The Spanish Civil War (19 page)

The government was now faced by a civil war. Indeed, the committee in control at Mieres were contemplating a march on Madrid. Though they did not know that, Lerroux and his ministers now took several harsh decisions. First, they sent for Generals Goded and Francisco Franco to act as joint chiefs of staff to direct the suppression of the rebellion.
¹
Secondly, they accepted the advice of these two officers when they recommended the dispatch of elements of the
Regulares
and of the Foreign Legion to reduce the miners. Goded, as has been seen, had been chief of staff for some months at the beginning of the republic but had been dismissed by Azaña.

Francisco Franco Bahamonde was forty-two when he reached his new post under Lerroux. Born in 1892 at the naval base at El Ferrol in Galicia, the son of a dissolute naval paymaster and descendant of naval administrators on both sides of his conventional family, he had been intended for the sea. But there was no room in the naval Cadet School. The naval disaster in the Spanish American War of 1898 was responsible. Instead, Franco went, in 1907, to the Infantry Academy at Toledo. He was posted to Morocco in 1912, where he became, in quick succession, the youngest captain, major, colonel and general, gaining the last rank after the victorious end to the war. In 1916, he had been severely wounded in the stomach and returned to Spain for four years’ garrison-duty at Oviedo. He was second-in-command of the Foreign Legion at its inception in 1920, commanded it from 1923 to 1927 and, in particular, led the landing-party at Alhucemas Bay (under Sanjurjo) in 1925 which brought victory. He had criticized Primo de Rivera to his face, when the dictator seemed to be trying to prepare the army to leave Morocco, at a dinner in 1924. Indeed, he and some other
africanistas
even planned, in that year, to arrest Primo and his staff out of outrage against the idea of abandonment of the territory. Franco was dedicated to his profession—he never drank, never went out with women, and, at that time (as his pious biographers make haste to interject), never seemed religious. His puritanism may be attributed to the indiscretions of his father, the naval paymaster, who separated from his wife in 1907 and lived with a mistress in Madrid thenceforth until his death in 1942, aged eighty-seven; and to the piety of his mother, who died in 1933 on the first step of a pilgrimage to Rome. Franco’s childhood was, no doubt, an unhappy time.

Franco always was known as a cruel disciplinarian. He had a reputation for bravery and for good luck under fire: he rode white horses in battle. The efficiency of the Foreign Legion owed much to him. He gained his first experience of fighting revolutions during the general strike of 1917, when he was first in Oviedo. He married—after delays due to campaigning—a girl of good Asturian family, Carmen Polo. Franco was short in height and, even in early middle life, had developed a stomach. His voice had also acquired a high-pitched tone which caused him to give to military commands the note of a prayer. To a British politician, he seemed like ‘a doctor with a big family practice
and a good bedside manner’, into whose ‘cotton-wool entanglements’ of ‘amazing complacency’ it was impossible to penetrate.
¹
He had a great reputation as ‘the brilliant young general’, but he refused to declare himself on any side in politics, though he had admired the idea of Maura’s ‘revolution from above’ and in the end liked Primo de Rivera. Even when the republic abolished promotions gained by merit, and so relegated him from near the top of the list of brigadier-generals to the bottom, he had taken the blow without complaint. When, in 1931, it was published in
ABC
that the new government intended to appoint him high commissioner of Morocco, Franco wrote that he would refuse such a post since to accept would reveal ‘a prejudice in favour of the régime recently installed, and a lukewarm loyalty to those who only yesterday epitomized the nation’.
²
He was shy, quiet and patient, but also ruthless, ambitious and determined: ‘a less straightforward man I never met’, said an American journalist who talked to him in 1936.
³
When monarchist conspirators were asked, ‘Is Franco with you?’, they were unable to give a clear answer. He had refused to support General Sanjurjo in the
pronunciamiento
of 1932. But he had promised Sanjurjo not to take action against him and he disliked Azaña’s reforms, particularly the closure of the new Military Academy at Saragossa, of which he had been the first commandant and to whose courses he had devoted much care (on the inspiration of Germany, which he had visited in 1928). Republicans knew, from addresses that he had given when at Saragossa, that he was a friend of authoritarian rule. They knew too that he had, for a long time, been interested in politics. As early as 1926, he had been demanding books on political theory to be sent to his headquarters.
⁴
But the general’s brother, Ramón, a noted pilot who had been the first man to fly the south Atlantic, was a republican, even a revolutionary: it had been he who in 1930 had dropped republican pamphlets over the Royal Palace during the abortive republican rising.

The government called not only on General Franco, who knew Asturias, to direct the battle against the miners, but also upon the Foreign Legion and Moroccan troops, because they plainly doubted whether other troops would be successful. The minister of war, the radical
Diego Hidalgo, later explained that he was appalled at the alternative prospect of seeing the young conscripts from the peninsula dying in Asturias because of their inexperience. They would be fighting against past-masters of dynamiting and of the technique of the ambush. ‘I decided’, he wrote, ‘that it was necessary to call on the units which Spain maintains for its defence, whose
métier
is to fight and die in the accomplishment of their duty.’
¹
Within a few hours of General Franco’s arrival at the ministry of war, units of the Legion were indeed dispatched under Colonel Yagüe to assist the regular garrisons in the north. Another column under a liberal general, López Ochoa, who had led the military side to the republican conspiracy in 1930, fought its way to reinforce the beleaguered garrison in the centre of Oviedo.

The Foreign Legion and the
Regulares
were successful. Accompanied by aircraft, they swiftly relieved Oviedo though not before the sanctuary of the ‘chaste King’ Alfonso, the beautiful ‘cámara santa’, was nearly destroyed by the miners. Gijón fell on 10 October. In these towns, the conquerors gave themselves over to repression. After fifteen days of war and revolution, only the communists wanted to fight on in the other towns. González Peña resigned his directorship of the revolution. The Legion captured several of the towns house by house. Colonel Yagüe, in command of the Legion, encouraged the exemplary use of brutality in the repression. In the end, the rebels at Sama finally surrendered. Belarmino Tomás, the socialist leader who had been at the centre of all the fighting, spoke in the following terms to a crowd of miners gathered in the main square:

Comrades, red soldiers! Here before you, certain that we have fulfilled the mandate with which you have entrusted us, we come to speak of the melancholy plight into which our glorious insurrectionary movement has fallen. We have to describe our peace conversations with the general of the enemy army. We have been defeated only for the time being. All that we can say is that, in the rest of the provinces of Spain, the workers did not do their duty and support us. Because of this failure, the government has been able to conquer the insurrection in Asturias. Furthermore, though we have rifles, machine-guns, and cannons, we have no more ammunition. All we can do, therefore, is to arrange peace. But this does not mean that we abandon the class strug
gle. Our surrender today is simply a halt on the route, where we make good our mistakes, preparing for our next battle which must end in the final victory of the exploited …
¹

There followed a severe retribution under the direction of a brutal major of police, Lisardo Doval, known for his ruthlessness. Some 1,500–2,000 persons were believed killed, and nearly 3,000 wounded. Of the dead, about 320 were civil guards, soldiers, assault guards and carabineers. The remainder, it must be presumed, were workers. Certainly many deaths occurred after the end of the fighting, at the time when the Legion were ‘driving home’ their victory.
²
Several thousand, perhaps as many as 30,000, political prisoners were also made in Spain during October and November 1934 (though the number may have been half that). Of these, the majority were in Asturias. The
casas del pueblo
of the region were turned into extra prisons, and those held within were subjected to every kind of indignity, including torture.
³
Almost 2,000 people died in this little revolution, among them 200 in the repression, 230–260 in the army or forces of order, and about 33 priests. A journalist, Luis de Sirval, who ventured to point out these terrible things, was himself arrested and murdered in prison by three officers of the Legion. In Madrid, Generals Franco and Goded were regarded as the saviours of the nation, while the right-wing press gave fearful information about the raping of nuns and gouging out of priests’ eyes. Otherwise, censorship on Asturias was complete. In the countryside, landlords celebrated by abandoning any willingness to collaborate with agrarian reform, evictions were carried on apace and those socialists who had avoided imprisonment received short shrift in the pursuit of employment. Further resentments were, therefore, created.

After the revolution of October 1934 and the manner in which it had been quelled, it would have required a superhuman effort to avoid the culminating disaster of civil war. But no such effort was forthcoming. Most socialist leaders were in prison. They were accompanied there by leaders of the Catalan government, by Azaña, and by several other left-wing politicians. Also in gaol were many anarchists, even though they had played little part in the rising, save in Asturias. The arrest of Azaña, attributable to panic, was followed by his being held in gaol for some months—an indignity for which there was no justification. In these conditions, the rising in Asturias assumed an epic significance in the minds of the Spanish Left. Some, echoing the last words of Belarmino Tomás in the doomed gathering in Sama, prophesied that October 1934 would be to Spain what 1905 had been to Russia. Largo Caballero, who remained in gaol till December 1935, passed his captivity in reading, for the first time, the works of Marx and Lenin. Now approaching seventy, the imagination of this long respected and moderate socialist leader became dominated by revolutionary visions. Many others found their time in gaol ‘a veritable school of revolution’.
¹
Meantime, in Paris, Romain Rolland announced that the world had seen nothing so beautiful since the Paris Commune. The brutality
of the proscription in Asturias caused people to forget that even Azaña would have put down the revolution; and news of the repression came through the reports of a Cortes commission and a British parliamentary delegation. Meantime, Largo’s mixed arbitration boards collapsed in many places, the building and metallurgical workers were driven back to a forty-eight-hour week and many were dismissed for having taken part in political strikes before October 1934. Employers cut wages wherever they could. CEDA deputies complained, but their voices were lost. On the other hand, no lands taken over by the Institute of Agrarian Reform were given back to their owners. Still, from now on a ‘revolutionary mentality of the Right and of the Left’ clearly dominated all parties.
¹

The events in Asturias caused a thrill of horror to run through the Spanish middle class. To them it seemed that anything, even a military dictatorship, was preferable to disintegration. Would General Franco take power now that he was chief of staff? Would Gil Robles and the CEDA make the best of their opportunity?

Lerroux was still Prime Minister. In the following months, the old pirate did his best to steer a middle path. Thus, when the monarchists demanded that the Catalan statute should be abolished altogether because of Companys’s revolution, Lerroux (here supported by the CEDA) secured its suspension only, with the Catalan provinces being administered by a governor-general. His minister of agriculture, the CEDA politician Giménez Fernández, continued to try and distribute land, for a time, and introduced legislation to protect smallholders. He desired, for instance, to settle 10,000 farmers during 1935. He was, however, continually thwarted by people, such as the Carlist Lamamié de Clairac, who had so damaged the first Agrarian Bill in its discussions in the Cortes.

The most difficult question for the government, however, concerned the punishment of the rebels of 1934. For, by February 1935, the military tribunals had named twenty death penalties. Of these, two were carried out.
²
The condemned included Companys; socialist deputies, such as poor Teodomiro Menéndez, who had gone al
most mad during his imprisonment because of the sounds of torture which he had heard; Ramón González Peña; Belarmino Tomás; and some officers who had sided with the rebellion in Madrid and in Catalonia. Meantime, many socialist-led municipal councils continued suspended, because their members belonged to the same party as the rebels of 1934. Lerroux, picturing the bitterness which would be caused by the execution of, say, Belarmino Tomás and González Peña (the two socialist deputies for Asturias), not to speak of Companys, favoured the commutation of all further death sentences. The CEDA ministers supported the death penalty. Gil Robles argued for it with energy. Lerroux was supported by the President, Alcalá Zamora, who recalled how General Sanjurjo and his co-plotters had been reprieved in 1933. The sentences were commuted. The CEDA ministers resigned. After a prolonged crisis, Lerroux reformed a cabinet in which the CEDA had five representatives, including Gil Robles as minister for war.

Gil Robles appointed Franco as chief of staff, bringing him back from command in Morocco where he had been sent the preceding winter. Thereafter, several right-wing officers were promoted, and others believed to be liberals or socialists lost their jobs. After the revolution in Asturias, the army understandably more than ever seemed to the Right a safe support for old Spain. Gil Robles also embarked on negotiations to buy arms from Germany. But there were no more executions. Companys and other leaders convicted of rebellion were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment—a sentence which no one believed would be carried out. Largo Caballero was detained with others without trial for months. Azaña was released, the charges against him having failed to gain a two-thirds majority in the Cortes, though it was clear from speeches made by politicians on the Right that many hoped to finish with him and the left republicans once and for all.
¹

The venom with which the two sides of the political spectrum now regarded each other was difficult to assuage. But the men of the Centre—and, in these circumstances, both the President and Prime Min
ister were so—had a chance to resolve matters. They wasted their opportunity. A revision of some clauses of the constitution was proposed. This might have modified the character of regional autonomy, established a senate, and altered the divorce and marriage laws. An independent, if orthodox, financier, Joaquín Chapaprieta, prepared to introduce a budget—which had not been seen in the republic since 1932. He desired to prune corruption and bureaucratic waste. These measures, admirable in themselves, would have cut government spending on education—including the still inadequate teachers’ salaries. But no budget and no constitutional revision were ever agreed.
¹
(The budget of 1932, repeated annually, was the republic’s only finance act.) Then the minister of agriculture, Giménez Fernández, was dismissed in May 1935, over a proposed alteration of the Agrarian Law: his humane ideas had given him the nickname of ‘the white bolshevik’ in monarchist circles, and his habit of invoking papal encyclicals to defend his drafts infuriated others. His eclipse spelled the end of any idea that the CEDA might modify, rather than shelve, the Law of Agrarian Reform. Chapaprieta formed a government, in which Lerroux became foreign minister. But the radical party was now ruined by scandal.

A Dutch financial adventurer, Daniel Strauss, had persuaded certain ministers to favour a new type of roulette wheel, the
straperlo.
Strauss promised that, in return for permission to introduce this wheel, he would guarantee profits. When the scandal broke, Lerroux’s adopted son was found to be intimately concerned with Strauss. Lerroux himself, whose finances had always been devious, was also implicated, as were Salazar Alonso, ex-minister of the interior and mayor of Madrid; the civil governor of Barcelona; and some others. The radicals resigned, amid execration, and the word
straperlo
passed into the language to signify a public scandal. Meantime, the radical party, which had played so important a part in the life of the republic, even though its policies had meant so little, fell apart, and the alliance which Lerroux had sealed with Gil Robles, and which had effectively governed Spain for a year, collapsed too.
²
Within weeks, the Prime Minister
quarrelled with Gil Robles, technically over Chapaprieta’s desire to introduce a land tax on large holdings and to increase death duties, to 3½ per cent from 1 per cent; but Gil Robles had provoked the crisis in order to make his final bid for the premiership.

Yet President Alcalá Zamora, who had interfered continuously in the day-to-day running of administration during the preceding year, was still determined to avoid asking the leader of the CEDA to form a government. While Gil Robles himself in late 1935 seemed to have matured from the experimental, Catholic corporativist which he had claimed to be in 1933,
¹
some of his followers, particularly the
JAPistas,
seemed impatient to take up arms: they had already taken symbols, as well as language, which resembled fascism. They carried a black cross from which hung the letters Alpha and Omega, set in white, and framed in red, hoping thus to symbolize Pelayo, the first king of the
Reconquista.
Gil Robles had also a programme of constitutional reform which Alcalá Zamora disliked.
²
So the President tried a rash expedient; he asked one of his friends, Manuel Portela Valladares, a politician from Galicia of the days of the monarchy, to form a caretaker government and prepare for new elections.
³
Portela, a freemason and the indefatigable historian of the Priscillian heresy, had been rediscovered as a politician by Lerroux on a beach in northern Spain in the summer of 1934. As minister of the interior earlier in 1935, he had been Alcalá Zamora’s informant as to what was going on in the cabinet. The President now hoped that Portela could reorganize the ‘forces of the Centre’ to take the place of the defunct radical party.

Gil Robles was outraged at Alcalá Zamora’s action. So was his under-secretary at the ministry of war, General Fanjul, who told him ‘If you give me the order, I will this very night move into the streets of Madrid with the garrison of the capital. General Varela thinks as I do.’ Gil Robles’s reply was not as explicit as it might have been: ‘If the army, grouped around its natural commands, believes that it must temporarily take over power with the object of saving the spirit of the constitution, I will not constitute the least obstacle.’ He told Fanjul to consult with the other generals. General Franco, chief of staff, gave his opinion that the army could not be counted upon to carry out a
coup
d’état.
So none was embarked upon.
¹
Gil Robles left the ministry of war. General Franco wept.
²
Portela formed a caretaker administration of extra-parliamentarians and centre politicians of the second rank. While the Right denounced Gil Robles for weakness, the press censorship was relaxed. Azaña had already begun to restore the fortunes of the Republican Left, with a successful oratorical performance to an audience of perhaps 100,000 in the autumn, outside Madrid, in a field at Comillas: the ‘clamorous ovation’ which greeted the speech had a resonance throughout the country.
³
Next, the
casas del pueblo
were reopened, and the Left reawoke: ‘October’ and ‘Asturias’ became sacred words, signifying a desperate struggle of heroic revolutionaries against the Foreign Legion—‘the Moors’, and the ‘butchers of October’.

4. Madrid during the Second Republic

The Cortes were dissolved on 4 January. The elections were to be held on 16 February. Portela tried to delay the poll by unconstitutional procrastination; he failed. The electoral campaign which intervened between these dates was, to begin with, dominated by Gil Robles. His photograph as the
Jefe,
with a legend beneath demanding for him ‘an absolute majority so that he can give you a great Spain’, stared threateningly from the hoardings of the Puerta del Sol. Yet, as the campaign got under way, it became clear to the leaders of the CEDA that their path might not be so easy as they had assumed. They therefore began to arrange common lists with other right-wing parties. The Alfonsine monarchists and Carlists, together with the ‘agrarians’ and ‘independents’, stood in alliance in most places with the CEDA in ‘the National Front’.

The past year had been an active one for both monarchist parties, with military training for two hundred Carlists disguised as Peruvian officers at an airfield near Rome,
¹
and ideological discussion among the monarchists, still veering between ‘fascism’ and traditionalism. Calvo Sotelo, Primo’s minister of finance, had joined Renovación Española but was trying to create an alliance of all authoritarian monarchists: his views had evolved towards fascism during his exile in France, partly from contact with Maurras’s Action Française. From his writings, and those of Ramiro de Maeztu (editor still of
Acción Española
), Pradera (the Carlist ideologue of ‘the new state’), and Sainz Rodríguez, now the leading Alfonsist ‘theoretician’, it certainly seemed as if the ranks of the authoritarian Right were closing.

As for the Falange, José Antonio had been engaged in a long controversy with the old leader of the JONS, Ledesma Ramos. The latter had always regarded José Antonio as a mere
señorito,
and criticized him for his contacts with the church and the upper class.
²
Ledesma started
a workers’ organization, the CONS (Confederación de Obreros Sindicalistas), which, however, found few followers. José Antonio succeeded in making headway against the Falange extremists who wanted violence, but he had been unsuccessful in creating a policy which his more monarchist financial backers could support as well as Ledesma. In October 1934, José Antonio had been confirmed as leader of the party by only one vote, seventeen to sixteen.
¹
Ledesma tried to break the JONS away from the Falange to keep it as a national syndicalist party, even if a minute one: his personal relations with José Antonio had always been bad. When Ledesma wrote some articles denouncing José Antonio as the ‘tool of reaction’, he was expelled from the party. These events, and the financial difficulties of these young Spanish fascists, had prevented their membership from increasing (especially after the rich monarchist Marqués de Eliseda had broken with them) following the Asturias revolution, when one might have expected their appeal to have grown. But they continued to parade in blue shirts on Sundays. In the election campaign, the Falange remained outside the right-wing alliance, Gil Robles being unable to agree to the demands for apportionment of seats made by José Antonio. José Antonio’s old constituency at Cádiz would have nothing to do with him and the CEDA, like the Carlists, were critical of José Antonio’s economic ‘corporativism’, which they regarded as dangerously socialist. The Falange put up a few candidates, nevertheless, who lambasted the CEDA’s ‘sterile and stupid biennium in power’. Many of the most energetic falangists were, however, below voting age.
²