Basque History of the World (41 page)

Since then, French social programs have greatly expanded both tourism and retirement to the Basque provinces. In Loti’s day, the Basques had only to stave off an invasion of the wealthy. But six weeks guaranteed vacation and early retirement pensions have made tourists and retirees the basis of the economy in coastal Labourd, which the French tourist industry insists on calling La Côte Basque.

Ugly white housing, of a design that speaks of nothing so much as quick construction and easy cleaning, much of it occupied only from May through October, is marring the outskirts of the beautiful ancient port of St.-Jean-de-Luz. Tourism is moving into Basse Navarre, and in Soule locals wish it would come their way too because their farms cannot compete with agro-industry, and traditional crafts cannot compete with Asian factories.

Soule, where fewer than 14,000 people live in quiet villages surrounded by mountainsides patched with small cornfields, is the forgotten province. It has always been that way. On May 5, 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, when Louis XVI presided over the États Généraux, Soule, neighboring Béarn, and also Brittany were the only parts of France that were not represented. Soule had not been making a political statement. It simply could not raise enough public funds to send someone to Paris. Mauléon, Soule’s capital, has a shady main square with a fronton court, where a few dozen people might pass at the busiest time of day. This is called the lower town. The upper town is built along the ramparts of a medieval castle. Why don’t tourists visit the castle? locals wonder. Without them there is only the corn crop, and a few sheep. Little is left of the town’s main business, making espadrilles.

In the thirteenth century, the king of Aragón commented on the curious hemp-soled cloth shoes, tied at the ankles, worn by recruits from the Pyrenees in the army of the Crusade. In nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Mauléon, the identical shoe was still being made and sold throughout Basqueland. In the famous photo of Sabino Arana behind prison bars, he is wearing espadrilles. Even in the early twentieth century, every morning, the now quiet town of Mauléon would fill up with about 1,000 espadrille workers. One plant made soles, another made fabrics, and women, often working at home, sewed them together.

In the 1950s, when Maïte Faure’s father died, her mother had to support the family with the only work available for women: sewing espadrilles. Strapped to her palm almost permanently was the small circular metal guard for pushing the thick needle.

In the 1980s, the handmade espadrille started to lose its market to the less expensive factory-made one from Spain, and then an even less expensive one from China In 1981, France imported 3 million pairs of Chinese espadrilles. About eighty people still work on espadrilles in Mauléon, because no local would wear one from China or anywhere else if it was not handmade. The last traditional textile plant for espadrilles is outside town, and a few artisans still hand sew them. But the population of Mauléon is in decline, as people leave their Euskera-speaking world for employment on the French-speaking coast or in Paris.

Sabino Arana in prison wearing espadrilles. (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)

W
HILE THE
S
PANISH
wanted the Basques to be the engine of their economy, the French provinces were of little economic significance to planners in Paris. The French, with coal, iron, and waterways to build great industrial centers in the north and east, could afford to let their Basques, ports and all, languish in benign neglect. The French state offered French services to the Basques and few opportunities for development. French schools were provided, were obligatory, and did not allow any language but French. Many Basques heard the French language for the first time at age five when it was forced on them in school. Under French administration, Basque culture had suffered a slow erosion over 160 years, but between 1965 and 1970, Euskera experienced a sudden, powerful blow: Television was introduced to rural France. For the first time in history, the French language was commonly heard in the homes of Basque farmers.

Daniel Landart, born in 1945, the son of Labourdine farmers, saw the disintegration of Euskera in his family. “During World War I my grandfather went to war and wrote my grandmother in Basque. During World War II my father was deported to a German labor camp and wrote my mother in French. They always spoke in Basque, but they wrote in French.”

Having grown up before television, no one spoke anything but Euskera in Landart’s home. But the language was forbidden in school. Some teachers let children speak Euskera during recess, but others were more strict. One teacher would force the student, caught in the act of speaking Euskera, to stand by the door holding a broom until he could catch someone else speaking it. The newly betrayed Euskaldun would then be given the broom until he caught someone else. The one holding the broom at the end of the class had to write fifty times, “I will not speak Basque.”

Landart said, “This created an atmosphere of denunciation and fear among us. The one who was denounced remained angry at the denouncer for life. It divided us.”

As a teenager, Landart could speak Basque, but he could only read and write in French, the language of his education. At sixteen, he began to teach himself to read in his mother tongue, starting with French Basque writers, because the dialect was easiest for him. In time, he was writing in Euskera. He wrote a sixty-four-page book of poetry and short stories and published 1,000 copies at his own expense. The 300 copies he sold in local markets paid the cost of publication, and the rest he gave away. Some of the poems have since become popular songs. He later wrote a novel and several plays, but the book for which he is best known is
Aihen Ahula
, (Weak Root), an autobiographical account of his search for his own culture. It is a search that many French Basques have been undertaking.

T
HE PERCENTAGE OF
Basques throughout the seven provinces who speak Euskera depends on whose definition of a Basque is used. The official definition is someone residing in Basqueland. The Basque government considers any citizen of its three-province region to be a Basque. But polls have shown that Basques have wide disagreement on the definition. Juan San Martin of the Basque Academy of Language said, “This is not a relevant debate in the Basque language. It only speaks of Basque speakers. Someone with a Basque name from Basque country who does not speak Basque is a Basque, but he is not an Euskaldun. And in Basque culture, being Basque is not significant. It can’t even be said.”

Taking into account the entire population gives little Soule, which has attracted few outsiders and, for that matter, has few locals, the highest percentage of Basque speakers, and gives Labourd, where retired Parisians have taken up residence by the beach, and Navarra, where half the province is no longer culturally Basque, the lowest ratios of Basque speakers. In all seven provinces, retirees and Castilians included, 37 percent of people speak some Euskera, but only 25 percent are completely fluent. This would mean that slightly more than 600,000 people speak fluent Euskera, though more than 800,000 speak some Euskera. Among that additional 200,000 are many people who are in the process of learning the language.

But what is of deep concern is that while the percentage of Euskera speakers is dramatically rising on the Spanish side, it is declining on the French side. Basques hold their territory by language, and there is a risk of completely losing the French Basque provinces. This would be the first significant loss of Basque territory since the late Roman Empire.

Until the abolition of the Fueros, Euskera was surviving far better under Spanish rule than under the French. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Hugo found the Basque language to be almost a religion, it was spoken by only about one-third of the population in the French provinces where he was visiting, whereas in 1867, more than 96 percent of the residents of Guipúzcoa spoke Basque.

In Spanish Basqueland, the number of Basque speakers declined under Franco and has risen to twentieth-century heights since his death. Despite the seventy commandos and the 15,000 police, this is one of the best moments Spanish Basques have ever had. Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, and Alava, home to almost three-fourths of the Basque population, are undergoing a dramatic change. Among the population born before 1932, 28 percent speak Euskera. Among those born at the height of Franco’s repression, when teaching Euskera to your children meant labeling them as “troublemakers,” only 21 percent speak it. But since 1972, the percentage of fluent Basque speakers has steadily increased. Bilingual schooling is the common practice, and if trends continue, Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa will soon have a Basque-speaking majority.

The Basque Nationalist Party government of the three provinces has taken over the education system, completely turning around the fate of the Basque language. Once a whispered rarity, Euskera is now commonly heard, not only in rural villages but on the streets of major cities. Even in Bilbao, one of the least Basque-speaking towns, Euskera is regularly heard. Having the language in common usage pressures increasing numbers of Spanish Basques to learn it. Among school-age Basques in Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya, it is the lingua franca.

In the French provinces, or Northern Basqueland, as it is known in the government documents of Southern Basqueland, 37 percent of those born before 1932 speak Basque, but only 11 percent of those born between 1972 and 1980 do. Obviously, a language spoken predominantly by older people has a dubious future. And yet there are a number of reasons for French Basques not to despair. The percentage of Basque speakers in France has been rising recently because Euskera education in schools was legalized under Mitterrand and because, in 1980, volunteers began a program based on the ikastolas to the south.

Spanish Basques have their own Basque governments that run school systems, finance programs, publish materials, and promote Basque culture. It is difficult for French Basques not to gaze covetously at the Basque governments in Spain which share their publishing, radio, and television with the north, where there are not enough public funds to have the equivalent programs.

Since the French Revolution, the Basques of France have had no entity of their own in French administration. They belong to the Département of Pyrénées-Atlantique, which has some 750,000 people, little more than one-fourth of whom live in the Basque provinces.

The government administrative system was designed in Paris with the intention of repressing regional cultures, but the Basques have periodically demanded their own Département. In 1836, the Chamber of Commerce in Bayonne, not an especially radical organization, petitioned the king to create a Basque Département, citing economic reasons. “Bayonne has no interest in common with Béarn,” the petition declared. In the 1960s, a growing Basque nationalist movement revived the old demand. In 1981, while campaigning for the presidency, Mitterrand made a list of 110 promises that he intended to fulfill upon taking office, including creation of a Basque Département. Though he surprised cynics by the number of promises he actually did fulfill, a Basque Département was not among them. Once in power, his government discovered, “The situation in Basqueland is very delicate.”

The growing cultural movement, the yearnings being felt from watching the Autonomous Community across the border, seemed to worry Mitterrand. In a 1984 speech in Bayonne, he said: “It is time to say to our Basque compatriots,
voilà!
That which you would preserve so that future generations find intact the heritage that you received and even improved upon—if it is thought that this could serve as a clever first step from which to leap further, toward autonomy, toward independence, then I say clearly and eye to eye: not with me, no! I will not let the fabric of France be torn.”

I
N
1900 A Bordeaux physical education instructor, Philippe Tissié, concluded an essay on Basque sports by speculating on whether Basque culture was about to end. He noted that peasants were moving from rural areas, that “electricity now penetrated to even the smallest village . . . Electricity, telegraph, telephone, automobile, railroad, steam and electric tramways, such are the agents of progress that undermine poetic traditions and turn them into utilitarian prose.”

To that formula could be added radio, television, and computers. What Tissié foresaw was the fate of much of European culture, especially those cultures rooted in rural life. Yet the Basques have survived the twentieth century and ended it in some ways stronger than they were in 1900. This is partly because they have never abandoned their rural roots and they have used modern technology to be closer to them. The Carlist reverence for rural life remains. This is as true of the French Basques as of the Spanish. The French provinces have no real urban centers. The largest, Bayonne, would better be described as a large town. Even the Basque cities of the Spanish side, Pamplona, Vitoria, San Sebastián, and Bilbao, are by contemporary standards small and manageable, and much of the Basque population still lives outside them. Nor is urbanization a Basque trend. Modern communications and good roads have meant increased opportunities for Basques to return to their land.