Franco. Paul Preston
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it was entirely possible that he might have become the darling of the Republic. As it was, Azaña’s policy towards Franco was to be altogether more restrained although, from the point of view of the Republican Minister of War, it was indeed generous. After losing the Academy, Franco was kept without a posting for nearly eight months which gave him time to devote to his reading of anti-Communist and anti-masonic literature but left him with only 80 per cent of his salary. Without a personal fortune, living in his wife’s house, his career apparently curtailed, Franco harboured considerable rancour for the Republican regime. Doña Carmen encouraged his bitterness.46
Throughout the summer of 1931, Army officers fumed at both the military reforms and at what they saw as the anarchy and disorder constituted by a number of strikes involving the anarchosyndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo in Seville and Barcelona.47 Given the discontent occasioned by Azaña’s reforms and the monarchist quest for praetorian champions to overthrow the Republic, there were well-founded rumours of possible military conspiracy. The names of Generals Emilio Barrera and Luis Orgaz were the most often cited and they were both briefly put under house arrest in mid-June. Eventually, in September, after evidence of further monarchist plots, Azaña would have Orgaz exiled to the Canary Islands. Azaña was convinced by reports reaching the Ministry that Franco was conspiring with Orgaz and regarded him as the more fearsome of the two (‘el más temible’).48 As the summer wore on, Azaña continued to believe that he was on the fringe of some kind of plot. In reports on contacts between Franco’s friend, the militantly right-wing Colonel José Enrique Varela, and the powerful hard-line monarchist boss of Cádiz, Ramón de Carranza, the names of Franco and Orgaz had been mentioned. The Minister wrote in his diary ‘Franco is the only one to be feared’, a tribute to his reputation for seriousness and efficiency. Azaña gave instructions that Franco’s activities be monitored. In consequence, when he visited Madrid in mid-August, the Director-General of Security, Angel Galarza, had him under the surveillance of three policemen.49
On 20 August, during his stay in Madrid, Franco visited the Ministry of War and spoke with the under-secretary who reminded him that he was obliged to call on the Minister. He returned on the following day. Azaña criticized his farewell speech to the Academy in Zaragoza. Franco had to swallow the criticism but Azaña was not fooled, writing later in his diary ‘he tries to seem frank but all rather hypocritically’. Azaña warned him, somewhat patronizingly, not to be carried away by his friends and admirers. Franco made protests of his loyalty, although he admitted that monarchist enemies of the Republic had been seeking him out, and seized the opportunity to inform the Minister that the closure of the Academy had been a grave error. When Azaña hinted that he would like to make use of Franco’s services, the young general commented with an ironic smile ‘and to use my services, they have me followed everywhere by a police car! They will have seen that I don’t go anywhere.’ An embarrassed Azaña had the surveillance lifted.50
The hypocritical Franco of Azaña’s account is entirely consistent with the document which he had submitted in defence of his speech at the closure of the Academy.* Azaña was rather condescending towards Franco, confident that he could bring him to heel.51 It is likely that his miscalculations about Franco derived in part from an assumption that he was as manipulable as his brother Ramón for whom Azaña, who knew him well, felt only impatience and contempt.
At the beginning of May, Franco had been refused permission to act as defender of Berenguer. In fact, the Consejo Supremo del Ejército had annulled the warrant against Berenguer soon afterwards and the Tribunal Supremo ordered the release of Mola on 3 July. However, the issue of ‘responsibilities’ remained deeply divisive, with moderate members of the government, including Azaña, keen to play it down. After a venomous debate, on 26 August, the Cortes empowered the ‘Responsibilities Commission’ to investigate political and adminstrative offences in Morocco, the repression in Catalonia between 1919 and 1923, Primo de Rivera’s 1923 coup, the Dictatorships of Primo and Berenguer and the Jaca court martial.52 To the fury of Azaña, who rightly believed that the Commission was dangerously damaging to the Republic, a number of aged generals who had participated in Primo’s Military Directory were arrested at the beginning of September.53
The hostility of some officers and the doubts of the many about the direction the Republic was taking were intensified by the bitter debate over the proposed new constitution which took place between mid-August and the end of the year. Its laic clauses, particularly those which aimed to break the clerical stranglehold on education, provoked hysterical press reaction on the Right. The determination of the Republican and Socialist majority in the Cortes to push these clauses through provoked the resignation of the two most prominent deeply Catholic members of the government, the conservative prime minister Niceto Alcalá Zamora and his Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura Gamazo. Azaña became prime minister. The right-wing press screamed that ‘the very existence of Spain is threatened’.54
Apocalyptic accounts in the right-wing press of anarchy and the implications of the constitutional proposals, together with the continuing determination of the Republican Left to press ahead with the ‘responsibilities’ issue, intensified the fears of Army officers. In the eyes of most of them, some senior generals were being accused of rebellion when all they had done was to put a stop to anarchy in 1923 while others, Berenguer and Fernández de Heredia, were being tried for dealing with the mutiny of Jaca. As the then Captain-General of Aragón, Fernández de Heredia was the man who had signed the death sentences. Posters, books and even a play by Rafael Alberti, Fermín Galán, glorified ‘the martyrs of the Repúblic’. Ramón Franco dedicated his book Madrid bajo las bombas (Madrid beneath the bombs) to ‘the martyrs for freedom, Captains Galán and García Hernández, assassinated on Sunday 14 December 1930 by Spanish reaction incarnated in the monarchy of Alfonso XIII and his government, presided by General Dámaso Berenguer’. The beatification of Galán and García Hernández was something which infuriated all but committed Republicans in the officer corps. Franco was especially outraged that the Republic appeared to be applying double standards in trying to eradicate unsound promotions granted during the 1920s at the same time as pursuing favouritism towards those who had collaborated in its establishment. Ironically, Ramón Franco had been appointed Director-General de Aeronáutica. Franco’s brother abused his position to participate in anarchist conspiracies against the Republic, lost his post and was only saved from a prison sentence by his election as a parliamentary deputy for Barcelona and by the solidarity of his masonic colleagues.55
When the Responsibilities Commission began to gather evidence for the forthcoming trial of those involved in the executions after the Jaca uprising, Franco appeared as a witness. In the course of his cross-examination on 17 December 1931, Franco’s answers were dry and to the point. He reminded the court that the code of military justice permitted summary executions to take place without the prior approval of the civilian authorities. However, when asked if he wished to add anything to his statement, he revealingly went on to defend military justice as ‘a juridical and a military necessity, by which military offences, of a purely military nature, and committed by soldiers, are judged by persons militarily prepared for the task’. Accordingly, he declared that, since the members of the Commission had no military experience, they were not competent to judge what had happened at the Jaca court martial.
When proceedings recommenced on the following day, Franco effectively lined himself against one of the cherished myths of the Republic by stating that Galán and García Hernández had committed a military offence, dismissing the central premiss of the Commission that they had carried out a political rebellion against an illegitimate regime. Franco declared ‘receiving