This is how the meeting between Tejero and Armada finishes, or that’s how I imagine it finishing. The general left the Cortes at exactly twenty-five past one in the morning; five minutes earlier the television had broadcast the message the King had recorded at the Zarzuela, a message that had been announced for several hours on various media and in which the King had proclaimed that he was on the side of the Constitution and democracy. The two events turned out to be deciding factors in the outcome of the coup, but the second was taken by most of the country as a sure sign that the coup had failed; it wasn’t true: the truth is that Armada’s failure in the Cortes and the broadcast of the King’s televised message meant only that the coup as originally conceived had failed: the coup could no longer be Milans and Armada’s coup, but it could still be Tejero’s coup (and Armada and Milans could still join it); the coup could no longer be a soft coup: it had to be a hard coup; the coup could no longer be with the King or using the King as a fraudulent alibi: it had to be a coup against the King. This of course turned it into a much more dangerous coup, because it could split the Army into two opposing halves, one loyal to the King and another in rebellion; but it absolutely didn’t turn it into an impossible coup, because it absolutely wasn’t impossible that, seeing that the King was not with them, the most hardened Francoist officers with most accrued fury might opt to follow Tejero’s example and take advantage of that perhaps unrepeatable opportunity to gather now without alibis around the coup for which they’d been calling for years. Milans and Armada’s coup had died in the office of the new building of the Cortes not because Tejero was mad, as Armada thought or pretended to think, but because, drunk with power, with egomania, with renown and idealism, ready to make a grand exit from the Cortes through triumph or failure (but only a grand exit), the lieutenant colonel broke a chain of command that was too weak and tried to impose his coup on Armada and Milans: not a coup that would result in a government of unity but a coup that would result in a military junta, not a coup with the monarchy against democracy but a coup against the monarchy and against democracy; Milans and Armada’s coup failed because in his talk with Armada in the Cortes Tejero gambled everything on everything and preferred the failure of the coup to the triumph of a coup different from his, but at half past one in the morning it was yet to be known how many soldiers would accept Tejero’s challenge, how many would share his exclusive idea of the coup and his utopia of the country as a barracks and how many would be ready to run a real risk to achieve it, embarking on a hard coup that would present the King with the option of accepting its result or giving up the Crown.
The King’s appearance on television and Armada’s failure in the Cortes did not therefore mark the end of the coup, but the start of a different phase of the coup: the last one. Both things happened at almost the very same time; this simultaneity inevitably sparked off conjecture. The most persistent was devised and spread by the golpistas facing trial for their actions on 23 February and claims that the Zarzuela held back the royal message until they heard the result of the talk between Armada and Tejero and only authorized the broadcast once they knew the general had failed; it also claims, if Armada had not failed, if Tejero had let the general negotiate with the deputies and they had agreed to form a unity government with him as a way out of the coup, the King would have accepted the agreement, his message would not have been broadcast and the coup would have triumphed with his blessing: all things considered, with the unity government led by Armada and backed by the Cortes the King would have achieved what he wanted when he put Armada in charge of the coup. It is a tricky conjecture — one more of the many served up during the 23 February trial to attempt to blame the King and exonerate the
golpistas — because it starts from the falsehood that the King ordered the coup and because it mixes the verifiable with the unverifiable, but in a certain sense it’s not foolish. The verifiable part is false; it has been proven that the King did not wait to know the result of Armada’s move before allowing the television station to broadcast his message: leaving aside the unanimous testimony denying it by the television directors and technicians, who maintain they put it on screen as soon as it was in their hands, it’s a fact that Armada came out of the Cortes five minutes after the King’s words were broadcast, and could not advise the Zarzuela of his failure from inside the Cortes — he would have had to do so in the presence of Tejero, who would have had the most interest in making it public during the trial — and that, when he arrived at the Hotel Palace and found out from those in charge of the cordon around the attackers that the King had just spoken on television, the general seemed surprised and displeased, in theory because the intervention of the monarch could divide the Army and provoke an armed conflict, but in practice because he was not resigned to his failure (and undoubtedly because he was beginning to feel that he had calculated badly, that he’d exposed himself too much by negotiating with Tejero, that the suspicions that hovered over him were increasingly dense and that, if the golpistas were defeated, it wasn’t going to be as simple as he’d originally thought to hide his actual role in the coup behind the façade of a mere unsuccessful negotiator for the liberty of the hostaged parliamentarians). All this is verifiable; then comes the unverifiable: what would have happened if Armada had been able to negotiate the creation of a unity government with the parliamentarians? Would they have accepted it? Would the King have accepted it? Armada’s plan might seem implausible, and perhaps it was, but history abounds in implausibilities and, as Santiago Carrillo remembered that night as he remained locked in the clock room of the Cortes, it wouldn’t have been the first time a democratic Parliament gave in to blackmail by its own Army and presented a defeat as a victory or as a prudent negotiated way out — temporary, perhaps unsatisfactory but imperious — an extreme situation: Armada always kept in mind that, twenty years earlier, just before he moved to Paris as a student at the École de Guerre, General de Gaulle had reached the presidency of the French Republic in a similar way, and he undoubtedly thought on 23 February that he could adapt de Gaulle’s model to Spain to stage a veiled coup. As for the King, one might ask if he would have refused to sanction an agreement adopted by the representatives of popular sovereignty, or even if he could have. Whatever the answer one chooses to give to this question, one thing seems beyond doubt to me: had the parliamentary leaders accepted Armada’s conditions, the royal message would not have represented any obstacle to their being fulfilled, because not a single one of his phrases denied that the government led by Armada could turn into the circumstantial means for the return to the constitutional order violated by the assault on the Cortes or because the perimeter of the King’s words had enough expanse to take on board, had it been necessary, Armada’s solution. The message was a reworking of a telex sent from the Zarzuela Palace at half past ten that night to the Captains General and said exactly the following: ‘In addressing all the Spanish people, briefly and concisely, in the extraordinary circumstances we are experiencing at this moment, I ask everyone for the greatest calm and confidence and tell you that I have sent the following order to the Captains General of the military regions, maritime zones and aerial regions: “In the face of the situation created by the events unfolding in the Cortes and of any possible confusion, I confirm that I have ordered the civil authorities and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to take all necessary measures to maintain constitutional order within existing legal frameworks. Any military measures that circumstances seem to require must have the approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” The Crown, symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, cannot in any way tolerate actions or attitudes by those who would seek to intervene by force in the democratic process outlined by the Constitution ratified by the Spanish people.’ These words — spoken by a monarch wearing his Captain General’s uniform and with his face transfigured by the most difficult hours of his forty-three years of life — are a clear declaration of constitutional loyalty, of support for democracy and rejection of the assault on the Cortes, and that’s how they were interpreted when the King spoke them and and how they’ve been interpreted since then; the interpretation strikes me as correct, but words have owners, and it’s obvious that, if Armada had managed to forge a pact with the political leaders to agree to form the government anticipated by the golpistas and present as the solution to the coup what in reality was the triumph of the coup, those same words would of course have continued to mean a condemnation of those who had assaulted the Cortes, but would have been able to come to mean a recognition of those, like Armada and the political leaders, who’d agreed to form part of his government, had managed to get the parliamentary hostages released and thus restore the shattered legality and constitutional order. In short: it’s not that the King’s speech was written anticipating or desiring Armada to come out of the Cortes triumphant; it’s that his words constitute a condemnation of Tejero’s coup, not necessarily a condemnation of Armada’s coup.