Washington Irving, already a celebrity of sorts as a literary gent, takes his ease as a guest of the Governor of Granada in the palace/fortress of the Alhambra. Probably no site on the travel itinerary better suited his taste for romantic storytelling, tinctured with unvarnished malarky. Here he considers his situation in the hands of his staff, including (among others) Antonia, the de facto proprietress, and Mateo Ximenes, his personal attendant--considers, and finds it suitable:
The good dame Autonia fulfils faithfully her contract with regard to my board and lodging; and as I am easily pleased, I find my fare excellent; while the merry-hearted little Dolores keeps my apartment in order, and officiates as handmaid at meal-times. I have also at my command a tall, stuttering, yellow-haired lad, named Pepe, who works in the gardens, and would fain have acted as valet; but in this he was forestalled by Mateo Ximenes, "the son of the Alhambra." This alert and officious wight has managed, somehow or other, to stick by me ever since I first encoun- tered him at the outer gate of the fortress, and to weave himself into all my plans, until he has fairly appointed and installed himself my valet, cicerone, guide, guard, and historiographic squire; and I have been obliged to improve the state of his wardrobe, that he may not disgrace liis various functions; so that he has cast his old brown man- tle, as a snake does his skin, and now appears about the fortress with a smart Andalusian hat and jacket, to his infinite satisfaction, and the great astonishment of his comrades. The chief fault of honest Mateo is an over- anxiety to be useful. Conscious of having foisted himself into my employ, and that my simple and quiet habits render his situation a sinecure, he is at his wit's ends to devise modes of making himself important to my welfare. I am in a manner the victim of his officiousness; I cannot put my foot over the threshold of the palace, to stroll about the fortress, but he is at my elbow, to explain everything I see; and if I venture to ramble among the surrounding hills, he insists upon attending me as a guard, though I vehemently suspect he would be more apt to trust to the length of his legs than the strength of his arms, in case of attack. After all, however, the poor fellow is at times an amusing companion; he is simple-minded and of infinite good humor, with the loquacity and gossip of a village barber, and knows all the small-talk of the place and its environs.
So Washington Irving, The Alhambra, composed around 1829, available here. I'd say that anyone who condescends to his tour guide "simple-minded and of infinite good humor" ought not be surprised if he finds himself first in the queue for the guillotine.
Still absorbing Stanley Payne's highly rewarding Spain: A Unique History, I'm particularly taken by his (justly) long appraisal of the career of the dominant figure in Spain's 20th Century politics, the Caudillo, Francisco Franco. It's way too to rich to summarize in a brief blog post but a couple of points are worth noting. One, per Payne it is not true that Franco was a reluctant ally of the Nazis. Payne undertakes to show that Franco was totally cool with the Nazis; the trouble was that his conditions for cooperation were too high. Specifically, he wanted large chunks of Africa and Hitler didn't think he could give them away without offfending the French who, apparently, he felt he needed more.
And two, everybody, not least Franco himself, seems to have been surprised that Franco survived the collapse of Nazi Germany--not only survived but thrived for another 20 years. He achieved this feat, on Payne's account, by a fabulous display of political trimming, as he struggled to fit old doctrines to new demands. A particularly instructive comparison here would be Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia who also succeeded in reinventing himself and his ideology in the interest of survival. On he evidence, one would say it was Franco who did it better, handing over power to a stable democratic state while Tito left behind a maelstrom.
The Tito example does indeed provoke reflection but I wonder another instructive comparison might be with Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet U-- pardon, Russia and the remnants of that rare political creatures, an empire that quietly and (more or less) peacefully disbanded itself. One especially point of comparison: apparently Franco thought/hoped that he could facilitate modern economy without abandoning the traditionalist authoritarianism that lay so near to his heart. So in the same vein Gorbachev who learned only too late--or maybe never learned--that once you loosened the traces, there simply wasn't any place for the party any more.
Franco had plenty of blood on his hands--much more, I'd say, than Gorbachev. Toss in the undisputed fact that he was a man almost totally without any personal magnetism or charm and you have a character who won't so much be remembered badly as not remembered at all. But on balance he makes me remember the old Kentucky (mock) political rallying cry: they can go further and do worse and probably will!
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Reading Stanley Payne's (somewhat ironically?) titled Spain: A Unique History, I'm reminded again of how blinkered are our own perceptions of our own political reality. As in, we think we're so special; but the briefest reflection should suggest that our own experience finds echoes almost everywhere,not least in the recent history of our close cultural neighbors, the Europeans.
Case in point: "liberals;" "nice people;"--that would be me, your honor--so often suck on their unassuageable sense of hurt, fueled by the insight that "they" just don't understand our good intentions: how we'd all be so much better off if "we'd all" just do as we say and become a tolerant, cooperative, seculariust and yes (perhaps) multiculturist and certainly (well-maybe) market--oriented. Specifically it makes us crazy when the Tea Party and its ilk let themselves get snarled up in the Muslim Thing, the Abortion Thing, the Gun Thing when we tend to regard all of these issues as distractions that ought to be got out of the way.
I won't labor the whole catalog of reasons of why "we" are right--nor the companion-account of how entirely this misses the point. My purpose at the moment is to observe only not-new this particular discontinuity is; how much it helps to explain so much of European politics over the past couple of hundred years.
You could start with the French Revolution, or more precisely, the royalist/Catholic reaction against the French Revolution; you could start with Balzac's first real novel, Les Chouans. People tend to dismiss the Chouans (when they pay attention at all) as useful idiotsm gullible tools of an evil and manipulative master classs. Balzac makes it clear that it's far more than that: the reaction (sic) of his Chouans is clearly fueled by the sincerest of passions.
So also Spain and Portugal. It's worth noting that as Spanish/Portugues "liberals" took baby steps with power in the 19th Century, they weren't at all enthusiastic about extending the franchise. And with good and sufficient reason: they understood that the peasants weren't at all interested in "their"--the liberals'--issues and would do what they could to defeat them. I suppose this has something to do with what Marx had ind when he fulminated about the idiocy of the peasants, although I suspect he may have come to the point from a slightly different perspective.
If this was novel insight for the Spanish liberals, it certainly wouldn't have surprised, say Napoleon III who grasped early on that he could build a government of the reactionary elite on a properly motivated mass audience. And forget about Napoleon: it comes close to the truth to say that every important European government of the 19th or 20th Century came from a reactionary elite that learned how one --not just the reluctant consent, but the enthusiastic cooperation--of a mass.
Another thing that is so great about Spain as an example here is that it is a dazzling instance of just how complicated both "liberalism" and "conservatism" can be. Spain had secularist/liberals whose main concern was to try to develop markets; but it had others whose primary motive seems to have been simply to bring down the church. Similarly the right had (at least) the traditionalists of church and monarchy; and the bullyboy streetfighters of falange. Also the military, whose internal complexities were far more arcane than our post-Franco memories tend to tell us. And let's not get started on the socialists...
I don't know if there is any consolation to be found here--to know that politics has always been as complex and contradictory a business as it appears today. But at least, Payne is a good companion along the way. And as to "unique," recall the old sports announcer's insight: everyone is unique and this one is no different.
