'God, country, king', a global look at Carlism: transnational, heterogeneous and anti-masonic

Historiography continues to pay notable attention to Carlism. Within this bibliography Jordi Canal occupies a prominent place. In 2000 he published a splendid synthesis on the phenomenon which he followed in 2006 White flags, red flags, compilation of studies on significant aspects of the history of Carlism. He is now publishing a new anthology: a valuable complement to the author's global vision of the issue.

It starts God, country, king with a general work on the civil wars, to then address aspects of Carlism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The author draws attention to the transnational nature of the legitimist protest, as demonstrated by the Portuguese and French cases. Canal highlights the coexistence within it of heterogeneous social sectors and different political options, united, however, against liberalism as an expression of an urban, bourgeois and capitalist order, without forgetting, as Vicens Vives stressed, its character as the armed wing of the Spanish Catholicism.

The addition of the provincial cause to the motto “God, country and king” would not allow the phenomenon to be directly connected with the expression of nationalist sentiments of a peripheral nature. Because Carlism also existed outside the Basque-Navarrean and Catalan stronghold and its intention was always to operate in Spain as a whole, enthroning its claimant to the throne. In this sense, the vision of the first theorists of Basque nationalism such as Sabino Arana himself or Arturo Campión seems more accurate than some later interpretations of nationalist historiography.

The book pays particular attention to the anti-Masonic obsession of the movement, to the mythologization of the image of successive pretenders, particularly Charles VII, and to the Venetian palace of Loredan, refuge of outlawed royalty. Of notable interest is the study of the vision of Carlism in the Episodes by Pérez Galdós. Carlism has had particularly brilliant literary attention. Not only in Galdos's work, but in the long series of Baroja novels dedicated to the life of the conspirator Eugenio de Avinareta or in the Carlist novels of Valle-Inclán. Except for the more or less aestheticizing philo-Carlism of the latter, Galdós and Baroja will agree on the dominant liberal vision in our nineteenth-century historiography of the long Carlist dispute present over two centuries. The surprising turn introduced in it throughout the late Franco era and the transition will be necessary to contribute to the end point of one of the longest political currents in our history.

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