IV

      IN COMMAND

      Franco and the Second Republic, 1934–1936

      AFTER THE vexations of the previous two years, the period of Centre-Right government, which came to be known by the Spanish Left as the bienio negro (two black years), moved Franco back into the sunlight. After what he perceived as the harsh persecution to which he and like-minded officers had been subjected by Azaña, the forty-two year-old general found himself lionized by politicians as he had not been since the Dictatorship. The reasons were obvious. He was the Army’s most celebrated young general of rightist views, and was untainted by collaboration with the Republic. His renewed celebrity and favour coincided with, and indeed to an extent fed upon, the bitter polarization of Spanish politics in this period.

      The Right saw its success in the November 1933 elections as an opportunity to put the clock back on the attempted reforms of the previous nineteen months of Republican-Socialist coalition government. In a context of deepening economic crisis, with one in eight of the workforce unemployed nationally and one in five in the south, a series of governments bent on reversing reform could provoke only desperation and violence among the urban and rural working classes. Employers and landowners celebrated victory by slashing wages, cutting their work forces, in particular sacking union members, evicting tenants and raising rents. The labour legislation of the previous governments was simply ignored.

      Within the Socialist movement, rank-and-file bitterness at losing the elections and outrage at the vicious offensive of the employers soon pushed the leadership into a tactic of revolutionary rhetoric in the vain hope of frightening the Right into restraining its aggression and pressuring the President of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, into calling new elections. In the long term, this tactic was to contribute to the feeling on the Right, and particularly within the high command of the Army, that strong authoritarian solutions were required to meet the threat from the Left.

      Alcalá Zamora had not invited the sleek and pudgy CEDA leader, José María Gil Robles, to form a government despite the fact that the Catholic CEDA was the biggest party in the Cortes. The President suspected the immensely clever and energetic Gil Robles of planning to establish an authoritarian, corporative state and so turned instead to the cynical and corrupt Alejandro Lerroux, leader of the increasingly conservative Radicals, the second largest party. But Lerroux’s power-hungry Radicals were dependent on CEDA votes and became the puppets of Gil Robles. In return for introducing the harsh social policies sought by the CEDA’s wealthy backers, the Radicals were allowed to enjoy the spoils of office. The Socialists were angered by the corruption of the Radicals but the first working class protest came from the anarchists. With irresponsible naivety, a violent uprising was called for 8 December 1933. However, the government had been forewarned of the anarcho-syndicalists’ plans and quickly declared a state of emergency (Estado de alarma). Leaders of the CNT and the FAI were arrested, press censorship was imposed, and union buildings were closed down.

      In traditionally anarchist areas – Aragón, the Rioja, Catalonia, the Levante, parts of Andalusia and Galicia – there were sporadic strikes, some trains were derailed and Civil Guard posts were attacked. After desultory skirmishes with the Civil Guard and the Assault Guards, the revolutionary movement was soon suppressed in Madrid, Barcelona and the provincial capitals of Andalusia, Alicante and Valencia. Throughout Aragón and in the regional capital, Zaragoza, however, the rising enjoyed a degree of success. Anarchist workers raised barricades, attacked public buildings, and engaged in armed combat with the forces of order. The government sent in several companies of the Army which, with the aid of tanks, took four days to crush the insurrection.¹ The movement reinforced the conviction of many of the more right-wing officers that, even with a conservative government in power, the Republic had to be overthrown.²

The difficulties experienced in the suppression of the revolt led, on 23 January 1933 to the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Manuel Rico Avello, who was packed off to Morocco as High Commissioner. He was replaced by Diego Martínez Barrio, the Minister of War, who was replaced in turn by the conservative Radical deputy for Badajoz and crony of Lerroux, Diego Hidalgo who knew more about the agrarian problem than about military questions.^* However, with engaging humility, he admitted his lack of military knowledge and his need for professional advice.³ He also set out to cultivate military sympathies for his party by softening the impact of some of the measures introduced by Azaña and reversing others.⁴ When the new Minister of War had been in post barely a week, at the beginning of February, Franco made his acquaintance in Madrid. Clearly impressed by the young general, at the end of March 1934, Hidalgo successfully placed before the cabinet a proposal for his promotion from Brigadier to Major-General (General de División), in which rank he was again the youngest in Spain.⁵ Hidalgo, expecting an effusive response, was dismayed by the cold and impersonal telegram which Franco sent him on receiving the news of his promotion. Reflecting on it later, Hidalgo commented, ‘I never ever saw him either joyful or depressed’.⁶

      The relationship between Franco and Hidalgo was consolidated in June during a four-day visit made by the Minister to the Balearic Islands where Franco was Comandante General. Hidalgo was much taken by the general’s considerable capacity for work, his obsession with detail, his cool deliberation in resolving problems. One incident stuck in his mind. It was the Minister’s custom on visiting garrisons to request that the commanding officer celebrate his visit by releasing any soldier currently under arrest. Although there was only one prisoner, a captain, in Menorca, Franco refused, saying ‘if the Minister orders me I will do it; if he merely makes a request, no.’ When Hidalgo asked what crime could be so heinous, Franco replied that it was the worst that any officer could commit: he had slapped a soldier. It was a surprising remark from the officer who had had a soldier shot for refusing to eat his rations. Both incidents in fact showed his obsession with military discipline. Hidalgo was so impressed by Franco that, before leaving Palma de Mallorca, and contrary to military protocol, he invited him to join him as an adviser that September during military manoeuvres in the hills (montes) of León.⁷

      As 1934 progressed, Franco became the favourite general of the Radicals just as, when the political atmosphere grew more conflictive after October, he was to become the general of the more aggressively right-wing CEDA. The favour of Hidalgo contrasted strongly with the treatment Franco perceived himself to have suffered at the hands of Azaña. Moreover, with the Radical government, backed in the Cortes by the CEDA, pursuing socially conservative policies and breaking the power of one union after another, the Republic began to seem altogether more acceptable to Franco. For many conservatives, ‘catastrophist’ solutions to Spain’s problems seemed for the moment less urgent. The extreme Right, however, remained unconvinced and so continued to prepare for violence. The most militant group on the ultra Right were the Carlists of the Traditionalist Communion, break-away royalists who had rejected the liberal heresy of the constitutional monarchists and advocated an earthly theocracy under the guidance of warrior priests. The Carlists were collecting arms and drilling in the north and the spring of 1934 saw Fal Conde, the movement’s secretary, recruiting volunteers in Andalusia. The Carlists, together with the fascist Falange Española, and the influential and wealthy ‘Alfonsists’, the conventional supporters of Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera, constituted the self-styled ‘catastrophist’ Right. They were so-called because of their determination to destroy the Republic by means of a cataclysm rather than by the more gradual legalist tactic favoured by the CEDA. Their plans for an uprising would eventually come to fruition in the summer of 1936.

      On 31 March 1934, two Carlist representatives accompanied by the leader of the Alfonsist monarchist party, Renovación