page_title: Carlism in literature
section_title: Unamuno
hierarchical_section_title: Carlism in literature / Modernism / Unamuno
caption_attribution_description: Español: Retrato de Miguel de Unamuno publicado en 1912, cuando era Rector de la Universidad de Salamanca.
context_page_description: On March 21, 1890, at a conference dedicated to the siege of Bilbao during the last civil war, Miguel de Unamuno delivered a lecture titled La última guerra carlista como materia poética. It was probably the first ever attempt to examine the Carlist motive in literature, as for the previous 57 years the subject had been increasingly present in poetry, drama and novel. However, it remains paradoxical that when Unamuno was offering his analysis, the period of great Carlist role in letters was just about to begin. It lasted for some quarter of a century, as until the late 1910s Carlism remained a key theme of numerous monumental works of Spanish literature. Afterwards it lost its appeal as a literary motive, still later reduced to instrumental role during Francoism. Today it enjoys some popularity, though no longer as catalyst of paramount cultural or political discourse; its role is mostly to provide exotic, historical, romantic and sometimes mysterious setting.
context_section_description: Among the giants of Generación de 1898 Miguel de Unamuno was chronologically the first one to address the Carlist question in a literary work; Paz en la guerra (1897) remained also his only novel featuring Carlism, though the phenomenon was discussed also in his numerous essays, treaties, studies and all genres which do not fall into belles-lettres. Nevertheless, Paz en la guerra is - perhaps along Baroja's Zalacaín el aventurero and Valle-Inclán's Sonata de invierno - the best known literary work related to Carlism. It is also one of the most ambiguous ones; analysis of its message and the role of Carlism is often heavily aided by quotations from Unamuno's non-literary works or private papers. One scholarly opinion is that Unamuno nurtured some sympathy for Carlism since he viewed it plainly as a form of regionalism. The opinion which prevails is that for Unamuno there were two Carlisms. One was genuine, rooted in the rural population but largely unconscious, communitarian if not socialist, federative and anarchist in spirit. This Carlism formed the most intimate layers of Spanish self and was present in "intrahistoria", a term coined by Unamuno and compared to massive, silent and invisible moves of waters in the depths of the ocean. Another Carlism was an ideological superstructure, built by "bachilleres, canónigos, curas y barberos ergotistas y raciocinadores", infected with Integrism and forming part of political history, this one compared to splashing waves on the ocean surface, noisy and picturesque, but built in one second and disappearing in another.
  The two Carlisms are constantly present in Paz en la guerra, confusing both the protagonists and the readers; initially Unamuno was accused of nurturing Carlist sympathies, something he immediately denied. In fact, for him Carlism was an element in a dialectic process of forming national identity and as such could not have been simply ignored or rejected. The vision of Pachico from last pages of the novel, namely that "both sides were right and neither was right", is usually attributed to Unamuno himself. The title of the novel might be interpreted in two ways: as citizens of Bilbao finding internal peace amongst the Carlist siege, and as new life being born out of a dialectic confrontation. This confrontation was not necessarily symbolic; in numerous works and statements Unamuno openly praised civil war as means of overcoming dialectic differences. It was only once he had learnt the deadly toll of first months of the Spanish Civil War that he changed his view. He considered re-writing Paz en la guerra, probably with much less understanding for Carlism; in the last document written before death Unamuno claimed that the emerging Nationalist regime was spiritually governed by a Carlist-inspired "Catholic Traditionalist paganism".
caption: Unamuno
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