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’The Basque Ulster’: Navarre and the Basque Autonomy Question under the Spanish Second Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Martin Blinkhorn
Martin Blinkhorn
Affiliation:
University of Lancaster
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Extract

The Spanish Civil War, as Stanley Payne has recently pointed out, was also a civil war between Spanish Basques. On the side of the Spanish Republic was the tiny and shortlived Basque Republic of Euzkadi, limited to the coastal provinces of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa where Basque Nationalism had its stronghold; on that of the insurgents were the inland provinces of Álava and Navarre, dominated politically by the ultra-conservative, monarchist and rabidly Catholic Carlists. In a war notorious for the bitterness of its fighting, some of the most bitter took place along the front formed by the Basque mountains, now a political as well as a physical barrier dividing the Basque country. Basque Carlists seized in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa were imprisoned and executed as enemies of Euzkadi; in Navarre and Álava, Basque Nationalists met a similar fate as traitors to Spain; and when Guipúzcoa was overrun by a predominantly Carlist invading army from Navarre, it was treated as conquered and occupied territory, part of its area actually being claimed for a Navarrese ‘corridor’ to the sea.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , September 1974 , pp. 595 - 613
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 Payne, S., ‘Catalan and Basque Nationalism’, Journal of Contemporary History, vi, 1 (1971), 47.Google Scholar

2 El Pensamiento Navarro (Pamplona), 21, 22, 25 Aug., 23 Sept. 1936. The suggestion received little encouragement from the ruling military junta of Nationalist Spain, and soon passed into oblivion.

3 J. M. Agiŕe Lekube (= Aguirre Lecube), Entre la libertad y la revolution 1930–1935: la verdad de tin lustro en el Pais Vasco (Bilbao 1935), pp. 295–97.Google Scholar

4 La Voz de Navarra (Pamplona), 21, 22, 23 June 1932.

5 Venero, M. García, Historia del nacionalismo vasco (Madrid 1945), p. 438.Google Scholar

6 Payne, , op. cit. p. 43.Google Scholar

7 Aguirre, , op. cit. pp. 267, 296.Google Scholar

8 To be precise, the Basque Nationalists' maximum programme envisaged a trans-Pyrenean State, consisting of the four Spanish provinces and three districts of south-western France known to Basques as Benabara (Basse Navarre), Zuberoa (La Soule) and Laburdi (La Labourd). During the 1930s, PNV propaganda was actually directed at the French Basques. On the whole, however, the French Basques have always been less nationally-inclined than those of Spain, and the aims of the latter have in practical terms been limited to their own side of the Pyrenees. See Bustamante, R. Sierra, Euzkadi (Madrid 1941), p. 226.Google Scholar

9 Blinkhorn, R. M., ‘Ideology and Schism in Spanish Traditionalism 1876–1931’, Iberian Studies, I, 1 (Spring 1972), 20.Google Scholar

10 The early history and ideology of Basque Nationalism are conveniently treated in Payne, , op. cit. pp. 31–9; the ideological relationship between Basque Nationalism and Carlism is dealt with in somewhat greater detail in my own article, referred to in the previous footnote.Google Scholar

11 El Siglo Futuro (Madrid), 25 Apr. 1931.Google Scholar

12 El Pensamiento Navarro, 13 Apr. 1931 provides the most detailed available account of the local election results in Navarre. Complete accuracy is impossible to arrive at, owing to the imprecise nature of party and coalition labels. Numerous candidates were officially described as ‘Catholics’, ‘Monarchists’ and ‘Independents’. From a knowledge of individual cases, it is evident that a high proportion of these were actually Carlists.

13 The full text of the Statute of Estella appears in Venero, García, Historia del nacionalismovasco, pp. 473–91.Google Scholar

14 El Pensamiento Navarro, 9, 10 June 1931.

15 El Pensamiento Navarro, 6, 7, 12 June 1931. A prolonged exchange of letters in the Carlist press between the Basque Nationalists and rhe Independents revealed how bitter was the disharmony between them.

16 The final list consisted of Joaquín Beunza and the Conde de Rodezno (Carlists), Rafael Aizpún and Miguel Gortari (Independents) and Aguirre (Basque Nationalist). Aguirre was not a navarro but a Vizcayan; given the choice of representing his own province or Navarre, he chose the latter, presumably in the hope of adding weight to Navarrese Basque Nationalism.

17 Diario de Navarra (Pamplona), 24, 25 Apr. 1931; de Arrese, D., El País Vasco y las constituyentes de la segunda república (Madrid 1932), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

18 Prieto, in Diario de sesiones de las Cortes Constitayentes de la República española (DSCC), 7 Aug. 1931, and quoted in El Sigh Futuro, 25 Aug. 1931; Ansó, in DSCC, 30 July 1931. The charges were widely believed, not least by the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura. During August, most of the Catholic press of northern Spain was suspended by government order, and troops were sent there on dubious manoeuvres. In reality there was little substance in such fears; Carlists were merely thinking about rebellion, whilst exploratory talks between Aguirre and Alfonsist conspirators came to nothing. For discussion of these contacts see Aguirre, , op. cit. pp. 150–60Google Scholar; and Bustamante, Sierra, op. cit. 124–30.Google Scholar

19 El Pensamiento Navarro, 30 June 1931; El Debate (Madrid), 30 06 1931.Google Scholar

20 Typical of this feeling was the atmosphere at a rally held in the symbolic capital of the Basque country, Guernica, immediately before the Basque-Navarrese deputies left for Madrid. Aguirre, for example, was publicly described by the Carlist Oriol as ‘a man sent by providence’, and as ‘the Basques' O'Connell’ by one of his own deputies, Canon Pildain (El Siglo Futuro, 14 July 1931).

21 El Pensamiento Navarro, II Aug. 1931. Voting at this assembly was by block vote, which is to say that a delegate would cast as many votes as there were voters in his pueblo for the view held by the majority of its local council. In the two assemblies of 1932, each council cast one vote representing its majority opinion. In villages with an electorate of less than 250, the entire enfranchized population sat as an ‘open council’; otherwise, the size of a council was proportionate to that of the electorate, varying from the five-man councils of pueblos with an electorate of 251–500 to the nineteen-man council of Pamplona. Evidence drawn from the local press suggests that voting in most councils, on the question of autonomy as well as on other issues, normally divided along right-left lines.

22 DSCC, 25, 26 Sept. 1931.

23 Aguirre, , op. cit. pp. 179–80.Google Scholar

24 Voz de Navarra, 23 Dec. 1931; El Pensamiento Navarro, 22 Dec. 1931; Aguirre, , op. cit. p. 189.Google Scholar

25 Heraldo Alavés (Vitoria), 29 Sept. 1931. Heraldo Alavés was Oriol's own newspaper.

26 La Constancia (San Sebastián), 7 Jan. 1931.

27 Aguirre, , op. cit. pp. 289–95.Google Scholar

28 Oriol had been a powerful figure in alavés politics for some years, largely because of his ownership of Heraldo Alavés. Though always on the fringe of Carlism, he did not commit himself to the movement until the coming of the Republic, when he sponsored his own parliamentary candidacy in Álava. Under Alfonso XIII, Oriol had been for a time a follower of the Conservative leader Antonio Maura, and therefore deserves to be regarded as an Alfonsist rather than a Carlist by background. See El Sigh Fuluro, 3, 18 June 1931.

29 The evidence provided by the few available copies of the small-circulation Navarrese Integrist newspaper, Traditión Navarra, seems to suggest that the Navarrese Integrists may in any case have been closer to the ‘orthodoxy’ of El Pensamiento Navarro than to the views of Olazaábal and La Constancia. One example of this was a pro-autonomy editorial in the issue of 11 July 1931.

30 El Pensamiento Navarro, 2 Feb. 1932.

31 El Pensamiento Navarro, 27, 28 Feb., 9 Mar. 1932.

32 Aguirre, , op. cit. p. 251.Google Scholar

33 El Pensamiento Navarro, 26 Apr. 1932.

34 Aguirre, , op. cit. pp. 214–15.Google Scholar

35 ibid. p. 256.

36 La Constancia, 13 May 1932; El Sigh Futuro, 17 June 1932.

37 Rodezno, , in El Pensamiento Navarro, 17 June 1932.Google Scholar

38 Beunza, , in El Pensamiento Navarro, 29 May 1932.Google Scholar

39 El Pensamiento Navarro, 24 May 1932.

40 Aguirre, , op. cit. pp. 269–97, gives a detailed account of the assembly's proceedings. On most important matters of fact, it agrees with the version presented on 21 June in El Pensamiento Navarro.Google Scholar

41 The analysis of the Navarrese vote which follows is based upon the details published in El Pensamiento Navarro on 21 June 1932. These list all the pueblos voting on the Statute, as do those published for the January assembly in the issue of 2 Feb. 1932.

42 Aguirre, , op. cit. pp. 285–6, prefers to argue that the Statute would have passed with the votes of some of those pueblos which abstained but which, he claims, were actually sympathetic to the Statute; he also suggests that a crucial number of representatives defied their mandates and turned against the Statute after they arrived in Pamplona. While it is impossible to confirm or refute the first of these statements with complete confidence, there is good reason to suppose that at least twelve of the abstainers, to judge by their conduct in previous votes as well as by their geographical position and political allegiance, would have been more likely to oppose than support the Statute had they voted at all; as for Aguirre's second point, some doubt is thrown upon his claims by the fact that one of the sixteen pueblos mentioned by him as defying a mandate and voting against the Statute actually voted for it; that a second did not exist at all; and that a thirdGoogle Scholar was controlled not by the Carlists, the target for Aguirre's charge, but by the left. Beyond this, evidence on the point is lacking, though there is no reason to suppose that if mandates were defied at all, they were not defied in both directions.

43 El Pensamiento Navarro, 19 Sept., 26 Oct. 1932.

44 Others were Oreja and Beunza, the latter trying vainly to give up his parliamentary seat in response to the defeat of the Statute which he had been elected to defend. See El Pensamiento Navarro, 24 June, 18 Sept. 1932. For the most detailed account of the later stages of the Basque autonomy campaign, see Aguirre, , op. cit. p. 297 ff.Google Scholar

45 For a more extensive discussion of Carlism's shift from a regional to a national strategy, see Blinkhorn, R. M., ‘Carlism and the Spanish Crisis of the 1930s’, Journal of Contemporary History, vii, 3–4 (1972).Google Scholar