Franco. Paul Preston
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of a controlled return to constitutional normality after the collapse of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. However, on the evening of polling day, as the results began to be known, people started to drift onto the streets of the cities of Spain and, as the crowds grew, Republican slogans were shouted with increasing excitement. In the countryside, the power of the local bosses or caciques was unbroken but in the towns, where the vote was much freer, monarchist candidates had suffered a disaster. With the artillerymen on his staff at the Academy openly rejoicing at the Republican triumph, Franco was deeply worried about the situation.1 While he mused in his office in Zaragoza, his one-time commanding officer and a man whom he admired, General Sanjurjo, was clinching the fate of the King. Sanjurjo now Director-General of the para-military Civil Guard, the monarchy’s most powerful instrument of repression, had informed several cabinet ministers that he could not guarantee the loyalty of the men under his command in the event of mass demonstrations against the monarchy.2 In fact, there was little reason to suspect the loyalty of the Civil Guard, a brutal and conservative force. Sanjurjo’s fear was rather that the defence of the monarchy could be attempted only at the cost of copious bloodshed, given the scale of the popular hostility to the King.
That Sanjurjo was not prepared to risk a bloodbath on behalf of Alfonso XIII reflected the fact that he had personal reasons for feeling resentment towards the King. He felt that he had been snubbed by the King for marrying beneath his rank and he had not forgiven Alfonso XIII for failing to stand by Primo de Rivera in January 1930.3 Sanjurjo’s reluctance to defend his King may also have reflected two conversations that he had with Alejandro Lerroux in February and April 1931, during which the Republican leader had tried to persuade him to ensure the benevolent neutrality of the Civil Guard during a change of regime. Sanjurjo informed the Director-General of Security, General Mola, of the first of these meetings and assured him that he had not agreed to Lerroux’s request.4 His subsequent actions during the crisis of 12, 13 and 14 April, together with the favourable treatment which he received afterwards from the new regime, were to lead Franco to suspect that perhaps Sanjurjo had been bought by Lerroux and betrayed the monarchy.
Franco was unaware of what Sanjurjo was saying to the cabinet ministers on 12 April, but he was in telephone contact with Millán Astray and other generals. He considered marching on Madrid with the cadets from the Academia but refrained from doing so after a telephone conversation with Millán Astray at 11.00 a.m. on the morning of 13 April.5 Millán Astray asked him if he thought that the King should fight to keep his throne. Franco replied that everything depended on the attitude of the Civil Guard. For the next five and a half years, the stance of the Civil Guard would be Franco’s first concern in thinking about any kind of military intervention in politics. Most of the Spanish Army, apart from its Moroccan contingent, was made up of untried conscripts. Franco was always to be intensely aware of the problems of using them against the hardened professionals of the Civil Guard. Now, Millán Astray told Franco that Sanjurjo had confided in him that the Civil Guard could not be relied upon and that Alfonso XIII therefore had no choice but to leave Spain. Franco commented that, in view of what Sanjurjo said, he too thought that the King should go.6
Franco had also been greatly influenced by the telegram that Berenguer sent in the early hours of 13 April to the Captains-General of Spain. The Captains-General in command of the eight military regions into which the country was divided were effectively viceroys. In the telegram, Berenguer instructed them to keep calm, maintain the discipline of the men under their command and ensure that no acts of violence impede ‘the logical course that the supreme national will imposes on the destinies of the Fatherland’.7 Berenguer’s attitude derived from his own pessimism about Army morale. He believed that some Army officers were simply blasé about the danger to the monarchy. More seriously, he suspected that many others were indifferent and even hostile to its fate in the wake of the divisions created in the 1920s. Nevertheless, despite his telegram and his own inner misgivings, on the morning of 14 April, out of loyalty to the monarchy, Berenguer told the King that the Army was ready to overturn the result of the elections. Alfonso XIII refused.8 Shortly after Berenguer’s interview with the King, Millán Astray told Berenguer about his conversation with the Director of the Zaragoza Academy on the previous day repeating, as ‘an opinion which has to be taken into account’, Franco’s view that the King had no choice but to leave.9
The King decided to leave Spain but not to abdicate, in the hope that his followers might be able to engineer a situation in which he would be begged to return. Power was assumed on 14 April 1931 by the Provisional Government whose membership had been agreed in August 1930 by the Republicans and Socialists who had made the Pact of San Sebastián. Although led by Niceto Alcalá Zamora, a conservative Catholic landowner from Córdoba who had once been a Minister under the King, the Provisional Government was dominated by Socialists and centre and left Republicans committed to sweeping reform.
In a number of ways in the first week of the Republic, Franco displayed unmistakably, if guardedly, a repugnance for the new regime and a lingering loyalty to the old. There was nothing unusual in his feeling such loyalty – a majority of Army officers were monarchists and would have been unlikely to change their convictions overnight. Franco was ambitious but took discipline and hierarchy very seriously. On 15 April, he issued an order to the cadets, in which he announced the establishment of the Republic and insisted on rigid discipline: ‘If discipline and total obedience to orders have been the invariable practice in this Centre, they are even more necessary today when the Army is obliged, with serenity and unity, to sacrifice its thoughts and its ideology for the good of the nation and the tranquility of the Patria.’10 It was not difficult to decipher the hidden meaning: Army officers must grit their teeth and overcome their natural repugnance towards the new regime.
For a week, the red and gold monarchist flag continued to fly over the Academia. The Captain-General of Aragón, Enrique Fernández de Heredia, had been instructed by the Provisional Government to raise the Republican tricolour throughout the region. With the military headquarters in Zaragoza surrounded by hostile crowds demanding that Cacahuete (peanut), as the vegetarian Fernández de Heredia was known, fly the Republican flag, he refused. At midnight on 14 April, the new Minister of War, Manuel Azaña, ordered him to hand over command of the region to the military governor of Zaragoza, Agustín Gómez Morato, who was considered loyal to the Republican cause and who, indeed, was to be imprisoned by the Nationalists in July 1936 for opposing the military rebellion in Morocco. Gómez Morato undertook the substitution and telephoned all units in Aragón to order them to do the same. At the Military Academy, Franco informed his superior that changes of insignia could be ordered only in writing. It was not until after 20 April when the new Captain-General of the region, General Leopoldo Ruiz Trillo, had signed an order to the effect that the Republican flag should be flown, that Franco ordered the monarchist ensign struck.11
In 1962, Franco wrote a partisan and confused interpretation of the fall of the monarchy in his draft memoirs in which he blamed the guardians of the monarchist fortress for opening the gates to the enemy. The enemy consisted of a group of ‘historic republicans, freemasons, separatists and socialists’. The freemasons were ‘atheistic traitors in exile, delinquents, swindlers, men who betrayed their wives’.12 The narrowness of his interpretation is striking in several ways. Franco’s admiration for the dictatorship is understandable. His assumption that the King had not contravened the constitution in acquiescing in a military coup d’état in 1923 and that the situation in April 1931 was therefore one of constitutional legality was clearly the view of a soldier who never questioned the Army’s right to rule. The clear implication is that the monarchy should, and but for Sanjurjo