"For love of Spain"

On August 10, 1932, General José Sanjurjo rose in Seville against the Republic. He declared a state of war and issued a manifesto, written up by the religious-right journalist Juan Pujol, announcing the dissolution of parliament and the army's taking of power. He did this "for love of Spain," and to "save her from ruin, iniquity and dismemberment."

Outside Seville, however, the rising failed. Sanjurjo tried to flee to Portugal, but was arrested on the way.

There had been murmurings in the army since the summer of 1931, when Manuel Azaña announced his plans for army reform, which were hateful to the extreme right. The first attempts at conspiracy were soon thwarted. However a nucleus of top officers, and of civilian monarchists, began to canvass for support in fascist Italy.

Sanjurjo was lukewarm at first, but his dismissal as general director of the Civil Guard, after the bloody suppression of a strike-related riot in January 1932, and his relegation to a lesser post, changed his mind. He began to think there were good reasons to substitute the Republic by a dictatorship.

Sanjurjo's own commitment encouraged others, though their indiscretion enabled the police to keep tabs on them and to arrest General Luis Orgaz, one of the leaders. The insurrection, however, was already decided on, and before the Azaña government could round up all the conspirators, they set the date of August 10.

He was allowed to live in Portugal, where he organized another coup against the Republic in July 1936

In Madrid, on the morning of that day, a group of officers and armed civilians took over the War Ministry and the nearby Palace of Communications (the post-telegraph-telephone hub). But loyal police forces cleared them out, not without some shooting and nine deaths. Elsewhere the rising also fizzled out. Only in Seville did Sanjurjo's personal prestige draw to it, for some hours, the army garrison and the units of the Civil Guard - until 3.30 in the afternoon, when the government was able to announce to the press that the rebellion had been "liquidated."

The punishment, for the sectors of the officer corps, the aristocracy and the extreme right that had been directly involved, was fairly severe. Several hundred officers were dismissed for their complicity, and 145 ringleaders deported to a colony in the Western Sahara, under the Defense of the Republic Law, as had been done with a number of anarchists some months earlier. Many rightwing journalists lost their jobs, and prominent monarchists were arrested or fled abroad.

The Interior Ministry received a flood of telegrams calling for "exemplary punishment" for Sanjurjo, and in particular the death penalty. Azaña, however, saw from the word go the need not to make a martyr of Sanjurjo, as the monarchy had done with two officers who had led a pro-republican military rising in Jaca two years earlier. In his diary he wrote: "We mustn't make the same mistake. We have to put a stop to the series of risings and firing squads, and defuse them of glory. Sanjurjo alive in prison will be a more salutary spectacle than Sanjurjo dead and glorified."

And so it was. Condemned to death by a court-martial "as responsible for an act of military rebellion," the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, though Interior Minister Santiago Casares Quiroga disagreed, holding that the pardon "breaks the government's firmness, encourages the conspirators and impedes us from rigorous treatment of extremists."

Sanjurjo was locked up in the prison of El Dueso in Cantabria, until the right made a comeback in the elections of November 1933, and the populist compromise government of Alejandro Lerroux released him a few months later. He went to live in Portugal, where he organized another coup against the Republic in July 1936, the one that led to the Civil War.

On July 20 he was killed when his airplane crashed on takeoff. He had overloaded it with luggage, against the pilot's warnings. So Franco became the "savior of his country," after Sanjurjo had led two military risings "for love of Spain."