Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  Marriage to Sabino, however, was not to be a peasant’s fantasy of marrying into the upper class. He ordered his original Vizcayan to cloister herself in religious contemplation to prepare for the marriage. For a honeymoon, he took her to Lourdes, the Catholic shrine near French Basqueland where thousands of infirm peasants flocked for faith healing.

  Soon came an event in the life of Spain and the Basques, of Unamuno and Arana, of singular importance. Americans call it the Spanish-American War, but in Spain it has always been known as El Desastre, the Disaster.

  THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR, the Disaster, the Cuban War of Independence—it was a different war for different people. But only the United States won. Though the war’s boosters in America had promoted it as the war to rescue poor Cuba in its noble struggle against Spanish tyranny, once the new territories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines were taken by military force, the United States had little interest in setting any of them free. In fact, the United States granted Puerto Rico and Cuba less self-government than the Spanish had offered. The new territories were, to the Americans, delicious war booty. Books with titles such as Our New Possesions excitedly introduced these prizes to the American public. Meanwhile, the Spanish public had to adapt to suddenly being without these places, the last of the empire that they had known for four centuries. Spain had lost the lands won by Columbus, Magellan, Elcano, and all the other great men reproduced in stone and bronze. The places with which they traded, the places to which a Spaniard went to seek a fortune or adventure, the places to go when things went wrong in Spain, the places that were Spain’s claim to being a world power, were gone.

  This disaster produced the greatest flow of literature Spain had seen since the period from the mid-fifteenth century to the late sixteenth century known in Spanish literature as the golden age. The new turn-of-the-century writers and artists were called “the generation of ‘98,” a group who responded to El Desastre by seeking to analyze and redefine the newly diminished Spain. Through paintings, novels, poems, and essays, they searched for the essence of Spain in Castilian landscape, in the history of the golden age, in critical examinations of classic literature such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. The pivotal question was: How can Spain undergo a regeneration?

  Miguel de Unamuno by Ignacio Zuloaga (1870-1945). Born in Eibar, Zuloaga, with his dark vision of Spain, was one of the leading painters in the generation of ‘98. (The Hispanic Society of America, New York)

  Curiously, this search for the soul of Spain was led by Basques. Experiencing the Spanish simultaneously as both “us” and “them” is essential to discovering the soul of Spain. Castilians, for whom Spain is only “us,” are the exception. Unamuno was a central figure in the generation of ‘98, as was San Sebastián-born Pío Baroja, the doctor-turned-novelist. Lesser-known members of the group, such as Ramiro de Maeztu, were also Basque. A number of the central figures were non-Basque, notably philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and poet Antonio Machado. But even most of these non-Basque writers were not from the Castilian heart of Iberia. Yet Spain, even Castile, was their focus.

  It was not the focus of Sabino Arana, who referred to Spain as Maketania and said, “It doesn’t matter to us if Spain is big or small, strong or weak, rich or poor. They have enslaved our country and this is enough for us to hate them with all our soul, whether we find them at the height of greatness or the edge of ruin.” Arana’s followers sometimes shouted, even on the streets of Madrid, “Down with the army! Die Spain!”

  In truth, the defeat of Spain, perhaps the sight of it shedding territory, inflamed both Basque and Catalan nationalism. It was at this moment in history that both the Basque and Catalan yearnings for nationhood, which had been romantic dreams, developed into serious political movements.

  To those other nationalists, the Spanish nationalists, this was an affront never to be forgiven. Spain, the great nation, had gone down in humiliating defeat, and in this dark hour, the Basques and Catalans were attacking, hoping to further amputate the already truncated nation.

  The defeated military developed a festering resentment of Catalans and Basques. At their urging, in 1900, the penal code was revised to categorize claims of separatism as acts of rebellion against the state. In 1906, such statements became “a crime against the army” and military justice was given jurisdiction over these cases.

  Sabino Arana came to an end, absurdly testing this new and furious rift. In May 1902, he attempted to send a telegraph to Washington:

  Roosevelt. President of the United States. Washington.

  In the name of the Basque Nationalist Party, I congratulate Cuba, which you have liberated from slavery, most noble federation, on its independence. You have shown in your great nation, exemplary generosity, learned justice and liberty, hitherto unknown in history and inimitable by European powers, especially the Latin ones. If Europe were to imitate this, then the Basque nation, the oldest people, who, for the most centuries, enjoyed the kind of liberty under constitutional law for which the United States merits praise, would be free.

  Arana y Goiri

  The telegraph office, rather than send it, delivered the telegram to the appropriate authorities, who arrested Arana. Never a healthy man, he had often been arrested and survived short prison terms. But now, at thirty-eight, his health seemed to be finally failing. Arana’s supporters circulated a petition asking for his release and got 900 signatures. The response of a government official, Segismundo Moret, was “It would be more gallant to leave him die in prison. The peace of Spain outweighs the life of one man.” After almost a half year, his frail health ruined, he was released. Fearing further legal action, he fled through the Roncesvalles pass to St.-Jean-de-Luz. Finishing the writing of a play titled Libe, he went to Vichy in the hope that the waters would restore his health.

  Arana believed that theater was second only to the press as the best vehicle for propaganda. Libe is the story of a woman who chooses to die, rather than be married to a Spaniard.

  Only weeks after his release, Arana returned to his home in Vizcaya to die, which he did on November 25, 1903, at the age of thirty-eight. According to legend, his last word was “Jaungoikua,” God. On a rainy day he was buried in Sukarrieta, leaving no descendants. His wife remarried a Spanish policeman.

  WHILE BASQUE NATIONALISM has grown, its detractors always find Sabino Arana the easiest of targets. Even most nationalists have few illusions about their founding father. Ramón Labayen, like his father and many other family members, a lifelong activist of the Basque Nationalist Party, said, “Sabino Arana was an unpleasant man with no sense of humor. A wealthy man who never worked a day for money.”

  But Sabino gave the Basques their colors, a flag, a vocabulary, the name of their country, and the political party that would produce many of their future leaders. Though he himself remained a seemingly preposterous figure, he gave credibility to his movement by attracting significant numbers of followers. Ramiro de Maeztu, one of the Basque generation of ‘98, said of Arana’s success, “Unfortunately we can no longer say—and here I am on the side of the Madrid press—that separatism is just four nuts.”

  It can be argued that it was the times, that between the end of the Fueros and 1898, Basque nationalism would have arrived even without this unpleasant zealot. What is certain, though, is that when Sabino was born, the Basques had a culture and an identity. Thirty-eight years later, when he died, they had the beginnings of a nation. A country was the great unfinished work.

  * * *

  9: Gernika

  GERNIKA!

  GUERNICA!

  Xoratzen iluntzen daut

  This name inflames

  hitz horrek bihotza.

  and saddens my heart

  Mendek jakinen dute

  Centuries will know its misfortune . . .

  haren zorigaitza . . .

  We can no longer say

  Numanze ta Kartagoz

  the names Numancia and Carthage

  ez gaitezke
mintza.

  Without saying in a loud voice

  Goraki erran gabe

  In Euskadi,

  Euskadin, han, datza:

  lying in its ruins:

  GERNIKA!

  GUERNICA!

  —Jean Diharce, a.k.a. Iratzeder, 1938

  * * *

  EVEN THOUGH IT BEGAN in 1931 as, at last, Spain’s first democracy, only the most optimistic of dreamers could have believed the new Spanish republic would end up well. It was called the Second Republic because there had been a first, but that had only lasted a wink of an eye between dictatorship and monarchy in the nineteenth century.

  Today the cause of the Second Republic and that of the Basques are so closely linked that to say someone was a Basque Republican seems redundant. But in 1931, at its birth, the Second Republic had few Basque supporters. Steeped in a traditional leftist ideology, the Republic was too socialist and too anti-Church for most Basques. Across Navarra, including Pamplona, the majority voted against the Republic. The only strong support for the Republic in Basqueland was among the urban population of San Sebastián, Bilbao, and Vitoria.

  Carlists were never likely to be Republicans. Their doctrines had far more in common with those of that other twentieth-century Spanish movement, the Falange, or Fascists. Many Carlists were close to another far-right group, the monarchists. However, Basque Carlists had one fundamental disagreement with both Fascists and monarchists: They wanted Basque self-determination.

  La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibarruri during the Spanish Civil War by David Seymour. (Magnum Photos, Inc.)

  On the eternal other side were the Liberals. But they were linked to the industrialists, whose main concern, in addition to resisting the leftist labor movement, was protectionist tariffs for their industries. By the time of the Second Republic, Basque iron fields were already showing signs of decline, but Vizcaya was still producing half of the iron and three-fourths of the steel in Spain. Basque banks controlled one-third of all investment in Spain. Basque industrialists worked closely with Catalan industrialists, not because they shared the issue of local autonomy, but because Catalonia was the only other important industrial center in Spain and the Catalans too wanted to stop the wage-and-working-condition demands of organized labor.

  The ruthless capitalism of Vizcayan and Guipúzcoan industrialists produced strong labor movements and Communist and Socialist parties in those two provinces. Such leftist figures as Vizcaya-born Dolores Ibarruri made up a third group of Basques who passionately supported the Republic. Ibarruri, always dressed in black, with her sculpted Basque face—the strong nose, deep-set eyes—had been a young sardinera, a woman who sold sardines from town to town in Vizcaya from a tray carried on her head. Until the twentieth century these women, covering as much as twenty miles in a day, selling on foot, were the primary distributors of fish in Basqueland. Ibarruri had married an Asturian miner and was elected to the Republican legislature as a Communist representing Asturias. During the Spanish Civil War she would become a symbol of the entire Republican cause. Known as La Pasionaria for a speaking style that brought tears to the eyes of thousands of listeners, she turned the World War I battle cry of Verdun, “They shall not pass,” into the motto of the Spanish republic. But she and other Basque leftists, for all their Basqueness, had little connection to Basque nationalism, its leaders from elite industrialist families, or its conservative Catholic ideology.

  A sardinera in Bermeo, Vizcaya, by David Seymour. (Magnum Photos, Inc.)

  The heirs to Sabino Arana, the Basque Nationalist Party, were avowed enemies of socialism. The party leader, José Antonio Aguirre, once theorized that Basques became socialists when they lost religious faith. In 1931, the Basque Nationalist Party was still racist and anti-Spanish, working toward the day when the Castilian language would no longer be spoken in Euskadi, disapproving of Basques who married Spaniards. Basque nationalism was strongly backed by the Basque Church, which rejected the anticlericism of the Republic and rejected the Spanish language as “the language of Liberalism.” The Basque deputies had protested the prevailing anticlericism of the legislative debates on a new constitution for the Second Republic by walking out.

  Later that year, after the Republic had been established, General Luis Orgaz, a perennial conspirator for the monarchist cause, having witnessed a Basque nationalist demonstration in Bilbao, tried to persuade José Antonio Aguirre to participate in a coup d’état against the Republic. “If you put at my disposal the 5,000 young Basque nationalists who marched at Deva the other day, I would quickly make myself master of Spain.”

  The monarchists understood, as did so many of their predecessors, how to obtain Basque cooperation, and a few days later, the exiled King Alfonso sent an envoy to Aguirre with the old proposition: Support us, and we will back the Fueros. “The means of restoring the Fueros are being studied,” Aguirre was informed.

  But this Basque leader, Aguirre, did not snap at the Fueros being dangled before his eyes. Once rejected, the monarchists reacted with what would prove to be an enduring animosity toward Basque nationalism.

  AGUIRRE WAS BORN in Bilbao in 1904, shortly after the death of Sabino Arana. During Aguirre’s childhood, Basque culture— language, literature, choral music, and painting—prospered. Like Basque youth of today, Aguirre’s generation could express their Basqueness with a natural fluency of both language and culture that thrilled and astounded older, more oppressed and assimilated Basques.

  The first ikastola, a primary school that taught in Euskera, was opened in San Sebastián in 1914 by Basque nationalists as an alternative to the Spanish-only educational system. Many communities in Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya soon followed. Aguirre’s Euskera-speaking parents sent him to Bilbao’s first ikastola. Later, like Sabino Arana, Aguirre was educated by Jesuits. Also like Arana, he had come from a traditional Basque industrialist family and he studied law. When his father died, he took over the family business, a chocolate factory called Chocolates Bilbaínos. Aguirre was a handsome man and, though small, a great athlete, a star soccer player for the Athletic Club of Bilbao at a time when soccer was the exciting new sport in the city. Because Aguirre is a very common Basque name—it means “an open field cleared of weeds”—shouting fans distinguished him by the nickname “Aguirre, chocolate maker.”

  Though his athletic success contributed to his popularity, so did his looks and an undefinable charisma. He is still remembered for such traits as “the liveliness of his eyes” and the quality of his smile. A natural leader, as a teenager he headed the Catholic youth movement. At age seventeen, he joined the still-underground Basque Nationalist Party and became its youth director. Though it may be true, as Pío Baroja once observed, that Basques produce great poets and singers but no great orators, with the exception of Ibarruri who seldom spoke on Basque issues, Aguirre was as close to one as there is in Basque history. In private he had a calm, soft voice that gave little hint of the booming tones of which he was capable. But it was difficult to identify anything in his oratory style that explained his ability to hold the attention of Basque crowds. George Steer, the British correspondent who often covered Aguirre during the Civil War, observed that Aguirre’s leading gesture was shoving his hands in his pockets.

  But Aguirre could project himself to the world as “the Basque”—not only a Basque speaker, with a Basque face, who could appear in a beret with a makila, the Basque walking stick, but someone who contradicted the outside world’s Basque stereotypes by being moderate and nonbelligerent.

  He was a devout Catholic but believed in a gentle Christianity, disavowing self-proclaimed defenders of the Church such as the Carlists and the Falange. “I dream with all the nostalgia of a Christian,” he wrote years later in exile after having endured the assaults of Franco and Hitler, “in the evangelical precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, a return to primitive Christianity which would have nothing in common with the opportunistic and spectacular affiliations with which we Christians rush to disfigure the most august of d
octrines.”

  He also preached a gentler Basque nationalism: “Our nationalism should be universal: if we don’t want to become selfish and petty, it should not be turned into a source of discord between peoples.” Unlike Arana and many other Basque nationalists, Aguirre never spoke badly of Spain or the Spanish.

  In 1931, Aguirre understood that the Republic, for all its leftist anticlericism, might still be friendly to Basque nationalists. The new Republican government had been elected with the nationwide expectation that it would bring Spain into the twentieth century, into Europe. To accomplish this, it needed the Basques and the Catalans, the only Iberians who enjoyed a European standard of living. Catalan nationalists were closer, politically and culturally to the leaders of the new leftist government than were the Basques, and the Catalans had already negotiated their own statute of autonomy at the start of the Republic.

  While polarized Spain was splitting even farther apart into a leftist and a rightist camp, Aguirre had the political courage to lead his conservative Basque Nationalist Party toward the leftists in Madrid. Neither the leftists nor the rightists of divided Spain could understand the seeming contradiction of this party—a conservative, pro-business, Catholic movement that in calling for Basque independence was embracing what to other right-wing movements was the worst of all heresies. To this day, the position of the Basque Nationalist Party, known in Spanish as the PNV, is little understood, but it was never more clearly articulated than in 1931, when Aguirre addressed the Cortes in Madrid: