When the Hapsburg, Carlos II of Spain, died in 1700 he left no heir. The Bourbon family took over and they have kept Spain in monarchs ever since despite a couple of hiccoughs along the way. For instance Fernando VII had his reign interrupted when Napoleon put his brother on the Spanish throne in 1808 but that didn't last long. Fernando was back in 1813. Just one generation later, in 1868, Isabella II was deposed and a new monarch had to be found. Eventually the politicians asked a chap called Amadeo, from Savoy in Italy, to be King but he never took to Spain and abdicated after just five years. There was a very short lived Republic before the Bourbons were back in 1874 but that went pear shaped again when, in 1931, Alfonso XIII and his English wife abdicated in the face of The Second Republic, the one that Franco and his pals put paid to in the 1936 -1939 Spanish Civil War. Franco ruled Spain from the overthrow of the Republic till his death, in bed, in 1975. He named, as his successor, another Bourbon, the still alive Juan Carlos I, who abdicated in 2014 and who is just now running into a bit of a problem around his handling dodgy money during his reign. His boy Felipe is a Bourbon too and our present Head of State.
Funny thing there. Franco was buried inside the basilica in the rather impressive Valley of the Fallen. The new Socialist government is talking about exhuming his body so that it can be buried somewhere a little less showy. At least for the moment there is no talk of heads on sticks.
Now Maggie was sifting through Facebook and came across an article reprinted from the Observer of 1959. I was going to trim it down and pull out the salient points and try to tie that in to rulers of one hue and another. In the end I decided to leave it as it was for you to read or not. The article is impressive in how old it feels; I suppose 1959 is, really, long time ago but it still sounds like the recentish past to me. I particularly noted the idea of the radio and films as engines for social change, the idea of needing a labour permit to get a job in the city and the "bread and circuses" reference to football but you may pick up on something else from an article written at just about the half way point in Francoist rule of Spain.
The Observer piece said that this was an edited extract from an article by Nora Beloff entitled ‘What’s Happening in Spain?’, published in the Observer on 19 July 1959. Here's the text.
One of Spain’s principal attractions to it’s millions of visitors from industrial Northern Europe - besides sunshine and cheap services - is the archaism of the countryside.
You can drive for hundreds of miles and, apart from a patchy and uncertain tarmac under your tyres, there is nothing to remind you of the twentieth century: no poles or pylons, no petrol stations or electric pumps, just the peasants and their children in floppy hats and dateless clothes, women carrying pitchers on their heads and the two commonest landmarks, the donkey and the Cross. All this produces an illusion of permanence: so these people have always lived and so it seems they always will.
The illusion is false: and the tourists themselves are one of the reasons why. Their disturbing impact on old Spain was noted by the National Association of Fathers of Families, one of the major corporations now authorised in Spain, who said at it’s annual congress this year: ‘It is impossible to overlook the danger represented in certain regions of Spain by the tourist current as a vehicle of ideas and customs highly pernicious to our family morality...’
Primarily Spanish farming is being forced away from its primitivism by the reproduction rate of the Spaniards themselves. The population has increased by five million since the Civil War, and a European country with the lowest agricultural yield and the highest birth-rate is condemned to modernise or die. The switching of public investment from industry to agriculture, notable in irrigation, has, in fact, already been decided upon.
The change is being accelerated by the penetration into rural Spain of Western notions of progress. This comes partly from the tourists, but also from a plentiful provision of American films (very cheap and available in local currency under the American Aid Agreement) in village cinemas and from the spread of radio. But the decisive fact has been the migration of surplus labour into the cities, so that hardly any peasant family is without a cousin, brother or child to bring it into touch with the modern world. An old lady from a remote mountain village in the Asturias said she had had seventeen children, but added with a chuckle that her eldest daughter had married in the nearby town and had had only three;’They are cleverer these days...’
Crowding into cities is a common enough feature in the modern world but in Spain it has reached catastrophic proportions. Madrid (now two million) and Barcelona (one and a half million) are in a state of siege. Every day police patrol the platforms when the trains from the west and south arrive and peasants without labour permits are sent back on the next train at public expense. They find other ways of slipping back.
There are today 120.000 of these immigrants grouped in the outlying slums of Barcelona. Some we visited have built their homes on the beaches by the railway track, regardless of the stench, where the sewers tip their contents into the sea. You can see them with buckets trying to fish food out of the filth. Bureaucrats have visited the site, declared it insalubrious, and forbidden further building. So now when, as frequently happens, the waves knock down existing shacks, families have to move in together.
Leaving aside the sub-proletariat of the slums, who sell their services far below the minimum wage, labourers have suffered far less from inflation than white-collar workers and school teachers whose standard of life has sunk far below conditions before the Civil War. Many Spaniards will tell you that the Government is deliberately pursuing what an orange-dealer from Valencia called the ‘cretinisation’ of the Spanish people: demoting and starving the intellectuals (who are traditionally anti-militarist, anti-clerical and anti-Franco) and boosting the current football craze (which has now ousted bull-fighting in popular favour) by radio, television, liberal allocation of newsprint to sports papers, and the building of colossal stadia.
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