Military reform of Manuel Azaña

[1][2] When the provisional government was formed, the Ministry of War fell to Manuel Azaña because he was the only member of the "revolutionary committee" who had knowledge of military matters (he had published the first part of a study on the French army) and because he had a clear idea of what had to be done: to reduce the excessive number of officers, a prior step to modernize the army, and to put an end to the "autonomous" power of the military, placing them under the authority of civilian power.

[3] It was precisely his outstanding management at the head of this ministry that made him the most prestigious figure in the government and which would finally lead him to preside it after the resignation of Niceto Alcalá-Zamora in October 1931 because of the "religious issue".

As Javier Tusell has pointed out, "Azaña knew how to see the opportunities offered by a situation of regime change and had the courage to confront a reform, the military, before which his predecessors in office had retreated".

[5] When he took office at ten o'clock in the evening of the same day, April 14, when the Republic was proclaimed, he addressed the military chiefs present at the Ministry of War, according to what Lieutenant Colonel Felipe Díaz Sandino, who had accompanied him to the Ministry, told years later, "making them aware of the proclamation of the Republic in Spain, its democratic aims, which were based on the maintenance of order and the reestablishment of justice in all the State bodies, and especially in the Army, which he considered to be insufficiently equipped with material; that one of the Government's concerns would be to make it more efficient, reorganizing it and trying to achieve the greatest professional competence, maintaining discipline and removing the military from politics".

As an argument for the dissolution of the former, it was stated that the Government of the Republic could not "prolong for a moment longer the existence of unduly and tendentiously armed irregular armies which, unnecessary as a support for order, could cause, through misunderstanding or abuse, disturbances of the same".

Almost 9,000 commanders (among them 84 generals) availed themselves of the measure, approximately 40% of the officers (the highest percentage of desertions occurred in the higher ranks), therefore, Azaña was then able to undertake the reorganization of the Army.

[13] Some historians point out that politically it was a debatable measure because it did not contribute to making the army more republican, since part of the most liberal sector of officers left active service at that time.

This last measure raised a lively debate in the Cortes, as both Miguel Maura and Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo denounced the injustice to which the approximately 5,000 recently retired officers who at any given time criticized the Government could fall victim.

[9] The decree of July 4, 1931, which reorganized the Army of Africa, separated the positions of High Commissioner —commended to a civilian— from that of Superior Chief of the Military Forces of Morocco —assumed by a general and subordinated to the first—.

To head the new institution, General Primo de Rivera thought of a military man with a mentality radically opposed to that of the "artillery spirit" (which he considered enlightened, elitist and bureaucratic) and for this purpose he first thought of General Millán Astray, founder of the Legion and a furious "Africanist", but he was advised against his appointment because he was a conflictive character, with enemies in the Army.

[26] However, the repeal of the Law of Jurisdictions, which President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora described as "an ominous law, which nobody dared to touch up and which we repealed in one stroke and completely" (although in 1906 he, being a liberal monarchist deputy, supported it) and which the decree of annulment called "a strange and disturbing body", did not mean at all that in the Republic the military jurisdiction was no longer used for the maintenance of Public Order without the need to resort to the suspension of constitutional guarantees or to declare a state of exception, and therefore military jurisdiction continued to be applied to civilian individuals for reasons of public order, as had happened during the Monarchy of the Restoration and during the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.

Many of the generals who led the rebellion of July 1936 had had responsibilities in the police administration and in the maintenance of public order: Sanjurjo, Mola, Cabanellas, Queipo de Llano, Muñoz Grandes or Franco.

That the Republican-Socialist coalition was aware of the choice it was making is shown by the fact that in the same decree promulgated by a government which had defined itself as having "full powers" (according to the legal Statute of the Provisional Government which it had promulgated the day after taking power) the Sixth Chamber of military justice was created in the Supreme Court (which assumed the competences of the former Supreme Council of War and Navy, which was abolished) made up of four military magistrates and only two civilians.

For example, the first paragraph of the seventh case of Article 7 of the Code of Military Justice remained as follows:[33]Article 7.°: By reason of crime, the jurisdiction of War knows the cases that against any person are instructed by.... 7.° Those of attack and contempt to the military authorities and those of insult and slander to them and to the corporations or collectivities of the Army, whatever the means of committing the crime, as long as it refers to the exercise of military assignment or command, tends to undermine its prestige or to relax the bonds of discipline and subordination in the armed organizations.An order of the Sixth Chamber of October 2, 1931 establishes that: "It corresponds to the War Jurisdiction" in the case of "insult to the Armed Forces" committed by a civilian.

The orders of October 27 and November 11, 1931, in which the cases of "aggression against the Armed Forces and death produced in repelling it" were elucidated, also pronounced in favor of the jurisdiction of the War Councils to the detriment of the Ordinary Courts.

The Supreme Court declares that in the "aggression against the Armed Forces, the war jurisdiction is competent even if it is for political or social purposes (A. of August 4, 1932).

The phrase was taken from a speech delivered by Azaña on June 7 in Valencia in which, referring to the municipal control by the caciques, he said that "if I ever have any participation in this kind of matters, I have to crush, I have to uproot this organization with the same energy, with the same resolution, without losing my serenity, that I have put into undoing other things no less threatening to the Republic".

They also protested when a law of September 1932 obliged candidates to enter the officer academies to serve in the army for six months and to follow a certain number of short courses at a university.

[44] The attempted coup d'état led by General Sanjurjo, in August 1932, was an exponent of the uneasiness of a part of the Army for reasons that were not strictly political.

The very strong campaign unleashed by the conservative media against the reform, personalized in the figure of Azaña, also contributed to turn the Prime Minister into the real bête noire of many military men.

[16] In a speech in the Republican Cortes, the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset described "the radical reform of the Army" carried out by Azaña as "marvelous and incredible, fabulous [and] legendary" "without the Spanish people having been well aware of it until now".

[45] For his part, the socialist Juan Simeón Vidarte, many years after the end of the Civil War, harshly criticized the fact that Azaña had not wanted to "form a Republican Army", arguing "that the first duty of the Republic was to form an Army based on authentically republican chiefs and officers and not to allow many hundreds of these to leave active service because they considered themselves to have been left behind".

[46] For historian Julio Gil Pecharromán, "Azaña, not exempt of political arrogance, did little to defend his project before public opinion and his verbal outbursts, which led him to be branded as a 'Jacobin', contributed to create grievances that weighed on the anti-regime attitude of many military men.

Republican politicians proved incapable of adapting the administration of public order to the principles of a democratic regime and resorted to the same instruments of the monarchy to achieve social pacification: state of war and troops in the streets, ingredients that perpetuated the prominence of the Army".