page_title: Tirso de Olazábal, 1st Count of Arbelaiz
section_title: Early 1900s (The king is dead, long live the king)
hierarchical_section_title: Tirso de Olazábal, 1st Count of Arbelaiz / Early 1900s (The king is dead, long live the king)
caption_attribution_description: Photograph taken in Venice showing a group of people in two boats. In "Ondarroa", Carlos de Borbón and Marie-Berthe de Rohan, Dukes of Madrid, accompanied by Tirso de Olazábal and Ramona Álvarez de Eulate, Counts of Arbelaiz. In the boat on the left, Tirso and Ramona's daughters Margarita, Blanca, Lorenza and Mercedes Olazábal. In the background, the Island of San Servolo.
context_page_description: Tirso de Olazábal y Lardizábal, 1st Count of Arbelaiz, 1st Count of Oria, was a Spanish noble and Carlist politician.
context_section_description: The early 1900s are marked by relative Olazábal's inactivity; he is noted only for occasional Saint-Jean-de-Luz conferences with other Carlist leaders. In pieces published by Spanish press envoys he was presented, “surrounded by his family”, as sort of a local tourist attraction. By this time, Villa Arbelaiz became the social center of Saint-Jean-de-Luz welcoming close friends and relatives of the Olazábal family and notable personalities associated with legitimists movements. Among its regular visitors were Don Jaime de Borbón, the former Queen Natalie of Serbia, the Countess of Bardi, Princes and Princesses of Bourbon-Parma, Italian aristocrats like the Counts Zileri Dal Verme and Emo Capodilista, the Duchess of Cadaval, the Counts O'Byrne of Corville and several Carlist politicians.
  During these years, Tirso and his family maintained their close relations with Carlos VII's family and were frequent visitors to the Palazzo Loredan in Venice. At least in 1905 he ventured to enter Spain, again accompanying Don Jaime during his visit to Covadonga. Also later he kept feeding the press with news about royal whereabouts, but during the 1907 trip it was already his son Rafael accompanying Don Jaime. It seems that his sons have already started to assume some of his tasks and it is indeed difficult to tell which Olazábal is referred to in various press notes from that period. Tirso is known to have exchanged vast correspondence with other Carlist leaders and upon death of the then Jefe Delegado Matías Barrio in 1909 he was invariably reported by the press as one of his potential successors; though the job went to Bartolomé Feliu instead.
  Olazábal was among major Carlist figures at the funeral of Carlos VII in Varese in July 1909; when republican unrest rocked Catalonia later that year, he resumed his now customary arms trafficking role serving the new claimant, Jaime III. The French security claimed that the Carlists were involved in massive contraband, controlled by a team located in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The French prime minister Briand estimated that 5–6,000 rifles were smuggled through Cerdanya only between December 1909 and February 1910. Contemporary scholars suspect that arms, including artillery pieces, originated mostly from England, with smaller amounts coming from Belgium, France and Austro-Hungary. Disguised as farming hardware, railway equipment, agricultural machines or even pianos, having passed carabineros and guardias civiles on the Spanish side they were stored in Zumárraga, Alsasua and Tudela. Madrid demanded that the French tightly control Olazábal and his son-in-law, Julio de Urquijo e Ibarra. As Paris was upset with Olazábal's public criticism of the republican secular education system, in October 1910 he was again ordered to move North of the Loire; his duties were taken over by Urquijo, permitted to stay in the South. It was only in May 1911 that he was allowed to come back to Labourd, though some sources claim he was expulsed from France in 1912. At that time another Carlist unrest, if indeed considered at any time, was nothing but a long gone illusion.
caption: Olazábal couple visiting their king in Venice, 1904
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