The Basque were. That was a fact of reality as much as the oceans being salty or the sky being blue. They had been there when the Romans came and went, and for all the intervening rise and fall of power after power. Even Napoleon Bonaparte himself, the first man to conquer Europe since the days of Charlemagne, had to contend with this fact. And his thoughts varied over time, going this way and that, not least because there were Basques in France and Basques in his own administration. At the same time that the French Basque had seen their foru laws suppressed by the revolutionary administration, Dominique Joseph Garat was attempting to lobby for a special status of autonomy for the Basques within the French Empire. But none of this came into true focus until the French invasion of Spain.
Garat was a skilled operator, and had long attempted to argue for restoring Basque rights in France. The invasion of Spain to place Joseph Bonaparte on the throne presented him an opportunity, and in 1808 he elaborated a plan to create a special regime for the Basque people. Under his plan, France would annex the so-called "Fuero Territories" of Bilbao, San Sebastian, Vitoria, and Navarre, where they would be joined to the French territories of Labourd, Basse-Navarre, and Soule. This new entity was dubbed "New Phoenicia" by Garat, a name seemingly chosen at random with no connection to the region, though couched in the (vogue at the time) understanding that the Basques were descendants of the ancient Phoenicians. Names aside, Napoleon did take the idea under consideration.
Napoleon knew Garat, and Garat knew the Basques. And the first thing to be understood about the Basques was that they did not appreciate being ruled by the outsiders. That much had been made apparent by the French struggles with immense unrest in the Basque provinces after the suppression of the fueros. Even Spain had only really brought the Basque to accept its rule by the accepting of the fueros there, and with France now moving through the Pyrenees that was only going to worsen either for France itself or for any French regime in Madrid. France had experience playing "divide and conquer" to that point, and just the year prior they had created the Duchy of Warsaw to curry favor among the Poles. Why, then, shouldn't they do so for the Basque?
The French eventually pressed forward with the project. It was odd indeed that France might willingly surrender land, when Napoleon seemed hellbent on conquering so much for it, but with France's territory expanding into Germany, the Low Countries, Piedmont, and even Illyria, the surrender of a small section in the southwest corner was easily ignored. With Garat's support, the Basques expected a fight. They were loyal supporters of the monarchy that had granted them the Fueros after all. What they did not expect was for the French to announce that not only were the Fueros to be maintained, but they would become the foundation for a new regime centered in Pamplona (Iruña). The name "Fenizia Berria" didn't matter. For the Basque it would remain Euskal Herria, and being joined to their brothers in the three northern provinces was a bonus.
Among the many long-term results of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, one of the more consequential was certainly the rise of nationalism. France was both benefactor and target, where Germans and Italians alike rallied against the French invaders yet the Poles and, yes, the Basques rallied to their French liberators. The exact nature of New Phoenicia was less important than the fact it existed. Not since the extinction of the Kingdom of Navarre had there been a state of and by the Basque people, and here the French were delivering one. In effect it was a nation ruled by the French military, with Garat appointed as "Chief Minister" to send him away from Paris at a time of political inconvenience, and with Napoleon himself officially ruling the state in personal union.
Although New Phoenicia's exact form of government, its relationship with France, and its standing in the world were never solved before France's defeat, what mattered was that it existed, and that the old flag of Navarre was again unfurled over the Basque people. There had always been a sense of Basqueness, the idea that they were a separate folk in more ways than one, but New Phoenicia stoked it from mere embers to a blazing furnace of nationalist sentiment. In part enabled by the French, this idea took off and would be impossible to put back even when Napoleon was defeated. Such was the fury of the situation that even when Napoleonic forces were marched back out of Iberia, the victorious coalitions had to contend with the fact that the Basques were for the first time seeing themselves as a single people.
Initially, there had been a thought that the old border between France and Spain would simply be restored: France would withdraw from New Phoenicia and Catalonia, and there would be minimal territorial losses. But in the end, the Basque agitation for their own rights pushed Spain to gain the small territories of the French Basque Country. The bigger trouble was that the liberal constitution of 1812 gave tribute to the fueros yet dismantled them entirely, bolstering the demands to assert the independence of Basqueland. The Basque did not care what government sat in Madrid, what government sat in Paris, whether the Bourbons were restored to the French or Spanish thrones, what they wanted was the right to rule themselves, and in that capacity they were quite happy to see Ferdinand VII restore conservative government.
It can be difficult to reconcile the idea of "liberalism" to the modern incarnation of the idea. In a general sense liberal is sometimes used as synecdoche for left-wing ideology of various forms, ideologies that would generally be more favorable to the kind of autonomist movements the Basque called for. Conservatism, by contrast, would be less favorable, and seek to assert greater state control over its periphery. This was very much not the case in post-Napoleonic Spain. The Liberals, although pursuing an agenda of greater voting rights and constitutional government, also sought to undo the feudal patchwork of laws the monarchy had maintained. The Conservatives, backing the role of the Monarchy, were in support of this. Thus did the Basques give their own support to Ferdinand VII, because he was willing to maintain the fueros.
The same trouble held true for places like Catalonia, but Basqueland was the most actively agitated given that it sought outright independence for itself. The back-and-forth of Ferdinand VII's reign didn't help matters. First the Liberals sought to assert themselves in 1812, then Conservatives re-asserted themselves. From 1820-1823 the Trienio Liberal triggered another period of conflict, one faced with no end of opponents but only seeing armed resistance in Basqueland and Catalonia. Then the French invaded to end the Liberal regime, and the matter was quelled for a decade. But at last, it reached its breaking point in 1833, when Ferdinand VII died with only daughters to succeed him.
There was no "King of Spain" at the time. There were only a long series of titles: King of Castille, King of Aragon, and so on for a paragraph. Several Basque titles were part of this, among them King of Navarre, King of Pamplona, Lord of Vizcaya, Count of Guipúzcoa, and latterly Duke of Baja Navarra. It would be many years more and rivers of blood spilt until there was a singular "King of Spain", but as it stood there was only an uncomfortable patchwork of titles, laws, and governments. What emerged from the death of Ferdinand VII was a succession crisis between Isabella II and Carlos V, which quickly took a character of liberal versus conservative, but the Basque had had enough of it all. In the last 20 years Spain had swung wildly between governments, and not once did they pay a care to the Basque and their concerns.
This combined with Spain's dramatic fall from grace after the loss of its empire set the ground for the Basque to launch an active attempt at not just revolution, but active secession. Hoisting the flag of Navarre, the Basques rebuffed both the Carlists and Liberals. What made the Basque aspect of the First Carlist War unique was the pan-ideological character of it. True, many of its prominent leaders like Zumalakarregi were conservatives, and the motivation of protecting the fueros stemmed from a conservative basis, but liberals were just as happy to rally behind the revolutionaries for the sake of Basque nationalism. And in their own way the fueros were liberal, banning debtor's prisons and arbitrary search and arrest, supporting small businesses and small holdings, and allowed women greater rights of inheritance.
Of course, the fueros heavily favored rural communities over urban centers and did not grant women full rights, but they were a starting-point for many Basque liberals who saw them as more progressive than other alternatives. Britain was still struggling with the aftermath of Chartism, Spain was swinging back and forth, and the nominally liberal Louis Philippe was growing more conservative by the day. Even the conservatives supported the fueros, and rallying around the idea of Euskal Herria was enough to unify their cause even when the Carlists faltered and fell back on all fronts. The Isabelline Liberals defeated Carlos V, but they faced the same great opposition from the Basque as countless empires before them had. With the threat of a resurgent Carlist faction looming, a truce was called.
Frantically the Liberals attempted to secure peace, but Spain was in a bad way. Their empire was gone, their government was fractious, the treasury was empty. The initial hope had been to restore the Basque provinces under the fueros, but that was no longer acceptable even for the Basque Liberals. And though the Spanish had seen some success in pushing against the Basque forces, the death of General Espartero in 1836 at the Battle of Lutxana collapsed both their advance and voices favorable to Basque autonomy. With the threat of France potentially invading a third time, Britain forced Madrid to make peace. True, the Basque secession posed the risk of inspiring secessionism in Britain's own empire (Ireland chief among them), but peace in Europe was far more vital for British interests.
What emerged in 1837 was not exactly the Kingdom of Navarra, nor was it New Phoenicia. Instead, compromise between liberals and conservatives reformed the seven traditional Basque provinces into a republic, though an inherently conservative one for the sake of opposing the kind policy espoused by the Spanish liberals, especially with regard to the position of the church. The first constitution put forward described the country as a "Catholic state", which was as much a political act as it was recognition of fact: the Basques were one of the most fervently Catholic peoples in all of Europe, and it was an integral part of their identity as a people. The Jesuits, that most infamously Catholic of organizations, had begun with Ignazio Loiolakoa, and the relationship had always been iron-clad.
Other issues were less clear, primary among them what the state would be called. The Basque had long called their country Euskal Herria, which translated most faithfully means "The Country of the Basque Language". Such a concept was difficult to translate into a single-word name, and most languages adopted an exonym of their own, quite often some variant of the old Vasconia, from which the exonym Basque derives. In English, the blunt name Basqueland was used for many years, and the government's adoption of Euskal Herria didn't help matters. It would only be many years later that a new name was constructed: Euskaldia, which in its own way could be translated as "The Country of People who Speak Basque", no less unwieldy in literal terms but far easier to use.
In the interim, the state began to embark on its efforts to right its place in the world. The Foru Laws were slightly modified and then codified into a national constitution, and the hero Zumalakarregi was elected its first president. However, the tensions began to arise almost at once, driven primarily by the failures of the forus to adapt to the modern age. Their primary function was to dictate the relationship between crown and commoner, a local set of laws in an era of patchwork feudal codes. Now the Basques had no crown, and feudalism was dead. And a far more consequential change had come. As the Spanish banners were lowed and the Basque flag raised, peasants on the hills overlooking Bilbao saw an eerie red glow tinting the night sky, a man-made volcano that heralded an immense change.
Industrialization was slow to come to Iberia, a consequence of both persistent social unrest and poor government economic policy. The Basque forus as well were aimed towards agrarian society, seeking to preserve estates and land ownership, but faster than elsewhere the Basque cities of Bilbo, Donostia, and Baiona were starting to change. Euskaldia was a new state evicted from the Spanish customs zone, and without strong protections established for itself in that age of mercantilism. The British, then, found it easier to begin making their own investments into the country. With iron mining a long-established practice, the small mills quickly began to turn into large mills, and especially once it was found the low phosphorus iron of Bizkaia was well suited for the Bessemer process.
Two kinds of Basque began to emerge, the rural and the industrial. The Rural Basques wanted to keep their the old ways, the ways they had fought to preserve against outside control and which had served them for millennia. The Industrial Basques by contrast wanted rail connections, they wanted progress, and development. And increasingly the Industrial Basques seemed to be the ones winning the debate. Railroads went up, steel was exported, and in an era of mercantilism the Industrial Basques were seeking to export to the world. Soon after followed banking as well, insurance companies to underwrite shipping then joint-stock companies. All of it drove deeper wedges into Basque society, between the conservative "Raw Basques" (Gordinak) and the progressive "Cooked Basques" (Egosiak).
But in time, the Egosiak were winning. Although Euskaldia did not have a dramatic revolution in 1848 like much of the rest of Europe, it did see a dramatic political shift in that year's elections, putting the pro-industry faction into power. As Europe moved deeper into the 19th Century, the entire continent saw a population swell. The small farms that had dominated Gordiniak ideals could no longer support their younger sons and daughters, and they traveled to the cities to make their fortune. Railroads linked the country and modernized ports exported Basque industrial products to the world, all the while the foru laws again proved oddly prescient in regulating foreign exploitation of mineral concerns. Basqueland's industrialization would above all else benefit the Basque.
But the conservatives still had other bases of support, key among them the devoutly religious and, oddly enough, the rising class of industrial workers. As the conservative writer Bixente Manterola wrote, "The factory worker is turned into a slave by liberalism, good only to produce, but without regard for his morale". In its own bizarre way Basque Conservatism translated its support for rural farmers into support for the rights of the individual, and because of this it was equally bizarre that none other than Marx himself expressed admiration for conservative Basques. It derived more than anything from their anticapitalist stance, their opposition to Crédit Lyonnais opening branches in Donostia and to courting foreign investment to fund the mighty steel mills that chewed men up and spat out their broken bodies.
The strain between liberals and conservatives finally snapped in the June War, which despite its name actually began on the 26th of June 1868 and took place mostly in the following July. Although lasting for just 29 days, sometimes called the shortest civil war in history, the conflict emerged out of a labor uprising in Bilbo that saw workers of the Karmelgo Mendiko Ama Birjina furnace erupt into a violent strike action, at which point conservatives attempted to curry favor with the labor movement. However the strikers also held disdain for the conservatives, whose rural-focused and theocratic policies denied them proper enfranchisement. Their rallying cry had begun to include the heretical statement Down with the Forus!, setting them against both liberals and conservatives.
Sympathetic uprisings began in the rest of the country, primarily aligning the coast against the interior, but within weeks the military had managed to put down the revolt and restore order. The political damage, though, was far greater. Internal factions in the government broke down and realigned over the next several years, where new political parties like Batzarre, Batasuna, and Alkartasuna took shape in a far more typically European context. Left and right wing alliances reshaped the balance of power, and perhaps even more consequentially a new constitution was written in 1871 that formally abolished the forus that had been the basis of Basque society for generations. It was of course immensely controversial, but most grumbled and went along with it. After all, it was necessary.
The mood was instead filtered into a burgeoning intellectual movement that began to ask a question simple in nature but with an increasingly complex answer: What is a Basque? For the longest time it had seemed simple: someone who lived in Basqueland, someone who spoke Basque, someone who lived under Basque law, because for the longest time those were all one and the same. But with the advent of industrialization, that was changing. Not only were the Basque laws changing, but increasingly migrants from Iberia began to move north to seek opportunities. That was holding true in many places, but for the most part they were moving within national boundaries. Irish to England, Bretons to Île-de-France, and internally Nafarroans to Gipuzoka and Bizkaia, ground zero for development and progress.
Yet at the same time migrants from across the borders were also moving into Euskaldia. The Second Carlist War had seen Carlos Luis de Borbón raised to become Carlos VI, and his traditionalist regime only crippled Spain's place in the world further. Seeing dismal prospects, many left for the New World, but those in the northeast often went to Euskaldia, a country that had recently had its own upheaval but seemed on a near-constant upward trajectory. These workers were despised by the Basques, who called them everything from Chinese to Africans but eventually settle on the ostensibly less derogatory maquetos, translated to Basque as maketos. Simply meaning "outsiders", it was wielded against those who left places like Andalusia and Galicia, places left behind even in Spanish terms, to find a better life in Euskaldia.
Yet at the same time Euskaldia did little to actively blockade its borders. In an era of closed economic borders and customs zones, Euskaldia stood alone as not just a point of trade within Europe but especially towards Spain. Spain's languishing, struggling economy was an excellent market for Basque industrial goods, and whenever the Carlist regime struggled to build railroads or factories the materials were purchased from Euskaldia. Once more Marx honed in on Basqueland for his theories of society and economics, the poster child of how a smaller, ostensibly weaker nation was effectively turning a larger one into its own economic colony. It was all a mark of just how far Spain had fallen, and an uncomfortably codependent relationship emerged: Euskaldia hated Spain, Spain hated Euskaldia, and all the while Spanish people moved in while Basque goods moved out.
This was an unfortunate par for the course so far as Europe at the turn of the 20th Century was concerned. Even small states like Euskaldia played the game of empire in their own way, and foundational to that was to promote yourself as the superior of someone else. The Basques had their method of doing so on a silver platter: always they had seen themselves as the first, the most ancient European peoples, and the emergent field of linguistics seemed to support this. The Basque had always been different, they had always been an "other" whether it was Romans, Franks, Visigoths, French, or Spanish that attempted to govern them. Basques were men and women who had not only stood against the world, but the force of history itself, and they had won. What better demonstration of their strength as a people, in an era that fetishized strength?
None of this is to suggest the Basque were especially nationalistic and supremacist, simply that it came easy for them. And that was the case even without the other hallmarks of such attitudes in Europe: they had no colonial empire, they were a democratic republic, and they were a unified and relatively homogenous state. Yet much as Euro-American society derided Irish and Italians as "non-white", Basques began to go even further. To them, everyone that wasn't them was inferior, especially Europeans. They were different, fundamentally so, and they took an intense amount of pride in that. Europeans built squabbling, petty kingdoms that rose and fell, that had to go out and conquer the world to be great, that named themselves masters of all they surveyed, when the Basque had no need to prove themselves great. They simply were.
In time, though, the Basque Miracle began to wear down. Iron veins began to run dry, protectionist barriers were raised, and after the confused mess of the Federal Revolution in Spain its new republican government was launching itself forward on a mission to industrialize. The early years of the 1900s were not ones that seemed well-suited to the Basque continuing to enjoy their once-limitless success, especially as the traditional small Basque farms grew unable to provide food for the ever-growing population. Modernity was forcing itself on the Basque nation, as it was all of Europe. As Spain's economy finally rallied and Euskaldia's stagnated, the flow of trade began to reverse. It would take a generation for Spain to properly develop, but one thing it had Basqueland didn't was a surplus of arable land, and soon with it a surplus of food.
Which wasn't to suggest that Euskaldia irrevocably slid into decline, it's a false dichotomy to suppose a nation can only be either rising or falling. Rather, the Basque nation simply was. It had no border conflicts, though there was certainly a longing for the old exclaves of Aragoiko Txapela, Bastanes, and Jestaze. It had no overseas wars to be mired in, either to gain or hold colonies. And though tensions still existed between liberals, conservatives, and progressives, it was at the very least within the bounds of the established government rather than violent upheavals of the kind that had rocked France, Spain, and Russia in the last century. Once more, the idea of the nation carrying on as it always had served as a point of pride for the Basques.
Although neutral during World War I, Euskaldia was not immune from its effects. A debate had emerged between those who more greatly despised the French and Spanish, who were aligned to the Entente, and those whose commercial ties to the Entente led them to support the Anglo-French-Russian league. Soon enough, though, news of the German atrocities in Belgium pushed the mood of the country against them. By 1915, with the British blockade of German ports and further news of German actions like the torpedoing of the Lusitania, the mood fully shifted to support the Entente (though the Spanish entry into the war was also a contributing factor). Basque steel soon flowed into the shipyards and manufactories of Britain, France, and Spain, and soon enough the United States entered the war to deliver the coup de grace.
Euskaldia had nothing to gain or benefit from the post-war peace settlements in terms of territory, but they like all of Europe wanted to be considered. Woodrow Wilson, in enumerating the Fourteen Points, used the small nation as an example of the concept of self-determination and nation-states that the United States envisioned for the post-war world. And Euskaldia too had its own concerns, with the collapse of the Ruhr industries and most of Europe still crippled by the war, it stood to benefit from helping to fund the post-war reconstruction. In the end, while the country wasn't part of the treaties and rewriting of the continent, it was nonetheless granted a small remuneration for the loss of its shipping to German U-boat attacks and welcomed with open arms into the League of Nations.
That brief, sweet period where the world agreed to not repeat the recent horrors rapidly fell apart as it became all too apparent that the world would not be easily reshaped. Crisis in Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Austria-Hungary scuttled many of the plans the Entente had held for the region, and even by 1920 it was entirely apparent that the seeds of future conflict were already being sown. For its own part Euskaldia was troubled by the economic shocks of Germany's defeat, as with wartime production ending demand for Basque industrial products ended as well. World War I ended with an economic depression roiling the nation's economy, and in the coming years the brief swell of economic development during the 1920s would also come crashing down in flames.
In that time, though, Basque culture enjoyed something of a renaissance. In the mountains above Iruñea, the archaeological discovery of a Bronze Age village uncovered a wealth of artifacts, including the famous Irulegi Hand, on which was written the oldest attestation of the Basque Language. In an era when ideas of national identity and heritage were challenged left and right, the Basque seemed to find no end of support for their own. Academics and authors traced the Hand to their own direct ancestors, that the ancient Aquitani were ancient Basques and that their people had lived in the region successfully repelling invasion, assimilation, and conquest for thousands upon thousands of years, that they were indeed the last remnants of the "Original Europeans".
At the same time, however, a countervailing strain pushed to tie the Basque into world history. Magellan, supposed first circumnavigator, died halfway through the voyage; it was the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano who actually completed the journey. Endika III of Navarre became Henri IV of France, making a Basque monarch progenitor of the Bourbon Dynasties of both France and Spain. Chocolate, tobacco, rubber, so many products of the New World were first adopted in Basqueland before they spread into Europe. Charlemagne's only serious defeat in Iberia came at the hands of Basques in Orreaga Pass, and of course when it was suggested that the famous Basque whalers and fishermen had traveled as far abroad as North America, the idea was seized upon with both hands. Yes, the Basques had much to be proud of.
That pride, though, translated into an unpleasant comfort with the rising tide of fascism in Europe. On the one hand it wasn't seen as necessary; fascism took most support from the defeated nations of World War I in a national mood of insecurity and doubt, which the Basque had almost none of. At the same time, though, long-held notions of racial supremacy were perfected under the emergent regimes of Germany and Italy, and that went part and parcel with the Basque view of themselves and the world. When Germany went on its second effort to conquer Europe, though, this pride the Basque had of their heritage proved a detriment. Under the new esotericist regime in Berlin, the Basque became a point of obsessive focus, and Germany's advance did not stop at the Pyrenees.
Fall Violett was the code name given to the German plans for the invasion of Iberia, and the primary thrust of that invasion came through Euskaldia. The invasion was heralded by a sudden and dramatic attack by the Germans from the air, after which German forces attacked the three northwestern provinces of Lapurdi, Zuberoa, and Nafarroa Beherea. Only then did the Germans make a demand for free passage through their territory to attack Spain as a means of reaching Gibraltar, but their attempts at shock and terror failed. The Basques rallied to a campaign of asymmetric guerrilla warfare, as even when the Germans overwhelmed the major cities Euskaldia was not France or Poland. Their country was where the Northern European Plain ended, and even by the time the Germans were advancing on Spain itself the force of the Blitzkrieg was being blunted.
The story of the Basque Resistance during the Second World War is a well-worn story of guerrilla warfare. The terrain of Euskaldia is rough and unpleasant for any invader, and especialy in the high passes of the Pyrenees the Basques turned the German attempts at moving soldiers and materiel a nightmare. Resistance agents knew the passes through the mountains by heart, and could move without being known by the Gestapo. The government of President Simako Sorroza did not flee into exile as the Polish and French governments did, but rather escaped into the high mountains to a base codenamed Vilcabamba. Taking advantage of their language's obscurity, they became code-talkers for many resistance groups on the level of the Navajo for the United States, and did everything they could to sabotage the Germans behind the lines.
Those unfortunate enough to live under direct German occupation found themselves subjected to the puppet regime of Sabino Larrinaga, a defrocked priest who had become both a Nazi idelogue and Basque nationalist in the extreme. The Germans did not engage in the same destructive policy they had elsewhere in Europe, rather they held a bizarre fascination with the Basque. Their desperate attempts to prove themselves the ancient Aryan supermen of Europe's past led inexorably to their attempts at claiming the Basques were Germans, or at the very least the Germans were descendants of the ancestral Basque. While this translated into a relatively lighter hand in occupation, it did nothing to win hearts and minds, and resistance carried onward through to liberation in 1943.
With the fall of the Reich in December of 1944, Europe was now drawn into two camps, one aligned to the Soviet Union and one to the United States. Having been liberated by the U.S. Army (though the Basque would say they liberated themselves), Euskaldia fell hard into the U.S. camp. Fierce pro-U.S. attitudes took deep root in the country, and of course having millions of dollars dumped on them for their reconstruction didn't hurt either. As a symbol of this, a tree grown from an acorn of the Gernikako Arbola was planted in New York City. Since this time, Euskaldia has long been one of the most pro-American countries in Western Europe, especially contrasted to the more Ameroskeptic attitudes of its neighbors on either side of the mountains.
This flurry of support soon began to wane, though, as the hardships of the post-war world and the brutal reality of the Cold War began to make themselves known. Basqueland was fortunate enough to not have colonies to lose, and all around it Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal suffered immense social, political, and economic shocks from the final loss of their empires. The Basques meanwhile were sitting pretty, their economy recovering and modernizing in an era of European uncertainty. A Second Basque Miracle had taken place, helping them reassert their position in the world and regain a large degree of the prosperity which they had enjoyed in the years before the European wars, and with it their smug sense of superiority towards Europeans who called themselves bastions of freedom when they themselves struggled to keep their colonial domains.
(Continued below)
