Carlism would long since have been reduced to impotency by the opposition it aroused among all classes of Spanish society, if one particular circumstance had not associated with its cause those interests and passions which it had taken under its protection. There are provinces in northeastern Spain which are Spanish only in name and which enjoy a veritable autonomy of which they are both jealous and proud. Furnishing the state neither soldiers nor money, they themselves regulate the use they make of their revenue, the equipment and employment of their militia—in fact all the details of internal administration. Honest, loyal, hardy, maintaining their roads and highways in their own fashion, which indeed left nothing to be desired; cultivating the least accessible of their mountains up to the very edges of the precipices, more industrious than the majority of the Spanish, the Basques of Guipuzcoa, Avala, and Biscay, had governed themselves for centuries, and they constituted a true mountain republic very similar to the primitive cantons of Switzerland. Who has not heard of the famous and everlasting oak of Guernica, under whose shade they held their patriarchal assemblies or calzaras and which in bygone days inspired Rousseau in the Contrât Social to utter these memorable and oft-quoted words: “When we see the happiest people in the world regulating their affairs of state by a body of peasants under an oak, and always conducting themselves wisely, what is to prevent one scorning the refinements of other nations which make themselves famous and miserable with so much art and mystery?”
Like all truly republican peoples the Basques regarded their freedom as a prerogative or a happy accident. They gave no thought to letting their neighbour share it and had never sought to make their happiness a subject of propaganda. Their language—the Eskuara—which has nothing in common with Spain or indeed with any known idiom, was a barrier between them and the rest of the peninsula, and reduced them to a state of isolation in which their freedom rejoiced. As their language possesses no literature, the few general ideas which circulate in their villages and townships come from their priests, who teach them what goes on in the world, what is said and planned at Madrid. Thus, narrow in mind as they are suspicious and defiant, their sole aim is to preserve their fueros.
It had been easy to make them understand that the liberal monarchy nourished the dark design of depriving them of these, and that it was disposed to reduce them to the same system of government as the other Spanish provinces. And it was not more difficult for the pretender to persuade them that only an absolute monarchy could guarantee the franchises which were dearer to them than life. Did they not know that their liberty was a privilege, and that privileges have less to fear from a king who can do as he pleases than from a constitutional régime, whether monarchy or republic, where everything is governed by law?
So, with the exception of the village bourgeoisie, won over to liberal ideas, these mountaineers belong body and soul to the Carlist cause, and thus we have seen the singular phenomenon of a republican people trying to impose upon others a government they would not have had at any price, and working to set upon the Spanish throne an absolute king who promised to let them remain a republic as a reward. “We hope that before long,” wrote Señor Castelar on the 12th of September, 1873, “these Basque provinces which furnish subsidies and spies to the Carlist and where the army of the republic can nowhere find either protection or assistance, will receive the chastisement their errors deserve, since these the happiest and freest provinces of Spain are fighting not to obtain a king for themselves or to offer him of their sons and the fruits of their economy, but to impose one upon the Spanish nation while continuing to live themselves as a republic. Certainly the government will respect a legislation which is in harmony with its principles and ideas, but I am its spokesman in saying to these people that if anything threatens their future and that tree celebrated by Rousseau as the monument of liberty, it will be due to their blind obstinacy in supporting at the price of their blood, as the Swiss did formerly, the monster of absolutism.”
It was among these sandalled republicans in hides and blue berets, indefatigable walkers and great players of peloto, that Carlism recruited its ranks as well as in Navarre and a part of Catalonia. The mountain regions in general were in the hands of the clergy and the pretender. They furnished them brave, sober, robust soldiers, nimble as smugglers, knowing all the secret passes and defiles, skilful at making off after a defeat and dispersing so as to rally elsewhere, possessing in fact all the necessary qualities for this species of tricky and partisan war in which Spain has always excelled. The country also lent itself to it. It was rugged and cut up, well fitted for ambuscades and surprises—full of difficulties for the invader who could not operate in detachments without exposing himself, nor in masses without being uneasy without sustenance.
However, if Carlism had preserved its troops, it was weakened by the loss of some of its most noteworthy chiefs. The spirit of the times is a subtle and penetrating gas, and the élite of the party was unable to resist its malign influence. One of the heroes of the seven years’ war—the illustrious general Cabrera, whose name alone was worth an army to the pretender—had found the latter deaf to his advice and was compelled to refuse him his services.
Among Don Carlos’ faithful adherents there were men of heart and intelligence who grumbled under their breath at his mistakes. As for the pretender himself, he was no longer master of his actions. The church was the mouthpiece of his will and it announced to Spain that if Don Carlos wished to mount the throne it was to give the people back their God—him of former days, whose glance rested with delight on the san-benito of a scourged and repentant heretic. They did not take the trouble to conceal from the Spaniards the designs they had upon them. When certain persons spoke to France, they had recourse to the precautions of the oratory, to the subtleties taught by casuistry, to reticences and equivocation, to denials which did not deny, and to promises which did not promise anything. If they did the country of Voltaire and Mirabeau the honour of lying to her, they inflicted on Spain the affront of their outrageous sincerity. They openly declared to her that they intended to bring back the Golden Age when the monk reigned and sent free-thinkers to peaceful sleep. The struggle which was now steeping the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian mountains in blood was a war to the death waged upon the bourgeoisie by fanatical priests, of shepherds upon their lambs; it was the white demagogy, which despairing of triumph had not scrupled to league itself with the pirates of Cartagena for the extermination of liberal ideas.[n]
THE DICTATORSHIP OF SERRANO
Castelar’s former party associates, who had forgotten nothing and learned nothing, could not forgive him for having brought the federative republicans to order with powder and shot; for having appointed conservative generals, and entered into negotiations with the papal see in regard to vacant bishoprics. When the cortes re-assembled on January 2nd, 1874, its president, Salmeron, brought about a vote of lack of confidence in Castelar’s government, whereupon the latter promptly resigned.