The Franco Regime, 1936–1975

5. Franco and the Military

Franco and the Military The decisive victory of the left in the parliamentary elections of 1936, followed by the decline in public order and the incipient collapse ofparliamentary and constitutional government, provoked widespread apprehension and fear among the middle and upper classes and in the conservative north. Some in the extreme right began to plot rebellion within no more than a fortnight of the political change, yet most conservative sectors seemed paralyzed, and months of conflict and disorder passed before a coherent revolt began to take shape. Only during its final phase did the leader who eventually emerged from the process as its dominant figure commit himself to it completely. Francisco Franco Bahamonde, at one point the youngest general in Europe and later the most prestigious figure in the Spanish Army, was born on December 4, 1892, in EI Ferrol, the Galician seaport that is Spain's chief naval base on the northern coast. 1 He was the second son of an old naval family, originally from Andalucia on the father's side, that had furnished naval officers in the direct male line uninterruptedly for six generations in EI Ferrol, spanning nearly two centuries. Franco's parents were unusually ill matched. His father, Nicolas, a naval paymaster and supplies 1. The many biographies of Franco are briefly evaluated in the selected bibliography. Here it may simply be noted that by far the best informed of the official and semiofficial biographies is Ricardo de la Cierva, Francisco Franco: Un siglo de Espana, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1973), a revised edition appearing in 1986. The best critical biographies are J. W. D. Trythall, El Caudillo: The Political Biography ofFranco (New York, 1970); Carlos Fernandez, El general Franco (Barcelona, 1983); and Juan Pablo Fusi, Franco: Autoritarismo y poder personal (Madrid, 1985). The most-detailed treatment of Franco's subsequent political career and regime is Luis Suarez Fernandez, Francisco Franco y su tiempo (Madrid, 1984), 8 vols. (hereafter cited as FF). 67 68 I. Origins officer, was a capable professional who eventually retired at the close of his career at the level of Vice-Admiral. Though the stories of his drinking and gambling may be exaggerated, Nicolas Franco was highly unusual among senior naval officers as an agnostic and freethinker who scoffed at much of conventional morality. He was a strong-willed, vehement man who disciplined his sons rather harshly, and he found the piety and Catholic moralism ofhis somewhat dull and unimaginative wife increasingly distasteful as the years passed. Franco's mother, Pilar Bahamonde, was ten years younger than the husband from whom she differed so greatly in temperament and outlook. The Bahamonde family stemmed in part from the minor Galician aristocracy and was distantly related to the novelist Emilia Pardo Bazan, and there is also some indication that the Francos of Andalucfa had a degree ofaristocratic ancestry.2 Dona Pilar seems to have been a gentle, high-minded, and self-sacrificing middle-class wife and mother, typical of the period, who found her husband's personal and philosophical extravagances incomprehensible. Don Nicolas had earlier fathered an illegitimate son while a naval officer in the Philippines,3 though this was not revealed to the rest of the family until 1950. And in 1912, when he was reassigned to Madrid, he abandoned the family altogether , setting up housekeeping with a servant girl with whom he lived for the rest of his life (evidently going through the simulacrum of a nonCatholic "popular wedding") and by whom he mayor may not have had a daughter.4 There were four Franco children, in order of birth Nicolas, Francisco (known as Paco or Paquito), Pilar, and Ram6n (a second daughter died in early childhood). Of the boys, Paco was clearly the most affected by his family's drama, identifying with his mother and learning from her a quiet manner, stoicism, restraint, self-control, Catholic religiosity, family solidarity , and respect for traditional principles. At the same time, he failed to absorb her gentleness and capacity for self-effacement. Many years later, after Franco's death as chief of state, the playwright Jaime Salom wrote a play entitled El Corto Vuelo del Gallo (The Short Flight of the Cock), advertised as "The Story of Franco through the Erotic Life of His Father." Ofall his children, the elder Franco seems to have had the least sympathy 2. Persistent rumors about Franco's alleged Jewish ancestry have no clear foundation, and Harry S. May, Francisco Franco: The Jewish Connection (Washington, D.C., 1978...