by Hugh Thomas
3. For a vraisemblable account of the repression by the Legion in Asturias, see the first chapters of José Martín Blázquez, I Helped to Build an Army (London, 1939), and Ricardo de la Cierva, Historia, vol. I, p. 447.
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1. Carrillo, p. 48.
1. Jaime Vicens Vives, Aproximación a la historia de España (Barcelona, 1968), p. 179.
2. These were Argüelles, a criminal miner, who had commanded an execution picket responsible for the death of a civil guard, and a sergeant, Vázquez, who had deserted from his unit in Asturias and joined the miners.
1. The Cortes had to decide whether he should or should not be tried by the courts. The vote against Azaña was nevertheless 189 to 68. The CEDA voted against Azaña, to appease the rich monarchists. He had spent two months in detention in a prison ship off Barcelona. The unjust indignity—he had tried to restrain both the socialists and the Catalans from insurrection—greatly affected him.
1. Chapaprieta’s memoirs shed light on the day-to-day workings of Lerroux’s government. (La paz fue posible: memorias de un politico, Barcelona, 1971.)
2. Another scandal, the so-called Nombela case, further weakened the radicals the next month.
1. Gil Robles, p. 364.
2. For a summary, see Robinson, p. 207.
3. Miguel Maura had tried and failed to form a government too.
1. Gil Robles, pp. 366–7.
2. See Gil Robles, p. 376, for this surprising fact.
3. Speech in Azaña, vol. III, pp. 269–93. Henry Buckley, Life and Death of the Spanish Republic (London, 1940), p. 123, has a good eye-witness description.
1. One among them was Jaime del Burgo, the historian of Carlism.
2. José Antonio’s relations with the army and other forces of the ‘old Spain’, which Ledesma denounced, derived partly from financial necessity, partly from his liking for the social connections with which, as the son of the dictator, he had been brought up, but also partly because he had no confidence that his party would grow fast enough to defeat socialism. It was in those words, at least, that he had put it in a curious letter to Franco just before the Asturias rising, on 24 September 1934. In this, he intimated that he would be willing to support a military coup d’état to restore the ‘lost historical destiny of the country’. Franco did not, apparently, answer the letter. (This information was first published in Y, the review of the Sección Femenina of the Falange, in October 1938. It is quoted in full in Ximénez de Sandoval, p. 224, and in his Obras, p. 709.)
1. Payne, pp. 66–7. There was also a controversy in the Falange in the autumn of 1934 over the idea that a place in it should be found for Calvo Sotelo: Calvo was making a bid for the leadership of the fascist party in Spain, but José Antonio was not prepared to accept that. In addition, he regarded Calvo Sotelo as a traitor to his father, and as a man who ‘had a head only for figures and could not understand poetry’. Ledesma was against Calvo as a reactionary.
2. The Falange perhaps numbered 5,000 in early 1936 apart from students or schoolboys (Gil Robles, p. 444, fn. 60, reporting Fernández Cuesta): Payne has 10,000, on the evidence of the then treasurer, Mariano García.
1. Or with the Right. A group of Basque deputies were reprimanded for not joining hands with the CEDA by Monsignor Pizzardo, assistant papal secretary of state. (From a diary of one of those present, qu. Iturralde, vol. I, p. 394.)
2. Speech of Dimitrov at the seventh meeting of the Comintern on 2 August 1935 (London, 1935), p. 43. The Spanish communists at the meeting included La Pasionaria and José Diaz.
1. Jacques Duclos, Mémoires 1935–1939 (Paris, 1969), pp. 107–10.
2. El Socialista, 28 January 1936, qu. Robinson, p. 246. See De la Cierva, Historia, vol. I, p. 579f., for consideration of the origins of the Popular Front.
3. Diego Abad de Santillán, Por qué perdimos la guerra (Buenos Aires, 1940), p. 37.
4. Ricardo de la Cierva, Los documentos de la primavera trágica (Madrid, 1967), p. 66f.
1. From a leaflet in the possession of the author. The five thousand refers to the number of workers allegedly killed in the repression of Asturias.
2. Qu. Robinson, p. 243 and p. 246.
3. Speech of 13 January 1936 (De la Cierva, Los documentos, p. 92).
4. The Times, 17 February 1936. De Caux was exceptionally well-informed.
5. These figures are adapted from those in Javier Tusell, Las elecciones del Frente Popular (Madrid, 1971), vol. II, p. 13. My ‘adaptation’ consists of adding what Tusell describes as ‘Popular Front with Centre’ and ‘Right with Centre’ to respectively the Popular Front and the Right.
1. Tusell, pp. 82–3; see also José Venegas, Las elecciones del Frente Popular, p. 47. These figures have been interminably disputed but the above appear the most reliable. The CEDA’s criticisms and explanations are summarized in Gil Robles, p. 509f. Practically no newspaper at the time, nor subsequent writers, have agreed on the figures at these elections.
2. Tusell, Las elecciones, p. 13 and p. 24.
3. See Jackson, pp. 523–4.
1. Robinson, p. 138.
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1. This was the final emergency situation envisaged under the Law of Public Order of 1933. The other two conditions envisaged were a ‘state of prevention’ and a ‘state of alarm’. Under the first, preventive arrests could be made. Under the second, there could be a censorship and the closing of organizations which ‘threatened public order’. Spain had had ‘a state of alarm’ for much of 1935.
2. Gil Robles, pp. 491–2.
3. Dr Marañón had met Franco at dinner at the Spanish Embassy in Paris in January. Franco was returning from the funeral of King George V in London, where he had represented Spain and walked in procession behind the ill-fated Marshal Tukhachevsky, representing Russia. The intellectual physician and the general of the Legion walked along the banks of the Seine, and Franco said that everything would calm down in Spain within a few weeks. (Recollection of Dr Marañón.)
1. For Portela, see Azaña, vol. IV, p. 718; and for Franco, George Hills, Franco (London, 1967), p. 212.
2. This complicated series of events is well disentangled by Robinson (pp. 249–52 and notes). See also Azaña, vol. IV, pp. 563–72.
1. Azaña, vol. IV, p. 564.
1. Juan March left on 16 February.
2. Tamames, p. 226.
3. See Robinson, pp. 256–7. Final figures for the main parties were: Republican Left, 80; Republican Union, 37; Socialists, 90; Communists, 16; Esquerra, 38; Centrists, 14; Radicals, 1 (!); Basque Nationalists, 9; CEDA, 86; Agrarians, 13; Lliga, 13; Monarchists, 11; and Carlists, 8. (Tusell, Las elecciones, vol. II, p. 187.)
4. José Antonio, Obras, p. 1103.
5. Zugazagoitia, pp. 7–8; Rudolfo Llopis in Ibérica, no. 7 (New York, 1957), pp. 4–6.
1. Payne, p. 99 and references.
2. On the basis of conversations with ex–jefes provinciales and other data, Stanley Payne has suggested a figure of 8,700 to be closer for ‘the first-line’ militants.
3. 15,000 JAPistas had gone over to the Falange by June. See Gil Robles, p. 573.
4. In 1934, José Antonio persuaded some followers of the syndicalist Pestaña, such as Nicolás Alvarez de Sotomayor (an unstable ex-anarchist student), to join the Falange, and there is a tale that José Antonio was sometimes escorted on his journeys to Barcelona by CNT pistoleros (José del Castillo and Santiago Alvarez, Barcelona, objetivo cubierto, Barcelona, 1958, p. 133). Negotiations as such between the syndicalists and the Falange never got under way.
1. According to Stanley Payne, The Spanish Revolution (New York, 1970), p. 108, the nickname began to be used by the socialist youth movement for Largo in the summer of 1933.
2. The UGT now numbered 1½ million members. Half were rural workers. Rather more than half the remainder were factory workers or miners. The rest were clerks, ‘intellectuals’ or shopkeepers. Madariaga, in a famous passage (Spain, p. 223), later argued that it was the quarrel between the two wings
of the socialist party which made the civil war inevitable.
1. El Debate, 6 March 1936. See Robinson, pp. 253–4.
2. The first president of UME was Major Bartolomé Barba, an ex-member of the staff of Azaña, for whom he had developed an obsessive hatred: he had apparently invented the slander that over Casas Viejas in 1933 Azaña ordered the assault guard to shoot the anarchists ‘in the guts’. The vice-president was Colonel Rodríguez Tarduchy, a conspirator of 1932. But the UME’s national leadership was never important: it was decentralized. It had contact with the Falange and the centrist and monarchist plotters from 1934 onwards. Its importance has been exaggerated. UMRA was founded by Colonel Ernesto Carratalá, Major José María Enciso, naval mechanic Rodríguez Sierra and Captain Palacio. None of these were very important, but later two generals joined (Núñez de Prado and Gómez Caminero), and several colonels. Díaz Tendero, an officer who had risen from the ranks and felt frustrated since he could not rise higher than captain (according to the rules), was the nerve of the organization. The communist Modesto says there were over 200 officers in Madrid who belonged to UMRA (Modesto, p. 13). It was actually a merger of the UMR and UMA (Unión Militar Republicana and Unión Militar Antifascista), and perhaps had some links with similar associations founded before 1931.
1. No one agrees who was there, nor precisely what was said. Generals Franco, Orgaz, Villegas, Barrera, Fanjul, Rodríguez del Barrio, Ponte, Saliquet, García de la Herrán, Varela, and González Carrasco, as well as Goded and Mola, have all been mentioned as present.
2. B. Félix Maiz, Alzamiento en España (Pamplona, 1952), p. 50; José María Iribarren, Mola (Saragossa, 1938), p. 44.
3. This dialogue was oblique. Franco said: ‘You are wrong to send me away. At Madrid, I would be of more use to the army and to the peace of Spain.’ Azaña answered: ‘I do not fear developments. I knew about Sanjurjo’s rising, and could have prevented it. I preferred to let it fail.’ (Cruzada, IX, p. 468.)
4. Joaquín Arrarás, Franco (Buenos Aires, 1937), pp. 186–7; Serrano Súñer, p. 8.
1. For a new picture of Sanjurjo’s visit, see the meticulous book by Angel Viñas, La Ale-mania Nazi y el 18 de julio (Madrid, 1974). But at St Jean de Luz, Prince François-Xavier de Bourbon-Parme, prospective heir of the aged Carlist Pretender, Don Alfonso Carlos, presided over a committee of war. This purchased 6,000 rifles, 150 heavy machine-guns, 300 light machine-guns, 5,000,000 cartridges, and 10,000 hand-grenades. Of these, however, only a few of the machine-guns, bought in Germany, reached Spain before July 1936. The rest were confiscated at Antwerp and the intervention of Prince François-Xavier with his cousin the King of the Belgians could not free them (Cruzada, XIII, p. 447).
2. Lizarza, p. 59.
3. Testimony of General González Carrasco in 1946, cited in De la Cierva, Historia ilustrada, pp. 225–30.
1. Ximénez de Sandoval, p. 520.
1. The only satisfactory account is Malefakis, p. 370.
2. For discussion, see Malefakis, p. 378.
1. De la Cierva, Los documentos, p. 199.
2. Gerald Brenan, Personal Record (London, 1974), p. 277.
3. Carrillo, p. 43.
4. Louis Fischer, Men and Politics (New York, 1941), p. 307.
5. Fernsworth, p. 176.
1. Azaña’s recollections, in Obras, vol. IV, p. 719.
2. Gil Robles, p. 578.
3. See Marichal’s conversation with Araquistain on this matter, and Prieto’s caustic comments, in Azaña, vol. III, p. xxxii.
4. Alcalá Zamora lingered in Spain a month or two and left in early July for South America where he stayed in penurious circumstances till his death in 1949. See Gil Robles’s account, pp. 582–95. Martínez Barrio was interim President.
5. Marichal, in Azaña, vol. III, p. xxxiii.
1. Cruzada, IX, p. 510. Another scheme revolved around an approach to the outgoing President to install a military cabinet.
2. Sefton Delmer, Trail Sinister (London, 1961), p. 299.
1. Qu. Bertrán Güell, p. 123.
1. This was the view of the Lawyer ‘Marón’ in Azaña’s dialogue, La velada en Benicarló, Obras, vol. III, p. 405.
2. Gil Robles, p. 729.
1. ‘Las niñas, regular, las encargadas, pésimas’ were the actual words of Colonel García Escámez.
2. Francisco Bravo, Historia de la Falange de las Jons (Madrid, 1940). Between February and July 1936, the Falange’s numbers, like those of the communists, greatly increased, perhaps to as many as 75,000. Apart from Onésimo Redondo’s organization at Valladolid (which gained some following also among the workers of Seville), these were young middle-class men or undergraduates not yet established in professions, and more army officers than is sometimes supposed.
1. De la Cierva, Los documentos, p. 235f. The speech is not without ambiguities.
2. Prieto, Convulsiones, vol. III, pp. 160–67. He escaped by the back door.
3. For a right-wing view, see Gil Robles, pp. 558–65.
4. Ximénez de Sandoval, p. 551.
5. Ansaldo, p. 125.
1. The members of this unfortunate administration, apart from Casares (who made himself minister of war), were: Juan Moles, an elderly Catalan nationalist trusted by the CEDA even if he were thought a ‘mummy’ (momia) by Joaquín Maurín, minister of the interior; Enrique Ramos, Azaña’s under-secretary and close associate in 1931–3, minister of finance; Augusto Barcia, a prominent freemason, republican lawyer, foreign minister; Mariano Ruiz Funes, professor of law, minister of agriculture; Antonio Velao, director of railways in 1931–3, was minister of public works; Francisco Barnés, a typical product of the Free Institute, was minister of education; José Giral, professor of chemistry, one of Azaña’s associates since the 1920s, returned to be minister of the navy, a post he had held from 1931–3; Manuel Blasco Garzón, an ex-radical and lawyer who had followed Martínez Barrio into the Republican Union party, minister of justice; Plácido Alvarez Buylla, from a family much associated with the Free Institute, minister of industry; Bernardo Giner de los Rios, similarly related to the founder of the Free Institute, minister of communications; and Juan Lluhí, a recent Councillor in the Generalidad, was brought in to be minister of labour. Catalonia had recently been quiet (‘the Catalan oasis’) despite the murders of Miguel and José Badia, two extreme separatist brothers, and it was thought that Lluhí might thus have a calming effect in Spain generally. The cabinet was intellectually distinguished, and honest, but there were too many lawyers in it and nobody had experience of industry—or even of labour unions.
1. El Socialista, 26 May 1936.
2. Mundo Obrero, 15 May 1936, quoted De la Cierva, Los documentos, p. 456.
3. The stories later circulated and widely believed (by myself among others) that there was a communist plan for a coup d’état were laid by Herbert Southworth, in Le Mythe de la croisade de Franco (Paris, 1964), p. 170f. The documents were published in fact in Claridad, 30 May 1936; Southworth publishes the ironic front page (p. 185). ‘How we are going to achieve the revolution by 29 June’, ran the headline! A plot of this sort was not, in fact, necessary.
1. Paz, p. 266. This book has a good picture of the congress.
1. Qu. Peirats, vol. I, pp. 111–31. ‘Does this Paradise have central heating?’ a pupil of Federico Urales once asked.
2. Iribarren, p. 57f.
3. Cruzada, IX, p. 511. The Garcerán-Mola meeting was on 1 June.
4. Maiz, pp. 103–4; Iribarren, p. 54.
5. Cruzada, XIII, p. 447.
6. Jorge Vigón, General Mola, el conspirador (Barcelona, 1957), p. 93.
1. Cruzada, XIII, p. 449. The local mayor told Casares of this meeting. (A. de Lizarra, Los vascos y la república española, Buenos Aires, 1944, p. 33.) In addition to Mola’s difficulties with the Carlists, he was also not fully at one with the Unión Militar. See the letters in de Castillo and Alvarez, which show that the UME wanted to arraign all the post-1931 ministers for treason.
2. Letter t
o the author from Desmond Flower.
3. Obras completas, pp. 1110–11. ‘Madrugadores’ are those who act at dawn, madrugada; that is, those who rebel.
4. Maiz, p. 168.
5. See Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain (Stanford, 1967), p. 330, and Gil Robles, p. 730 and p. 798, fn. 50, where the CEDA leader says he gave 500,000 pesetas from his party’s funds in the ‘first days of July’ to ‘help prevent from failing what would inevitably come to pass’—or to help Mola’s escape, if necessary.
1. Gil Robles’s role in the conspiracy is investigated in De la Cierva, Historia, vol. I, p. 735f. Apparently he refused to convoke a right-wing rump Cortes in Burgos when asked. For further comments, see Manuel Fal Conde in ABC, 2 and 3 May 1968, and Ignacio Luca de Tena, ABC, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 9 April 1968. Gil Robles’s reply to the latter was in Ya, 10 April 1968.
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1. Some discussions in the cabinet about oil supplies are described by Azaña in his diaries.
1. The decline in share prices was admittedly accompanied by hoarding, to almost the same extent as investment in equities had fallen: post-office savings stood at 239 million pesetas in 1928—and at 370 million in 1935. Savings-bank deposits were at 1,608 million pesetas in 1928; they had reached 2,778 million in 1934.
1. From 230,646 Tm in 1927 to 340,917 Tm in 1931–34.
2. Figures in Tamames, pp. 86–91. The percentage of Spanish exports represented by oranges was 11.7 per cent in 1926–30, and (for the sake of contemporary comparison), 12.67 per cent in 1959.
3. The population increased from 23.6 million in 1930 to 25.88 million in 1940—a regular rate of increase of just under 1 per cent per year, even taking into account the civil war.
1. 39,582, 37,376 and 24,927 in 1931, 1932 and 1933 respectively (Ramón Tamames, La república, la era de Franco, Madrid, 1973, p. 58).
2. In 1933, there were well over 1,000 strikes, losing some 14 million work days: such figures are only perhaps meaningful if they are compared with what went before. Thus the number of strikes for the seven years 1929–35 were 96, 402, 734, 681, 1,127, 594 and 164 respectively (Balcells, p. 175).
