The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [62]
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