The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [56]
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 A uniform school curriculum in France banned Basque and other regional languages, an act that was not repealed until the election of François Mitterrand in 1981.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.
AFTER 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