Introduction
It has been said that the oldest continuous European political movement to maintain its original philosophical framework is Spanish Carlism. From its early beginnings in the late 1820s, then more formally with the claims of Don Carlos Maria Isidro de Borbon [de jure Carlos V] to succeed his deceased brother King Ferdinand VII of Spain in 1833, and the succeeding series of civil wars over the next century, Spanish Carlism has persisted, both on the battlefield and more notably, intellectually.
Joining a profound commitment to and belief in the necessity and legitimacy of the historic Spanish monarchy, with an unshakeable allegiance to the Catholic Church, Carlism—sometimes simply called “tradicionalismo espanol”—not only defended dynastic legitimacy for nearly two centuries but, through its illustrious exponents and authors elaborated an amazingly detailed outline of just what an ideal “Catholic state” should look like. Indeed, popes from the Blessed Pius IX, Leo XIII, continuing to Pius XII made approving references, sometimes direct, to the writings and views of notable Carlist authors.
At various points in its long history Spanish Carlism appeared moribund, its followers drifting into other, more modern or attractive political movements. Defeat on the battlefield would, in turn, produce solemn obituaries…only to see Carlism revive once more, in a new epoch, offering responses to new crises. And its voice would be heard beyond the borders of Spain.
On February 28, 1876, at the end of the Third Carlist War (1873-1876) Carlos V’s grandson, Carlos de Borbon y Austria-Este, took leave of his small army in northern Spain. “Carlos VII,” as he was known to those who believed him to be the rightful and legitimate king of Spain, made a promise: “Volvere,” he declared as he left Spanish soil for the last time: “I will return.” Carlos VII would not be able to keep his promise. When he died in 1909, in exile, his cause, the cause of Spanish legitimist traditionalism—Carlism—was once more in political decline. Nevertheless, despite defeat on the battlefield at least three times during the course of the nineteenth century, Carlism would flourish again, and provide the intellectual framework for much of Catholic traditionalist and nationalist thought that would percolate in Spain and Latin America during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Who Was Juan Vazquez de Mella?
During the years 1885-1928 one individual above all was responsible for keeping Carlism alive as a political faith: Juan Vazquez de Mella y Fanjul. He would lend his considerable literary, journalistic, and oratorical skills to the Carlist movement during those lean years. His familiarity with the works of earlier Spanish Catholic and traditionalist philosophers and writers such Jaime Balmes, Juan Donoso Cortes, and Antonio Aparisi y Guijarro, and his knowledge of contemporary Catholic political and social thought elsewhere in Europe would provide ample background and foundation for his labors.
Mella, however, was not just an imitator or synthesizer. In the numerous speeches, articles, and essays found in his Obras Completas collected and published after his death, Mella articulates a Carlist theory of the state and of society, that, while it may owe a debt to Balmes, Donoso, and the Thomistic and Leonine teachings on society and politics, is also original in much of its exposition and analysis. Indeed, Mella’s vision of a traditionalist, Catholic and corporativist society, not only infused new life into politically weakened Carlism, but influenced and shaped the broad tenor of the Spanish Catholic response to the social, political, and religious challenges of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
With the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic on April 14, 1931, Carlism, which had been wracked by schisms and reduced to its bastions in Navarra, the Levante, and parts of the Basque Provinces and Catalonia, reappeared as the most organized, most intellectually coherent, and most popular movement on the Spanish Right, in opposition to the threats of anticlericalism, socialism, communism, and anarchy. The triumph of the republic for Carlism was the prophetic fulfillment of the prediction that the Alfonsine (or “liberal’) monarchy, with its corrupt parliamentary system of government, was only a step on the road to anarchy and revolution.
The end of the liberal constitutional monarchy also presented the thinned ranks of Carlism with an opportunity. Old internal rivalries ceased and schisms ended. The early 1930s saw unparalleled growth for Carlism. Soon Carlist militia were once again drilling in the hills of Navarra and Aragon, and Carlist brigades or “tercios,” filled with tens of thousands of enthusiastic and fervent volunteers—the Requetes—prepared to fight once again under the banners of the of the Blessed Virgin. Within a few weeks of the July 18, 1936 rising, Carlist columns were on the march all over northern Spain, and their cry, “Viva Cristo Rey!” became a reassuring—or frightening—sound on the bloody battlefields throughout the peninsula. For many of them the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War was “La Cruzada”—a crusade—a fourth Carlist War.
Looming over this renewed activity was the spirit and inspiration of Juan Vazquez de Mella. Although he died in 1928, Mella’s intellectual contributions, his memory, and his disciples played a vital role, not just in the rejuvenated Carlist movement, now termed the “Comunion Tradicionalista,” but in broader Catholic groupings such as Gil Robles’ CEDA and the Renovacion Espanola. In 1936 Mella’s understudy, Victor Pradera, published his opus El Estado Nuevo, which in one volume restates Mella’s central ideas. Throughout the 1930s hundreds of pamphlets and compilations of Mella’s writings were published, not to mention the initiation of the publication of his complete works. After the Nationalist victory in 1939, leading figures of the new regime paid tribute to Mella and proposals to implement his ideas circulated widely, if ultimately unsuccessfully.
Early Life and Intellectual Formation
There is no biography of Juan Vazquez de Mella in English, and although he is well known in Hispanic historiography and among Spanish historians, no one study in the Spanish language fills that gap, either. In English, only Martin Blinkhorn, Richard A. H. Robinson, Stanley Payne, and a few others have discussed Mella’s political and philosphical influence and given him credit for his pivotal role in Spanish politics.
In the Obras Completas, Mella’s friend and co-founder of the Madrid daily, El Pensamiento Espanol, Miguel Fernandez “Penaflor,” leaves us an extensive biographical essay that remains perhaps the best source for personal data. Other authors, including Rafael Garcia y Garcia de Castro, Constantino Suarez, and Manuel Rodriguez Carrajo have provided additional material on Mella’s life and intellectual development.
Born in Cangas de Onis, Asturias, on June 8, 1861, Mella lived much of his early life in Galicia. In 1877-78 he entered the Faculty of Law of the University of Santiago de Compostela, and it was at that university where he first read the works of that great defender of Hispanidad, the polyglot Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo. Menendez y Pelayo’s works, En Defensa de la Sociedad and Santiago, Jerusalem, Roma, first captured the young Mella’s imagination and opened new doors for him. In Santiago Mella also read Balmes, Donoso Cortes, Aparisi y Guijarro, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and contemporary French traditionalists writers. Of the Aquinatense Mella read De Regimine Principium and absorbed Thomas’ ideas on monarchy as the most natural and temperate form of government. From the Summa Theologica he drew ideas on the moral obligations of men to God and to constituted society.
Jaime Balmes’ magnum opus, El Protestantismo Comparado con el Catolicismo, figured prominently in the formation of Mella’s social thought. Like Balmes he viewed society as organically composed of natural intermediate organisms. Like Balmes he viewed the effects of the French Revolution and its repercussions in Spain as destructive of the natural order of society, a question he would address continually in his thirty-five-year career as essayist, parliamentarian, orator, and journalist.
Antonio Aparisi y Guijarro, the great Valencian traditionalist, passed on to Mella a love for and devotion to the traditional Spanish monarchy, its historic regionalism, and a firm rejection of the liberal Alfonsine version that dominated Spain from 1876 until 1931. Through Aparisi he discovered the “realistas”—the first Spanish traditionalists of the early nineteenth century—and digested their great apologia, the “Manifesto of the Persians” of 1814, that attacked the monarchical absolutism of the Enlightenment and urged its replacement with a “temperate” and representative monarchy modeled on that of the Habsburg epoch and the Spanish Middle Ages.
Nevertheless, it was Juan Donoso Cortes who seems to have exercised the greatest influence on Mella. Mella saw Donoso as a prophet who had foreseen clearly the advent of modern socialism, bolshevism, and eventual dictatorship. From Donoso Cortes Mella drew a keen appreciation of the workings of Providence in history. Over his long career he developed his own theory of “catastrophism,” which, briefly, suggested that the liberal revolution of the late eighteenth century in thinking and the capitalist revolution of the early nineteenth century in economics, would inevitably destroy the older, natural social order. These revolutions would lead inexorably to a socialist and communist revolution: to cataclysm, war, and human destruction on a vast and previously unknown scale.
In this Mella not only absorbed a conceptual framework from Donoso (and indirectly, Joseph de Maistre), but created a modern vision and launched a warning heard well into the twentieth century. The inevitable result of the dethroning of God by the “philosophes” and the Revolution of 1789 led to the social and economic destruction of Catholic order–to all the ills condemned by Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX, contested on the battlefield by Carlist claimants Don Carlos V and VII, and opposed by like-minded co-religionists in other European countries. In the end, only Divine Providence could restore and repair the devastation.
Career as a Journalist and Political Spokesman
In 1885 Mella began submitting articles on a regular basis to the Carlist organ in Galicia, El Pensamiento Galaico, and the Carlist review, La Restauracion. Almost immediately his formidable journalistic skill caught the eye of the Marquis of Cerralbo, Don Carlos’ delegate in Spain, who invited Mella to collaborate as an editor of the Madrid daily, El Correo Espanol, the national newspaper of the Carlist political organization, “La Comunion Catolico-Monarquica.” From 1889 until his break in 1919 with Don Jaime I, Don Carlos’ son and successor, Mella collaborated with the national Carlist daily, serving eventually as its editor. And after 1919 for several years Mella edited his own national organ, El Pensamiento Espanol, which was widely read by Catholic opinion of all stripes.
El Correo Espanol was the flagship of a network of several dozen regional Carlist papers. Articles that Mella penned in the Madrid journal were invariably picked up and republished in regional Carlist organs. Mella’s other writings included longer and more detailed articles in the traditionalist La Revista Social and in La Restauracion, and his one published book, La Filosofia de la Eucaristia. Like French traditionalist journalist, Louis Veuillot, whom he greatly admired and eagerly read, and whose career roughly parallels his own, Mella did not express his ideas in finished tomes, but via more diffuse means: in extended speeches, in essays, in his newspaper columns. Only 400—by no means all—of his newspaper articles and editorials were collected and republished in his Obras Completas. These articles and essays did much to inspire Carlism and provide it with a basis to resist division and temptations to enlist in the regime. But above all it was in his public oratory—in his numerous interventions in the Spanish Congress of Deputies where he sat for nearly thirty years or at enormous public gatherings, that he undoubtedly exercised direct and immediate influence.
Mella was a true master logician who reveled in exquisite and apocalyptic verbal imagery. A contemporary observer has stated that, “the very mention of his name would completely fill a conference hall or arena with passionate and enthusiastic followers, eager to hear every inspiring word uttered by the Asturian. In his discourses he was physically transformed and succeeded in transforming his audiences. No one was immune, not even his fiercest enemies.” In his Obras approximately one hundred of his speeches were collected for publication, about half being congressional interventions. The remainder, and by far the most extensive and detailed sources for his thought and ideas, were given at various functions, in conference halls, at vast public rallies, at dignified academic events.
Many of his speeches were never written down or published. Although unfortunate, this lacuna is not as serious as it first would seem. As with his shorter journalistic pieces, there are clearly identifiable and repeated themes elaborated in his oratorical outings, and what has seen publication presents a fairly complete window on his social, political, and religious thought. Although we lack easy access to some of Mella’s prolific output, the Obras Completas contain more than enough to enable us to construct a rather developed understanding of his thought.
Just how many Spaniards heard Mella? Carlist historian Melchor Ferrer estimates that 40,000 heard him at one mammoth outdoor rally at Zumarraga in the Basque Provinces in 1908, and it was not unusual for 5,000 or more to assemble if Mella was on the program. Not counting those who saw him more than once, as many as three quarters to one million Spaniards may well have heard the Asturian at least once in those days before radio and television. Even in the 1970s there were many Spaniards alive who personally remembered the vivid impression made by Mella sixty years earlier. Mella’s unique gift with words guaranteed his message would be heard, if not always assented to. He was appreciated well beyond the ranks of the Carlist Communion. His admirers—and sometime imitators—included figures as diverse as Miguel Primo de Rivera, Ramiro de Maeztu, Azorin, Pope Pius XI, and Charles Maurras. His fame spread across the Spanish border, and he made appearances in Portugal, France, and Italy, and was read in Germany and Latin America.
Mella, the Codifier of Traditionalist Thought
From almost the beginning of his professional life Mella was able to combine his magisterial gift for expression with an acute capacity to reformulate Carlist and traditionalist Catholic thought in a more contemporary and coherent manner and language. Given a green light by Carlos VII and Cerralbo, he was able to systemize and organize the various strands of Carlist traditionalism and give the lie to the impression that the Carlist was, in his words, “a kind of crow lurking in the crevices of feudal keeps, disposed to damn every scientific discovery and condemn all the marvels of industry…a kind of romantic poet who, bowed down with present-day reality and a nostalgia for the past, turns tearful eyes towards bygone centuries.”
In various addresses and essays Mella, the trained Thomist, begins his reformulation with a discussion of the very foundations of society, itself. His relentless critique of liberalism begins here, as well, for it was classic liberalism as propounded by Rousseau and his successors that demanded the rationalization of both society and the state. The result was the destruction of those traditional intermediary institutions—the guilds, fraternities, self-governing communities, religious and pious charities, common land arrangements, and the whole patchwork of local and regional privileges and rights—which the revolutionaries considered to be relics of an irrational past. As Rafael Gambra Ciudad, a modern-day interpreter of Mella, has described it: “Over the ruins of all these institutions was placed a new god, the individual, and above him, uniquely and inexorably, the rational liberal state, with the imperative of inhibiting any activity in society other than the defense of the inalienable rights of this individual.”
But as Mella observes, those traditional institutions were organisms which defined the individual—a place, a profession, a language, a family, a community—and which had arisen naturally in Spanish Christian society over hundreds of years. “Who has ever seen ‘the individual,’” asks Mella rhetorically, “if not defined by his family, his region, his profession, his language, his inheritance, his faith?” Removed from these defining characteristics the individual is an abstraction, and a political system based on an abstraction—such as that of Alfonsine Spain—must either end in despotism or revolution.
Mella identifies two types of intermediary institutions. First are those responding to the specific nature of man—the affective and familial; the economic and material, as encountered in the professions; the military and defensive; and the intellectual, in educational institutions. A second group he denominates existential, and he includes here institutions that developed in a geographical and/or historical context, including the traditionally powerful Spanish municipalities and the historic regions of Spain that, until the eighteenth century, had actually been separate kingdoms intimately united by one Catholic faith and by the monarchy.
Nineteenth century Spanish liberalism had seriously weakened, if not fatally corrupted, these organisms. “The modern state,” declares Mella, “does not recognize the juridical existence and rights of the guild, nor of the municipality, nor even of the family, unless sanctioned by its express will. Liberalism, he continues, had made the state mother, source, and manager of all liberty and rights. Workers and farmers, once protected by a strong Spanish guild framework, had nothing to shield them from unfettered capitalism. The poor who, prior to the “desamortizacion” or disentailment of Spanish lands in the 1830s, had a right to common lands, were dispossessed and forced into the inhumanity of the wretched “barrios” of Spain’s newly industrialized cities. While the political bosses and caciques of liberal Spain enriched themselves by expropriating church lands, destroying church charities, and by placing the formerly independent Spanish artisan in industrial sweat shops, socialism and communism offered workers beguiling but deceptive solutions.
This “social question” that Mella identifies can have, he suggests, only one of two solutions: either the state must inevitably move beyond the limits artificially imposed by nineteenth century liberalism and “convert itself into the manager of the national wealth and the regulator of the most minuscule social and economic affairs,” or there must be a radical restoration, even re-creation, of the natural organisms and intermediate bodies that had created and were identified with the historic social order. It is this potential radical restoration of traditional society that forms and defines the core of Mella’s socio-political philosophy. For Mella liberalism must necessarily conduct Spain to socialism and revolution. Out of the ashes of this cataclysm and catastrophe he hoped would emerge a rediscovery of Spanish tradition, a return to Catholic unity, and the restoration of the natural institutions and organisms that had made Spain great. The installation of the traditional monarchy, with circumscribed powers and authority, and the rebirth of regionalism, through which the local rights of the various principalities and historic kingdoms of Spain re-emerged, would signal the end of uniformity and centralization and the triumph of true federalism.
According to modern historian of Carlism Martin Blinkhorn, Mella’s “personal contribution to Spanish Traditionalist ideas lay in his detailed discussion of a ‘representative monarchy,’ based upon the proposal of the “[Manifesto of] the Persians” and of Aparisi, yet updated in such a way as to assume…a relevance to contemporary problems.” Just as the traditional Catholic Church assured the internal unity of Spain, so the role of the traditional monarchy was to complement the role of the church by insuring political unity. But this political unity was in not to be “absolutist.”
The king would rule actively, but never absolutely. He would be assisted by an appointive Council of Notables, composed of the most illustrious men of the realm, and by a truly representative Cortes, organized not on the basis of corrupt and divisive political parties and “one man, one vote” partiocracy, but on the natural constituent organisms—familial, regional, professional, military, clerical, and educational—that Mella had identified as integrative to and productive of historic Spanish society. These orders would elect members to the Cortes. Although they would not actually legislate in the sense that modern parliaments legislate, their approval would be requisite before taxes could be levied or appropriations approved and for any modification in the fundamental laws of the kingdom.
Opposing the classical liberal and statist paradigms, Mella termed his vision of society “sociedalist.” That is, solidarity would exist between classes and between regions, and autarky and subsidiarity would dictate that “within each historic region of Spain issues and questions of governance and direction would be determined on the appropriate level.” What should be decided on a lower level of political and social competence, should not be adjudicated on a higher, more remote level. This, indeed, for Mella was true “democracy.” Apart from foreign affairs, international trade, the armed forces, the national judiciary, and the arbitration of interregional and interclass disputes, all administration ought to revert to corporative, regional, and local organs.
Mella was convinced that Carlism—Catholic traditionalism–was the only force capable of consistent opposition to an increasingly centralized “deep state” and the only force capable of blunting the growing appeal of separatism in regions such as Catalonia and the Basque provinces. In his defense of historic regionalism and his appeal to subsidiarity, Mella precedes Pope Pius XI’s teachings on the subject by nearly forty years. His ideas were translated into French and Italian and made their way across the Alps, where they deeply influenced the pontiff in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. Indeed, Pius XI acknowledged his debt to Mella in 1935 when, through his Secretary of State Cardinal Pacelli—the future Pope Pius XII—he spoke approvingly of Mella’s doctrines on the subject.
Mella and Spanish Political Matters
During Mella’s career Carlism was characterized not only by the hard reality of battlefield defeat, but by schism and serious political challenges from within its ranks. The accession of Alfonso XII as constitutional king of Spain in 1876 witnessed the return of nineteenth century liberalism to Spanish government. Alfonso, as he announced in his “Manifesto of Sandhurst,” would be “like my ancestors, a good Catholic,” and as “man of my century, a true liberal.” Although the new Spanish constitution recognized the Catholic faith as the religion of Spain, it also provided in its Article 11 that other beliefs and cults would not be impeded in their public expression or exercise.
Despite their extreme opposition to this break with Catholic “unity,” a few Carlists, led by Alejandro Pidal, decided their fight would be more effective from within the regime than from without. Mella did not deny the signal importance of the rights of the Church, but Pidal’s “possibilist” solution, he opined, only divided, diluted, and, eventually, submerged, the voice of traditional Catholicism in a liberal system incapable of real reform. Indeed, the leader of the liberal party during the 1880s and 1890s, Mateo Sagasta, confirmed what must happen to Carlists who accepted the new regime: “In this regime,” he declared in a moment of candor, “only liberals belong; the Carlist masses don’t belong here, unless they become liberals.”
A second major crisis within Carlist ranks was the Integrist schism, which lasted from the mid-1880s until the death of claimant Don Jaime I in 1931. Led by the brilliant journalist, Ramon Nocedal, son of Candido Nocedal, who had been Carlos VII’s delegate in Spain during the 1860s and 1870s, the Integrists were alarmed that Carlos VII would permit Carlist ideology to be repackaged in contemporary language or in any way reformulated as Mella was doing. Integrism was never a mass movement, although it did enjoy intellectual support from a number of prominent members of the Jesuit and other religious orders.
From political forces outside Carlism, several temptations also threatened Carlist solidarity. Perhaps the most serious came from what became known as “maurismo,” after the rightist political leader Antonio Maura. Three times president of the Council of Ministers between 1907 and 1923, during the period immediately preceding the First World War Maura was deeply concerned about the “social question” and expressed sympathy for certain traditionalist ideas. On several occasions it appeared that Maura might join forces with Mella and the Carlists. Or, as Mella expressed it, with some irony: “He could have been a Mussolini before Mussolini. He had at his side an enthusiastic youth movement and a name that inspired devotion and combat.” But Mella and the Carlists would not compromise, and Maura was never quite ready to completely cast off his liberal principles and stage a “march on Rome.
In 1919 Mella, himself, broke with Don Jaime I ostensibly over the Carlist claimant’s support of France during the First World War. Mella’s separation was not so much motivated by ideology as by a series of misunderstandings with the Carlist claimant and personal conflicts with the prince’s advisors. Although several prominent traditionalists severed ties with the movement, deleterious effects on Carlism were temporary, and the Carlist base in Navarra remained faithful to Don Jaime. Ironically, the very doctrinal structure Mella had given Carlism for over thirty years would prevent permanent hemorrhaging when he, himself, left. As traditionalist writer Santiago Galindo Herrero commented, after his split, Mella “dedicated himself during the remainder of his life to perfecting traditionalist doctrine, providing, thereby, a great service to Carlism,” in whose ranks he no longer officially contended. Indeed, even separated from the “Comunion” that he so loved and had defended for so long, Mella rejected the opportunity to counsel collaboration with the regime.
The accession to power of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera in September, 1923, is a case in point. Although initially received favorably by some Carlists, it was Mella’s terse judgment that summed up the voice of the vast majority of his brethren: “At the beginning I could sympathize with the initial impulse, but as its work unfolded my applause became muted and reserved.” Primo de Rivera and his “Union Patriotica” would have only minimal success recruiting among the Carlists.
In large part due to Mella’s eloquence in hundreds of speeches, articles, and essays, and because of dynastic loyalty, the Carlist masses did not follow Pidal or Nocedal, and were not convinced by the “men on horseback” like Maura or Primo de Rivera. Although weakened by defeat from without and division from within, Carlism survived, strong in its northern bastions, if no longer for the moment a major player nationally. But all that would change in the 1930s, when, armed with an apocalyptic rhetoric that seemed to fit the times and a socio-political program refashioned by Mella that appealed to Catholics of all stripes, Carlism would rise again.
The Survival of Spanish Carlism
Contributing perhaps 100,000 volunteers to the Nationalist side during the civil war and gaining a reputation for valor and excellence on the battlefield, Carlism hoped to play a leading role off the battlefield in the “new” Nationalist Spain. Internal and dynastic divisions within the “Comunion Tradicionalista” in the 1950s and 1960s and the skillful manipulations of General Francisco Franco dashed those hopes. But Carlism survived its premature obituaries with a new generation of intellectuals, thinkers, and devotees grouped around such organizations as “La Ciudad Catolica,” the journal Aportes, and in a renewed “Comunion Tradicionalista Carlista.” “If God should need Carlism to save Spain once more, it will emerge from the shadows,” writes the traditionalist Rafael Gambra. And its survival, its relevance, and its continued intellectual attractiveness will be due in no small measure to Juan Vazquez de Mella.
A Note
Mella’s works have been collected in Obras Completas del Excelentisimo Senor Don Juan Vazquez de Mella. 30 vols. (1931-1950). I presented my doctoral dissertation, “La Doctrina Politica de Juan Vazquez de Mella y Fanjul,” to the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Navarra, Pamplona, in October 1975.
The basis for any detailed study of Carlism must be Melchor Ferrer, Domingo Tejedo and Jose F. Acedo, Historia del Tradicionalismo Espanol, 29 vols. Melchor Ferrer reproduces hundreds of important documents, letters, and manifestos for the first century of Carlist history. This series remains fundamental.
A second series, begun under the direction of Manuel Santa Cruz: Apuntes y Documentos para la Historia del Tradicionalismo Espanol, 1939-1966, 28 vols., chronicles Carlism’s history in documents from the end of the Spanish Civil War. Of almost equal importance for source materials and historiography is Jaime del Burgo’s superbly done Bibliografia de las Guerras Carlistas y las Luchas Politicas de Siglo XIX, 5 vols (1954-1956), and subsequent editions.
A concise and readable history of Carlism is Roman Oyarzun, Historia del Carlismo. Alexandra Wilhelmsen’s volume, La Formacion del Pensamiento Politico del Carlismo, is a detailed study of the development of Carlist thought during the course of the nineteenth century.
Accounts Carlist history include: Richard A. H. Robinson, The Origins of Franco’s Spain; Martin Blinkhorn, Carlism and the Crisis in Spain, 1931-1939; Juan Carlos Penas Bernaldo de Quiros, El Carlismo, la Republica y la Guerra Civil (1936-1937); Aurora Villanueva, El Carlismo Navarro durante el Primer Franquismo. Lastly but of major importance, Professor Stanley Payne’s various works on Spain must also be mentioned.
