Franco. Paul Preston
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the Zaragoza Academy, he had enjoyed a light work load and a full social life. Now, in La Coruña, he was effectively military governor, and had a splendid life-style, with a large house and white-gloved servants. La Coruña was then a beautiful and peaceful seaport and not the bustling and anonymous town that it was to become during the later years of his dictatorship. Franco’s minimal duties as military commander permitted him to be a frequent visitor to the yacht club (Club Náutico) where he was able to indulge, on a small scale, his love of sailing. It was there that he made the acquaintance of Máximo Rodríguez Borrell, who after the war would become his regular fishing and hunting companion. Max Borrell was to be one of his very few close civilian friends and to remain so until his final illness.67
The fact that Franco was not prepared to take risks for Sanjurjo does not mean that he was enthusiastic about the political situation. However, he was altogether more cautious than many of his peers and he carefully distanced himself from the coup attempt of 10 August 1932. Nonetheless, as might have been expected given his long African association with Sanjurjo, he knew about its preparation. On 13 July, Sanjurjo visited La Coruña to inspect the local carabineros and had dinner with Franco, discussing with him the forthcoming uprising. According to his cousin, Franco told Sanjurjo at this meeting that he was not prepared to take part in any kind of coup.68 The monarchist plotter Pedro Sainz Rodríguez organized a further, and elaborately clandestine, meeting in a restaurant on the outskirts of Madrid. Franco expressed considerable doubts about the outcome of the coup and said he was still undecided about what his own position would be when the moment arrived, promising Sanjurjo that, whatever he decided, he would not take part in any action launched by the government against him.69
Franco was sufficiently vague for Sanjurjo to assume that he would support the rising. According to Major Juan Antonio Ansaldo, an impetuous monarchist aviator, conspirator and devoted follower of Sanjurjo, Franco’s ‘participation in the 10 August coup was considered certain’, but ‘shortly before it took place, he freed himself of any undertaking and advised several officers to follow his example’.70 It is probably going too far to suggest that Franco first supported Sanjurjo’s plot and then changed his mind. However, given Franco’s labyrinthine ambiguity, it would have been easy for Sanjurjo and his fellow-plotters to allow themselves to take his participation for granted. His hesitations and vagueness while he waited for the outcome to become clear would have permitted such an assumption. It is certainly the case that Franco did nothing to report what was going on to his superiors.
Franco’s final refusal to become part of the conspiracy was based largely on his view that it was inadequately prepared, as he indicated to the right-wing politician, José María Gil Robles, at a dinner in the home of their mutual friend, the Marqués de la Vega de Anzó.71 He was afraid that a failed coup would ‘open the doors to Communism’.72 He was, however, also highly suspicious of the links between Sanjurjo and Lerroux whose involvement in what was being prepared could be perceived in a speech which he made in Zaragoza on 10 July. Aligning himself with the cause of the plotters, Lerroux was trying to push the government to adopt a more conservative line, tacitly threatening the military intervention which would follow if it did not. As ever the outrageous cynic and flatterer of the military, Lerroux declared that, when he came to power, he would reopen the Academia General Militar and reinstall Franco as Director.73
Franco himself visited Madrid at the end of July in order ‘to choose a horse’.74 It was rumoured, to his annoyance, that he had come to join the plot. When asked by other officers, as he was repeatedly, if he were part of the conspiracy, he replied that he did not believe that the time had yet come for a rising but that he respected those who thought that it had. He was outraged to discover that some senior officers were openly stating that he was involved. He told them that, if they continued to ‘spread these calumnies’, he would ‘take energetic measures’. By chance, he met Sanjurjo, Goded, Varela and Millán Astray at the Ministry of War. Varela told him that Sanjurjo wanted to sound him out about the forthcoming coup. Sanjurjo at first denied this but agreed to meet Franco and Varela together. Over lunch, Franco told them categorically that they should not count on his participation in any kind of military uprising. In a barely veiled rebuke to Sanjurjo for his behaviour in April 1931, Franco justified his refusal to join the plot on the grounds that, since the Republic had come about because of the military defection from the cause of the monarchy, the Army should not now try to change things.75 This meeting could account for the caustic remark made by Sanjurjo in the summer of 1933 during his imprisonment after the coup’s failure: ‘Franquito es un cuquito que va a lo suyito’ (‘little Franco is a crafty so-and-so who looks after himself’).76
The Sanjurjo coup was poorly organized and, in Madrid, easily dismantled. It was briefly successful in Seville but, with a column of troops loyal to the government marching on the city, Sanjurjo fled.77 The humiliation of part of the Army and the reawakening of the mood of popular fiesta which had initially greeted the establishment of the Republic occasioned by Sanjurjo’s defeat cannot have failed to convince Franco of the wisdom of his prognostications about the rising.78 The fact that the armed urban police, the Guardias de Asalto and the Civil Guard had played no part in the rising had underlined their importance. Franco was more convinced than ever that any attempted coup d’état needed to count on their support.
Azaña had long been worried that Franco might be involved in a plot against the regime and in the course of the Sanjurjada had feared that he might be part of the coup. However, when he telephoned La Coruña on 10 August, he was relieved to find that Franco was at his post. Curiously, he very nearly was not. Franco had requested permission for a brief spell of leave in order to take his wife and daughter on a trip around the beautiful fjord-like bays of Galicia, the rías bajas, but it had been refused since his immediate superior, Major-General Félix de Vera, had also been about to go away. Accordingly, when the coup took place, Franco had been in acting command of military forces in Galicia.79
The conspiratorial Right, both civilian and military, reached the more general conclusion which Franco had drawn in advance – that they must never again make the mistake of inadequate preparation. A monarchist ‘conspiratorial committee’ was set up by members of the extreme rightist group Acción Española and Captain Jorge Vigón of the General Staff in late September 1932 to begin preparations for a future military rising. The theological, moral and political legitimacy of a rising against the Republic was argued in the group’s journal Acción Española, of which Franco had been a subscriber since its first number in December 1931.80 The group operated from Ansaldo’s house in Biarritz. Substantial sums of money were collected from rightist sympathizers to buy arms and to finance political destabilization. One of the earliest operations was to set up subversive cells within the Army itself, and the responsibility for this task was given to Lieutenant-Colonel Valentín Galarza of the General Staff.81 Galarza had been involved in the Sanjurjada but nothing could be proved against him. Azaña wrote in his diary, ‘I have left without a posting another Lieutenant-Colonel of the General Staff, Galarza, an intimate of Sanjurjo and Goded, who before the Republic was one of the great mangoneadores (meddlers) of the Ministry. Galarza is intelligent, capable and obliging, slippery and obedient. But he is definitely on the other side. There is nothing against him in the prosecution case. Nevertheless, he is one of the most dangerous’.82 All that Azaña could do was to leave Galarza