Franco. Paul Preston
that Azaña was being advised by a group of Republican officers known among his rightist opponents as the ‘black cabinet’. The abolition of promotion by merit reflected the commitment of the artillery to promotion only by strict seniority. Azaña’s informal military advisers included artillery officers, such as Majors Juan Hernández Saravia and Arturo Menéndez López, and consisted largely of junteros who had taken part in the movement against the Dictatorship and the Monarchy. Franco regarded these officers as contemptible. There was ill feeling elsewhere in the officer corps that, instead of using the most senior Major-Generals, Azaña should listen to such relatively junior men.34
However, Hernández Saravia complained to a comrade that Azaña was too proud to listen to advice from anyone. Moreover, far from setting out to persecute monarchist officers, Azaña seems rather to have cultivated many of them, such as Sanjurjo or the monarchist General Enrique Ruiz Fornells whom he kept on as his under-secretary. Indeed, there were even some leftist officers who took retirement out of frustration at what they saw as Azaña’s complaisance with the old guard and the offensive and threatening language which Azaña was accused of using against the Army is difficult to find. Azaña, although firm in his dealings with officers, spoke of the Army in public in controlled and respectful terms.35
Franco was well known for his repugnance for day-to-day politics. His daily routine at the Military Academy was a full and absorbing one. Nevertheless, he was soon obliged to think about the changes that had taken place. The conservative newspapers which he read, ABC, La Época, La Correspondencia Militar, presented the Republic as responsible for Spain’s economic problems, mob violence, disrespect for the Army and anticlericalism. The press, and the material which he received and devoured from the Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale, portrayed the regime as a Trojan Horse for Communists and freemasons determined to unleash the Godless hordes of Moscow against Spain and all its great traditions.36 The challenges to military certainties constituted by Azaña’s reforms cannot have failed to provoke, at the very least, nostalgia for the monarchy. Similarly, news of the rash of church burnings which took place in Madrid, Málaga, Seville, Cádiz and Alicante on 11 May did not pass him by. The attacks were carried out largely by anarchists, provoked by the belief that the Church was at the heart of the most reactionary activities in Spain. Franco was probably unaware of accusations that the first fires were started with aviation spirit secured from Cuatro Vientos aerodrome by his brother Ramón. He cannot, however, have failed to learn of his brother’s published statement that ‘I contemplated with joy those magnificent flames as the expression of a people which wanted to free itself from clerical obscurantism’.37 In notes made for his projected memoirs, jotted down nearly thirty years after the event, Franco described the church burnings as the event which defined the Republic.38 That reflects not only his underlying Catholicism, but also the extent to which the Church and the Army were increasingly flung together as the self-perceived victims of Republican persecution.
However, more than for anything else that had happened since 14 April, Franco was to bear Azaña the deepest grudge of all for his order of 30 June 1931 closing the Academia General Militar de Zaragoza. The first news of it reached him while on manoeuvres in the Pyrenees. His initial reaction was disbelief. When it sank in, he was devastated. He had loved his work there and he would never forgive Azaña and the so-called ‘black cabinet’ for snatching it from him. He and other Africanistas believed that the Academy had been condemned to death merely because it was one of Primo de Rivera’s successes. He was also convinced that the ‘black cabinet’ wanted to bring him down because of their envy of his spectacular military career. In fact, Azaña’s decision was based on doubts about the efficacy of the kind of training imparted in the Academy and also on a belief that its cost was disproportionate at a time when he was trying to reduce military expenses. Franco controlled his distress with difficulty.39 He wrote to Sanjurjo hoping that he might be able to intercede with Azaña. Sanjurjo replied that he must resign himself to the closure. A few weeks later, Sanjurjo commented to Azaña that Franco was ‘like a child who has had a toy taken away from him’.40
Franco’s anger glimmered through the formalised rhetoric of his farewell speech which he made on the parade-ground at the Academy on 14 July 1931. He opened by commenting with regret that there would be no jura de bandera (swearing on the flag) since the laic Republic had abolished the oath. He then surveyed the achievements of the Academy under his direction, including the elimination of vice. He made much of the loyalty and duty that the cadets owed to the Patria and to the Army. He commented on discipline, saying that it ‘acquires its full value when thought counsels the contrary of what is being ordered, when the heart struggles to rise in inward rebellion against the orders received, when one knows that higher authority is in error and acting out of hand’. He made a rambling and convoluted, but nonetheless manifestly bitter, allusion to those who had been rewarded by the Republic for their disloyalty to the monarchy. He made an oblique reference to the Republican officers who held the key posts in Azaña’s Ministry of War as ‘a pernicious example within the Army of immorality and injustice’. His speech ended with the cry ‘¡Viva España!’.41 He was to comment proudly more than thirty years later ‘I never once shouted ‘¡Viva la República!’.42
After his speech, Franco returned to his office only to be called out several times to appear on the balcony to receive the frenetic applause of those present. When he said farewell to Pacón, who had worked with him as an instructor in tactics and weaponry and as his ADC, the future Caudillo was crying. He packed his things and travelled to his wife’s country house, La Piniella, at Llanera near Oviedo.43
The speech was published as Franco’s order of the day and reached Azaña. Azaña wrote in his diary two days later, ‘Speech by General Franco to the cadets of the Academia General on the occasion of the end of the course. Completely opposed to the Government, guarded attacks against his superiors; a case for immediate dismissal, if it were not the case that today he ceased to hold that command.’ As it was, Azaña limited himself to a formal reprimand (reprensión) in Franco’s service record for the speech to the cadets.44
Acutely jealous of his spotless military record, Franco’s resentment on being informed of this reprimand on 23 July may be imagined. Nevertheless, his concern for his career led him to swallow his pride and to write on the next day an ardent, if less than convincing, self-defence, in the form of a letter to the Chief of the General Staff of the V Military Division within whose jurisdiction the Academy lay. It requested him to pass on to the Minister of War, ‘my respectful complaint and my regret for the erroneous interpretation given to the ideas contained in the speech … which I endeavoured to limit to the purest military principles and essences which have been the norm of my entire military career; and equally my regret at his apparent assumption that there is something lukewarm or reserved about the loyal commitment that I have always given, without officious ostentation which is against my character, to the regime which the country has proclaimed, whose ensign hoisted in the central parade ground of the Academy flew over the military solemnities and whose national anthem closed the proceedings.’45
Azaña did not regard the obligatory flying of the Republican flag and the playing of the new national anthem as special merits and was not convinced. He seems to have believed that the once favourite soldier of the monarchy needed bringing down a peg or two. His contacts with Franco, in this letter and at a meeting in August, convinced him that he was sufficiently ambitious and time-serving to be easily bent to his purposes. In his basic assessment, Azaña was probably correct, but he seriously misjudged how easy it would be