Franco. Paul Preston
semi-official trade union organization of the regime. A massive programme of infrastructural investment in roads and railways created a high degree of prosperity and near full employment. For an Army officer, particularly after the disorders of the period 1917 to 1923, it was a good time to be on active service. The constant criticism of the Army which officers associated with the parliamentary monarchy had been silenced. The triumph of Alhucemas had revived military popularity. It is little wonder that, like many Army officers and civilian rightists, Franco would come to look back on the six years of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship as a golden age. He often commented during the 1930s that they were the only period of good government that Spain had enjoyed in modern times. In his view, Primo’s error was to have announced that he would hold power only for a short time until he had solved Spain’s problems. Franco said reprovingly to his Oviedo acquaintance, the monarchist, Pedro Sainz Rodríguez ‘that was a mistake; if you accept a command you have to take it as if it was going to be for the rest of your life’.55
The Dictatorship was also a period in which Franco experienced further inflation of his ego. On the evening of 3 February 1926, his fellow cadets of the fourteenth intake (promoción no. 14) at the Academia de Infantería de Toledo met to pay homage to the first of their number to become a general. They presented him with a dress sword and a parchment with the following inscription: ‘When the passage through the world of the present generation is no more than a brief comment in the book of History, there will endure the memory of the sublime epic written by the Spanish Army in the development of the nation. And the glorious names of the most important caudillos will be raised on high, and above them all will be lifted triumphantly that of General Francisco Franco Bahamonde to reach the sublime heights achieved by other illustrious men of war, Leiva, Mondragón, Valdivia and Hernán Cortés. His comrades pay this tribute of admiration and affection to him in recognition of his patriotism, his intelligence and his bravery’.56
In the course of the next few days, Franco would receive many telegrams from the local authorities of El Ferrol recounting the acts of homage mounted for his mother. On Sunday 7 February, bands played, firework displays were organized and ships in the bay sounded their horns. The town turned out to acclaim the historic flight by Ramón, who was still in Argentina, although Franco was not forgotten in the endless tributes made to Doña Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade. 12 February was declared a holiday in El Ferrol in honour of both brothers. The streets of the town were illuminated and a Te Deum was sung in the Church of San Julián to celebrate their achievements. The plaque was unveiled in the calle María. Messages of congratulation to Doña Pilar for both her sons arrived from the Alcaldes (mayors) of El Ferrol, the four provincial capitals of Galicia and from many towns across Spain.57 On 10 February, a massive crowd turned out in the Plaza de Colón (Columbus) in Madrid to acclaim Ramón’s achievement. In part, the media coverage and public enthusiasm were orchestrated by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in order to profit in propaganda terms from the flight of the Plus Ultra.
The adulation was largely directed at Ramón, but there is no reason to believe that Franco was resentful at seeing the black sheep of the family suddenly converted into a national hero. The adulation of his brother as a twentieth century Christopher Columbus may, however, have inspired Franco’s later efforts to present himself as a modern-day El Cid. Franco always had an intense loyalty to his family and, over the years, was to use his own position to help and protect Ramón from the consequences of his wilder actions. In any case, his own triumphs and popularity were sufficient in frequency and intensity for him not to need to feel envy. At Easter 1926, during the Corpus Christi procession at Madrid’s San Jerónimo Church, he commanded the troops which lined the streets and escorted the host. As the legendary hero of Africa, he was the object of the admiring attention of the upper class Madrileños who made up the congregation.58 In the late summer of 1927, Franco accompanied the King and Queen on an official visit to Africa during which new colours were given to the Legion at their headquarters in Dar Riffien.59
On 14 September 1926, Franco’s first and only child María del Carmen was born in Oviedo where Carmen had gone to be with her dying father.60 The new arrival was to become the focus of his emotional life. Years later, he was to say ‘when Carmen was born, I thought that I would go mad with joy. I would have liked to have had more children but it was not to be’.61 There have been insistent rumours that Carmen was not really Francisco’s daughter but was adopted, and that the father may have been his promiscuous brother Ramón. There is no evidence to support this theory, which seems to have arisen entirely from the fact that there are no known photographs of Carmen Polo noticeably pregnant and from Ramón’s notorious sexual adventurism.62 Franco’s sister, Pilar, went out of her way in her memoirs to make a point of saying that she saw Carmen Polo pregnant although her dates are wrong by two years.63
The posting to Madrid began a period in which Franco had plenty of spare time. Rather than make the lives of his colonels a misery by frequent surprise inspections, he left them to get on with running their own barracks, a pattern that he would later follow with his ministers. He rented an apartment on the elegant Castellana avenue and enjoyed a busy social life. He regularly met military friends from Africa and the Toledo Academy at the regular social gatherings or tertulias of the upper-class club, La Gran Peña, and in the cafés of Alcalá and the Gran Via. He was relatively close to Millán Astray, Emilio Mola, Luis Orgaz, José Enrique Varela and Juan Yagüe.64 While living in Madrid, he acquired a passion for cinema and became a member of the tertulia of the politician and writer Natalio Rivas, a member of the Liberal Party.65 At Rivas’s invitation, he appeared along with Millán Astray in a film entitled La Malcasada made by the director Gómez Hidalgo in Rivas’s house. Franco’s small part was as an Army officer recently returned from the African wars.66
At this stage of his life, as later, Franco had little interest in day-to-day politics. None the less, he began to think that ultimately he might play a political role of some kind. The popular acclaim which he had received after Alhucemas, the rapidity of his promotions, and the company which he now kept in Madrid, all pushed him to take for granted his own importance as a national figure. As he put it in retrospect ‘I was, as a result of my age and my prestige, called to render the highest services to the nation’. The Army’s apparent political success under Primo de Rivera may also have increased his tendency to dream of higher things for himself. He claimed later that, in preparation for his transcendental tasks, and taking advantage of the fact that his command in Madrid left him with very little to do, he began to read books on contemporary Spanish history and political economy.67 How much reading he did is impossible to say; his books were lost in Madrid in 1936 when his flat was ransacked by anarchists. Certainly, neither his speeches nor his own writings indicate any significant insight into history or economics.
Given his propensity to chat, he probably talked rather than read about economics. As he claimed later, he started at this time ‘with some frequency to visit the manager of the Banco de Bilbao, where Carmen had a few savings (unos ahorrillos)’. The banker in question was affable and intelligent and stimulated in Franco an interest in economics. Franco also discussed contemporary political issues with his immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. It is likely that such café conversations with friends, the bulk of whom were Africanistas like himself, can only have cemented his prejudices. Nevertheless, in later life he was to place enormous value on these conversations.68
His reading and his tertulias boosted