The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [58]
The term liberal has become synonymous with reformist, progressive politics. And that is how some of the Spanish Liberals saw themselves. Yet Marx and subsequent Marxists have always viewed the original Liberals in Spain as the epitome of bourgeois hypocrisy. This is in part because, as always happens, many of the Liberals were not liberals. Isabella, the Liberal choice for monarch, grew up to be no liberal, nor was her mother, the regent María Cristina.
Nor was Carlos himself wholly Carlist. Unlike his brother Ferdinand, he was deeply religious and sincere in his sense of royal responsibility. He did not compromise and deal away royal authority. But he had no interest in restoring the Inquisition, which, to him and most of the world, seemed an obsolete institution.
Nothing so illustrates the romance of the Carlist cause as their hat, the Carlist trademark, a large red beret. The Carlists brought the beret into fashion in Europe, and it has never since gone out of style. Although the first known use of the word beret dates to a 1461 text in Landes, and though Gascognes and others in the region had worn this hat of unknown origin, there has been a long-standing association between Basques and berets. Jesuit novices wore a birette, and a bas-relief in Tolosa dated 1600 shows berets. The Carlists wore it in red, the color traditionally worn on Basque holidays, and made it their own. La Boina, “the beret,” was the name of a Carlist newspaper, and it was during the First Carlist War that the French began referring to the hat, as they still do, as le beret Basque. Since the First Carlist War, the hat not only has become a central symbol of Basqueness but has also gained international popularity and is generally associated with the political left. Argentine leftist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara saw no contradiction in using the image of the beret, because it is the hat of the underdog fighting the establishment.
“WHEN YOU SAY BASQUE, 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