Franco. Paul Preston
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elaborated a scheme to bribe the Republican Civil Governor of Alicante while Aznar prepared a violent prison break-out. They were received in Salamanca by Franco who, after thanking von Knobloch for securing the escape from Alicante of the family of his brother Nicolás, gave his permission for them to continue their efforts. However, that verbal permission obscured the fact that his backing was less than enthusiastic. While von Knobloch returned to Alicante to implement his scheme, Franco informed the German authorities that he insisted on a number of conditions for the continuation of the operation. These were that efforts be made to rescue José Antonio without handing over any money, that if it was necessary to give money then the amount should be haggled over, and that von Knobloch should not take part in the operation. These strange conditions considerably diminished the chances of success but the Germans in Alicante decided to go ahead. Franco then issued even more curious instructions. In the event of the operation being a success, total secrecy was to be maintained about José Antonio being liberated. He was to be kept apart from von Knobloch, who was the main link with the Falangist leadership. He was to be interrogated by someone sent by Franco. He was not to be landed in the Nationalist zone without the permission of Franco. He informed the Germans that there existed doubts about the mental health of Primo de Rivera. The operation was aborted.86
A further possibility for Primo de Rivera’s release arose from a suggestion by Ramón Cazañas, Falangist Jefe (chief) in Morocco. He proposed that an exchange be arranged for General Miaja’s wife and daughters who were imprisoned in Melilla. Franco apparently refused safe-conducts for the negotiators although he later agreed to the family of General Miaja being exchanged for the family of the Carlist, Joaquín Bau. The Caudillo also refused permission for another Falangist, Maximiano García Venero, to drum up an international campaign to save José Antonio’s life.87 Similarly, Franco sabotaged the efforts of José Finat, Conde de Mayalde, a friend of José Antonio. Mayalde was married to a granddaughter of the Conde de Romanones and he persuaded the venerable politician to use his excellent contacts in the French government to get Blum to intercede with Madrid on behalf of Primo de Rivera. Franco delayed permission for Romanones to go to France until after the death sentence was announced.88
José Antonio Primo de Rivera was shot in Alicante prison on 20 November 1936. Franco made full use of the propaganda opportunities thereby provided, happy to exploit the eternal absence of the hero while privately rejoicing that he now could not be inconveniently present. The news of the execution reached Franco’s headquarters shortly after it took place.89 It was in any case published in the Republican and the French press on 21 November. Until 16 November 1938, Franco chose publicly to refuse to believe that José Antonio was dead. The Falangist leader was more use ‘alive’ while Franco made his political arrangements. An announcement of his death would have opened a process whereby the Falange leadership could have been settled at a time when Franco’s own position was only just in the process of being consolidated. The provisional leader of the Falange, the violent but unsophisticated Manuel Hedilla, made the tactical error of acquiescing in Franco’s manoeuvre. The first news of the execution coincided with the Third Consejo Nacional of the Falange Española y de las JONS in Salamanca on 21 November but Hedilla failed to make an announcement, out of a vain hope, built on a hundred rumours, that by some subterfuge or other, his leader had survived. Thereafter, Franco would have to deal only with a decapitated Falange.90
Franco’s attitude to José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s ‘absence’ was enormously revealing of his peculiarly repressed way of thinking. ‘Probably’, he told Serrano Suñer in 1937, ‘they’ve handed him over to the Russians and it is possible that they’ve castrated him’.91 Franco used the cult of el ausente (the absent one) to take over the Falange. All its external symbols and paraphernalia were used to mask its real ideological disarmament. Some of Primo de Rivera’s writings were suppressed and his designated successor, Hedilla, would be imprisoned under sentence of death in April 1937. While the public cult was manipulated to build up Franco as the heir to José Antonio, the Caudillo in private expressed his contempt for the Falangist leader. Serrano Suñer was always aware that praise for José Antonio was guaranteed to irritate Franco. On one occasion, the Generalísimo exploded ‘Lo ves, siempre a vueltas con la figura de ese mucbacho como cosa extraordinaria’ (‘see, always going on about that lad as if he was something out of the ordinary’). On another, Franco claimed delightedly to have proof that Primo de Rivera had died a coward’s death.92
It is possible that José Antonio might have worked to bring an early end to the carnage although whether, in the hysterical atmosphere of the times, he would have had any success is entirely a different matter. He was certainly open to the idea of national reconciliation in a way never approached by Franco either during the war or in the thirty-five years that followed. In his last days in prison, José Antonio was sketching out the possible membership and policies of a government of ‘national concord’ whose first act was to have been a general amnesty. His attitude to Franco was revealed clearly in his comments on the implications of a military victory which he feared would merely consolidate the past. He saw such a victory as the triumph of ‘a group of generals of depressing political mediocrity, committed to a series of political clichés, supported by old-style intransigent Carlism, the lazy and short-sighted conservative classes with their vested interests and agrarian and finance capitalism’.
The papers in which he put these thoughts down were sent to Prieto by the military commander of Alicante, Colonel Sicardo. Eventually, the Socialist leader forwarded copies to his two executors, Ramón Serrano Suñer and Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, in the hope of provoking dissent among the Falangist purists. This was a political error on Prieto’s part. With José Antonio dead, the validation of Serrano Suñer and Fernández Cuesta as his executors gave them his authority to carry out Franco’s policy.93 Had José Antonio Primo de Rivera reached Salamanca, he would have been a certain, and influential, critic of Franco. Franco’s exploitation of the Falange as a ready-made political base would have been made significantly more difficult.94 However, to assume that Franco would not have seen off Primo de Rivera in the same way as he disposed of so many rivals is to take too much for granted.
In contrast to the ruthlessness with which Franco disposed of his rivals was the alacrity with which he bent rules in the interests of his family. The examples of this during the Civil War presaged the protection under which the so-called ‘Franco clan’ would prosper in the post-war years. His intervention on behalf of Nicolás’s in-laws was an example of his readiness to do things for his family. Even more striking was the rehabilitation of his left-wing extremist brother Ramón despite the vehement opposition of many important military figures. In September 1936, Ramón Franco who was in Washington as Spanish air attaché, wrote to a friend in Barcelona to ascertain how he would be received in the Republican zone. Azaña allegedly said to the mutual friend ‘he shouldn’t come, he’d have a really hard time’. In the wildly precipitate way that had always characterized his behaviour, Ramón decided to go instead to the Nationalist zone shortly after hearing of his brother’s elevation to the Headship of State.95
Despite his past as an anarchist agitator and as a freemason and his involvement in various revolutionary activities, all ‘crimes’ for which others paid with their lives, Ramón was welcomed by his brother. In Seville, Queipo de Llano had already executed Blas Infante, the Andalusian Nationalist lawyer who had stood with Ramón in the revolutionary candidacy in the 1931 elections. The exquisite care for appearances which had allegedly prevented Franco opposing the execution of his cousin Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde at the beginning of the military uprising did not apply in the case of his brother. Ramón was sent to Mallorca to take over as head of the Nationalist forces there and given the acting rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.