Paul Preston - Franco

Franco’s attitude to José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s ‘absence’ was enormously revealing of his peculiarly repressed way of thinking. ‘Probably’, he told Serrano Suñer in 1937, ‘they’ve handed him over to the Russians and it is possible that they’ve castrated him’. 91 Franco used the cult of el ausente (the absent one) to take over the Falange. All its external symbols and paraphernalia were used to mask its real ideological disarmament. Some of Primo de Rivera’s writings were suppressed and his designated successor, Hedilla, would be imprisoned under sentence of death in April 1937. While the public cult was manipulated to build up Franco as the heir to José Antonio, the Caudillo in private expressed his contempt for the Falangist leader. Serrano Suñer was always aware that praise for José Antonio was guaranteed to irritate Franco. On one occasion, the Generalísimo exploded ‘ Lo ves, siempre a vueltas con la figura de ese mucbacho como cosa extraordinaria ’ (‘see, always going on about that lad as if he was something out of the ordinary’). On another, Franco claimed delightedly to have proof that Primo de Rivera had died a coward’s death. 92

It is possible that José Antonio might have worked to bring an early end to the carnage although whether, in the hysterical atmosphere of the times, he would have had any success is entirely a different matter. He was certainly open to the idea of national reconciliation in a way never approached by Franco either during the war or in the thirty-five years that followed. In his last days in prison, José Antonio was sketching out the possible membership and policies of a government of ‘national concord’ whose first act was to have been a general amnesty. His attitude to Franco was revealed clearly in his comments on the implications of a military victory which he feared would merely consolidate the past. He saw such a victory as the triumph of ‘a group of generals of depressing political mediocrity, committed to a series of political clichés, supported by old-style intransigent Carlism, the lazy and short-sighted conservative classes with their vested interests and agrarian and finance capitalism’.

The papers in which he put these thoughts down were sent to Prieto by the military commander of Alicante, Colonel Sicardo. Eventually, the Socialist leader forwarded copies to his two executors, Ramón Serrano Suñer and Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, in the hope of provoking dissent among the Falangist purists. This was a political error on Prieto’s part. With José Antonio dead, the validation of Serrano Suñer and Fernández Cuesta as his executors gave them his authority to carry out Franco’s policy. 93 Had José Antonio Primo de Rivera reached Salamanca, he would have been a certain, and influential, critic of Franco. Franco’s exploitation of the Falange as a ready-made political base would have been made significantly more difficult. 94 However, to assume that Franco would not have seen off Primo de Rivera in the same way as he disposed of so many rivals is to take too much for granted.

In contrast to the ruthlessness with which Franco disposed of his rivals was the alacrity with which he bent rules in the interests of his family. The examples of this during the Civil War presaged the protection under which the so-called ‘Franco clan’ would prosper in the post-war years. His intervention on behalf of Nicolás’s in-laws was an example of his readiness to do things for his family. Even more striking was the rehabilitation of his left-wing extremist brother Ramón despite the vehement opposition of many important military figures. In September 1936, Ramón Franco who was in Washington as Spanish air attaché, wrote to a friend in Barcelona to ascertain how he would be received in the Republican zone. Azaña allegedly said to the mutual friend ‘he shouldn’t come, he’d have a really hard time’. In the wildly precipitate way that had always characterized his behaviour, Ramón decided to go instead to the Nationalist zone shortly after hearing of his brother’s elevation to the Headship of State. 95

Despite his past as an anarchist agitator and as a freemason and his involvement in various revolutionary activities, all ‘crimes’ for which others paid with their lives, Ramón was welcomed by his brother. In Seville, Queipo de Llano had already executed Blas Infante, the Andalusian Nationalist lawyer who had stood with Ramón in the revolutionary candidacy in the 1931 elections. The exquisite care for appearances which had allegedly prevented Franco opposing the execution of his cousin Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde at the beginning of the military uprising did not apply in the case of his brother. Ramón was sent to Mallorca to take over as head of the Nationalist forces there and given the acting rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. This caused very considerable ill feeling within the Nationalist Air Force and planted the seeds of a rift between Franco and his kingmaker, Alfredo Kindelán. On 26 November, Kindelán wrote the Generalísimo a fierce protest against his high-handed action. Couched in formally respectful terms, it accepted Franco’s right to command as he felt best but spoke of the ‘personal mortification’ felt by Kindelán at not even having been consulted and of the ill feeling which had been provoked among Nationalist airmen whose reaction ranged ‘from those who accept that he be allowed to work in aeronautical matters outside Spain to those who demand that he be shot’. 96 Franco simply ignored the letter and took his revenge against Kindelán by dropping him at the end of the war. Franco had taken to the prerogatives of his power with the skill and arbitrariness of a Borgia: they were attributes he was to need and to use to the full in the months ahead.

* Before the myth-makers began to work, ABC , Seville, 3 October 1936 claimed that ‘communications with the outside were totally cut throughout the siege’.

* At some point on either 20 or 21 September, Yagüe and Mola met to discuss the co-ordination of operations between their forces which had recently made contact over a long front. Their disagreements became increasingly heated. Mola told Yagüe that his behaviour constituted mutiny for which he could have him shot. Turning to his column commanders, Asensio, Castejón and Tella, Yagüe said ‘We don’t think so’ ( ¡Verdad que no! ) at which Mola was forced to make a joke of his original remark and back down. (Letter to the author from General Ramón Salas Larrazabal, 9 May 1991, recounting the testimony of one of the column chiefs present at the meeting, probably Asensio Cabanillas.)

* The myth propagated by Franco’s hagiographers (Luis Galinsoga & Francisco Franco-Salgado, Centinela de occidente (Barcelona, 1956) p. 21) that he did not attend the meeting has no basis other than a determination to give the impression that the Generalísimo had power thrust upon him. Brian Crozier, Franco: A Biographical History (London, 1967) p. 212, mistakenly places the meeting on 29 September and so assumes Franco’s absence on the grounds that, on that day, he was in Toledo congratulating Moscardó.

* What Queipo called Franco is deemed by Cabanellas to be ‘unprintable’ and so ‘swine’ is merely a guess.

* It had a Secretaría General del Jefe del Estado, a Secretaría General of Foreign Relations and a Gobierno General. There were also seven ministerial departments or ‘commissions’, Finance; Justice; Industry, Commerce and Supply; Agriculture; Labour, Culture and Education; Public Works and Communications.

† Gil Robles told the author in Madrid in 1970 of his belief that Franco could not tolerate having around anyone who had been his superior.

* The seed had been first planted in Franco’s mind in the late 1920s. At that period, he spent time at a small Asturian estate owned by his wife known as La Piniella, situated near San Cucao de Llanera, thirteen kilometres from Oviedo. A particularly sycophantic local priest who fancied himself as the chaplain to the house was constantly telling both Doña Carmen and Franco himself that he would repeat the epic achievements of El Cid and the great medieval Caudillo Kings of Asturias. Franco’s wife had often reminded him of the priest’s comments.