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СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">¹⁵ The difficulties of Franco’s relationship with his father were later reflected in various efforts to reconstruct it in an idealised way. In his diary of his first year in the Spanish Foreign Legion, he told a clearly apocryphal story in which can be discerned his own longings. A young officer in Morocco is crossing the street when a grizzled veteran soldier salutes him. The officer goes to return the salute, their eyes meet, they look at each other and embrace in tears. It is the officer’s long-lost father.¹⁶ It was a trial run for his autobiographical novel, Raza, in which he created the father he would rather have had as a naval hero of total moral rectitude. When his father died, he had the body seized and implicitly reinvented the second part of his life by having him buried with a pomp which, while in accord with military regulations, was hardly appropriate to the bohemianism of Don Nicolás’s final years. Franco’s own lifelong avoidance of drink, gambling and women bore testimony to a determination to create an existence which was the antithesis of his father’s life.

      Franco would implacably reject all the things he associated with his father, from the pleasures of the flesh to the ideas of the Left. Franco’s repudiation of his father was matched by a deep identification with his mother, something which might perhaps be seen in many aspects of his personal style, a gentle manner, a soft voice, a propensity to weep, an enduring sense of deprivation. A tone of self-pitying resentment runs through his speeches as Caudillo, a continual echo of the hard-done-by little boy that he must have been, and was one of the motivating forces of his drive to greatness.

      Two great political events of Franco’s early youth were to dominate his later development – the loss of Cuba in 1898 and the involvement of Spain in a costly colonial war in Morocco. Imperial disaster provoked civilian distrust of an incompetent Army and intensified military resentment of the political establishment and of civilian hostility to conscription. Throughout his life, Franco would remark on the profound effect that the 1898 ‘disaster’ had on him. In 1941, when he was near to declaring war on the Axis side, he declared ‘when we began our life, … we saw our childhood dominated by the contemptible incompetence of those men who abandoned half of the fatherland’s territory to foreigners’. He would see his greatest achievement as wiping out the shame of 1898.¹⁷

      Francisco was five and a half when the great naval defeat at the hands of the United States occurred in Santiago de Cuba on 3 July 1898. Spain lost the remnants of her empire – Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Although it is highly unlikely that, at such an age, he was aware of what was happening, a disaster of that dimension could not but have a profound effect on a small naval garrison town like El Ferrol. Many of his school-friends lost relatives and wore mourning. Mutilated men were seen around the town for many years. More importantly, when he became a cadet in the Army, he went directly into an atmosphere which had festered since 1898. Defeat was attributed to the treachery of politicians who had sent naval and military forces into battle with inadequate resources. That it took the massively superior US forces three months to defeat the ramshackle Spanish fleet left Franco convinced that bravery was worth hundreds of tons of superior equipment.¹⁸

      The defeat of 1898 had an immediate impact on Franco because of the consequent budget cuts. The Escuela de Administración Naval, the usual channel for boys of the Franco family into the Navy, was closed in 1901. It was decided that Nicolás and Francisco would prepare instead for the entrance examinations of the Cuerpo General de la Armada. They went to the local middle-class school, the Escuela del Sagrado Corazón. At this time, before his father abandoned the family home, Francisco was, according to contemporaries who saw him outside the family, a meticulous plodder, ‘good at drawing but otherwise quite average, quite ordinary. He was a nice lad, of a happy disposition, thoughtful; he took his time in answering questions but he was a playful lad.’¹⁹ He was of sickly appearance and so thin that his playmates nicknamed him cerillito (little match-stick). Within the family, his sister was struck by the extent to which Francisco emulated his mother’s quiet seriousness. He was an obedient, well-behaved and affectionate child, although timid, rather sad and uncommunicative. Then, as later, he had little spontaneity. He was very particular about his appearance, a trait that would follow him throughout his life. Even then he seemed older than his years and his obstinacy, astuteness and caution were evident. Among his closest childhood friends was his cousin Ricardo de la Puente Bahamonde, who would be executed in Morocco in 1936, with Franco’s acquiescence.²⁰ As an adolescent, Francisco showed a normal interest in girls, favouring slim brunettes, mainly from among his sister’s schoolfriends. He wrote them poems and was mortified when they were shown to his sister.²¹

      The loss of Cuba was to have serious domestic consequences. It hastened the rise of a regionalist movement in Catalonia and imbued Army officers with a determination to wipe away the ignominy of defeat through a colonial enterprise in Morocco. Catalan regionalism and the Moroccan adventure were to interract in an explosive manner. The demonstration in 1898 of Spain’s international impotence shook the faith of the Catalan élites in the central government. The Catalan economy had depended on the Cuban market and now the previously latent sense that Madrid was an incompetent and parasitical obstacle to Catalan dynamism found ever more vocal expression, above all in the appearance in early 1901 of the Catalanist party, the Lliga Regionalista.²² In the context of insecurity and humiliation provoked by the loss of Cuba, military anger at what was seen as as political betrayal during the war with the USA was compounded by the emergence of militant Catalanism, which soldiers perceived as an aggressive separatist threat to the unity of the Patria.²³

      In November 1905, the Barcelona offices of both the Catalan satirical magazine, Cu-Cut! and of the Lliga Regionalista’s newspaper, La Veu de Catalunya, were ransacked by three hundred fiercely centralist junior officers to the applause of the officer corps throughout Spain. Given widespread military approval of what was happening, the government was unable to impose discipline or to resist military demands for measures to punish offences against the honour of the Army. In 1906, politicians bowed to military readiness to interfere in politics by introducing the Ley de Jurisdicciones which gave the Army jurisdiction over perceived offences against the Patria, the King and the Army itself.²⁴ It was a considerable boost to the Army’s sense of superiority over civilian society.

On reaching the age of twelve, first Nicolás and then Francisco, together with their fourteen year-old cousin, Francisco Franco Salgado Araujo, entered the Naval Preparatory School run by Lieutenant-Commander Saturnino Suanzes. There they became friendly with Camilo Alonso Vega, who was to remain a lifelong comrade. Nicolás, and a friend of the two brothers, Juan Antonio Suanzes, were successful in their efforts to join the Cuerpo General de la Armada. Nicolás chose to go to the Naval Engineering School. Franco and his lanky cousin Pacón^* nurtured hopes of going to the Escuela Naval Flotante, the naval cadet ship. Then a decree was published restricting entry which closed the way to them. There was never any question of seeking a career other than a military one and so the now fourteen year-old Franco was sent to the Academia Militar de Infantería in Toledo. Pacón failed the entrance examination for 1907 but was successful the following year.²⁵

      When he accepted a post in Madrid in 1907, Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo went alone and gradually severed his links with his family. Members of his family have suggested that he was obliged to take the post, but having been able to spend nearly twenty years in El Ferrol without threat of being moved away, it seems more likely that he deliberately sought the posting to the capital in order to escape СКАЧАТЬ