The Basque Phase, 1833–35

Abstract

This chapter narrates and explains the First Carlist War from the start of the insurgency in October 1833 to the start of the siege of Bilbao in May 1835. It shows how the Carlists mobilised the charismatic leadership of Tomas de Zumalacánd propitious socio-political factors in the Basque country to create a Carlist state which expanded in spite of increasingly desperate Cristino military attempts to vanquish it. It also introduces the significance of Carlist insurgencies in the Maestrazgo and Catalonia, although these are explored in greater depth in subsequent chapters. It explains how the cumulative Cristino defeats on the battlefield were both the cause and consequence of political revolución. The popular experience of the Cristino war effort created a ‘community of sacrifice’ amongst both soldiers and militiamen, who gave this new popular aesthetic of heroic martyrdom. Finally, this chapter also introduces the fraught international context of this civil war.

I believe in the power of Queen Isabella II, creator of Spanish felicity, and in Maria Cristina her mother, our Queen-Regent, who gave birth to Ferdinand VII’s daughter in order to console us and to condemn the friars. I believe that the mother and daughter suffered under the infernal government of Calomarde, that the mother was infamously oppressed and her honour outraged, that she descended to the dungeons to save faithful liberals… I believe in pardoning those who have been led astray, in the resurrection of our National Congress, in our political regeneration.¹