Franco. Paul Preston
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the bride’s widowed father, Felipe Polo. He declared that to let his daughter marry Franco would be tantamount to letting her marry a bullfighter, a comment which carried with it considerable snobbery as well as a recognition of the risks of service in Africa.63 Even more determined was the opposition of Carmen’s aunt Isabel, Felipe Polo’s sister, who, since the death of his wife had taken responsibility for the upringing of his four children. Like her brother, Isabel Polo hoped for a better match than a soldier for her niece.64 However, despite this parental opposition, Franco pursued Carmen Polo tenaciously. He would pass messages to her in the hat-band of a mutual friend or else place them in the pockets of her coat while it hung in a café. They would meet clandestinely.65 Ultimately, Carmen’s own determination would overcome the resistance of her family. Thereafter, that determination would be put at the service of her future husband’s career.
The relationship developed in a socially divided city. The inflation and shortages which resulted from the First World War were intensified by the militancy of the local working class. The Socialist Party took the lead in agitation against the deteriorating living standards along with attacks on the ‘criminal war in Morocco’ which deeply offended and infuriated Franco and other soldiers. Outrage that such attacks should be permitted was part of a general disgust with a political system which was blamed for the many disasters faced by the Army. Military discontent now came to the boil because of a simultaneous internal squabble between those who had volunteered to fight in Africa and those who had remained in the Peninsula, Africanistas and peninsulares. For those who had fought in Africa, the risks were enormous but the prizes, in terms of adventure and rapid promotion, high. The mainland signified a more comfortable, but boring, existence and promotion only by strict seniority. When salaries began to be hit, like those of civilians, by inflation, there was resentment among the peninsulares for those like Franco who had gained quick promotion. Some arms, such as the Artillery, had managed to impose a system of totally rigid seniority with an agreement by all members of its officer corps to refuse any promotion by merit. So-called Juntas de Defensa, rather like trade unions, were founded in many garrisons to protect the seniority system and to seek better pay.
What might have been an internal military issue was to contribute to a catastrophic upheaval in national politics. The coming of the First World War had already aroused political passions by giving rise to a bitter debate involving senior generals about whether Spain should intervene. Given the country’s near bankruptcy and the parlous state of the Army, neutrality was inevitable, much to the chagrin of many officers. Massive social upheaval came as a consequence of Spain’s position as a non-belligerent. Her economically privileged position of being able to supply both the Entente and the Central Powers with agricultural and industrial products saw coalmine-owners from Asturias, Basque steel barons and shipbuilders, and Catalan textile magnates experience a spiralling boom which constituted the first dramatic take-off for Spanish industry. The balance of power within the economic elite shifted. Agrarian interests remained pre-eminent but industrialists were no longer prepared to tolerate their subordinate political position. Their dissatisfaction came to a head in June 1916 when the Liberal Minister of Finance, Santiago Alba, attempted to impose a tax on the notorious war profits of northern industry without a corresponding measure to deal with those made by the agrarians. Although the move was blocked, it so underlined the arrogance of the landed elite that it precipitated a bid by the industrial bourgeoisie to carry through political modernisation.
In the kaleidoscopic confusion of rapid economic growth, social dislocation, regionalist agitations and a bourgeois reform movement, the military was to play an active and contradictory role. The discontent of the Basque and Catalan industrialists had already caused them to challenge the Spanish establishment by sponsoring regionalist movements which infuriated the profoundly centralist military mentality. Now the self-interested reforming zeal of industrialists determined to hold on to their war profits coincided with the more desperate bid for change from a proletariat impoverished by the war. Boom industries attracted rural labour to towns where the worst conditions of early capitalism prevailed. This was especially true of Asturias and the Basque Country. At the same time, massive exports created shortages, rocketing inflation and plummeting living standards. The Socialist trade union, the Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers) and the anarcho-syndicalist Confederation Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour) were drawn together in the hope that a joint general strike might bring about free elections and then reform.66 While industrialists and workers pushed for change, middle-rank Army officers were protesting at low wages, antiquated promotion structures and political corruption. A bizarre and short-lived alliance was forged in part because of a misunderstanding about the political stance of the Army.
Military complaints were couched in the language of reform which had become fashionable after Spain’s loss of empire in 1898. Known as ‘Regenerationism’, it associated the defeat of 1898 with political corruption. Ultimately, ‘Regenerationism’ was open to exploitation by either the Right or the Left since among its advocates there were those who sought to sweep away the degenerate political system based on the power of local bosses or caciques by democratic reform and those who planned simply to destroy caciquismo by the authoritarian solution of ‘an iron surgeon’. However, in 1917 the officers who mouthed ‘Regenerationist’ cliches were acclaimed as the figureheads of a great national reform movement. For a brief moment, workers, capitalists and the military were united in the name of cleansing Spanish politics of the corruption of caciquismo. As things turned out, the great crisis of 1917 was not resolved by the successful establishment of a political system capable of permitting social adjustment but instead consolidated the power of the entrenched landed oligarchy.
Despite a rhetorical coincidence in their calls for reform, the ultimate interests of workers, industrialists and officers were contradictory and the existing system survived by skilfully exploiting these differences. The Prime Minister, the Conservative Eduardo Dato, conceded the officers’ economic demands. He then provoked a strike of Socialist railway workers in Valencia, forcing the UGT to act before the anarcho-syndicalist CNT was ready. Now at peace with the system, the Army was happy to defend it by crushing with excessive harshness the strike which broke out on 10 August 1917. In Asturias, where the strike was pacific, the military governor General Ricardo Burguete y Lana declared martial law on 13 August. He accused the strike organizers of being the paid agents of foreign powers. Announcing that he would hunt down the strikers ‘like wild beasts’, he sent columns of regular troops and Civil Guards into the mining valleys to cow the population. A curfew was imposed by a campaign of terror. The severity of Burguete’s response, with eighty dead, one hundred and fifty wounded and two thousand arrested of whom many were severely beaten and tortured, guaranteed the failure of the strike.67
One of the columns was under the command of the young Major Franco. Consisting of a company of the Regimiento del Rey, a machine-gun section from the Regimiento del Princípe and a detachment of Civil Guards, he played a significant role in re-establishing order after the strike. Indeed, the official historian of the Civil Guard referred to him as ‘the man responsible for restoring order’.68 Despite several allegations that his actions at this time established his reliability in the eyes of the local bourgeoisie, Franco himself claimed years later, before a huge audience of Asturian miners, that his column had seen no action.69 That seems unlikely but it is impossible to reconstruct now the exact role that he played in the repression. Certainly, his job was to protect the mines from sabotage and, within the terms of martial law, to pass judgement on cases of fighting between individual strikers and Civil Guards since the strike had been declared. Implausibly, in 1963, he told George Hills, then head of the BBC Spanish services, that the appalling conditions which he saw led him to start a huge programme of reading in sociology and economics.70 In contrast to Franco’s paternalist recollections, Manuel Llaneza, the moderate leader