Franco. Paul Preston
Читать онлайн книгу.
and blessing of the Church was essential. It was not just a question of broad Catholic support for the Nationalist cause but rather of specific recognition by the universal Church of his personal status as its champion. The speed with which Franco sought such recognition mirrored the speed with which he began to manifest monarchical pretensions. Religious ritual had traditionally played a crucial part in elevating the figure of the King in the great age of early modern Spain. Believing that he represented continuity with the glories of the Golden Age, he took it for granted that the Church would validate his rule. Accordingly, he arrogated the royal-prerogative of entering and leaving churches under a canopy (bajo palio).
On 1 October, the Primate of Spain Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás sent a telegram congratulating him on the relief of the Alcázar and on his elevation to the Headship of State. Franco replied on 2 October with one of his grandiloquent messages, beginning ‘on assuming the powers of the Headship of the Spanish State with all their responsibilities I could receive no better help than the blessing of Your Eminence.’65 It was the beginning of a close relationship with Gomá.
Franco’s fellow generals were somewhat taken aback by the ease with which the new Generalísimo adopted a distant and elevated style. He set up his headquarters in the Episcopal Palace in Salamanca which was graciously ceded to him by Bishop Plá y Deniel. Within two weeks of his investiture, visitors to the Palace, often known as the cuartel general, were being required to attend audiences in morning suit.66 He was already surrounded by the Guardia Mora, the Moorish Guard, which would accompany him everywhere until the late 1950s. In resplendent uniforms, they stood like statues throughout the palace, a graphic indication of the Asiatic despotism in the making. German specialists arrived and built a special air-raid shelter.67 Franco’s picture appeared everywhere, on cinema screens, on the walls of shops, offices and schools. Along with his portrait, slogans were stencilled on walls, ‘the Caesars were undefeated generals. Franco!’ An entire propaganda apparatus was erected and then devoted to the inflation of the myth of the all-seeing political and military genius Franco. The scale of adulation to which he was subjected inevitably took its toll on his personality.68
In the process of moving from the improvised bureaucracy appropriate to a military campaign to the erection of a State apparatus, Franco made several errors in his choice of collaborators until the entire enterprise was taken over by his brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer. His brother Nicolás may have been an excellent kingmaker but he was less successful as a chancellor. By dint of his relationship with the new Generalísimo, and operating out of an office next to that of his brother, he quickly accumulated enormous power. Nicolás, who resembled his father in his tastes and appetites much more than he did his brother, was an amusing and popular bon viveur whose bohemian and chaotic life-style was the despair of all who had to deal with him. He would rise at 1 p.m. and receive visitors until 3 p.m. when he would disappear for lunch until 7 p.m. followed by an evening’s socializing. Reappearing around midnight, he would then work until 4 or 5 a.m., often keeping those who had come to see him waiting for seven or eight hours at a time. Given his relationship to the Generalísimo, few complained, although his practices especially infuriated the Germans.69 Yet despite the power and the favour that he enjoyed, Nicolás did little or nothing to begin the task of creating a State infrastructure.
However, the most disastrous of Franco’s appointments was that of Millán Astray as Head of Press and Propaganda. It is possible that Franco enjoyed Millán’s adulation but most of his activities were counter-productive. Within days of Franco’s elevation, Millán was proclaiming that Franco was ‘the man sent by God to lead Spain to liberation and greatness’, ‘the man who saved the situation during the Jaca rising’ and the ‘greatest strategist of the century’.70 He ran the Nationalist press office like a barracks, summoning the journalists in his team with a whistle and then haranguing them much as he had the Legion prior to an action. Franco seems to have seen him as a kind of mascot, but his antics ended up bringing the Nationalist cause into disrepute.71 Millán’s own choice of collaborators was especially unfortunate. Because of the link established between Franco and Luis Bolín during the flight of the Dragon Rapide, Millán named Bolín chief of press in the south and gave him the honorific title of Captain in the Legion.72 Bolín started to use the uniform and throw his weight about accordingly, attempting to control the flow of news about Nationalist Spain by intimidating foreign journalists. Millán Astray encouraged his subordinates to threaten foreign journalists with execution. Bolín followed the order with gusto, most notoriously in the case of Arthur Koestler, the mistreatment of whom provoked an international scandal which led to his release from prison. As a result of the subsequent publication of Koestler’s book Spanish Testament, Bolín fell into disgrace.73
Press liaison in the north was put in the hands of the notorious Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera, Conde de Alba y Yeltes, a polo-playing excavalryman, mainly on the grounds of his manic bigotry and the fact that he could speak excellent English, German and French. Captain Aguilera did more harm than good by outrageous and eminently quotable remarks to journalists. Much of what he said merely reflected the common beliefs of many officers on the Nationalist side. On the grounds that the Spanish masses were ‘like animals’, he told the foreign newspapermen that ‘We’ve got to kill and kill and kill’. He boasted to them of shooting six of his labourers on the day the Civil War broke out ‘Pour encourager les autres’. He regularly explained to any who would listen that the fundamental cause of the Civil War was ‘the introduction of modern drainage: prior to this, the riff-raff had been killed by various useful diseases; now they survived and, of course, were above themselves.’ ‘Had we no sewers in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, all these Red leaders would have died in their infancy instead of exciting the rabble and causing good Spanish blood to flow. When the war is over, we should destroy the sewers. The perfect birth control for Spain is the birth control God intended us to have. Sewers are a luxury to be reserved for those who deserve them, the leaders of Spain, not the slave stock.’74 He believed that husbands had the right to shoot their unfaithful wives. When accompanying the influential journalist Virginia Cowles, Aguilera maintained a constant flow of sexist remarks which he occasionally interrupted to say things like ‘Nice chaps, the Germans, but a bit too serious; they never seem to have any women around, but I suppose they didn’t come for that. If they kill enough Reds, we can forgive them anything’.75
That Millán was hardly the best man to present the cause of Franco’s New State to the outside world was made starkly clear on 12 October 1936, during the celebrations in Salamanca of the Day of the Race, the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America. The magnificent and regal choreography stressed the permanence of the New State. A tribune was erected in the Cathedral for the distinguished guests. Franco was not present but was represented by General Varela and by Doña Carmen. A sermon by the Dominican priest Father Fraile praised Franco’s recuperation of the ‘the spirit of a united, great and imperial Spain’. The political, military and ecclesiastical dignitaries then transferred to the University for a further ceremony under the presidency of the Rector Perpétuo, the seventy-two year-old philosopher and novelist Miguel de Unamuno. He announced that he was taking the chair in place of General Franco who could not attend because of his many pressing commitments.
A series of speeches stressed the importance of Spain’s imperialist past and future. One in particular, by Francisco Maldonado de Guevara, who described the Civil War in terms of the struggle of Spain, traditional values and eternal values against the anti-Spain of the reds and the Basques and Catalans, seems to have outraged Unamuno, who was already devastated by the ‘logic of terror’ and the arrest and assassination of friends and acquaintances.