Franco’s fears of the socio-political drift during the two years of the Republican–Socialist government would only last a short time. The global economic crisis hit Spain with full force during those years, causing industrial production rates to plummet, restricting Spain’s commercial exports, increasing its budgetary difficulties and generating huge unemployment, concentrated mostly in the agricultural sector (in December 1933, of the more than 600,000 unemployed, more than 400,000 were agricultural labourers from southern provinces).40 The Republican–Socialist Cabinet was almost powerless before the challenge and its own internal divisions accentuated the weariness of the coalition, which suffered a serious defeat in the general elections of November 1933. The victory went to the conservatives of Alejandro Lerroux’s Radical Party and the powerful and generally pro-authoritarian Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA – Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right), the new Catholic mass party led by José María Gil-Robles.
Franco had voted for the CEDA in the general election as he identified with its Catholic and conservative ideology and its pragmatic political strategy that sought to reform the Republic from within. He welcomed political change that would advance his professional expectations and reduce his instinctive repugnance towards the Republican regime. In fact, under both the Radical and Radical–CEDA governments of 1934 and 1935, Franco became the most distinguished Spanish army officer and the favourite general of the authorities: he was promoted to major general in March 1934 (just a month after the death of his beloved mother in Madrid, from where she was about to start a pilgrimage to Rome).
For these reasons of professional prestige, in October 1934, when the Socialists called for a general strike against the entry of the CEDA into the government and revolution broke out in Asturias (a revolution expolited by the Catalan autonomous government for its own ends), the Lerroux government tasked Franco with crushing both challenges with all military forces under his command, including the transfer and use of his beloved Legion to the Asturian front. This critical juncture provided an already clearly ambitious Franco with his first, satisfying, taste of quasi-omnipotent state power. For about 15 days, following the declaration of a state of war and the delegation of governmental functions, Franco was a genuine emergency dictator, controlling all the military and police forces in what he perceived to be a struggle against the revolution planned by Moscow and executed by its undercover agents and Spanish traitors. As he declared to the press in Oviedo after successfully quelling the last pockets of resistance: ‘This is a frontier war against socialism, Communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism.’41
The overwhelming victory he won in Asturias not only made him the hero of conservative public opinion but also reinforced his moral leadership among the army chiefs and officers, far above his recognized rank and seniority. His appointment as chief of central general staff in May 1935 by Gil-Robles, the new minister of war, cemented that leadership almost unassailably. As a result of this renewed public and professional prestige, Franco was repeatedly courted by nearly all parties of the political right. Apart from his good connections with Lerroux’s conservative Republicanism, his contacts with the CEDA were excellent, given the friendship shown to him by Gil-Robles and the membership of his brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Suñer (married to Franco’s wife’s younger sister), a prominent CEDA deputy for Zaragoza since 1933.42 His relationship with Alfonsist monarchism remained fluid through Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, one of the ideologists of the journal Acción Española, whom Franco had met when Sainz was professor of literature at the University of Oviedo.43 With regard to the Spanish Falange, the new and small fascist party founded in 1933 by the son of the former dictator, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, contact was scarce but revealing. The Falangist leader had sent a personal letter to Franco (through a mutual friend, Serrano Suñer) on the eve of October 1934 to alert him to the danger of revolution. Franco gave him a verbal response asking him to ‘keep faith in the military and give them support if a crisis broke out’.44
Given the circumstances, Franco’s concern at the prolonged governmental crisis that undermined collaboration between the Radicals (defenders of a democratic regime) and the cedistas (supporters of authoritarian reform that called into question the persistence of the regime) during 1935 is not surprising. In the end, tensions led to the breakdown of the coalition and forced the president of the Republic, the Catholic and conservative Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, to call new elections for 16 February 1936, against a backdrop of severe economic depression, strong political bipolarization and acute social antagonism. To the surprise of many observers, the elections gave victory to a new coalition of the left (the so-called Popular Front) over right-wing candidates by a slight majority (no more than 200,000 popular votes) and brought to power a left Republican government headed again by Azaña and supported by the Socialist and Communist parties.
The narrow victory of the Popular Front on 16 February 1936 tempted Franco to take part in his first serious coup. Over the following two days he sought to obtain the backing of the government and the president of the Republic in order to declare a state of war and prevent the transfer of power. The attempt was thwarted by the resistance of the civil authorities to taking that crucial step, the lack of material resources to execute it and by the decision of the cautious chief of staff not to act until almost fully certain of success. When the head of government suggested to him on the 18th that the military act on their own initiative, Franco replied with full sincerity: ‘The army does not yet have the moral unity necessary to undertake this task.’45
Consequently, Franco had to resign himself to the return to power of Azaña, who, as a precautionary measure, ordered, on 21 February, Franco’s transfer from Madrid to the important but distant military headquarters of the Canary Islands. It was a very considerable professional and political setback and affected him deeply. Before leaving, he officially met the new prime minister and forcefully reproached him on his decision to dispense with his services: ‘You are making a mistake in sending me away because in Madrid I could be more useful to the army and to the peace of Spain.’ Azaña’s response only accentuated his fears: ‘I don’t fear uprisings. I knew about Sanjurjo’s plot and I could have avoided it but preferred to see it defeated.’46
Franco’s concerns continued to be exacerbated by the persistent political crises experienced during the first half of 1936; the decidedly reformist actions of the government of the Popular Front again had to face a two-pronged attack. On one side were the revolutionary demands of anarcho-syndicalism, seconded by the radical faction of the socialists, which undermined the crucial cooperation between bourgeois republicanism and reformist socialism as pillars of the ruling coalition and its interclass supporters. On the other side was the convergence of the right-wing parties around a reactionary strategy which put all its hopes in military intervention to tackle the crisis and overthrow democratic reformism and the perceived revolutionary spectre behind it.
By virtue of his rank and influence, Franco was from the outset – although with his usual caution – in contact with the broad anti-republican conspiracy that was brewing within the army under the technical direction of General Emilio Mola from Pamplona (he was the former chief of security and police forces for Alfonso XIII). Finalized through the months of April and May, Mola’s plan consisted of orchestrating a simultaneous uprising of all military garrisons to seize power within a few days, after crushing any possible resistance in the larger cities and manufacturing centres. Franco’s hesitation to commit himself definitively to the uprising (which exasperated the rest of the plotters) came from both his fear of the consequences of failure (‘We can’t count on all of the army’) and his tenuous hope that the deterioration of the situation could be tackled legally with reduced risk and cost. Many years later he confessed with the utmost sincerity to his cousin and aide the reasons for his caution:
I was always in favour of the military
movement, because I understood that the time had come to save Spain from the chaos as the socialists and all the forces of the left together marched resolutely to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, as was proclaimed unreservedly by Largo Caballero [Union leader of the Socialist left] at his rallies and in the press, and especially in Parliament. What I always feared was that the lack of concerted action by the majority of the army would be a repeat of 10 August [1932]. […] I realized that the military movement would be resisted with great energy, and therefore rejected the widespread opinion, as stated by General Orgaz, which you also heard in Tenerife, ‘that it would be an easy job, and if I decided not to do it, another would’.47
Despite his initial scepticism, Franco persuaded his comrades in arms to accept that the hypothetical uprising would have no defined political profile (monarchist or otherwise) and was ‘only for God and for Spain’. He also insisted repeatedly that the operation was exclusively military, without reliance on any right-wing party: ‘No consideration was given by the movement to political forces.’48 He met with no opposition as all the conspirators shared his opinions, as General Mola, ‘technical director’ of the conspiracy, proclaimed very soon afterwards:
In this formidable undertaking [the reconstruction of Spain] we, the military, have to lay its foundations; we have to launch it; it is our right, because that is the nation’s wish, because we have a clear idea of our power and only we can consolidate the union of the people with the army.49
Finally, already deeply concerned by the powerful strike movements of May–June 1936, Franco’s vacillations that had unnerved the rest of the conspirators were swept away following the murder of the monarchist leader, José Calvo Sotelo, on 13 July 1936. The crime had been perpetrated by a group of assault guards (urban police) seeking revenge for the death of one of their commanders, a socialist sympathizer, in a Falange attack the day before in Madrid. Assuming that the assassination showed that the Republican government had no real authority and that state power lay in the gutter, Franco was prepared to fulfil his role in the coup: to conquer the Canary Islands and to proceed immediately to Morocco to take charge of the best and most hardened Spanish troops, the Army of Africa.
Divine Providence and Civil War
On 17 July 1936, as the military uprising began in Morocco, Franco fulfilled expectations and assumed command of the insurgents in the Canary Islands shortly before moving to the Protectorate to be at the forefront of the rebel troops. In keeping with the old praetorian and militaristic tradition, in his declaration of martial law he stated that ‘the situation of Spain is every day more critical’ because ‘anarchy reigns in most of the countryside and cities’ and ‘revolutionary strikes of all orders that paralyse the life of the nation’ proliferate, with the ‘complicity and negligence of weak civil authorities’. Accordingly, ‘the army, the navy and the forces of public order rush to defend the fatherland’ and to restore ‘peace, brotherhood and justice in all regions’. The final warning was not empty: ‘the energy required to maintain order shall be in proportion to the magnitude of the resistance that is offered.’50
With the same mixture of caution and determination that he had shown during his years as an officer, Franco managed to overcome problems. In case things went badly, he had already shipped his wife and daughter to France (they did not return until September). He also procured a diplomatic passport and shaved off his moustache in order to go unnoticed on the flight from the Canary Islands to Tetuán. Once he arrived in Morocco (after having stayed incognito in the French Zone), he installed himself in the high commissioner’s office and took over the direction of the insurrection with a strong nerve and infectious energy. He had an immediate chance to show his commitment to the cause in a difficult personal matter: it was reported that his cousin and childhood friend, Flight Commander Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde, had been sentenced to death for trying to resist the coup at the airfield in Tetuán. Franco did nothing to save him and temporarily ceded command to General Luis Orgaz to allow the cautionary execution.51
Much to the dismay of the military rebels, the insurrection launched on 17 July 1936 initially succeeded in only half of the country (the most agrarian and rural) and was crushed in the other half (the most developed and urbanized) by a combination of armed forces loyal to the government and swiftly armed trade union militias. In fact, the uprising had been strongest in a wide area of the west and centre of the peninsula (from Aragón to Galicia and the north of Extremadura, including almost all of Castile) and in a small zone of Andalusia (around Seville and Granada). The battle had been lost in two large separate zones: the east-central area (including Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia) and a northern strip (between the Basque country and Asturias). In military terms, the rebels had achieved control of most of the armed forces, including the crucial troops in Morocco (especially the Legion and indigenous regular forces, the Moors). However, they had also suffered the defection of most of the navy, air force and a good part of the forces of law and order (which had been key to saving the government in the capital and in Barcelona). As a result, in a few days the inconclusive military coup became a long and bloody civil war which pitted a military reaction, on one side of the trenches, against an unstable, forced alliance of reformists and revolutionaries on the other.52
In any case, the outbreak of hostilities also meant the beginning of the meteoric career of Franco to become supreme commander of the revolt and the leader of a purported ‘new state’ where Falangism would serve as the modernizing garb for a socio-political regime that was at heart reactionary and ultra-conservative. The Civil War waged between 18 July 1936 and 1 April 1939 laid the foundations of what would become the Francoist state, while at the same time providing an excellent political and diplomatic school for Franco. To his astounding good fortune – which he took as a sign of Divine Providence – the majority of politicians and generals who could have disputed his prominence in the insurgent camp were eliminated from the scene one after another: the charismatic Calvo Sotelo had been murdered previously; Sanjurjo was killed in a plane crash shortly after the uprising; General Fanjul and General Goded failed to succeed in their rebellion in Madrid and Barcelona respectively and were shot by Republicans; so too, the Falange leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who had been in a Republican prison since March, was shot in November 1936. Meanwhile, other generals with effective commands of troops, Mola and Queipo de Llano, were limited in their aspirations by their lower seniority (the former), their previous Republican inclinations (the latter) and their shared difficulties in holding their respective war fronts (Madrid in the case of Mola, Andalusia for Queipo).
It was Franco who got timely and vital military and diplomatic support from Germany and Italy through his own personal efforts and sending direct emissaries to Rome and Berlin. It was also Franco who had been recognized as the de facto insurgent leader by Hitler and Mussolini, despite the formal existence of the Junta de Defensa Nacional (National Defence Council) established in Burgos on 24 July with General Miguel Cabanellas, the oldest rebel commander, as president.53 Franco also attracted the strongest personal support from the Catholic hierarchy and led the victorious rebel troops who, once airlifted from Morocco, advanced unchecked from Seville to Madrid (the official capital whose occupation would lead to international legal recognition). In addition, given his reputed political neutrality, Franco enjoyed tacit and preferential support from all the right-wing groups that were confident of influencing his future political plans in their favour. This neutrality would prove to be a useful personal quality that he would use with great skill and notorious cynicism until the end of his days: ‘I am here because I neither understand nor do politics. That is the secret.’54
At the end of September 1936, those military, political and diplomatic successes by Franco and the expectation of a final assault on Madrid raised the need to concentrate strategic and political direction under a single command to increase the effectiveness of the war effort. The show o
f strength by the military junta could not be sustained without very serious domestic and diplomatic difficulties. Accordingly, in two meetings at an airfield close to Salamanca, on 21 and 28 September, the generals decided to elect Franco as Generalissimo of the army, navy and air force and head of government of the Spanish state, specifically giving him ‘all the powers of the new state’.55 On 1 October, after the transfer of power from the hands of the junta in Burgos, in his first political decision signed as ‘head of state’, Franco created a Junta Técnica del Estado (State Technical Council) responsible for administrative functions until ‘domination throughout the national territory’, subject to ‘the approval of the head of state’. A propaganda campaign began shortly afterwards with the first public reference to the head of state as ‘Caudillo of Spain’ with inevitable similar slogans in the press: ‘a fatherland, a state, a caudillo’; ‘the Caesars were the victorious generals’.56
The political rise of Franco meant the conversion of the collegiate military junta into a personal dictatorship, with an individual chosen by his comrades in arms as the absolute representative of the only power in insurgent Spain: the military. Significantly, Franco said after his election, ‘This is the most important moment of my life.’57 In his first public speech in Burgos after accepting office, on 1 October 1936, he announced emphatically both his style and political purpose: ‘You place Spain in my hands. My hand will be firm, it will not tremble and I will try to raise Spain to its rightful place according to its history and its past.’58
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