Basque History of the World (19 page)

Neither the wealth nor industry that was changing urban life reached the agricultural sector. Into the twentieth century, soil was still being turned by Basque women using the two-pronged
laia
, the basque hoe.

The most striking feature of modern industrial Bilbao is at the end of most any downtown street: The green, steep slopes of the Basque countryside can be seen with shepherds tending grazing flocks. Bilbao is an urban population surrounded by a rural one. Farming families look down from their low-pitched, red-tile-roofed country houses into the busy streets of the largest, most industrial Basque city. The
baserritarrak
look down at the scrambling
kaletarrak
.

Farm women with
laias
, photographed by Eulalia Abaitua Allende Salazar. Born in Bilbao in 1853, she began documenting Basque life during the Second Carlist War. She died at the age of ninety in 1943. (Euskal Arkeologia, Etnografia eta Kondaira Museoa, Bilbao)

In 1801, Simón Bernardo de Zamácola, a jauntxo, approached the regional Basque government, the Juntas Generales, meeting in Guernica. Zamácola wanted to break the trade monopoly of the Bilbao commercial class, which had exclusive rights to the port of Bilbao. He proposed that the Juntas open and manage a new port in Abando, which is today part of Bilbao.

The Juntas sent Zamácola to the next step, the required Royal approval from Madrid for a new port Madrid named its terms: The Basques could have their port, but in exchange they would have to agree to perform Spanish military service. The explosion that this counteroffer produced in Bilbao in 1804 has become known as the Zamacolada.

The Zamacolada of 1804 was a miniwar in Bilbao. Spanish troops occupied state buildings, closed down the Juntas, suspended self-rule, and held the city under a state of siege for three years until yet another war broke out—this time against Napoleon.

N
OWHERE IN
S
PAIN
was there more loyalty to the Spanish monarchy, and more hostility to the antimonarchist, anticleric reforms of French republicanism, than in Navarra. Oddly, the Spanish kings did not share the ferocity of their supporters. In February 1808, when a Napoleonic army climbed through the pass over the ghosts of Roncesvalles and down to Pamplona, it met little resistance because the Spanish monarchy had declared the French to be allies. In March, Charles IV abdicated and fled to France. His son, Ferdinand VII, sought only to be a servile puppet to Napoleon. But, reasoning that a relative was more dependable than a collaborator, Napoleon forced Ferdinand to step down and made his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, ruler instead.

On May 2, 1808, a date remembered in Spanish history as Dos de Mayo, the Madrid citizenry rose up against the French. A French ruler was one step too far, which is why the six-year Iberian war—the Spanish, Portuguese, and British against Napoleon—is called the Spanish War of Independence. Most combatants were fighting to keep Napoleon from incorporating Spain into his growing empire. But the Navarrese fought for the monarchy itself. Ferdinand, the pathetic prince who had capitulated, was referred to by the Navarrese as
El Deseado
, the longed-for.

Though Pamplona remained in French hands for most of the war, Napoleonic troops had to contend with relentless Basque guerrilla attacks from the mountains. The first of the guerrilla movements was organized at the mouth of the Roncesvalles pass in Valcarlos.

Napoleon had originally shown contempt for local Basques. His troops had harassed them when they attempted to hold meetings of local Foral administration. Now, realizing his error, he proposed a constitution with special Basque provisions.

Neither Spain nor the Basques had ever had a constitution. Napoleon not only imposed his own absolute rule but, by drawing up a constitution for his Spanish holdings, also imposed a new form of government. The issue of constitutions has been an enduring controversy in Spain. This first taste was bitter for most of Spain since the new constitution abolished almost all institutions of regional self-government. But in Navarra and the Basque provinces, Napoleon allowed the Fueros to remain in force. Kings of Castile had controlled Basques with this same concession. However, being by nature obsessed with centralized authority, Napoleon could not resist adding that the Fueros would be subject to review at a later date.

In France, Napoleon had been determined to end regionalism. Préfets, government officials charged with carrying out the will of Paris, were sent to each region. A uniform school curriculum in France banned Basque and other regional languages, an act that was not repealed until the election of François Mitterrand in 1981.

But in Spain, Napoleon promised, it was all to be different. He even let it be known that he was thinking of creating a Basque state. Called Nueva Fenicia, it was to have had two parts: The three French provinces would become Nueva Tiro, and the four Spanish ones, Nueva Sidon. It is not clear how the Basques felt about becoming “new Phoenicians,” nor even how serious Napoleon was about this plan. The broader plan, one that he was ready to act on, was moving the French-Spanish border to the Ebro. North of the Ebro would be France, and south of it would be a puppet Spain ruled by his brother.

The Navarrese guerrilla resistance, apparently not impressed by any of these plans, continued. A small group called the División de Navarra was particularly effective at defeating far greater French forces, heroics for which the French regularly retaliated with the execution of citizens in Pamplona, gruesomely displaying the corpses after each Navarrese victory.

By 1813, the Spanish-Portuguese-British alliance had swept through Iberia and driven the Napoleonic army back everywhere. But the French stubbornly held Pamplona through a four-month siege, finally surrendering after losing 2,300 men.

Spain was rid of Napoleon and once more free to choose its own destiny. But the French had set off a controversy which to this day has not been resolved: the idea of Spain. Not only did the French Revolution proclaim “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” but it also established a new kind of nationhood. Instead of an inherited kingdom whose borders were defined by the wins and losses of a ruling family, France had established a strong, centralized state that incorporated many peoples and cultures, backed by a constitution, which, of course, could always be rewritten.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, Spain was still more of a geographic demarcation, like Iberia, than a state. In the fifteenth century, Ferdinand of Aragón, through his diplomatic skills, had created an amalgamation of distinct kingdoms. And that is what Spain remained. As such, it was willing to negotiate a special relationship with the Basques. There was no monarch with the title king of Spain. Rather he was king of Castile and León, king of Navarra, of Aragón—the list of titles was long. So that he could rule Basque provinces that had never been kingdoms, titles were invented such as “count of Guipúzcoa.” It took a long paragraph to give the monarch’s full title. Many would die before the title would be condensed to “king of Spain” in the late nineteenth century.

A
FTER THE DEFEAT
of Napoleon, as so often happened at these critical moments, the Spanish had one idea of how to proceed and the Basques another. The Basques, as always, wanted regional autonomy and rule by the Fueros. But to the Liberals in Madrid, the problem had been an inept monarchy, and the solution was the French concept of strong central constitutional government.

A group of radicals who had escaped the war in Cádiz, calling themselves “the Liberals,” now wanted to create a homegrown version of constitutional government. The term
liberal
is an Old French word meaning “a completely free man,” which was to say, a nobleman. The Spanish Liberals in Cádiz were the first to use the word to refer to those who believed in greater liberty.

But to the Liberals, greater liberty did not mean autonomy for the Basques. The preamble to their 1812 constitution paid tribute to the Fueros, but the body of the document dismantled them. Francisco Espoz y Mina, the former commander of the División de Navarra, one of the great heroes of the war, took a copy of the constitution, placed it on a chair, and ordered it shot.

The stage was set for civil war—conservative against liberal, Church against secular, populist against bourgeoisie, rural against urban. But in Basqueland, a crucial factor was regionalist against centralist—the Liberals wished to abolish the Fueros. To many Basques, and to the Catalans also seeking to preserve their self-determination, it was a struggle for survival.

The first civil war to occur, the Royalist War of 1820-23, was the smallest. While the Liberals had opponents throughout Spain, armed resistance occurred only in Navarra and Catalonia.

When Ferdinand VII died in 1833, a decade later, the rift deepened. The two sides backed different candidates for the throne. Ferdinand had named his daughter Isabella, three years old at the time of his death, as his heir, with her mother, María Cristina, as regent. But many wanted to see Carlos, Ferdinand’s younger brother, as king instead and invoked the so-called Salic Law, which had barred women from inheriting the throne in France.

In Spain, it was not clear what the laws of succession were since there was no real king of Spain but only a collection of titles with varying rules. The real debate was not over who had the right to succeed but over what kind of monarchy to have. The rule of Isabella and María Cristina would be Liberal: a weakened monarch and a strongly anti-Church constitutional government that wanted to move Spain closer to the new French model of a secular republican society.

Carlos stood for absolute monarchy. His supporters, Carlists, were mostly Basque, Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian. These passionate monarchists were also the people of Iberia who enjoyed special measures of home rule. They wanted strong monarchy, but from a distance. Among the Basques, Carlists were clergy, peasants, and aristocrats. The urban middle class, the commercial class, and the high-ranking military officers supported Isabella and María Cristina. It was the same enduring split that began with the French Revolution.

The Carlists often seemed fanatically right-wing. They opposed an elected representative parliament as a foreign concept. They opposed universal male suffrage because it dismantled the privilege of rural landowners. Freedom of religion was objectionable because it diminished the power of the Catholic Church, and they were infuriated by the long overdue abolition of the Inquisition even though it had persecuted Basque peasants.

Freemasonry, a nonsectarian religious movement, was singled out by Carlists as a particularly odious enemy that, according to the bishop of Urgel, chaplain of the Carlist army, “has been robbing Europe and the new world of its beliefs and Christian morality.” Mystifyingly, Freemasons, by virtue of their lack of Church affiliation, have always been a target of denunciation, but especially in the nineteenth century. In the United States, the Anti-Masonic Party of 1827 was the first third party.

Though today Carlism seems extremist, in the volatile nineteenth century, Carlists were often seen as romantic figures. They were the underdogs, the brave and hardworking people of the countryside, fighting the powerful. Curiously, the great anticleric voice of the nineteenth-century industrial masses, Karl Marx, praised the Carlists and not the anti-Church Liberals: “The traditional Carlist has the genuinely mass national base of peasants, lower aristocracy and clergy, while the so-called Liberals derived their base from the military, the capitalists, latifundist aristocracy, and secular interests.”

The term
liberal
has become synonymous with reformist, progressive politics. And that is how some of the Spanish Liberals saw themselves. Yet Marx and subsequent Marxists have always viewed the original Liberals in Spain as the epitome of bourgeois hypocrisy. This is in part because, as always happens, many of the Liberals were not liberals. Isabella, the Liberal choice for monarch, grew up to be no liberal, nor was her mother, the regent María Cristina.

Nor was Carlos himself wholly Carlist. Unlike his brother Ferdinand, he was deeply religious and sincere in his sense of royal responsibility. He did not compromise and deal away royal authority. But he had no interest in restoring the Inquisition, which, to him and most of the world, seemed an obsolete institution.

Nothing so illustrates the romance of the Carlist cause as their hat, the Carlist trademark, a large red beret. The Carlists brought the beret into fashion in Europe, and it has never since gone out of style. Although the first known use of the word
beret
dates to a 1461 text in Landes, and though Gascognes and others in the region had worn this hat of unknown origin, there has been a long-standing association between Basques and berets. Jesuit novices wore a
birette
, and a bas-relief in Tolosa dated 1600 shows berets. The Carlists wore it in red, the color traditionally worn on Basque holidays, and made it their own.
La Boina
, “the beret,” was the name of a Carlist newspaper, and it was during the First Carlist War that the French began referring to the hat, as they still do, as
le beret Basque
. Since the First Carlist War, the hat not only has become a central symbol of Basqueness but has also gained international popularity and is generally associated with the political left. Argentine leftist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara saw no contradiction in using the image of the beret, because it is the hat of the underdog fighting the establishment.