The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [72]
A sardinera in Bermeo, Vizcaya, by David Seymour. (Magnum Photos, Inc.)
The heirs to Sabino Arana, the Basque Nationalist Party, were avowed enemies of socialism. The party leader, José Antonio Aguirre, once theorized that Basques became socialists when they lost religious faith. In 1931, the Basque Nationalist Party was still racist and anti-Spanish, working toward the day when the Castilian language would no longer be spoken in Euskadi, disapproving of Basques who married Spaniards. Basque nationalism was strongly backed by the Basque Church, which rejected the anticlericism of the Republic and rejected the Spanish language as “the language of Liberalism.” The Basque deputies had protested the prevailing anticlericism of the legislative debates on a new constitution for the Second Republic by walking out.
Later that year, after the Republic had been established, General Luis Orgaz, a perennial conspirator for the monarchist cause, having witnessed a Basque nationalist demonstration in Bilbao, tried to persuade José Antonio Aguirre to participate in a coup d’état against the Republic. “If you put at my disposal the 5,000 young Basque nationalists who marched at Deva the other day, I would quickly make myself master of Spain.”
The monarchists understood, as did so many of their predecessors, how to obtain Basque cooperation, and a few days later, the exiled King Alfonso sent an envoy to Aguirre with the old proposition: Support us, and we will back the Fueros. “The means of restoring the Fueros are being studied,” Aguirre was informed.
But this Basque leader, Aguirre, did not snap at the Fueros being dangled before his eyes. Once rejected, the monarchists reacted with what would prove to be an enduring animosity toward Basque nationalism.
AGUIRRE WAS BORN in Bilbao in 1904, shortly after the death of Sabino Arana. During Aguirre’s childhood, Basque culture— language, literature, choral music, and painting—prospered. Like Basque youth of today, Aguirre’s generation could express their Basqueness with a natural fluency of both language and culture that thrilled and astounded older, more oppressed and assimilated Basques.
The first ikastola, a primary school that taught in Euskera, was opened in San Sebastián in 1914 by Basque nationalists as an alternative to the Spanish-only educational system. Many communities in Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya soon followed. Aguirre’s Euskera-speaking parents sent him to Bilbao’s first ikastola. Later, like Sabino Arana, Aguirre was educated by Jesuits. Also like Arana, he had come from a traditional Basque industrialist family and he studied law. When his father died, he took over the family business, a chocolate factory called Chocolates Bilbaínos. Aguirre was a handsome man and, though small, a great athlete, a star soccer player for the Athletic Club of Bilbao at a time when soccer was the exciting new sport in the city. Because Aguirre is a very common Basque name—it means “an open field cleared of weeds”—shouting fans distinguished him by the nickname “Aguirre, chocolate maker.”
Though his athletic success contributed to his popularity, so did his looks and an undefinable charisma. He is still remembered for such traits as “the liveliness of his eyes” and the quality of his smile. A natural leader, as a teenager he headed the Catholic youth movement. At age seventeen, he joined the still-underground Basque Nationalist Party and became its youth director. Though it may be true, as Pío Baroja once observed, that Basques produce great poets and singers but no great orators, with the exception of Ibarruri who seldom spoke on Basque issues, Aguirre was as close to one as there is in Basque history. In private he had a calm, soft voice that gave little hint of the booming tones of which he was capable. But it was difficult