Francisco Franco - Military Career - During The Second Spanish Republic

During The Second Spanish Republic

With the fall of the monarchy in 1931, in keeping with his long-standing apolitical record, Franco did not take any notable stand. But the closing of the Academy, in June, by War Minister Manuel Azaña, provoked his first clash with the Spanish Republic. Azaña found Franco's farewell speech to the cadets insulting. For six months, Franco was without a post and under surveillance.

Franco was a subscriber to Acción Española, an ultra-right wing monarchist theoretical journal, and a firm believer in the Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy - or contubernio, (filthy cohabitation), 'one of Franco's favourite words'; a conspiracy in which Jews, Freemasons and leftists allegedly sought the destruction of Christian Europe, with Spain the principal target.

On 5 February 1932, he was given a command in A Coruña. Franco avoided involvement in José Sanjurjo's attempted coup that year, and even wrote a hostile letter to Sanjurjo expressing his anger over the attempt. As a side result of Azaña's military reform, in January 1933, Franco was relegated from the first to the 24th in the list of Brigadiers; conversely, the same year (17 February), he was given the military command of the Balearic Islands: a post above his rank.

New elections held in October 1933 resulted in a center-right majority. In opposition to this government, a revolutionary movement broke out 5 October 1934. This uprising was rapidly quelled in most of the country, but gained a stronghold in Asturias, with the support of the miners' unions. Franco, already general of a Division and aide to the war minister, Diego Hidalgo, was put in command of the operations directed to suppress the insurgency. The forces of the Army in Africa carried this out, with General Eduardo López Ochoa as commander in the field. After two weeks of heavy fighting (and a death toll estimated between 1,200 and 2,000), the rebellion was suppressed.

The insurgency in Asturias sharpened the antagonism between Left and Right. Franco and López Ochoa—who, prior to the campaign in Asturias, was seen as a left-leaning officer—emerged as officers prepared to use 'troops against Spanish civilians as if they were a foreign enemy'. Franco did not hesitate to ship Moorish mercenaries to fight in Asturias and described the rebellion to a journalist in Oviedo as, 'a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism.' Though the colonial units sent to the north by Franco consisted of the Spanish Foreign Legion and the Moroccan mercenaries of the Regulares Indigenas, the right wing press portrayed the Asturian rebels in xenophobic terms as lackeys of a foreign Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. At the start of the Civil War, López Ochoa was assassinated. Some time after these events, Franco was briefly commander-in-chief of the Army of Africa (from 15 February onwards), and from 19 May 1935 on, Chief of the General Staff.