Franco. Paul Preston
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Fanjul confided a similar opinion to Basilio Alvarez, who had been a Radical deputy for Orense in 1931 and 1933: ‘perhaps Franco wants to protect himself from any governmental or disciplinary inconvenience by means of parliamentary immunity.’19
Certainly, the versions of the Cuenca episode produced by Franco and his propagandists make it clear that it was to be an abiding source of embarrassment. Within a year, Franco was to be found rewriting it, through his official biographer Joaquín Arrarás. In his 1937 version, the parties of the Right offered Franco a place in the list for Cuenca, because he was a persecuted man and to allow him the freedom ‘to organize the defence of Spain’. Franco ‘publicly rejected’ the offer because he neither believed in the honesty of the election process nor expected anything from the Republican parliament.20 This ludicrously inaccurate version of the events surrounding the Cuenca elections implied that, if the electoral system had been honest, Franco would have stood. Subsequently in 1940, Arrarás eliminated this inadvertent proclamation of faith in democracy and claimed that Franco had withdrawn his candidacy because of ‘the twisted interpretations’ to which it was subject.21 A decade after the events, Franco himself claimed in a speech to the Falangist Youth in Cuenca that his desire to be a parliamentary deputy was occasioned by ‘dangers for the Patria’.22
By the early 1960s, Franco was eschewing any hint that he might have been seeking a bolt-hole. Writing in the third person, he claimed rather that ‘General Franco was looking for a way of legally leaving the archipelago which would permit him to establish a more direct contact with the garrisons in order to have a more direct link with those places where there was a danger of the Movement being a failure’. There is an outrageous re-casting of history in this account. Franco attributes to himself the credit for securing a place for José Antonio Primo de Rivera in the right-wing candidacy, which is simply untrue. With equal inaccuracy, he claims that General Fanjul had stood down as a candidate to make way for Franco himself when he had done so for José Antonio. He then fudges the reasons for the eventual withdrawal of his own candidacy with the vague and incorrect statement that, on the morning that candidates were to be announced, he received a telegram from those concerned (los afectados) to the effect that ‘it was impossible to maintain his candidacy because his name had been ‘burned’ (quemado).23
That Franco should omit to mention the rift with the leader of the Falange was entirely understandable. After all, after 1937, the Nationalist propaganda machine would work frenetically to convert Franco into the heir to José Antonio in the eyes of the Falangist masses. Similarly, in writing that his intention was to be able to oversee the preparations for a coup, Franco inadvertently revealed his desire to diminish Mola’s posthumous glory as the sole director of the rising. In his third and most plausible attempt to rewrite the Cuenca episode, Arrarás wrote that Franco withdrew ‘because he preferred to attend to his military duties, by which means he believed he could better serve the national interest’. The suggestion of any friction between Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera remained taboo.24
Left-wing suspicions of Franco’s motives were expressed by Indalecio Prieto shortly after Franco’s candidacy was dropped, in a celebrated speech in Cuenca. He commented that ‘General Franco, with his youth, with his gifts, with his network of friends in the Army, is a man who could at a given moment be the caudillo of a movement with the maximum chances of success’. Accordingly, without attributing such intentions to Franco, Prieto claimed that other right-wing plotters were seeking to get parliamentary immunity for him in order to facilitate his conversion into ‘the caudillo of a military subversion’.25 In any case, the Cuenca election was declared at the last minute to be technically a re-run. Since the electoral law required that candidates in a re-run should have secured 8 per cent of the vote in the first round, new candidates could not be admitted by the provincial Junta del Censo. Accordingly, although José Antonio Primo de Rivera gained sufficient votes to win a seat, his election was not recognized.26
Helpless before the rising numbers of strikes and deaf to the background hum of military conspiracy stood the minority government. Only Republicans sat in the Cabinet, because Largo Caballero refused to let Socialists join a coalition. He pinned his hopes on two naive scenarios: either the Republicans would quickly find themselves incapable of implementing their own reform programme and have to make way for an exclusively Socialist cabinet or else there would be a fascist coup which would be crushed by popular revolution. In May, Largo used his immense influence inside the Socialist leadership to prevent the formation of a government by the more realistic Prieto. As long as Azaña was prime minister, authority could be maintained. However, in order to put together an even stronger team, Azaña and Prieto plotted to remove the more conservative Alcalá Zamora from the presidency. Azaña would become president and Prieto take over as prime minister. The first part of the plan worked but not the second as a result of Largo Caballero’s opposition and Prieto’s failure to fight it. The consequences were catastrophic. The last chance of avoiding civil war was missed. Spain lost a shrewd and strong prime minister, and, to make matters worse, on assuming the presidency, Azaña increasingly withdrew from active politics. The new Prime Minister, Santiago Casares Quiroga, suffering from tuberculosis, was incapable of generating the determination and energy required in the circumstances.
Unemployment was rocketing and the election results had dramatically raised the expectations of workers in both town and countryside. To the outrage of employers, trade unionists sacked in the aftermath of the Asturian events were forcibly reinstated. There were sporadic land seizures as frustrated peasants took into their own hands the implementation of the new government’s commitment to rapid reform. What most alarmed the landlords was that labourers whom they expected to be servile were assertively determined not to be cheated out of reform as they had between 1931 and 1933. Many landowners withdrew to Seville or Madrid, or even to Biarritz or Paris, where they enthusiastically joined, financed, or merely awaited news of, ultra-rightist plots against the Republic.
Under the energetic leadership of General Mola, the plot was developing fast. It was more thoroughly prepared than any previous effort, taking full account of the lesson of the Sanjurjada of 10 August 1932 that casual pronunciamientos could not work where the Civil Guard was in opposition and where the proletariat was ready to use the weapon of the general strike. The tall bespectacled Mola, as ‘El Director’, having learnt plenty of police procedure during his time as Director-General of Security in 1930–1931, took to conspiracy with gusto. Brave and of adventurous spirit, he enjoyed the danger.27 Pamplona was an excellent place from which to direct the conspiracy, being the headquarters of the most militant group of the ultra-Right, the Carlists.28 Mola had plenty of willing and competent assistants. Through Valentín Galarza, known among the plotters as ‘the technician’ (el técnico), the right-wing conspiratorial organization, Unión Militar Española, was at his disposal. He drew up his first directive in April, ‘The objective, the methods and the itineraries’. In it, aware of the deficiencies of the preparations of Sanjurjada, he specified in detail the need for a complex civilian support network and above all for political terror: ‘the action must be violent in the extreme in order to crush the strong and well-organized enemy as soon as possible. All leaders of political parties, societies or unions not committed to the Movement will be imprisoned and exemplary punishments administered to such individuals in order to strangle movements of rebellion or strikes’.29
In the middle of May, Mola was visited secretly by a Lieutenant-Colonel Seguí of the general staff of the African Army, who informed him that the garrisons of Morocco were ready to rise. Among the Africanista officers, Mola relied on Yagüe as the most tireless in the preparation