The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [67]
In some ways, the Fueros were remarkably progressive for medieval law. The revision written in 1526 under Guernica’s oak tree was one of the first legal codes to outlaw the use of torture. It was also one of the first European codes to ban debtors’ prison. It protected citizens from arbitrary arrest and unwarranted house searches. But contrary to what is often asserted, traditional Basque government was not a representative democracy. It favored rural people and did not give proportional representation to urban dwellers. The code did not give full rights to women but gave women more consideration than most medieval law. For example, inheritance law emphasized keeping an estate intact and favored surviving widows. An older sister had priority over a younger brother. The Fueros were sympathetic to family-owned business and small holdings. When Socialist-led democracy came to power in Spain in 1982, wanting to rewrite property laws to break up large holdings, it looked to the Basque Fueros for a model of property law.
In any event, Arana, who touted the Fueros as the perfection of democracy, did not have a notably high standard of democracy. His ideal was closer to a Catholic theocracy, a notion which traces back at least to 1881, when he was fifteen and had fallen so ill that he was given last rites. Miraculously, he recovered, and ever after he credited the Virgin Mary with this unexpected reversal. His slogan for the Basque Nationalist Party, a motto which is still used, was Jaungoikua eta Lagizarra, God and the Old Laws, today frequently abbreviated on official Basque Nationalist Party messages as JeL.
Arana wrote that if the Basques were ever to abandon the Church, he would abandon the Basques. He called for Euzkadi to be “an essentially Catholic state” and added, “It will not admit in its midst any individuals affiliated with a false religion, sect, schism, masonic or liberal.” In 1888, when he was twenty-three, he learned that a London-based Bible society had obtained permission to sell Protestant books in Bilbao. He applied for permission to distribute Catholic literature next to them, giving his away without charge, until he drove the Protestants out of Bilbao. As for Jews, on the occasion of the death of French writer Emile Zola, Arana wrote a profile describing the hero of the infamous Dreyfus case as “el nuevo Judas who got filthy-rich by using his pen to help Jews fight Christ.”
ARANA WAS ONE of the first Basques to address a question destined to plague Basque nationalists forever: Who is a Basque? This was an especially contested issue in his epoch because, for the first time in history, a large percentage of the population of Basque country did not come from Basque families. Vizcaya had a labor shortage soon filled by the poor of Spain.
This new and different kind of invasion was one that history had not prepared Basques to face. From 1857 to 1900, the population of Alava grew by only 2.5 percent, which was about the same growth as Navarra. But during the same period, Guipúzcoa’s population grew by 25 percent and Vizcaya’s by almost 94 percent. For the first time in history, more people were moving to Vizcaya than leaving it.
This immigration to industrial areas tended to further exacerbate the differences between rural and urban life. The countryside was remaining Basque, while the cities were becoming cosmopolitan. In 1850, the population of Bilbao was 20,000. By the end of the century, the population had grown to almost 100,000, more than half of the residents born outside Vizcaya. Some of these outsiders—British, Germans, and other northern Europeans— were entrepreneurs, managers, and supervisors who came with foreign capital. They had a huge impact on the cultural life of Bilbao, especially the British. The Athletic Club of Bilbao, Vizcaya’s now-much-loved soccer team, was founded and trained