Paul Preston: Franco

Life as an Army cadet would itself have strengthened his interest in Spanish history. Even by his own restrained account in later life, it is clear that he suffered some considerable agonies. Away from the loving care of his mother for the first time, young Franco had to grit his teeth and find inner reserves of determination to get on. In the austere conditions of the Alcázar, he would also have to deal with the problems arising from his anything but imposing physique (1.64 metres/5′4″ tall, and painfully thin). Already vulnerable because of the desertion of his father, the separation from his mother, his central refuge, must inevitably have forced him to cope with acute insecurity. He seems to have dealt with it in two related ways. First, he threw himself into Army life, fulfilling his tasks with the most thorough sense of duty and making a fetish of heroism, bravery and the military virtues. The rigid structures of military hierarchy and the certainties of orders gave him a framework to which he could relate. At the same time, he began to create another identity. The insecure teenager from Galicia would become the tough desert hero and eventually, as Caudillo, the El Cid-like ‘saviour of Spain’. 30

On account of his size and high-pitched voice, he was soon called Franquito (little Franco) by his companions and, during his three years in the Academy subjected to various minor humiliations. He was forced to drill with a rifle which had had fifteen centimetres sawn off the barrel. He worked hard, with a particular interest in topography and the uncritical and idealized military history of Spain served up to the cadets. Having no interest in sexual or alcoholic safaris into the more disreputable parts of the town, he became a target for the cruel initiation ceremonies ( novatadas ) of his fellow students, against which he reacted with some violence. In his own muted version, recollected nearly seventy years later, he spoke of the ‘sad welcome offered to those of us who came full of illusions to join the great military family’ and described the novatadas as a ‘heavy cross to bear’ ( un duro calvario ). 31 Other accounts, seeking traces of the later hero in the young cadet, recount his virile reactions. One oft-repeated story tells how his books were hidden and he was punished for not having them in the correct place. They were hidden again. The cadet officer was about to punish him again when Franco threw a candlestick at his head. When taken before the C.O., he refused to name those who had picked on him. 32 Such behaviour helped him to make some friends, including Camilo Alonso Vega, Juan Yagüe and Emilio Esteban Infantes, although he was never to be close to any of them.

In Britain and America, the Army cadet at the turn of the century began his military studies only after completing his civilian education. In Toledo, young, relatively uneducated boys began to absorb Army discipline and the conventions of the military view of the world when they were that much more ignorant and impressionable. 33 In professional terms, Franco can have learned little beyond the practical skills of horsemanship, shooting and fencing. The basic text-book was the Reglamento provisional para la instrucción teórica de las tropas de Infantería which was based on the lessons of the Franco-Prussian war and ignored the sweeping changes which had taken place in German military thinking since 1870. The increasing prominence given in both the German and British armies to the artillery and engineers was not replicated in Spain where the infantry remained dominant. The recent experience in Cuba was not used to draw any military conclusions, although they would have been immensely useful for the colonial adventures in North Africa. The stress was rather on discipline, military history and moral virtues – bravery in the face of the enemy, unquestioning faith in military regulations, absolute obedience and loyalty to superior officers. 34 Cadets were also imbued with an acute sense of the Army’s moral responsibilities as guardian of the essence of the nation. No slight or insult to the Army, to the flag, to the monarch, to the nation could ever be tolerated. By extension, when a government brought the nation into disrepute by permitting disorder then it was the duty of the patriotic Army officer to rise up against the government in defence of the nation.

The method of training was usually the rote learning of masses of facts, in particular of the details of the great battles of the Spanish past. However, these battles were examined as exemplars of bravery and resistance to the last rather than analysed for their tactical or strategic lessons. Franco’s own central memory of his time at the Academy was of a major on the teaching staff who had been decorated for heroism with the Cruz Laureada de San Fernando (the Spanish equivalent of the Victoria Cross). He had been given the medal for a hand-to-hand knife fight in Morocco from which, Franco recalled with pleasure, ‘he still had the glorious scars on his head’. The impact on Franco’s way of thinking – and, indeed, on his own methods when Director of the Spanish General Military Academy at Zaragoza twenty years later – was revealed in his remark that ‘this alone taught us more than all the other disciplines’. 35 When the cadets eventually went into the field, they had to improvise since they had been taught very little of practical application.

While Francisco was studying in Toledo, the events known as the semana trágica broke out in Barcelona in late July 1909. To military eyes, these disturbances were triply disturbing, with their connotations of anti-militarism, anti-clericalism and Catalan separatism. The government of Antonio Maura was under pressure from both Army officers close to Alfonso XIII and Spanish investors in Moroccan mines. Moreover, attacks by tribesmen on the railway leading to the port of Melilla had given rise to French threats to export their ore through Algeria. Maura also feared that France might use the apparent Spanish inability to keep order in her protectorate as an excuse to absorb it. Accordingly, he took advantage of an attack by tribesmen on the railway at Melilla on 9 July to send an expeditionary force to expand Spanish territory as far as the mineral deposits of the nearby mountains. The Minister of War decided to send a brigade of light infantry garrisoned in Barcelona. The brigade’s reservists, mainly married men with children, were called up and, without adequate preparations, embarked from the port of Barcelona over the next few days. Over the next week, there were anti-war protests in Aragón, Valencia and Catalonia in the home towns of the reservists. In Barcelona, on Sunday 18 July 1909, a spontaneous demonstration broke out against the war. On that same day, Rif tribesmen launched an attack on Spanish supply lines in Morocco. On the following day, news began to reach Spain of new military disasters in Melilla. Untrained, ill-equipped and devoid of basic maps, the appallingly ramshackle state of the Spanish Army was revealed again. Throughout the week, the scale of the defeat and of the casualties was inflamed by rumours. There were anti-war demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona and cities with railway stations from which conscripts were departing for the war.

During the following weekend, anarchists and socialists in Barcelona agreed to call a general strike. On Monday 26 July, the strike spread quickly, although it was not directed against the employers, some of whom supported its anti-war purpose. The Captain-General of the region, Luis de Santiago, decided to treat it as an insurrection, overruling the civil governor, Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, and declared martial law. Barricades were set up in the streets of outlying working class districts and anti-conscription protests debouched into anti-clerical disturbances and church-burnings. General de Santiago could do no more than defend the principal points of the city because he feared that his conscripts would fraternize with the rioters. Reinforcements were delayed by the fact that the attention of the military high command and of the government was distracted by the battle of Barranco del Lobo in Morocco. By 29 July, however, units had arrived and the movement was put down over the next two days with the use of artillery. There were numerous prisoners taken and 1,725 people were subsequently tried, of whom five were sentenced to death. Among them was Francisco Ferrer Guardia, the free-thinking founder of the libertarian school, the Escuela Moderna. 36