Spanish Steps

Lately it has become more apparent than ever that the only history we are ever comfortable deploying analogously — or indeed oh-so-readily weaponising — in contemporary debate is that of 1930s Germany. The comparisons have become so banal that they have ceased to be illuminating.

I’ve put some alternative medieval comparisons out there recently, but there’s also something in the nineteenth century history of Spain that deserves examination when it comes to the undoubtedly knotty situation in the US right now. (In particular as this was a preamble to another notorious ‘rise of fascism’ in Europe.)

Religious conservatism had long penetrated and to some extent overwhelmed the infrastructure of the Spanish state and, sitting in suspension above the empirical reality of Spanish society, there was a pervasive and occasionally rather toxic, ultra-traditionalist notion of what it meant to be Spanish.

Against this backdrop, in the early part of the nineteenth century middle class, would-be modernisers had somewhat overplayed their hand relative to their demographic position, attempting a wholesale re-engineering of Spanish society along not just traditional liberal principles but additionally upholding some fairly ‘out there’ ideas which had come tagging along.

The backlash came in 1823 when the King Ferdinand VII, teamed up with his French counterpart Louis XVIII in forming the ‘Holy Alliance’ with the aim of dramatically rolling back liberal modifications to the Spanish way of life. They they even reinstated the Holy Office (Inquisition) as a way of extirpating all forms of ‘mad thinking’, and it’s safe to say that the liberals had not expected that.

Soon afterwards, the monarchy itself became the focus of this escalating culture war, with Ferdinand's daughter and heir Queen Isabella II literally in bed with the liberal elites in the armed forces and the reactionaries coalescing around her uncle Don Carlos.

These so-called Carlistas — as illustrated — would become especially strong in deeply-traditionalist Navarra (home today to nice folk like Opus Dei) and had their first proper war named after them in 1833. They would go on to play a key role in the next century as the various conflicts embedded in the national psyche hypertrophied into all out civil war.