Franco. Paul Preston
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signed a pact which promised money and arms for a rising.8 In May 1934, the monarchists’ most dynamic and charismatic leader, José Calvo Sotelo, was granted amnesty and returned to Spain after the three years’ exile suffered as he fled the ‘responsibilities’ campaign. Henceforth, the extreme rightist press, in addition to criticizing Gil Robles for alleged weakness, began to talk of the need to ‘conquer the State’ – a euphemism for the violent seizure of its apparatus, as the only certain way to guarantee a permanent authoritarian, corporative regime.
Although Franco was careful to distance himself from the generals who were part of monarchist conspiracies, he certainly shared some of their preoccupations. His ideas on political, social and economic issues were still influenced by the regular bulletins which had been receiving since 1928 from the Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale of Geneva. In the spring of 1934, he took out a new subscription at his own expense, writing to Geneva on 16 May expressing his admiration for ‘the great work which you carry out for the defence of nations from Communism’ and his ‘wish to co-operate, in our country, in your great effort’.9 An ultra-right-wing organization which now had contacts with Dr Goebbels’ Antikomintern, the Entente skilfully targeted and linked up influential people convinced of the need to prepare for the struggle against Communism, and supplied subscribers with reports which purported to expose plans for forthcoming Communist offensives. The many strikes which took place during 1934, when seen through the prism of the Entente’s publications, helped convince Franco that a major Communist assault on Spain was under way.10
If Franco was circumspect with regard to extreme Right monarchist conspirators, he had even less to do with the nascent fascist groups which were beginning to appear on the scene. Gil Robles’ youth movement, the Juventud de Acción Popular (JAP) held great fascist-style rallies were held at which Gil Robles was hailed with the cry ‘¡Jefe! ¡Jefe! ¡Jefe!’ (the Spanish equivalent of Duce) in the hope that he might start a ‘March on Madrid’ to seize power. However, the JAP was not taken seriously by the ‘catastrophist’ Right. Monarchist hopes focused rather more on the openly fascist group of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the Falange, as a potential source of shock troops against the Left. As a southern landowner, an aristocrat and eligible socialite, and above all as the son of the late dictator, José Antonio Primo de Rivera was a guarantee to the upper classes that Spanish fascism would not get out of their control in the way of its German and Italian equivalents. The Falange remained insignificant until 1936, important until then only for the role played by its political vandalism in screwing up the tension which would eventually erupt into the Civil War. José Antonio was a close friend of Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law, but despite Serrano’s efforts to bring them together, the cautious, hard-working general and the flamboyant playboy would never hit it off.
Indeed, during the first half of 1934, Franco’s interest in politics was minimal. In late February, his mother Pilar Bahamonde de Franco had decided to go on pilgrimage to Rome. Franco travelled to Madrid in order to escort her to Valencia to catch a boat to Italy. While in the capital, staying at the home of her daughter Pilar, she caught pneumonia. After an illness lasting about ten days, she died on 28 February, aged sixty-six. It is the unanimous affirmation of those close to him that the loss affected Francisco profoundly despite the fact that he had not lived with his mother for twenty-seven years. He had adored her.11 Outside the family, he showed no signs of his bereavement. After her death, Franco rented a large apartment in Madrid where he and his wife regularly received the visits of other generals, prominent right-wing politicians, aristocrats and the elite of Oviedo when they passed through the capital. The most frequent recreations of Francisco and Carmen were visits to the cinema and to the flea-market (Rastro) in search of antiques, often accompanied by their favourite niece Pilar Jaraiz Franco.12
While Franco concerned himself with family and professional matters, the political temperature was rising throughout Spain. The Left was deeply sensitive to the development of fascism and was determined to avoid the fate of their Italian, German and Austrian counterparts. Encouraged by Gil Robles, the Radical Minister of the Interior Rafael Salazar Alonso was pursuing a policy of breaking the power of the Socialists in local administration and provoking the unions into suicidal strikes. The gradual demolition of the meagre Republican-Socialist achievements of 1931–1933 reached its culmination on 23 April with the amnesty of those accused of responsibilities for the crimes of the Dictatorship, like Calvo Sotelo, and those implicated in the coup of 10 August 1932, most notably Sanjurjo himself. Lerroux resigned in protest after Alcalá Zamora had hesitated before signing the amnesty bill. While Lerroux ran the government from the wings, one of his lieutenants, Ricardo Samper, took over as prime minister. Socialists and Republicans alike felt that the entire operation was a signal from the Radicals to the Army that officers could rise whenever they disliked the political situation.13 The Left was already suspicious of the government’s dependence on CEDA votes, because the monarchist Gil Robles refused to affirm his loyalty to the Republic.
Political tension grew throughout 1934. Successive Radical cabinets were incapable of allaying the suspicion that they were merely Gil Robles’ Trojan Horse. By repeatedly threatening to withdraw his support, Gil Robles provoked a series of cabinet crises as a result of which the Radical government took on an ever more rightist colouring. On each occasion, some of the remaining liberal elements of Lerroux’s party would be pushed into leaving it and its rump became progressively more dependent on CEDA whims. With Salazar Alonso provoking strikes throughout the spring and summer of 1934 and thereby picking off the most powerful unions one by one, the government widened its attacks on the Republic’s most loyal supporters and also began to mount an assault against the Basques and, even more so, the Catalans.
In Catalonia, the regional government or Generalitat was governed by a left Republican party, the Esquerra, under Luis Companys. In April, Companys had passed an agrarian reform, the Ley de Cultivos, to protect tenants from eviction by landowners. Although Madrid declared the reform unconstitutional, Companys went ahead and ratified it. Meanwhile, the government began to infringe the Basques’ tax privileges and, in an attempt to silence protest, forbade their municipal elections. Such high-handed centralism could only confirm the Left’s fears of the Republic’s rapid drift to the right. That anxiety was intensified by Salazar Alonso’s provocation and crushing defeat of a major national strike by the Socialist landworkers’ union during the summer. There were hundreds of arrests of trade union leaders and thousands of internal deportations, with peasants herded onto trucks and driven hundreds of miles from their homes to be left to make their way back without food or money. In the meantime, Army conscripts brought in the harvest. Workers’ societies were closed down and leftists on town councils forcibly replaced by government nominees. In the Spanish countryside, the clock was being put back to the 1920s.14
The vengeful policies pursued by the Radical governments and encouraged by the CEDA divided Spain. The Left saw fascism in every action of the Right; the Right, and many Army officers, smelt Communist-inspired revolution in every demonstration or strike. In the streets, there was sporadic shooting by Socialist and Falangist youths. The Government’s attacks on regional autonomy and the increasingly threatening attitude of the CEDA were driving sections of the Socialist movement to place their hopes in a revolutionary rising to forestall the inexorable destruction of the Republic. On the Right, there was a belief that, if the Socialists could be provoked into an insurrection, an excuse would be provided to crush them definitively. Gil Robles’ youth movement, the JAP, held a rally on 9 September at Covadonga in Asturias, the site of a battle in 732 considered to be the starting point for the long reconquest of Spain from the Moors. The symbolic association of the right-wing cause with the values of traditional Spain and the identification of the working class with the Moorish invaders was a skilful device that would help secure military sympathy. It foreshadowed the Francoist choreography of the Reconquista developed after 1936 with Franco himself