Paul Preston - Franco

However, the most disastrous of Franco’s appointments was that of Millán Astray as Head of Press and Propaganda. It is possible that Franco enjoyed Millán’s adulation but most of his activities were counter-productive. Within days of Franco’s elevation, Millán was proclaiming that Franco was ‘the man sent by God to lead Spain to liberation and greatness’, ‘the man who saved the situation during the Jaca rising’ and the ‘greatest strategist of the century’. 70 He ran the Nationalist press office like a barracks, summoning the journalists in his team with a whistle and then haranguing them much as he had the Legion prior to an action. Franco seems to have seen him as a kind of mascot, but his antics ended up bringing the Nationalist cause into disrepute. 71 Millán’s own choice of collaborators was especially unfortunate. Because of the link established between Franco and Luis Bolín during the flight of the Dragon Rapide, Millán named Bolín chief of press in the south and gave him the honorific title of Captain in the Legion. 72 Bolín started to use the uniform and throw his weight about accordingly, attempting to control the flow of news about Nationalist Spain by intimidating foreign journalists. Millán Astray encouraged his subordinates to threaten foreign journalists with execution. Bolín followed the order with gusto, most notoriously in the case of Arthur Koestler, the mistreatment of whom provoked an international scandal which led to his release from prison. As a result of the subsequent publication of Koestler’s book Spanish Testament , Bolín fell into disgrace. 73

Press liaison in the north was put in the hands of the notorious Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera, Conde de Alba y Yeltes, a polo-playing excavalryman, mainly on the grounds of his manic bigotry and the fact that he could speak excellent English, German and French. Captain Aguilera did more harm than good by outrageous and eminently quotable remarks to journalists. Much of what he said merely reflected the common beliefs of many officers on the Nationalist side. On the grounds that the Spanish masses were ‘like animals’, he told the foreign newspapermen that ‘We’ve got to kill and kill and kill’. He boasted to them of shooting six of his labourers on the day the Civil War broke out ‘ Pour encourager les autres ’. He regularly explained to any who would listen that the fundamental cause of the Civil War was ‘the introduction of modern drainage: prior to this, the riff-raff had been killed by various useful diseases; now they survived and, of course, were above themselves.’ ‘Had we no sewers in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, all these Red leaders would have died in their infancy instead of exciting the rabble and causing good Spanish blood to flow. When the war is over, we should destroy the sewers. The perfect birth control for Spain is the birth control God intended us to have. Sewers are a luxury to be reserved for those who deserve them, the leaders of Spain, not the slave stock.’ 74 He believed that husbands had the right to shoot their unfaithful wives. When accompanying the influential journalist Virginia Cowles, Aguilera maintained a constant flow of sexist remarks which he occasionally interrupted to say things like ‘Nice chaps, the Germans, but a bit too serious; they never seem to have any women around, but I suppose they didn’t come for that. If they kill enough Reds, we can forgive them anything’. 75

That Millán was hardly the best man to present the cause of Franco’s New State to the outside world was made starkly clear on 12 October 1936, during the celebrations in Salamanca of the Day of the Race, the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America. The magnificent and regal choreography stressed the permanence of the New State. A tribune was erected in the Cathedral for the distinguished guests. Franco was not present but was represented by General Varela and by Doña Carmen. A sermon by the Dominican priest Father Fraile praised Franco’s recuperation of the ‘the spirit of a united, great and imperial Spain’. The political, military and ecclesiastical dignitaries then transferred to the University for a further ceremony under the presidency of the Rector Perpétuo , the seventy-two year-old philosopher and novelist Miguel de Unamuno. He announced that he was taking the chair in place of General Franco who could not attend because of his many pressing commitments.

A series of speeches stressed the importance of Spain’s imperialist past and future. One in particular, by Francisco Maldonado de Guevara, who described the Civil War in terms of the struggle of Spain, traditional values and eternal values against the anti-Spain of the reds and the Basques and Catalans, seems to have outraged Unamuno, who was already devastated by the ‘logic of terror’ and the arrest and assassination of friends and acquaintances. (A week earlier Unamuno had visited Franco in the Bishop’s Palace to plead vainly on behalf of several imprisoned friends.) 76 The vehemence of Maldonado’s speech stimulated a Legionaire to shout ‘ ¡Viva la muerte! ’ (long live death), the battle cry of the Legion. Millán Astray then intervened to begin the triple Nationalist chant of ‘ ¡España! ’ and back came the three ritual replies of ‘ ¡Una! ’, ‘ ¡Grande! ’ and ‘ ¡Libre! ’ (United! Great! Free!). When Unamuno spoke, it was to counter the frenzied glorification of the war and the repression. He said that the civil war was an uncivil war, that to win was not the same as to convince ( vencer no es convencer ), that the Catalans and Basques were no more anti-Spanish than those present. ‘I am a Basque and I have spent my life teaching you the Spanish language which you do not know’. At this point he was interrupted by a near apoplectic Millán Astray who stood up to justify the military uprising. As Millán worked himself into a homicidal delirium, Unamuno stood his ground pointing out the necrophiliac inanity of the slogan ‘Long live death’. Millán shouted ‘Death to intellectuals’ to which Unamuno replied that they were in the temple of intelligence and that such words were a profanity.

With shouting and booing rising to a crescendo and Unamuno being threatened by Millán Astray’s armed bodyguards, Doña Carmen intervened. With great presence of mind and no little courage, she took the venerable philosopher by the arm, led him out and took him home in her official car. It has been suggested by two eyewitnesses that Millán Astray himself ordered Unamuno to take the arm of the wife of the Head of State and leave. 77 Such was the ambience of fear in Salamanca at the time that Unamuno was shunned by his acquaintances and removed at the behest of his colleagues from his position in the University. 78 Under virtual house arrest, Unamuno died at the end of December 1936 appalled at the repression, the ‘collective madness’ and ‘the moral suicide of Spain’. 79 Nevertheless, he was hailed at his funeral as a Falangist hero. 80 Nearly thirty years later, Franco commented to his cousin on what he saw as Unamuno’s ‘annoying attitude, unjustifiable in a patriotic ceremony, on such an important day and in a Nationalist Spain which was fighting a battle with a ferocious enemy and encountering the greatest difficulties in achieving victory’. In retrospect, he regarded Millán Astray’s intervention as an entirely justified response to a provocation. Nevertheless, at the time, it was thought prudent to have Millán Astray replaced. 81

The incident with Unamuno was a minor embarrassment in the process of consolidation of Franco as undisputed leader. In political terms, everything was going his way. In the course of the attack on Madrid, Franco was fortunate to see, indeed to an extent to facilitate, the removal from the scene of one of his last remaining potential rivals. The panic provoked by the advance on the capital and the broadcast of boasts by Mola about the imminent capture of Madrid by his ‘Fifth Column’ of secret Nationalist sympathisers had seen violent reprisals taken among rightists, either against individual saboteurs who were caught or against the large groups of prisoners taken from Madrid jails and massacred at Paracuellos de Jarama. 82 The conservatives and other middle class victims of atrocities in Madrid were not the only Nationalist civilians to lose their lives. The most celebrated was José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Although the Falangist leader had been in a Republican jail in Alicante since his arrest on 14 March 1936, an escape bid or a prisoner exchange was not inconceivable. * Obviously, given the pre-eminence of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, his release or escape would not be easy. In the event, however, lack of co-operation by Franco ensured that it would not happen.