Basque History of the World (20 page)

“W
HEN YOU SAY
B
ASQUE
, you say Catholic” is an old proverb. To the Basques, a principal attraction to Carlism was its defense of the Church. The rural priests, almost always local because they had to hear confession in Euskera, were among the most dedicated Carlists. Miguel de Unamuno, in his first novel,
Paz en la Guerra
, wrote, “All the villagers thought the same, hearing it directly from the mouth of the priest.” These local priests were instrumental in rallying Basque peasants to the Carlist cause by making it sound like a religious crusade. To an anti-Carlist Liberal such as Unamuno, this alone was a reason to curtail the power of priests. But to a Carlist, this was the reason to leave the power of the Church unhampered. The difference had no resolution.

Making berets in the nineteenth century at the Elosogui Beret factory in Tolosa, still a leading beret maker. (Museo San Telmo, Donastia Kultura, San Sebastián)

Under Joseph Bonaparte and the French occupation, religious orders had been suppressed. In 1808, Bonaparte was the first to abolish the Inquisition. Once back in power, Ferdinand reestablished it, also restoring the religious orders, including, of special significance to Basques, the Jesuits.

But the legislature, the Cortes, continued to pass anticlerical laws, and after Ferdinand’s death anticlericism became an avowed policy. Though, in 1833, the Liberals installed Isabella as Queen Isabella II, the Vatican refused to recognize her rule. On July 15, 1834, the Spanish Inquisition was finally abolished. Economic and political privileges of the Church were dismantled. The Carlists were furious and prepared to go to war for the Church.

Many Basques rallied for Carlos. Most of Vizcaya, all of Alava, much of Guipúzcoa, though not San Sebastián, and most of Navarra but not Pamplona; declared their support for Carlos. Although his intellect was not held in high regard and he was not a skilled military commander, he inspired intense loyalty. Counting on that, he made no attempt to secure the crown when his brother was alive but assumed that his loyal minions would bloodlessly hoist him to power after Ferdinand’s death. He waited at the Portuguese border, yet no such movement materialized.

T
HE FIRST CARLIST WAR
, from 1833 to 1839, was fought on three separate fronts: Basqueland, Aragón, and Catalonia. But the most concentrated fighting was in Basqueland, the Carlist stronghold. While Carlists went into battle singing songs of Ignatius Loyola, the Liberals burned churches and monasteries. Most of Europe took sides: England and France, for once on the same side, backed the Liberals, and Russia, Prussia, and Austria supported the Carlists. To Europe, it was a war for or against absolute monarchy.

The British and French both sent troops to fight for the Liberal side. The British troops were amazed by the Basque way of fighting, comparing it to the “Indian” tactics of the American colonists in the Revolution, resenting their “un-European” tactic of only firing from under cover.

No longer waiting for the masses to triumphantly carry him in, Carlos slipped into Spain through Basqueland to Elizondo, a valley town in northern Navarra. He found a war under way and an able general with several victories behind him in command.

The general, from Guipúzcoa, was Tomás Zumalacárregui, whose family name of imposing length means “willows on the mountain slope.” Zumalacárregui’s image—the daring young general with the fine long Basque nose, thick mustache, and sideburns framing a strong Basque chin, wearing a large red beret with a tassel draped from the middle—caught the international imagination.

This poster revolutionary, whose portrait helped make berets fashionable, was made a romantic figure by those who wrote of the war. In 1835, Augustin Chaho, one of the great Basque propagandists, wrote a popular account,
Journey to Navarra during the Basque Insurrection
, in which he quotes Zumalacárregui as saying, “Isn’t this the land of our fathers? What are the Christians to us Basques except thieves who come in the night to attack the innocent man at home with his family?” Despite their attachment to the Church, speaking of the enemy as the Christians, as though the Basques were still animists fighting off the Visigoths, became a fashion of Basque nationalists.

Zumalacárregui was a brilliant tactician who had built a fine defensive military, schooled in hit-and-run guerrilla tactics but capable of major assaults. His army was fiercely committed, loyal, and disciplined. They took town after town: Vergara, Guernica, Tolosa. But they still had no port. In 1835, Carlos ordered them to take Bilbao. Zumalacárregui thought this was a mistake, but he obeyed orders from Carlos. This was the siege that is remembered for pil pil. The attack failed, and, wounded in the fight, Zumalacárregui died eleven days later.

A warring people with more wars to come, the Basques had in Tomás Zumalacárregui their last great military commander. Carlism never recovered from this loss.

T
HE PROBLEM WITH
the army Zumalacárregui had built was that, typically Basque, it was based on the defense of Basqueland against invaders. Except for a brief period under the Kingdom of Navarra, Basques never fought to take new land. But now they were in a war for more than the defense of their own borders. To bring Carlos to power, they needed to seize the offensive. In a surprise attack they almost made it to Madrid and were within striking distance of kidnaping María Cristina. But instead, they retreated back to Basqueland.

Tomás Zumalacárregui, from
Don Carlos et ses Défenseurs
, by Isidore Maquès, Paris, 1837.

Again they tried and failed to take Bilbao. Another foray into Spain failed. After they crossed the Ebro, progress was slowed by the insistence on saying Mass in every liberated church. They finally got as far as Valencia, took it, started to march toward Madrid, but confronted with a superior force, they reverted to guerrilla tactics, retreating back to Navarra.

Needing to strengthen his base, Carlos did what monarchs always did when they wanted Basque support. From this point on, when raising money or recruiting volunteers among rural Basques, the Carlists declared that Carlism stood for the Fueros against María Cristina and the Liberals who wanted to abolish all of the traditional rights. Suddenly the motto of Carlism,
Dios, Patria, Rey
, God, Country, King, became
Dios y Fueros.

But in 1837, a Carlist writer-turned-general, José Antonio Muñagorri, began questioning the value of Basques killing Basques in the name of Carlos. He suggested that the Basques on both sides give up fighting, that the cause of Don Carlos be abandoned in exchange for an agreement from Madrid that the rule of the Fueros would be respected in Basqueland. “Our first objective is the total restoration of the Fueros,” he said. Few listened.

Both armies were brutal. Prisoners were frequently massacred. Espoz y Mina, the constitution-slaying hero of the División de Navarra, in a fury over a defeat, burned down the Navarrese village of Lecároz and executed one in every five of its men. The Carlists, always poorly provisioned because they did not control major ports, captured town officials and tortured them to locate caches of money and supplies. As often happens in war, women were singled out for their collaboration. When Carlists took a town, they would tar-and-feather women who were said to be Liberal sympathizers. Because Carlist general Ramón Cabrera was infamously brutal, Liberal forces in Aragón captured and murdered his mother.

On August 29, 1839, an end to hostilities was signed in Vergara. To prove that hostilities had ended, the two opposing generals embraced, which came to be known as the
Abrazo de Vergara
, a phrase which in Basqueland became synonymous with sellout. The troops from Alava and Navarra did not even appear for the signing. After their defeat, thousands of Basque peasants immigrated to the Americas. A curious footnote is that Muñagorri, the reluctant general, was assassinated in 1841, not by a Carlist angered by his willingness to give up fighting for Carlos, but by a Liberal.

I
T WILL NEVER BE
known if a victorious Carlos would have defended Basque independence. But his claim that their enemies were out to destroy it was proven true. The process that began with the century of chipping away at Foral rights continued. Already under Ferdinand, the Navarrese had lost their right to review royal decrees. In 1833, the Ministry of Interior in Madrid had ordered Spain to be divided into forty-nine provinces, meaning that even Navarra, which had still been recognized as a nominal kingdom, was reduced to being just another province. In 1836 the traditional Navarrese ruling body was replaced by a provincial legislature. The following year the same was ordered in the three other Basque provinces.

The Liberals had for a number of years been forcing anticlerical and antiregional measures on a reluctant María Cristina. In 1837 they forced her to reinstate the 1812 constitution. Three years later a more liberal faction came to power, and, unable to accept further demands, María Cristina resigned, leaving Spain and her daughter, now ten-year-old Queen Isabella II. With the victorious Liberal general Baldomero Espartero acting as regent, there was no longer any hope of saving the Fueros. The Navarrese, through compromise, were able to negotiate better terms than the other Basque provinces, but in the law of August 16, 1841, Basque autonomy was largely ended. Customs controls now began at the Pyrenees border and not at the Ebro. Provincial governments retained control only over internal affairs.

As the assassinated and forgotten Carlist general Muñagorri had warned, the war for Carlos had been disastrous for the Basques. But even worse disasters were to come.

The First Carlist War had resolved nothing, merely intensifying society’s divisions. The Liberals, in control, did not try to assuage the Carlists, and with each new Liberal measure restricting regional autonomy or eroding the position of the Church, the Carlists grew angrier. Throughout northern Spain, the veterans of the First Carlist War were restless and occasionally violent. In 1844, the Spanish government responded by creating a national police force, the Guardia Civil, which became and has remained the greatest single irritant in Basque-Spanish relations.

8: The Basque Ear

I am tempted to say about metaphysicians what Scalinger would say about the Basques: they are said to understand one another, but I don’t believe it at all.

—Nicolas Chamfort, French writer, 1741-94

S
OON AFTER THE
C
ARLIST
defeat, disillusioned peasants in farmhouses on the green slopes above Bilbao looked down and saw an eerie red glow tinting the night sky along the Nervión River. That strange man-made volcano told them the world was changing— all the more reason to fight for the old ways.

A revolution was taking place in the cities and even some towns of Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya. Aside from these urban Basque regions and parts of Catalonia, the great changes of England, Germany, eastern France, and the northern United States—the industrial revolution—were not reaching Iberia.

The defeat of the Carlists and dismantling of the Fueros had presented Basque industrialists with an opportunity. When the Basque economy was focused on trading between Latin America and Europe, being outside the Spanish customs zone had been a great advantage. But while Basqueland was mired in the First Carlist War, Britain had revolutionized metal making by fusing coke and iron to produce steel, which destroyed the iron industry of Vizcaya that had once been a world leader. As the British eroded the Basque competitive edge for industrial products in Europe, and Latin American colonies became increasingly rebellious, the Basques were beginning to find the internal Spanish market attractive, especially since the population of Spain almost doubled during the nineteenth century. Once Vizcaya was inside the Spanish customs zone, the Basques were in a position to dominate the Spanish market against foreign competition.

In 1841, the same year that Basque autonomy was dismantled, the first blast furnace was built in Basqueland at a steel plant called Santa Ana de Bolueta. This one plant produced as much steel as 100 of the small mills that had been operating in Vizcaya. In 1846, Ibarra Hermanos, a leading Basque iron mining company, built the first completely modern Basque steel mill, Fábrica de Nuestra Señora de la Merced, down the Nervión River from Bilbao. In 1855, the Fábrica de Nuestra Señora del Carmen was built on the left bank of the Nervión.