Basque History of the World (21 page)

In 1856, Henry Bessemer, working in Britain on an improved artillery shell, found that by blowing air through molten iron, he could speed up the process of converting iron to steel. No longer requiring tremendous time and energy, the new Bessemer converter process made steel cheap enough to be a practical metal for common use.

Ninteenth-century steelworkers in Vizcaya. The fact that they are wearing canvas espadrilles on their feet while working with molten metal is an indication of the safety standards for workers at the time. (Kutxa Fototeka, San Sebastián)

Bessemer had by chance used for ore a low phosphorus iron called hematite, and it was later discovered that this was a requirement for the Bessemer process to function well. There was only one place in Europe that had known deposits of this type of ore in easily exploitable fields near a coastline for efficient transport: Vizcaya.

A rail line was built from the mines to the coast, and the port of Bilbao was modernized. Confident that iron exports could generate enough capital to build Basque industry, the new infrastructure was financed with public money. The smaller mills merged into Altos Homos de Vizcaya, Vizcaya Blast Furnaces, which by the end of the nineteenth century was the largest steelmaker in Spain and one of the largest in the world. By exporting iron to England, Basque mills were able to get advantageous arrangements for British coal, which was the return freight From 1885 until the early twentieth century, Vizcaya produced 77 percent of Spain’s cast iron and 87 percent of its steel. With the ability to manufacture the cheapest steel in Europe, the banks of the Nervión from Bilbao to the sea, once a world capital of shipbuilding, became one of the world’s great steel centers, creating enormous wealth and thousands of jobs. Basques also invested in chemical factories, and in 1878 one of the first oil refineries in Spain was built on the Nervión.

There have always been two kinds of Basques. While some were fighting for the Basque way, the Basque tradition, other Basques, naming their steel mills after saints, just as they used to name the ships in their commercial fleets, fought for a place in the forefront of modern industry and became very wealthy.

These industrial Basques did not want serene isolation in their mountain lairs. They wanted rail connections to move raw materials, manufactured products, and people. These Basques wanted to be physically connected to Spain, which to them was nothing more or less than a market. In 1845, a rail link was completed between Irún, Guipúzcoa, on the French border, and Madrid. In 1863, a line from Bilbao to Tudela connected Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, and Navarra. Both the railroads and the industries were financed by investments attracted from England, France, and Belgium. Basqueland was no longer to be a rugged enclave of isolated valleys.

The Basques were not only the leading industrialists but also the first modern bankers in Spain, providing the capital for growing industry. First came insurance companies in Bilbao, which underwrote shipping. In the 1850s, new laws allowed joint stock companies to finance banking and railroads. In 1857, the Banco de Bilbao was founded by the leading industrial and commercial families of the city to finance industry and infrastructure. Though hailed as a great success when it opened in 1863, the Bilbao-Tudela train line was bankrupt three years later, and the intervention by the newly formed Banco de Bilbao averted a severe economic crisis. In 1868, the Banco de San Sebastián was created. The Banco de Vizcaya invested in hydroelectric companies that controlled rights to the Ebro and not only provided for Bilbao’s energy but that of Barcelona, Santander, and Valencia.

The reason Marx admired Carlists and not Liberals is that Carlists were profoundly anticapitalist, the sworn enemies of the new banking and industry. Rural Basques could see the new capitalist class profiting on the loss of Basque privileges. The moving of the customs zone to the French border had gready profited Basque banking and spurred the creation of Basque industry. Carlists were appalled by bank and industry efforts to attract foreign investment. They saw foreign banks such as Crédit Lyonnais opening branches in San Sebastián and British engineers taking over mines. Vizcaya’s huge iron deposits were noted as long ago as Roman times, when Pliny wrote of a mountain “composed entirely of iron.” But this source of wealth was not inexhaustible, and only 10 percent of Vizcayan ore was going to Basque steel mills. The rest was being shipped abroad, 65 or 75 percent to British steel mills, which was contrary to Foral tradition. For centuries the Fueros had regulated iron mining as Basqueland’s most valuable resource, forbidding the exploitation of Vizcayan iron by non-Basques.

The Carlists were vehement anti-Communists, but they were among the first to speak out against the mistreatment of industrial workers. V. Manterola wrote in his Carlist newspaper,
La Reconquista
, “The factory worker is a virtual slave, turned into a machine by Liberalism, good only to produce, but without regard for his morale.”

I
N
1869, THE Spanish government instituted secular marriage. In giving the state, rather than the Church, the right to create families, the government was shifting the fundamental control over Basque society. The family was the primary Basque institution, not only socially but economically, since most farms, stores, and businesses were family run. Even today, a high percentage of Basque businesses are family operations.

That same year, freedom of religion became law. No longer would Catholicism be the only legal religion in Spain. During debate in the legislature, the Cortes, it was pointed out that “the Jews descending from Spanish families, in London, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, and other parts of Europe, will want to return to Spain where their ancestors are buried, in the expectation that the elected Cortes has given them the freedom to practice their religion.” The Carlists warned that there could soon be mosques, synagogues, Buddhist shrines, and protestant churches in Spain and that the Jews and Muslims would take control of business and Spain would lose “not only its religion but its money.”

In 1872, a Basque Carlist rebellion financed by provincial Foral governing bodies grew into the Second Carlist War. The Banco de Bilbao funded Liberal forces to fight the Carlists. It was to be yet another war of Basque against Basque.

The two sides battered each other from 1872 to 1876, each side losing 2,000 men over Bilbao alone. The Liberal troops fighting for a secular state burned churches and monasteries, while Carlist forces torched town halls and civil records.

The Carlists established their own state in territory they held, crowning Carlos “king of the Basques” and establishing schools and other institutions, even issuing their own money and postage stamps. But in the end, once more, the Carlists lost. Their grandchildren would be the next Basques to have a taste of self-government.

The law of July 21, 1876, ended the remaining Foral rights. Now the Basques would not even have the right to manage their financial affairs. They would pay taxes to the Spanish government and be required to serve in the Spanish military.

T
O THE
B
ASQUES
, culture has always been a political act, the primary demonstration of national identity. One of the keys to Basque survival is that political repression produces cultural revival. The loss of independence in two Carlist wars produced a conscious effort at a cultural rebirth known as the Basque Renaissance. Arturo Campión (1854-1937), a Navarrese writer on the myths and culture of Navarra, in 1884 produced a landmark work on Euskera,
Grammar of the Four Dialects
. Campión wrote that Euskera “is the living witness which guarantees that our national independence will never be enslaved.”

In 1891, Resurrección María Azkue, son of a noted poet, wrote a major book on Euskera,
Basque Grammar
, and went on to write an Euskera-French-Spanish dictionary and numerous other pivotal works on the Basque language. He also gathered folk songs and myths, village by village, to use as subjects for huge choral works. He was returning to a tradition started in the fifteenth century by a Guipúzcoan choral master, Johanes Antxieta, who arranged ancient Basque songs for choral works. The Basques are noted for their love of singing.
On chant comme un Basque
, You sing like a Basque, is a French expression for someone who sings loudly, well, and often. By the turn of the century the Basques were again singing like Basques, asserting their Basqueness in choruses that were larger than ever before, performing booming choral works in Euskera for soaring sopranos and chocolaty basses. Choral groups were established in Pamplona, Vitoria, Bilbao, and San Sebastián. The Orfeon Donastiarra, the San Sebastián Lay Choir, founded in 1897, and the Bilbao Choral Society, started the following year, are still performing.

Choral group in St.-Jean-de-Luz. (Collection of Charles-Paul Gaudin, St-Jean-de-Luz)

To the Carlists, and to many other Basques, preserving Basqueness was the first step toward regaining the Fueros. It was this concern about the Basque past that led to exploring prehistoric caves—such as Santimamiña cave, found in Vizcaya in 1917—for drawings and artifacts from the Paleolithic Age. Prehistoric discoveries led to assertions about the ancient Basque people in numerous tracts and books written by both French and Spanish Basques. In French Basqueland, that underdeveloped corner of France, ignored by the industrial revolution, where sons whom the farms could not support immigrated to America in large numbers, this cultural reawakening, especially a fascination with the ancient Basque past, was embraced. The invention of Aïtor, the father of the Basques, by Augustin Chaho, who was born in Soule in 1810, was typical of the kind of creative mythologizing of the period.

But of even greater interest on the Spanish side was the recent past The Fueros became the great martyr of Basque Carlism, and their restoration, a sacred cause. The hymn of a new Basque militancy, “
Gernikako Arbola
,” The Tree of Guernica, became to the Basques what the “International” was to Communism, or the “Marseillaise” to the French Revolution. From the Middle Ages until 1876, Basque leaders had met in front of the oak tree at the edge of Guernica. Once the Basques agreed to live under the monarchs of Castile, each king had been obliged to come to Guernica to stand under the tree and pledge continuing support for the Fueros.

Until the nineteenth century when the Fueros were threatened, the meeting spot was a simple place consisting of the tree and an old church. In 1826, a new pillared, neoclassical
Batzarretxea
, or meeting house, was built. In 1860, the then-300-year-old oak tree died and was immediately replaced with an offspring that still stands there. José María Iparraguirre, a Carlist volunteer in the first war at the age of thirteen, wrote “Gernikako Arbola” in 1853. He would sing it in unrestrained Euskera with his guitar in cafés. It begins:

The oak of Guernica. (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)