by Hugh Thomas
Hedilla, who was not yet thirty-five years old, had been living in Salamanca since October, attempting to organize the still growing movement. Most of the ‘old shirts’ supported Hedilla, as did the provincial chiefs of the northern provinces, as well as the intellectuals in the movement. The expanding falangist press also looked to Hedilla: though FE, of Seville, preferred Sancho Dávila. Hedilla responded sympathetically to the pressures which sought to make him a national leader; but he did not create these pressures. Both he and his supporters looked towards Germany rather than to Italy for inspiration, and the German ambassador, Faupel, had set out to cultivate a Nazi spirit among them. Hedilla had some political gifts; for example, when José Andino, the falangist leader in Burgos, had diffused a speech of José Antonio’s on Castile Radio against the orders of Vicente Gay, head of the Generalissimo’s press department, and had been arrested, Hedilla had patiently negotiated his release.1 On the other hand, he was tactless: he allowed a journalist, Victor de la Serna, to publish an excessively laudatory article about him, and he once kept Serrano Súñer waiting in his anteroom. He had also offended some by his interventions in favour of mercy in the case of people who would otherwise have been shot;2 and the Italian ambassador, Roberto Cantalupo, had tried to use him as a go-between to limit the repression.3 Hedilla’s efforts, meantime, to establish the Falange as a serious movement separate from the army were thwarted, partly since many thought it prudent to remain friendly with both him and Franco’s headquarters; and partly because the military had all the resources. One difficulty was that the telephone lines were controlled by the army and a call from Valladolid to Salamanca which was not about a military matter might mean a wait of ten hours.
If the opposition to Hedilla had come from the ‘Madrid group’ it would not have been serious. But the opposition to him within the movement was stiffened by a number of professional men—engineers, lawyers, ‘technocrats’—who wished to convert the Falange into the single pragmatic party of a new authoritarian state. They too had backed the idea of negotiations with the Carlists (a characteristic member of this group, the engineer José Luis Escario, had been on the falangist delegation to Lisbon). Serrano Súñer gave support to these men: neither he nor Franco desired to have another centre of authority, whether expressed by Hedilla or anyone else.
With all these developments Hedilla was out of sympathy. In early April, he went to Vitoria to visit Fal Conde’s provisional successor as national delegate of the requetés, José Luis Zamanillo, and the two agreed that, if there were any unification of Falange and Carlism, they would have nothing to do with it, and would say so. Almost at the same time, however, Franco was talking with Rodezno about the idea of a formal unification of all the parties, movements, and sub-groups of nationalist Spain. It was a very military suggestion: who else but a general would even consider a unification of such contrasting kinds of men into a single movement, as if they were indeed merely the freebooting gangs of armed men that their enemies believed them to be? Still, Rodezno recommended the scheme to his followers. The news of this reached Hedilla while still in the north. He announced that he would convoke a national council of the Falange on 25 April. His falangist opponents, Dávila, Aznar, and Garcerán, then denounced him for ‘making monstrous propaganda on behalf of himself … gearing his activity towards the creation of personal followers … showing evident ineptitude, worsened by illiteracy …’1 They declared that the continued absence of José Antonio demanded, according to the statutes of the party, a rule by a triumvirate, and accordingly took over, physically, the movement’s offices in Salamanca, with the connivance of other falangists in the city, and perhaps of Franco and Serrano Súñer. Hedilla accepted the fait accompli, but went to Franco to complain: he only saw Franco’s staff officer, Colonel Barroso. But the ‘rebels’ were received by Franco. Hedilla next ordered the local Falange in Salamanca, headed by Ramón Laporta, to reoccupy the movement’s offices and he asked the commandant of the nearby Pedro Llen school for falangist officers, the Finnish fascist Major von Haartman, to send a unit of his cadets to assist. Von Haartman (who had arrived to fight against communism the previous October and who owed his post at Pedro Llen to the German ambassador) insisted on a written order, but when he received it, his cadets marched in and the offices of the Falange were returned to Hedilla, without bloodshed, in the middle of the night.1 The building quickly filled with Hedilla’s friends, among them Hans Kroeger, the Nazi party representative on Faupel’s staff.
Precisely what happened next is open to doubt. Von Haartman recalled that Hedilla ordered him to detain the insurrectionary falangist leaders, while Hedilla himself said that he merely wanted the triumvirate to come and talk with him, and sent out emissaries with that intent. The evidence seems to suggest that the mission was an offensive one.2 At all events, the head of the falangist militia in Santander, José María Alonso Goya, a friend of Hedilla, went with a posse of armed men to Sancho Dávila’s pension in the Plaza Mayor. Goya had been in the Model Prison in Madrid with Sancho Dávila. But when he arrived at the latter’s lodging, a brawl began. Goya and one of Sancho Dávila’s friends (the bodyguard Peral, of Seville) were killed. The civil guard arrested all others involved, including Dávila. Within a few hours, Garcerán was also arrested, when another Hedillista gang was about to break into his house. The civil guard had followed all these events closely. Von Haartman was arrested too.3
Hedilla called a meeting of the Falange’s national council for 18 April. Present on that occasion were all the surviving leaders of the movement, except Dávila, who was in gaol. Hedilla made a speech justifying his time as provisional leader, and requested a new vote on the subject of who was to be the chief henceforth. In the ballot, Hedilla was chosen, by ten against four, out of twenty-two votes; the rest were blank papers. Hedilla went to Franco to tell him that his position had been confirmed. Franco said that he was pleased: it was, he said, what he had hoped would happen. He persuaded Hedilla to appear on the balcony with him. There were cheers and vivas for both. Franco made what ABC the next day described predictably as ‘a magnificent speech, inspired by the most pure ideas and sentiments of the Spanish tradition’. The three preparatory phases, Franco explained, of the new Spain were the Spain of the Catholic kings, of Charles V, and of Philip II. Since 1598, however, it had been downhill all the way. On 19 April, Hedilla dismissed the only member of the rebel ‘triumvirate’ out of gaol, Aznar, from the leadership of the militias. This act seemed to be underwritten by Franco, since Aznar and all his followers, including bodyguards, were sent to the front. Hedilla appeared to have won the battle, but, at eight o’clock in the evening, he received, at his home, the text of a decree which Franco proposed to issue later that night on Radio Nacional, forcibly uniting the Falange with the Carlists. At midnight, the decree was issued, incorporating all groups which were supporting the nationalist side, including the monarchists. Franco would be the leader, adding that title to that of Head of State and commander-in-chief. The new party would have the portmanteau name of Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS.1 As well as keeping Hedilla in ignorance of his plans, Franco had consulted neither Fal Conde nor the Carlist regent Xavier de Bourbon-Parme. The aged widow of old Don Alfonso Carlos (María de las Nieves, a Portuguese princess, herself a veteran of the Second Carlist War in the 1870s) wrote to Fal Conde on 23 April: ‘It is an infamy that has been done to us. With what right …?’ The Carlist War Council was not officially told what had happened by Franco till 30 April.2 The four Carlists included by Franco in the proposed new political secretariat of the movement (Rodezno, Dolz de Espejo, Arellano and Mazón) were known compromisers with the army. Many Carlists, who gained far less than their due from the new ‘movement’ simmered with rage but, for the moment, kept their protests to silent disapproval.
But what, it will be asked, of General Mola, the commander of the Army of the North, the old conspirator of Pamplona? He was present on 18 April on the balcony of Franco’s headquarters at
Salamanca. But he only expressed himself by a petty objection to the use, in the decree, of a verb not registered by the Spanish Academy.1 Queipo de Llano was also summoned from Seville and his adhesion reluctantly obtained. From all over Spain, meantime, servile congratulations reached Franco by telegram. He had brought off a second coup d’état.
Hedilla was allocated a place on this new political secretariat. He refused it. Those who accepted were all unimportant in the movement.2 Franco tried to persuade him, through emissaries. Hedilla continued to refuse, on the advice of Pilar Primo de Rivera, of Aznar (whose motives were mixed), of Ridruejo, the young poet who was provincial chief in Valladolid, and the German ambassador, all of whom still had hopes for an independent Falange of ‘old shirts’. A telegram was sent to all provincial chiefs in nationalist Spain which (apparently written by José Sainz) told them that, to avoid possible wrong interpretations of the decree of unification, they were only to follow orders received directly from the supreme command. This was later considered to be an act of defiance of Franco, but apparently Hedilla did not know that it had been sent. The circumstances were ambiguous enough for misunderstanding to be almost inevitable. During the next day or two, Hedilla went from person to person seeking advice: perhaps his actions seemed like plotting to the Generalissimo and his advisers. The Nazi leader, Kroeger, offered to Hedilla to ensure his safe conduct to Germany, and the Italian fascist Guglielmo Danzi offered a similar safe conduct to Italy.1 Hedilla refused. Aznar, meantime, was arrested on charges relating to the events of the night of 16 April.
On 25 April, Hedilla was also detained and placed in Salamanca gaol.2 There he was charged with the illegal detention of Dávila; with the illegal use of government lorries to carry the cadets of Pedro Llen to Salamanca; and with causing the laboratory of the Faculty of Science at the University of Salamanca to be transformed for his personal benefit, in order to manufacture a gas which, in its turn, would have enabled him to assault the Generalissimo’s headquarters.3 These bizarre charges enabled the régime to keep him in gaol while other prominent falangists were also arrested and charged with one act of subversion after another. On 1 May, all the provincial leaderships (jefaturas) of the Falange were abolished and, in June, while some falangists were released, Hedilla was newly charged, with the murder of Peral, Dávila’s bodyguard, and with trying to overthrow the Caudillo. Franco’s legal adviser, Colonel Martínez Fuset, and the new commander of the civil guard in Salamanca, Major Lisardo Doval, of sinister memory in Asturias, played a prominent part in all these charges, both seeing the falangists as dangerous ‘reds’. Hedilla was condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted. There were some public demonstrations in support of Hedilla, but those who took part in them were arrested as ‘reds’ and disappeared into gaol. Several other prominent falangists were similarly charged, receiving long sentences which were in the end all commuted. Few of them, however, played any subsequent part in Spanish politics.4 Other more accommodating falangists served Franco willingly, often with enthusiasm.
This clash between fascism and authoritarian conservatism was won by the latter because of Franco’s contempt for ideas; and, to be honest, many of the ‘ideas’ which he smashed were un-thought-out, second-rate and second-hand, as a great many are in the century of mass culture, in Spain and elsewhere.
So ended the so-called ‘Hedilla plot’, in which Hedilla was almost the only person not to have conspired: yet he was to spend the next four years in detention, hunger and discomfort.1 The treatment of Hedilla by Franco is another example of the latter’s coldness of heart, in this case shown to one who had helped the cause a good deal in the first months of the war. It was a bizarre moment, as well as a tragic one for Hedilla, since, the very day of his arrest, the new salute, with the arm extended, with the palm facing outwards, was adopted as a national salute for formal occasions. This ‘dialectic of fists and pistols’, in José Antonio’s words, had been won by those who had most of the latter.
Serrano Súñer became secretary-general of the new movement. He palliated the different sections of the political Right, in particular those falangists who gathered in the drawing-room in Salamanca of Pilar Primo de Rivera.2 Pilar Primo de Rivera, who had been herself restless in the spring of 1937, became the presiding figure in Auxilio Social from October 1937. General Monasterio, a cavalry officer, and one of Gil Robles’s aides as war minister, took on the post of commander of the militias—an honorific post, since Carlist and falangist militiamen were all integrated in the army.
Franco considered that, since Serrano was a man without followers and owed everything to himself, he would be easily manageable. Indeed, no dispute between the two seems to have occurred till after the end of the civil war. Serrano remained isolated, distrusted and feared. He was strongly, even passionately, pro-German, though he was disliked by the German ambassador. As a onetime member of the CEDA, Serrano had old friendships with many on the Right in Spanish politics. He was well prepared to create a ‘new state’. This was,
what it is convenient to name the authoritarian state, the unique type of modern state which appears expedient, the only form which can carry out the re-education and reorganization necessary for the political life of Spain. Perhaps, in its outward form, this state offers some resemblance to régimes already adopted by certain other peoples, but what, truly, varies from people to people is the dogma which covers this form, and the spirit with which it is obeyed. There can, as in totalitarian Russia, be a complete divergence between government and governed. The form can, as in the case of Germany, have an immoral side. We, on the other hand, have nothing to do with such doctrinal points. Our position derives from our national tradition and our confessional faith. We reject political relativism and political agnosticism. Outside the vast field left to discussion and doubt, there exist permanent truths, certainties, of which political life is composed, and which give limits to governmental action. These are the great and unchanging principles which affect the ‘to be or not to be’ of the country and of the whole of civilized society.1
Serrano sought an ideology which would ‘absorb Red Spain, our great ambition and our great duty’ and he supposed that the Falange would do this more than would traditionalism. The main achievement of the April decree was, however, not to give the new state a structure, but to remove the necessity for political speculation at least until the war was won.
Franco’s allies, Generals Faupel and Roatta, met to discuss these developments. The latter now thought that, unless Germany and Italy intervened to exercise a decisive influence both on operations and on the development of Spanish society, the war could not be won. Faupel gave to Franco a Spanish translation of the Nazi labour law. He suggested that he should embark on similar social legislation, and offered to place appropriate ‘experts’ at his disposal. The Italian fascist representative, Danzi, gave Franco a draft constitution for Spain on the Italian model. But the Generalissimo paid attention neither to Danzi nor to Faupel.2 Serrano Súñer said that these schemes and their inspirers would have been more welcome if the latter had taken the trouble to translate what they had to say into Spanish.3
Meantime, what of the monarchy? Franco told ABC, the monarchist paper, his ideas, later in the year: ‘If the moment comes for a restoration,’ the new monarchy would have to ‘be very different from what fell on 14 April … the person who incarnates it must come as a pacifier.’ But that meant that the return of monarchy would be delayed: delayed a long time.1 The only monarch in Spain would be Franco. Surrounded by an escort of Moroccans, greeted with reverence by all who met him, the title of sultan would indeed have been a more appropriate one for the new conqueror, if it did not suggest to the modern ear a certain regard for the pleasure of life. Perhaps ‘Caesar’, much used by nationalist propaganda in 1937, would have been appropriate.
During 1937, Franco’s position received further buttressing; a decree of 4 August, obliging all serving officers to affiliate to the FET de las JONS, stated that the Caudillo w
ould designate his own successor. Franco began to appear dressed as an admiral, as well as a general. At the same time, the walls of nationalist Spain were covered with posters crying ‘Franco, Caudillo de Dios y de la Patria’, and with photographs of the ‘smiling general’,2 while new books often contained a pious dedication to Franco, such as ‘paladin of new epics, present and future, of Western Christian civilization’.3 The propagandists of the new Spain of the era of Franco were the bellicose priest from Navarre, Father Yzurdiaga; the ‘proto-fascist’, Giménez Caballero; and Eugenio D’Ors, once a radical Catalan republican, student of the Free Institute, now a fervent falangist. (He had remarked: ‘the Spaniards love a uniform, provided it is multiform’.) During early 1937, the press department of the Generalissimo continued to be directed by Vicente Gay, the alcoholic, anti-semitic professor from Valladolid. New polemical ‘Franquistas’—the word began now to be used—included the monarchist journalist Joaquín Arrarás, who would soon publish Franco’s first biography; the police writer Mauricio Carlavilla, an expert on the relation between ‘Anti-España’ and homosexuality; and ‘El Tebib Arrumi’, a doctor turned journalist, whom Franco had known in Morocco, and who was the headquarters’ official reporter.1 Gay’s assistant was Ramón Ruiz Alonso, the ex-CEDA deputy for Granada who had been implicated in Lorca’s death.2 Other intellectuals of the Right came forward to fill posts as rectors of universities, directors of new institutes and newspapers. It was a wonderful time for all those disgruntled, or unsuccessful, writers who had failed during the republic due, as they purported to believe, to the ‘Jewish-Marxist-masonic conspiracy for the capture of patronage’ in the universities or for favour in the arts.
