Spain from Within

by Rafael Shaw

THE REVIVAL OF CARLISM

CHAPTER VII
THE REVIVAL OF CARLISM

For a long time past it has been assumed abroad that Carlism is dead in Spain, and probably few even among diplomatists in other countries could say off-book what the proscribed branch of the Spanish Bourbons now consists of, where the different members of the family live, and what relations they maintain with each other and with the country from which they have been exiled since 1876. Even so careful an observer as Major Martin Hume wrote in 1899 that Carlism as a political system was dead in Spain, and the absolutism upon which that party pin their faith, past revival.[12]

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the Carlists have been left out of account by those who observe Spanish political troubles from outside. Indeed, the very existence of the old Pretender seemed to have been forgotten by the generation which has grown up in England in the thirty-four years which have elapsed since the close of the last civil war. But the Spanish working classes have not forgotten Don Carlos, nor have they for a moment lost sight of the continued existence of this party in their own country.

The root of their long memory lies in their antipathy to the Religious Orders. To the people the Carlists are indissolubly associated with the Ultramontanes, and who says Jesuit says Carlist in their vocabulary of distrust. And that the people have reason on their side has been proved by the words and actions of the Ultramontanes themselves since the events that took place in the summer of 1909.

The Catalonian question has been discussed at such length and with so much confidence by writers living in other countries that I may be forgiven if I add to their pronouncements on the causes and effects of the “Red Week” certain information which is not common knowledge beyond the Pyrenees, unless possibly at the Castle of Frohsdorf or in the palaces of the proscribed branch in Venice or Trieste. The censorship exercised over the press, and over telegrams and even letters addressed to newspaper offices, was so severe while the country was under martial law, and, indeed, right up to the fall of the Maura Cabinet in October, 1909, that representatives of foreign journals who tried to put the facts before their leaders found it impossible to do so. Any man who had once tried—and failed—to get off even the most cryptic telegram relating to the part played by the Ultramontanes in the riots, was thenceforth marked by the Intelligence Department of the Society of Jesus, and if he continued his efforts to communicate what he knew, he not only found his telegrams suppressed after they had been accepted and paid for, but stood a good chance of having his personal liberty interfered with. There was plenty of excitement about the work of a foreign correspondent in Spain in the summer of 1909, wherever he happened to be stationed. But it was not precisely the form of danger suggested by the reports of revolution and anarchy which were supplied to the foreign Press. Notices of that class could be procured and sent through without the slightest difficulty. The newspaper correspondent who was in danger was the man who crossed the frontier to telegraph the facts as he saw them, and who was not unlikely to meet with an “accident” as he made his way back to the scene of his labours.

The result of this regime of espionage was that all Europe was hoodwinked as to the real crisis in Spain, for naturally as soon as affairs in Cataluña ceased to be sensational, the foreign Press relapsed into its usual indifference to what was going on in the Peninsula.

Foreign residents, living as quietly and comfortably as usual, were considerably astonished when their home newspapers reached them, packed with sensational tales of revolution, incendiarism, military sedition, and wholesale executions, and asked what on earth the Spanish Government was about that it allowed these slanders to be propagated all over the world? Who was responsible for these perversions of the truth? What advantage was hoped for by those who fostered so colossal a misrepresentation of the conduct of the inarticulate proletariat of Spain?[13]