by Hugh Thomas
The committee of generals in Madrid were making separate plans, however, under the direction of General Rodríguez del Barrio. A scheme was put forward for a coup d’état on 17 April. Rodríguez del Barrio, Orgaz and Varela would raise Madrid; Villegas, Saragossa; Fanjul, Burgos; Ponte and Saliquet, Valladolid; and González Carrasco, Barcelona. The rising would be ‘for Spain’, with no specific political goal. After victory only, the generals would consider ‘the structure of the régime, symbols etc.’.3 The planners were in some uncertainty as to whether to advance on Madrid from the provinces, or to concentrate on Madrid and then crush the provinces, perhaps with the help, under both schemes, of Mola, Goded and Franco, in Pamplona, Palma de Mallorca and Las Palmas, respectively. Sanjurjo would be titular commander-in-chief.
If the officers were beginning to decide what they wanted, the government seemed increasingly unable to maintain themselves. Their freedom of action was, furthermore, limited since they needed the votes of the socialists to remain in power. Hence they could close the headquarters of the Falange in Madrid, on 27 February, but could do nothing against the socialist youth. Nor, it is fair to say, did several ministers want to. Azaña might flirt with the idea of some government of the centre, but the Popular Front, of which he was the leader, seemed, both in Madrid and in the provincial capitals, more and more the instrument of the revolutionary socialist Left. Day after day, the tension was maintained by news of a murder here, an attempted lynching there, a church, nunnery, or newspaper office burned down in a provincial capital. On 15 March (when a falangist had placed a bomb in Largo Caballero’s house following an attack on Jiménez de Asúa), José Antonio was arrested, nominally on a charge of keeping arms without licence.1 This left his organization without a leader, and removed his moderating influence. Before his arrest, Azaña apparently sent for José Antonio and suggested that he leave the country. ‘I cannot,’ answered José Antonio, ‘my mother is ill.’ ‘But your mother died many years ago,’ answered Azaña. ‘My mother is Spain,’ allegedly replied José Antonio, ‘I cannot leave her.’ Eduardo Aunós, minister of labour under Primo, also proposed that José Antonio should flee the country. ‘Certainly not,’ answered José Antonio, ‘the Falange is not an old-fashioned party of plotters, with its leaders abroad.’
The secretary-general of the party, Raimundo Fernández Cuesta, an old childhood friend and fellow-lawyer of José Antonio, was too weak to provide effective alternative leadership after the leader was in gaol.
A week later, the republic received a blow from the Left, in the manner of Casas Viejas. Despite the new impetus given to the agrarian reform, many landless peasants who had voted for the Popular Front considered the pace too slow. The clash came in the latifundio regions of Estremadura, politically incandescent since 1931. The tension was exacerbated by the heavy rains of the winter, which had delayed ploughing. Hence, agricultural unemployment was again on the increase. Early in March, peasants began to move onto one or two large estates, anticipating land reform, but unconnected to the Institute’s plans for the villages concerned. The new minister of agriculture, Mariano Ruiz Funes, a professor of law by profession, sensing the mood, tried to hasten the speed of settlement in Estremadura, making use of a ‘social utility’ clause of the last Land Law of the radical government which had been intended for very different purposes. This concession was not enough. On 25 March, some 60,000 peasants, by pre-arrangement, under the direction of the socialist union, the FNTT of the province, took over some 3,000 farms at five in the morning, cried ‘¡Viva La República!’ and started to plough. This settlement, on a single day, of several times the number of farmers who had been established since the passage of the Law of Agrarian Reform, was not gone back upon. Troops were dispatched, but this was no longer 1917; they were withdrawn. Other settlements—numbers are uncertain—in the same region followed, equally unchallenged by the law. The epidemic of occupations ended with the end of the spring ploughing season, but a whole province’s economic life had been overturned. In Badajoz, at least, Liberty had come! The land concerned was partly farmed collectively, partly by new peasant proprietors.1
This occupation was followed in other provinces by a crippling series of rural strikes over wages. Many confident labourers would arrive at large farms and demand work with threats. Landowners left for the cities. So too did such smaller farmers as could afford it. Pusillanimous people were even afraid in some villages to go to church, since that seemed an act aligning the church-goer with traditional Spain. Meantime, regular settlements by the Institute of Agrarian Reform continued: some 70,000 settlers were officially confirmed in March, including those of the great peasant revolt of Badajoz; 20,000 in April; and 5,000 a month between then and July. Perhaps, though, the Institute’s figure of 114,000 settlers between February and July was over-modest and that of the minister, Ruiz Funes, more accurate: he said the total was 190,000.2 One serious incident occurred at Yeste (Murcia), where several peasants were brutally, if accidentally, killed. Alongside these troubles, agriculture itself declined, the harvest being poor, agricultural credit unavailable, and farm managers wondering if it were worthwhile continuing to carry on operations. Terror prevailed in many parts of the countryside in early 1936. This was increased by the FNTT’s call to its members to form militias in every village to defend the occupations carried out; actually, these existed since 1934, often under the guise of athletic associations.1 Lightning strikes were often called, men came out without warning, with demands for increases in wages or short hours, and obtaining both from landlords or managers too much on the defensive to resist. ‘The look of triumph on the faces of the workmen was sometimes very striking’, recalled an Englishman in Andalusia.2
Youth movements on both sides despised the ‘conformism’ of party leaders: the socialist youth looked on Prieto as a traitor, and the JAPistas looked on Gil Robles (still under forty) as too old. Several socialist youth leaders visited Moscow in March and returned communists.3 Newsboys in particular fought pitched battles over bales of left- or right-wing newspapers. Youth, on both sides, was in the street, and seems to have carried the nation with it, wherever it was going. Motorized squadrons of the JAP drove, like the early fascists in Italy, into working-class districts and shot up their enemies, who replied in kind. All that Azaña did was to reflect that the Spanish working class were ‘raw material for an artist’. On 4 April, he gave an interview to Louis Fischer, the American journalist. ‘Why don’t you purge the army?’ asked Fischer. ‘Why?’ demanded Azaña. ‘Because some weeks ago there were tanks in the streets, and you were in the ministry of the interior until two o’clock in the morning. You must have feared a revolt.’ ‘Café gossip,’ answered Azaña. ‘I heard it in the Cortes,’ returned Fischer. ‘Ah, that’s one big café,’ replied Azaña (many cafés were, in fact, extensions of the Cortes). He added: ‘The only Spaniard who is always right is Azaña. If all Spaniards were Azañistas, all would be well.’4 But to another journalist he admitted, more accurately, ‘¡Sol y sombra! Light and shade! That is Spain.’5
In early April a constitutional crisis came, over the presidency. Alcalá Zamora, by the terms of the constitution, could be voted out of his presidential office, since he had dissolved the Cortes twice. The Left proceeded to use the constitution in this way even though they had profited from the last dissolution. The President, the new government found, was ‘a furious, inflamed enemy’ who seemed to be ‘a leader of the anti-republican opposition’. Some thought that Alcalá Zamora might stage a coup d’état by dissolving parliament and forming an extra-parliamentary government.1 Largo Caballero and his friends believed that with Alcalá Zamora ‘the Bourbon spirit survived in the Palacio de Oriente’.2 They hoped to remove Alcalá Zamora from the presidency, and then Azaña effectively from the government, by promoting the latter’s presidential candidature.3 Azaña might, it is true, then ask Prieto to form a government. But the socialist party could veto that idea, and Prieto would probably conform. Thus Azaña and Prieto wou
ld both be ‘neutralized’ and a weak government formed which would be incapable of resisting either Left or Right. The way would then be really open to ‘revolution’. In the event, Prieto, always nervous lest he might lose his footing in the socialist party, did conform. He was even persuaded to take the lead in the ‘impeachment’ of the President. When this test came, Alcalá Zamora had no friends. Gil Robles and the CEDA could not vote for him after he had intrigued so long to keep them from power. The monarchists hated him as a traitor to the king. So he left, unregretted, a bitter intriguer hating all his old associates and never forgiven by them.4
Azaña did turn out to be the only possible candidate for the presidency for whom the Left would vote. Events seemed to be going the way that Largo Caballero, Araquistain and Álvarez del Vayo hoped. They and their young supporters had now ‘absolute faith in their capacity to occupy violently and victoriously the centres of governmental power’.5
On 15 April, a bomb was flung at the presidential tribune during the parade held in the Paseo de la Castellana in honour of the fourth anniversary of the republic. Lieutenant Anastasio de los Reyes, of the civil guard, was shot dead by the assault guards, apparently because he was thought to have had his own revolver trained on Azaña. The funeral of this officer on the 17th occasioned a demonstration. The hearse was accompanied on its way to the East Cemetery by most of the Madrid falangists still at large, all shouting ‘Spain! One, Great, and Free!’ Enthusiastic members of the socialist youth movement sang the ‘International’, saluted with their fists, and sprayed the cortège with bullets. At the cemetery itself, a running battle occurred between the falangists and assault guards. About a dozen people were killed during the course of the day—among them Andrés Sáenz de Heredia, a first cousin of José Antonio. The skirmish suggested that civil war had almost begun. The war of rumours was certainly uncontrollable. The Right thus alleged that Bela Kun, the Hungarian communist, who was believed throughout the western world to be a mixture of Robespierre and Lenin, had arrived in Seville, to start a revolution. But it was probably the journalist Ilya Ehrenburg.
Although conditions seemed promising, the plan for the military rising in April collapsed. All depended on General Rodríguez del Barrio, inspector-general of the army, whose task was to arouse the Madrid garrisons. General Varela was to arrest the minister of war, General Masquelet, and take over the army. But Rodríguez del Barrio was dying of cancer of the stomach. At the last moment, partly because of his health, partly because of cold feet among officers in Barcelona, he postponed the action. General Orgaz waited in vain for the signal in the friendly Italian Embassy. If a rising had occurred in April, it would probably have failed, since neither the Carlists nor the Falange were ready. The failure of this attempt led to agreement among the rebellious officers that General Mola in Pamplona should become ‘the director’ of the whole conspiracy.1
Emilio Mola was a courageous, imaginative, devious and literary-minded officer, whose ascetic, spectacle-framed face caused him to seem more a ‘papal secretary than a general’.2 But he came from a military family which had been busy in the liberal interest in the nineteenth century. Born in Cuba, active in Morocco with the native troops of the Regulares from their formation, gallant at the defence of Dar Akobba, Mola had been director-general of security at the time of the fall of the monarchy, and as such had incurred the special enmity of republican intellectuals: ‘Shoot Mola’ had been a popular slogan for rioters in 1930–31. As a result, he had been left without employment during Azaña’s first government, though his memoirs had been widely read. Before 1936, he had not associated with the plots against the republic. But conspiracy turned out to be peculiarly his métier.
His plans were soon made clear. Two branches of the plot, one civil, one military, were to be set up in the main cities of Spain, the Balearic and Canary Isles, and Spanish Morocco. Unlike some, Mola realized that the age of the old-style pronunciamiento was past: civilian support was necessary. The aim of the movement, declared Mola, was to establish ‘order, peace, and justice’. But it was obvious that the subsequent government envisaged would be tougher, and more lasting, than Primo de Rivera’s directorate had been: Mola envisaged no mere ‘brief parenthesis’ in the constitutional life of Spain, as Primo did, in his first pronunciamiento. All could take part in the rising ‘except those who receive inspiration from abroad, socialists, freemasons, anarchists, communists, etc.’. The provincial representatives were instructed to work out detailed plans for seizing public buildings in their localities, particularly lines of communication, and to prepare a declaration announcing a state of war. General Sanjurjo would fly in from Portugal and become President of a military junta, ‘which will immediately establish the law of the land’. In some places, such as Seville, the Falange was given an important part in the rising, but nowhere were the political aims of that party mentioned. Mola’s first plan included the following provision:
It will be borne in mind that the action, in order to crush, as soon as possible, a strong and well-organized enemy, will have to be very violent. Hence, all directors of political parties, societies, or unions not pledged to the movement will be imprisoned: such people will be administered exemplary punishments, so that movements of rebellion or strikes will be strangled.1
The document was signed ‘El Director’—that is, Mola. This conspiracy was organized by a minority of officers relying on the patriotism of others to join in, if the occasion to act were appropriately chosen: not many officers were falangists, and few were even monarchist. But many retired officers were happy to play a part. Perhaps their wives egged them on: ‘You tolerate this? What is the army doing? When will it rise?’1 During the course of the spring, more and more officers became disturbed at the continuing disorder. In Madrid General Rodríguez del Barrio, meantime, died, as expected. General Varela was imprisoned in Cádiz, and Orgaz exiled to the Canaries. Their activities in April had become known to the government.
The Carlists were busy in Lisbon trying to arrange with Sanjurjo the nature of the future Spain after the revolution. Fal Conde wanted the dissolution of all political parties, and a government of three men only—Sanjurjo as President and in control of defence, an education minister, and an ‘industrial’ minister. During the spring, meantime, negotiations between the conspirators and the Basque nationalists were begun: Mola and the monarchists sought to draw the latter away from their understandings with the Left, and some arms were even made available to them.2 The canvassing of possible leaders of the rising continued. Through the headquarters of the eight military commands of the Spanish army on the Peninsula, to the smaller commands in the Balearics and the Canaries, to the three mountain brigades and the three general inspectorates, Mola’s messengers, sometimes upper-class girls, sometimes officers in civilian dress, travelled patiently and secretly by rail or road: names, dates, tasks were assigned, and reassigned.
Each of the eight military regions in Spain at that time had on paper one division, and each division had two brigades. Usually, the second brigade was undermanned, because of men being on leave, or because many conscripts had bought themselves out. Hence, the commander of the first brigade in each division was the important officer. His headquarters were in the same city as that of the regional divisional commander: the other brigade would be in a lesser city, such as indeed was Mola’s brigade, in Pamplona (the second, attached to the 6th Division, whose headquarters was at Burgos). Each brigade had two regiments, of which the first was quartered at divisional headquarters: the other three regiments were scattered in other towns, the unit being sometimes only a platoon.
Azaña’s government had ensured, as they thought, that all the divisional commanders were republicans; but General Cabanellas in Saragossa, in command of the 5th Division, was party to Mola’s plans. The others were hostile. Mola’s plan envisaged that those hostile divisions and the other units dependent on them would be seized by other generals or colonels, either serving in the city concerned, or specially
sent there.
Mola’s agents went too, of course, to the headquarters of the Army of Africa. But Mola’s name was not a magic one. Many commanders were reluctant to commit themselves. What was Goded going to do, they asked, and what of Franco? The generals in Madrid, the UME, and the Carlists still seemed to pull in different directions. ‘The children normal, the nannies worse,’ one of Mola’s representatives telegraphed from Andalusia to Pamplona in April, suggesting the unpreparedness of the senior officers and the readiness of younger ones.1 What, too, of the Falange? José Antonio in prison still warned, ‘We will be neither the vanguard, nor the shock troops, nor the invaluable ally of any confused reactionary movement’.2 Brave words, and they may well have expressed the real views of those old falangists who had been brawling in the streets ever since Ledesma launched La Conquista del Estado in 1931. But, by this time, the die was cast. The Falange could obviously not stand aside from a military rising.