2023-09-19 08:22:06
Colette Rabaté and Jean-Claude Rabaté make up a peculiar couple where, instead of talking about the electricity bill or where they are going on vacation, the conversations since breakfast revolve around the poetry of Miguel de Unamuno or what was the role of Eduardo Ortega y Gasset during the opposition to Primo de Rivera. The pair of French scholars have dedicated their lives to the search for new information about Unamuno, one of those very unknown acquaintances. «He was not a perfect man, but he had great lucidity about history and he was the best commentator on the situation in Spain. His journalistic work is totally forgotten, being the only writer in Spain who does not have his complete works together,” defends Jean-Claude Rabaté, who puts passion in a duo where she is the synthesis. «I’m going to the point. And he, so passionate, goes around in detours,” summarizes the Frenchwoman.
The Rabatés’ latest investigation focuses on the intimate rivalry that the Basque thinker experienced with the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera and that led him to exile in Paris in desperate conditions. «He had to make many sacrifices and live in a modest hotel in Paris while he feared for his family and his financial situation. Yes, it is true that he took advantage of his stay in Paris so that his work would take on an international dimension, but in several letters he said that he felt threatened with death,” says Jean-Claude. His wife considers the title the publisher has chosen for the new work incomplete, ‘Unamuno against Miguel Primo’ (Gutenberg Galaxy)since the fight in favor of freedom also extended against King Alfonso
«Unamuno was a tolerant man until the end, but he insulted a lot. “He claimed the right to insult to combat tyranny,” he recalls. To the dictator, in addition to ‘royal goose’, he called the hooded fool, the hoodlum, the scoundrel, the monstrous child, the peacock or the goat.
The work combats some recurring myths about the author of ‘Of the tragic feeling of life’, starting with those who present him as a lonely ranger with little commitment to politics. «Unamuno was a writer, thinker and philosopher, but he was also a politician, although he did not like to be attached to a party. During the dictatorship he was the driving force of the opposition and truly behaved like a politician,” Colette summarizes about some groups of resistance that anticipated the republic.
Colette Rabaté remembers that if Unamuno was able to carry out this battle against the regime it was, in large part, because of the moral protection that his wife Cocha gave him, “an important factor of resistance. I would like to do a biography of her because she is the one who fixes everything in Salamanca. A woman who was not only a housewife who had nine children, but she helped her husband with her correspondence and was her moral support in the complicated moments she experienced.
Testicular patriotism
Since the second one of the dictatorship, when other intellectuals still gave room for doubt to Rivera’s cousin, Unamuno understood the danger it posed to freedom of expression. «They close the Ateneo, which was the temple of culture in Spain; They close the universities and attack the professors… Unamuno says that it was the return of the Inquisition: the Spaniards betraying their neighbor. Tremendous! A return to the Middle Ages or at least to the worst of the 19th century,” he describes Jean-Claude RabatIt is about the gears of a dictatorship obsessed with propaganda and camouflaging a heavy-handed military man behind the image of a folksy man.
«He couldn’t stand the lack of freedom. He had suffered military censorship throughout his life and, furthermore, he did not like the character. Trying to get closer to the psychology of the character, he would say that what irritated him most was the lies and all the political shenanigans. He couldn’t stand the King and the dictator deceiving the people. Not in vain, we have always wondered why he did not react in the same way in ’36 and the answer is that I already knew Primo de Rivera before », reflects the co-author of ‘Unamuno against Miguel Primo de Rivera’.
Primo de Rivera (bottom left) with Alfonso XIII. ABC
Although in ’36 half of the Army was Republican and society was fractured, in ’23 the support for Primo de Rivera was enormous, with people taking to the streets of Barcelona applauding and excited about the change. The dictatorship launched a propaganda apparatus aimed at singing the virtues of the military order against the disorder of the free thinkers. Primo de Rivera was so obsessed with what was written about him that he bribed the press inside and outside the country. «He spent a lot of money on spies, on influencing newspapers throughout Europe and even on trying to penetrate Latin America. A kind of more peaceful Goebbels, but with tremendous brainwashing,” says Jean-Claude.
Both the King, who is credited with the famous telegram to General Silvestre of ‘Hey there, your balls’ that incited the Annual disaster, and the dictator and his clique showed an attitude and language injected with testosterone that irritated the thinker. «We cannot say that it was feminism, but it was against that machismo and that way of expressing itself. It was what he called a testicular patriotism similar to that of the guy who kissed the Spanish soccer player. That long tradition…», jokes the French author.
“We cannot say that it was feminism, but it was against that machismo and that way of expressing oneself”
However, the thinker was convinced that the Andalusian soldier was one of those who “shot and then aimed”, that is, that he was a useful fool for those who actually selected the prey for him. The code name for Unamuno’s correspondence was Severiano Martínez Anido, who was civil governor of Barcelona, ”the greatest executioner in Spain, in his words, a totally unknown general who carried out a gigantic repression in the 1920s,” defends Jean-Claude, who highlights that this “character was in front of Unamuno.” of everything and he was the one who was truly in charge. In the coming years, the pair of researchers hope to demonstrate the military’s participation in this and other key conspiracies of the time.
Colette and Jean-Claude Rabaté. Isabel B Permuy
Despite the enormous price he paid for his fight with the dictator, Unamuno had no problems years later meeting with his heir, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of Falange, and even attending his rally in Salamanca. «It’s very typical of him. He forgot about his father and saw the character. It is a form of tolerance where he was interested in listening to people before ideas, apart from the fact that for him the worst thing is resentment, which only produces hatred, desire for revenge and which leads to civil wars,” says Colette. According to what was rumored at the time, that specific approach to the Falangist leader cost him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1935, a recognition that he never received.
An instant
The film ‘While the war lasts’, by Alejandro Amenábar, and the documentary ‘Words for the end of the world’, by Manuel Menchón, have placed the figure of the writer in the public spotlight in recent years. The Rabaté marriage He celebrates that more than two million Spaniards have come closer thanks to these fictions, although he regrets that his entire biography has been reduced to the famous incident in Salamanca with Millán Astray.
«Unamuno’s work, which is thousands of pages, millions of words, cannot be reduced to four words that perhaps he did not even pronounce exactly. Of course, it was not a coffee fight, as some have said, but rather the confrontation of the two ideologies of the Second World War. The clash between the spirit of July 18 and a wind of freedom that for a few minutes flooded a University of Salamanca taken over by Falangists. Millán Astray represented the ideology of the unique Spain that survives today in the minds of some. And we cannot make the dead talk, but he would have attributed his survival today to illiteracy, the ignorance of some », concludes Jean-Claude Rabaté.
#Unamunos #total #war #fool #hood #botarate #mastuerzo #monstrous #child #Primo #Rivera