Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  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.

  IT 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

  * * *

  SOON AFTER THE CARLIST 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.

  In 1856, Henry Bessemer, working in Britain on an improved artillery shell, found that by blowing air through molten iron, he could speed up the process of converting iron to steel. No longer requiring tremendous time and energy, the new Bessemer converter process made steel cheap enough to be a practical metal for common use.

  Ninteenth-century steelworkers in Vizcaya. The fact that they are wearing canvas espadrilles on their feet while working with molten metal is an indication of the safety standards for workers at the time. (Kutxa Fototeka, San Sebastián)

  Bessemer had by chance used for ore a low phosphorus iron called hematite, and it was later discovered that this was a requirement for the Bessemer process to function well. There was only one place in Europe that had known deposits of this type of ore in easily exploitable fields near a coastline for efficient transport: Vizcaya.

  A rail line was built from the mines to the coast, and the port of Bilbao was modernized. Confident that iron exports could generate enough capital to build Basque industry, the new infrastructure was financed with public money. The smaller mills merged into Altos Homos de Vizcaya, Vizcaya Blast Furnaces, which by the end of the nineteenth century was the largest steelmaker in Spain and one of the largest in the world. By exporting iron to England, Basque mills w
ere able to get advantageous arrangements for British coal, which was the return freight From 1885 until the early twentieth century, Vizcaya produced 77 percent of Spain’s cast iron and 87 percent of its steel. With the ability to manufacture the cheapest steel in Europe, the banks of the Nervión from Bilbao to the sea, once a world capital of shipbuilding, became one of the world’s great steel centers, creating enormous wealth and thousands of jobs. Basques also invested in chemical factories, and in 1878 one of the first oil refineries in Spain was built on the Nervión.

  There have always been two kinds of Basques. While some were fighting for the Basque way, the Basque tradition, other Basques, naming their steel mills after saints, just as they used to name the ships in their commercial fleets, fought for a place in the forefront of modern industry and became very wealthy.

  These industrial Basques did not want serene isolation in their mountain lairs. They wanted rail connections to move raw materials, manufactured products, and people. These Basques wanted to be physically connected to Spain, which to them was nothing more or less than a market. In 1845, a rail link was completed between Irún, Guipúzcoa, on the French border, and Madrid. In 1863, a line from Bilbao to Tudela connected Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, and Navarra. Both the railroads and the industries were financed by investments attracted from England, France, and Belgium. Basqueland was no longer to be a rugged enclave of isolated valleys.

  The Basques were not only the leading industrialists but also the first modern bankers in Spain, providing the capital for growing industry. First came insurance companies in Bilbao, which underwrote shipping. In the 1850s, new laws allowed joint stock companies to finance banking and railroads. In 1857, the Banco de Bilbao was founded by the leading industrial and commercial families of the city to finance industry and infrastructure. Though hailed as a great success when it opened in 1863, the Bilbao-Tudela train line was bankrupt three years later, and the intervention by the newly formed Banco de Bilbao averted a severe economic crisis. In 1868, the Banco de San Sebastián was created. The Banco de Vizcaya invested in hydroelectric companies that controlled rights to the Ebro and not only provided for Bilbao’s energy but that of Barcelona, Santander, and Valencia.

  The reason Marx admired Carlists and not Liberals is that Carlists were profoundly anticapitalist, the sworn enemies of the new banking and industry. Rural Basques could see the new capitalist class profiting on the loss of Basque privileges. The moving of the customs zone to the French border had gready profited Basque banking and spurred the creation of Basque industry. Carlists were appalled by bank and industry efforts to attract foreign investment. They saw foreign banks such as Crédit Lyonnais opening branches in San Sebastián and British engineers taking over mines. Vizcaya’s huge iron deposits were noted as long ago as Roman times, when Pliny wrote of a mountain “composed entirely of iron.” But this source of wealth was not inexhaustible, and only 10 percent of Vizcayan ore was going to Basque steel mills. The rest was being shipped abroad, 65 or 75 percent to British steel mills, which was contrary to Foral tradition. For centuries the Fueros had regulated iron mining as Basqueland’s most valuable resource, forbidding the exploitation of Vizcayan iron by non-Basques.

  The Carlists were vehement anti-Communists, but they were among the first to speak out against the mistreatment of industrial workers. V. Manterola wrote in his Carlist newspaper, La Reconquista, “The factory worker is a virtual slave, turned into a machine by Liberalism, good only to produce, but without regard for his morale.”

  IN 1869, THE Spanish government instituted secular marriage. In giving the state, rather than the Church, the right to create families, the government was shifting the fundamental control over Basque society. The family was the primary Basque institution, not only socially but economically, since most farms, stores, and businesses were family run. Even today, a high percentage of Basque businesses are family operations.

  That same year, freedom of religion became law. No longer would Catholicism be the only legal religion in Spain. During debate in the legislature, the Cortes, it was pointed out that “the Jews descending from Spanish families, in London, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, and other parts of Europe, will want to return to Spain where their ancestors are buried, in the expectation that the elected Cortes has given them the freedom to practice their religion.” The Carlists warned that there could soon be mosques, synagogues, Buddhist shrines, and protestant churches in Spain and that the Jews and Muslims would take control of business and Spain would lose “not only its religion but its money.”

  In 1872, a Basque Carlist rebellion financed by provincial Foral governing bodies grew into the Second Carlist War. The Banco de Bilbao funded Liberal forces to fight the Carlists. It was to be yet another war of Basque against Basque.

  The two sides battered each other from 1872 to 1876, each side losing 2,000 men over Bilbao alone. The Liberal troops fighting for a secular state burned churches and monasteries, while Carlist forces torched town halls and civil records.

  The Carlists established their own state in territory they held, crowning Carlos “king of the Basques” and establishing schools and other institutions, even issuing their own money and postage stamps. But in the end, once more, the Carlists lost. Their grandchildren would be the next Basques to have a taste of self-government.

  The law of July 21, 1876, ended the remaining Foral rights. Now the Basques would not even have the right to manage their financial affairs. They would pay taxes to the Spanish government and be required to serve in the Spanish military.

  TO THE BASQUES, culture has always been a political act, the primary demonstration of national identity. One of the keys to Basque survival is that political repression produces cultural revival. The loss of independence in two Carlist wars produced a conscious effort at a cultural rebirth known as the Basque Renaissance. Arturo Campión (1854-1937), a Navarrese writer on the myths and culture of Navarra, in 1884 produced a landmark work on Euskera, Grammar of the Four Dialects. Campión wrote that Euskera “is the living witness which guarantees that our national independence will never be enslaved.”

  In 1891, Resurrección María Azkue, son of a noted poet, wrote a major book on Euskera, Basque Grammar, and went on to write an Euskera-French-Spanish dictionary and numerous other pivotal works on the Basque language. He also gathered folk songs and myths, village by village, to use as subjects for huge choral works. He was returning to a tradition started in the fifteenth century by a Guipúzcoan choral master, Johanes Antxieta, who arranged ancient Basque songs for choral works. The Basques are noted for their love of singing. On chant comme un Basque, You sing like a Basque, is a French expression for someone who sings loudly, well, and often. By the turn of the century the Basques were again singing like Basques, asserting their Basqueness in choruses that were larger than ever before, performing booming choral works in Euskera for soaring sopranos and chocolaty basses. Choral groups were established in Pamplona, Vitoria, Bilbao, and San Sebastián. The Orfeon Donastiarra, the San Sebastián Lay Choir, founded in 1897, and the Bilbao Choral Society, started the following year, are still performing.

  Choral group in St.-Jean-de-Luz. (Collection of Charles-Paul Gaudin, St-Jean-de-Luz)

  To the Carlists, and to many other Basques, preserving Basqueness was the first step toward regaining the Fueros. It was this concern about the Basque past that led to exploring prehistoric caves—such as Santimamiña cave, found in Vizcaya in 1917—for drawings and artifacts from the Paleolithic Age. Prehistoric discoveries led to assertions about the ancient Basque people in numerous tracts and books written by both French and Spanish Basques. In French Basqueland, that underdeveloped corner of France, ignored by the industrial revolution, where sons whom the farms could not support immigrated to America in large numbers, this cultural reawakening, especially a fascination with the ancient Basque past, was embraced. The invention of Aïtor, the father of the Basques, by Augustin Chaho, who was born in Soule in 1810, was typical of the kind of creative m
ythologizing of the period.

  But of even greater interest on the Spanish side was the recent past The Fueros became the great martyr of Basque Carlism, and their restoration, a sacred cause. The hymn of a new Basque militancy, “Gernikako Arbola,” The Tree of Guernica, became to the Basques what the “International” was to Communism, or the “Marseillaise” to the French Revolution. From the Middle Ages until 1876, Basque leaders had met in front of the oak tree at the edge of Guernica. Once the Basques agreed to live under the monarchs of Castile, each king had been obliged to come to Guernica to stand under the tree and pledge continuing support for the Fueros.

  Until the nineteenth century when the Fueros were threatened, the meeting spot was a simple place consisting of the tree and an old church. In 1826, a new pillared, neoclassical Batzarretxea, or meeting house, was built. In 1860, the then-300-year-old oak tree died and was immediately replaced with an offspring that still stands there. José María Iparraguirre, a Carlist volunteer in the first war at the age of thirteen, wrote “Gernikako Arbola” in 1853. He would sing it in unrestrained Euskera with his guitar in cafés. It begins:

  The oak of Guernica. (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)

  Gernikako arbola O tree of our Guernica

  de bedeincatuba, O symbol blessed by God

  euskaldunen artean Held dear by all euskaldunak