Basque History of the World (24 page)

It can be argued that it was the times, that between the end of the Fueros and 1898, Basque nationalism would have arrived even without this unpleasant zealot. What is certain, though, is that when Sabino was born, the Basques had a culture and an identity. Thirty-eight years later, when he died, they had the beginnings of a nation. A country was the great unfinished work.

9: Gernika

—Jean Diharce, a.k.a. Iratzeder, 1938

E
VEN THOUGH IT BEGAN
in 1931 as, at last, Spain’s first democracy, only the most optimistic of dreamers could have believed the new Spanish republic would end up well. It was called the Second Republic because there had been a first, but that had only lasted a wink of an eye between dictatorship and monarchy in the nineteenth century.

Today the cause of the Second Republic and that of the Basques are so closely linked that to say someone was a Basque Republican seems redundant. But in 1931, at its birth, the Second Republic had few Basque supporters. Steeped in a traditional leftist ideology, the Republic was too socialist and too anti-Church for most Basques. Across Navarra, including Pamplona, the majority voted against the Republic. The only strong support for the Republic in Basqueland was among the urban population of San Sebastián, Bilbao, and Vitoria.

Carlists were never likely to be Republicans. Their doctrines had far more in common with those of that other twentieth-century Spanish movement, the Falange, or Fascists. Many Carlists were close to another far-right group, the monarchists. However, Basque Carlists had one fundamental disagreement with both Fascists and monarchists: They wanted Basque self-determination.

La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibarruri during the Spanish Civil War by David Seymour. (Magnum Photos, Inc.)

On the eternal other side were the Liberals. But they were linked to the industrialists, whose main concern, in addition to resisting the leftist labor movement, was protectionist tariffs for their industries. By the time of the Second Republic, Basque iron fields were already showing signs of decline, but Vizcaya was still producing half of the iron and three-fourths of the steel in Spain. Basque banks controlled one-third of all investment in Spain. Basque industrialists worked closely with Catalan industrialists, not because they shared the issue of local autonomy, but because Catalonia was the only other important industrial center in Spain and the Catalans too wanted to stop the wage-and-working-condition demands of organized labor.

The ruthless capitalism of Vizcayan and Guipúzcoan industrialists produced strong labor movements and Communist and Socialist parties in those two provinces. Such leftist figures as Vizcaya-born Dolores Ibarruri made up a third group of Basques who passionately supported the Republic. Ibarruri, always dressed in black, with her sculpted Basque face—the strong nose, deep-set eyes—had been a young
sardinera
, a woman who sold sardines from town to town in Vizcaya from a tray carried on her head. Until the twentieth century these women, covering as much as twenty miles in a day, selling on foot, were the primary distributors of fish in Basqueland. Ibarruri had married an Asturian miner and was elected to the Republican legislature as a Communist representing Asturias. During the Spanish Civil War she would become a symbol of the entire Republican cause. Known as La Pasionaria for a speaking style that brought tears to the eyes of thousands of listeners, she turned the World War I battle cry of Verdun, “They shall not pass,” into the motto of the Spanish republic. But she and other Basque leftists, for all their Basqueness, had little connection to Basque nationalism, its leaders from elite industrialist families, or its conservative Catholic ideology.

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.

A
GUIRRE 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 to identify anything in his oratory style that explained his ability to hold the attention of Basque crowds. George Steer, the British correspondent who often covered Aguirre during the Civil War, observed that Aguirre’s leading gesture was shoving his hands in his pockets.

But Aguirre could project himself to the world as “the Basque”—not only a Basque speaker, with a Basque face, who could appear in a beret with a
makila
, the Basque walking stick, but someone who contradicted the outside world’s Basque stereotypes by being moderate and nonbelligerent.

He was a devout Catholic but believed in a gentle Christianity, disavowing self-proclaimed defenders of the Church such as the Carlists and the Falange. “I dream with all the nostalgia of a Christian,” he wrote years later in exile after having endured the assaults of Franco and Hitler, “in the evangelical precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, a return to primitive Christianity which would have nothing in common with the opportunistic and spectacular affiliations with which we Christians rush to disfigure the most august of doctrines.”

He also preached a gentler Basque nationalism: “Our nationalism should be universal: if we don’t want to become selfish and petty, it should not be turned into a source of discord between peoples.” Unlike Arana and many other Basque nationalists, Aguirre never spoke badly of Spain or the Spanish.

In 1931, Aguirre understood that the Republic, for all its leftist anticlericism, might still be friendly to Basque nationalists. The new Republican government had been elected with the nationwide expectation that it would bring Spain into the twentieth century, into Europe. To accomplish this, it needed the Basques and the Catalans, the only Iberians who enjoyed a European standard of living. Catalan nationalists were closer, politically and culturally to the leaders of the new leftist government than were the Basques, and the Catalans had already negotiated their own statute of autonomy at the start of the Republic.

While polarized Spain was splitting even farther apart into a leftist and a rightist camp, Aguirre had the political courage to lead his conservative Basque Nationalist Party toward the leftists in Madrid. Neither the leftists nor the rightists of divided Spain could understand the seeming contradiction of this party—a conservative, pro-business, Catholic movement that in calling for Basque independence was embracing what to other right-wing movements was the worst of all heresies. To this day, the position of the Basque Nationalist Party, known in Spanish as the PNV, is little understood, but it was never more clearly articulated than in 1931, when Aguirre addressed the Cortes in Madrid:

I am affiliated with the Basque Nationalist Party, founded by Sabino Arana Goiri. The PNV has for a motto:
Jaungoikua eta lagizarra,
God and the ancient laws. In naming God in the first word, we understand that the party wishes to be religious, and in the phraseology of the left and the right, ridiculous phraseology, we have a well defined position: We are Catholics, virile and upright, in a human Catholicism, not a bigoted sentimentality. For us, in this phraseology to which I have alluded, if you are on the right, you are opposed to the legitimate progress of democracy, since it opposes absolute power. If that is what being on the right means, then we are leftists. If being on the right means defending any kind of regime, as long as it is identified with religion, and against the absolute separation of powers of church and state, than we are leftists. And if by being rightist, it is understood that in social matters we oppose progress for the working class, if that is what is meant by being on the right then we are leftists. But, on the other hand, if to be a leftist means we are going to be against family, against the holy principles of the Catholic Church, whose rules we observe, then in this phraseology which I find ridiculous, we are right-wingers.