends. On 25 May, Mola had drawn up his second directive to the plotters, a broad strategic plan of regional risings to be followed by concerted attacks on Madrid from the provinces. 34 Clearly, it would be an enormous advantage to have Franco as part of the team. Captain Bartolomé Barba was sent by Goded to the Canary Islands on 30 May to tell Franco to make his mind up and abandon ‘so much prudence’. Colonel Yagüe told Serrano Suñer that he was in despair at Franco’s mean-minded carefulness and his refusal to take risks. 35 Serrano Suñer himself was baffled when Franco told him that what he really would have liked was to tranfer his residence to the south of France and direct the conspiracy from there. Given Mola’s position, there was no question of Franco organizing the rising. The clear implication was that he was more concerned with covering his personal retreat in the event of failure. 36 This inevitably suggests that selfless commitment to the rising had not been his main reason for trying to stand for election in Cuenca.

The rationale for the conspiracy was the fear of the middle and upper classes that an inexorable wave of Godless, Communist-inspired violence was about to inundate society and the Church. Their panic was generated assiduously by the rightist press and by the widely reported parliamentary speeches of the insidious Gil Robles and the belligerent monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo. Their denunciations of disorder found a spurious justification in the street violence provoked by the Falange’s terror squads. In their turn, the activities of Falangist gangs were financed by the same monarchists who were behind the military coup. The startling rise of the Falange was a measure of the changing political climate. Cashing in on middle class disillusionment with the CEDA’s legalism, the Falange expanded rapidly. Moreover, attracted by its code of violence, the bulk of the CEDA’s youth movement, the JAP, went over en masse. The rise of the Falange was matched by the ascendancy within the Socialist movement of Largo Caballero. Intoxicated by Communist flattery – Pravda had called him “the Spanish Lenin” – he undermined Prieto’s efforts at a peaceful solution. Largo toured Spain, prophesying the triumph of the coming revolution to crowds of cheering workers. The May Day marches, the clenched fist salutes, the revolutionary rhetoric and the violent attacks on Prieto were used by the rightist press to generate an atmosphere of terror among the middle classes and to convince them that only a military coup could save Spain from chaos.