The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [57]
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