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Spain and Carlism
Although there is some inaccurate sentences in the text which should be subject to a slight correction, and some of the works which are cited in the footnotes are not a good source for a complete undestanding of the spanish legitimist movement, I think the following text can serve as a broadly introduction in this theme.
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Spain and Carlism
Triumph would be a crusading journal. Its editors militantly sought the conversion of America and the construction of a confessional state. Much of the inspiration for such an apostolate was derived from Bozell’s and Wilhelmsen’s experiences in Spain. Both lived in Spain for a period of time and came to admire both the country’s Catholic culture and Europe’s oldest and most significant traditional Catholic political movement, Carlism. Bozell lived in Spain from 1961 until 1963, while Wilhelmsen lived in Spain for almost a decade. The Spain of the 1950s and 1960s, however, seemed like an odd country to admire. Why would Bozell and Wilhelmsen move there; why would they revere Spain; and more importantly, how did their experiences in Spain lead to Triumph’s founding?
Spain, after all, was a very poor country and was ruled by the dictator, Francisco Franco.75 Franco in 1939 had overthrown Spain’s republican government after his Nationalist forces emerged victorious in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).76 Franco was generally reviled by the liberal intellectual establishment in the United States, even though he had kept Spain neutral during the Second World War and had aligned Spain with the United States during the Cold War.77 Few liberal intellectuals admired right-wing authoritarian regimes, and even fewer could forget that during the Spanish Civil War, Franco had accepted military support from Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini.78 Contrary to popular opinion, however, Franco was not a fascist; his authoritarian regime was more traditionalist and Catholic than it was radically statist and totalitarian. It was, however, still repressive; he was most brutal in the wake of victory, when he sought to purge his Republican enemies and consolidate his rule.79 The Franco regime, however, became less rigid in the fifties and sixties.80
Despite Franco’s undemocratic methods, it was not unusual for American Catholics that grew up in the 1930s to admire the Catholic Franco. During the Spanish Civil War, the majority of them, including the Church’s hierarchy, rooted for the Nationalist forces, while the majority of Protestant Americans rooted for the Republicans.81 Patricia Bozell, a member of the well-known conservativeand Catholic Buckley family, remembered such a distinction growing up in Sharon, Connecticut:
My earliest memory of any sort of dissension with the outside world was at a dance we attended when I was about eleven. People were talking about the Spanish Civil War, all of course taking the Republican side, and I said something to the effect of “up with Franco.” That, in Sharon, was practically as bad as eating your children, incomprehensible.82
Many American Catholics viewed the Spanish Civil War as much more than a battle between Franco’s nationalist forces and the Republicans; rather, it was a sacred battle for the survival of Roman Catholic Spain. The Spanish Republic had attacked the Catholic Church; the Republic’s anticlerical constitution and subsequent anticlerical legislation separated Church and state, removed the Church from education, and curbed the Church’s economic power. As historian Sebastian Balfour explained, “the church was transformed from one of the official expressions of Spain’s identity into a mere voluntary association.”83 Even more appalling to Catholics was the outburst of Republican violence directed at the Catholic Church at the outbreak of the Civil War—thousands of priests and nuns were murdered and hundreds of churches were looted and burned—actions that Wilhelmsen labeled an “excrudescence of Hell.”84 The Republican side was further tainted, in the eyes of Catholics, by its inclusion of communists in its coalition. During the war, the Republicans conceded to the communists more power and influence in order to gain access to Soviet arms supplies. The Soviet Union, after all, was the Republic’s only major foreign supporter. While historian Hugh Thomas has concluded that there was no communist plot to take over Spain, Bozell and Wilhelmsen believed that thiswould have been the only reason for communist involvement. Franco, then, was leading a crusade against the enemies of Christ—it was, Wilhelmsen often remarked, about “the Cross.”85 Franco, when he was victorious, reversed the anticlerical reforms of the Republic and established an explicitly Catholic regime. Historian Raymond Carr writes, “In spite of Falangist rhetoric which infected the public pronouncements of the government, the fundamental values of the new state were military order and Catholic orthodoxy.”86
Spain, then, was not such a peculiar destination for American Catholics like Bozell and Wilhelmsen, especially given the Catholic and cosmopolitan character of the conservative intellectual revival in the 1950s and 1960s. European émigrés bolstered the ranks of the conservative revival, and many American conservative intellectuals naturally admired and sought to link the Christian political and cultural tradition of European civilization with America’s. They established contacts with European right wingers, and many of them frequently traveled to Europe and even lived there for a period of time.87 Bozell and Wilhelmsen, in addition to Reid Buckley, Willmoore Kendall, and Francis Wilson—the latter three were all future Triumph contributors—chose Spain as one of their European destinations. Born and raised in a Protestant country, and with some of them being converts, they were eager to visit a Catholic country, and few countries, if any, had a greater claim to be called a Catholic country than Spain.88
Spain’s Catholic fervor made its history. “Spain was forged as a nation,” Wilhelmsen argued, “through eight hundred years of Reconquest against theArabs. That long battle was fought under the aegis of the Cross.”89 It was Spain’s Catholic faith that allowed it not only to defeat Islam but also communism. “The Crescent and the Hammer and Sickle: ultimately they have but one common enemy,” Wilhelmsen noted: “the Cross of Christ and that civilization that took root and flourished from the wood of Golgotha. There is only one nation in history that has bested at arms both Islam and Marxism and that nation is Spain.”90
In Spain they found a fundamentally Catholic culture. Wilhelmen wrote of Spain: “The fact is that the entire culture is Catholic, the very air Spaniards breathe is thoroughly Catholic—and that Catholic air is Spain.”91 Patricia Bozell reflecting on her and her husband’s experience in Spain, remarked:
In Spain they lived the Catholic faith. Its history is peppered with battles for the faith. . . . During Franco’s governance, the many Masses were well attended, the streets were named after saints, the bells rang, nuns strolled the streets, crosses proliferated. You breathed the Catholic thing; it was rich and full. It gave you a sense of belonging and of history and of continuance. Things were not chopped off, partitioned. Religion was not relegated to an hour on Sunday, to getting dressed up, nodding at the sermon, and coming home to read the funny papers. It was alive, or so it seemed to us.92
In Spain, Bozell and Wilhelmsen also found Carlism—a traditional Catholic political movement that dated back to the early nineteenth century and the most explicit expression of Spain’s Catholic fervor.93 Bozell and Wilhelmsen admired Franco; ultimately, however, they were not Francoists.94 Rather, Bozell, and especially Wilhelmsen—who had taught for five years in Navarre, the heartland of Carlism—revered the Carlists.
The origins of Carlism are traced back to the French Revolution. Although Spain resisted French Revolutionary influence through war—first against the French Convention in the 1790s and then against Napoleon in the early nineteenth century—the revolution nonetheless augmented the development of a liberal bloc that stood in opposition to Spain’s Catholic and traditional political and social order. This development gave birth to “two Spains”—Catholic traditionalist Spain and liberal anti-clerical Spain.95 Both posited different cures for Spain’s nineteenth-century decadence. The former sought a resurgence of traditional institutions, especially the Church and the Bourbon monarchy; however, a contingent of these traditionalists—the ideological predecessors of the Carlists—did not seek to conserve eighteenth-century Bourbon rule, which they identified as a period of royal and ministerial despotism. They rejected Bourbon absolutism and regalism and believed that Spain should return to its pre-bourbon past, one in which the monarchy was limited by the Church, the Cortes, and regional political and administrative rights and institutions.96 Liberals, in contrast, sought further modernization through anticlerical, anti-privilege, and centralizing reforms. The division fostered five civil wars in the nineteenth century alone.97
Carlism emerged from the Catholic traditionalist side in the 1820s during the reign of Ferdinand VII. Ferdinand’s incompetence annoyed both traditionalists and liberals. Traditionalists were further angered by Ferdinand because he favored the policies of moderate liberals and did not restore the Inquisition. A contingent of traditionalists—called the Apostólicos—began tounite around the leadership of Carlos María Isidro, Ferdinand’s conservative brother and heir to the throne. They were content in the likelihood that Carlos would soon succeed the ill and childless Ferdinand. Yet matters were complicated when Ferdinand’s fourth wife, María Cristina, gave birth to a female heir, Isabel. Ferdinand changed the law of succession, claiming that Philip V’s Salic Law of 1713, which prevented women from inheriting the throne, was revoked by the Cortes’s Pragmatic Sanction of 1789, and he named Isabel as his heir. “Queen María Cristina,” historian Alexandra Wilhelmsen notes, “promised the liberals a freed hand in transforming the government if they would support Isabel’s shaky claims to the crown.”98 The Apostólicos supported Carlos’s succession and subsequently became known as the Carlists. “For the following one hundred years,” Alexandra Wilhelmsen writes, “the throne in Spain would be identified with liberalism and contested by banished members of the royal family who refused to make their peace with the Revolution.”99
Ferdinand’s death in 1833 and Isabel’s succession triggered the First Carlist War (1833-1840). Carlos V was defeated and failed to reclaim the throne. His son, Carlos Luis, or Carlos VI (1845-1861), failed in the same task in the Second Carlist War in the 1840s, and Carlos V’s nephew, Carlos María de los Dolores, or Carlos VII (1868-1909), was unsuccessful also in his effort to reclaim the throne in the Third Carlist War in the 1870s.100 War was not, however, the only method of Carlist expression; Carlists also promoted their cause politically, which included the use of campaigns, debates, speeches, treatises, and Carlist presses.101
Carlism was much more than a dynastic conflict; it was a Catholic traditionalist political movement that included the claim of legitimism. The Carlist political agenda—solidified during Carlos VII’s leadership in the late nineteenth century—was encapsulated in the Carlist motto: “Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey” (“God, Fatherland, Regional Rights, King”).102 Carlists believed that Spain had been devastated by liberals—and their anticlerical, centralizing, democratic, economic, and secular reforms—and was in need of reconstruction. Carlists wanted to return to a sacral society in which Christ, through His Church, exerted a dominant influence on society. The Carlists first and foremost were defenders of the Church. It was, they believed, the only foundation on which to construct and organize society. The fourth Bourbon pretender, Jaime III, stated in a 1919 manifesto that “above all other aspirations, I desire the reign of Jesus Christ over rulers and nations, in the individual and in society, because I am convinced that there is no salvation outside Him for either society or the individual.”103
The creation of a sacral society—that is, a society in which all authority was rendered unto Christ’s Church—included the establishment of both a confessional state (its corollary, the enforced preeminence of Catholicism for the salvation of its members) and the political independence of the Church. Although there would be collaboration between Church and state, the former had to be independent, Carlists believed, in order to avoid state meddling and for the Church to function correctly—the Church was not of this world and was not to be manipulated by politicians; it was above the political fray.
The Carlist call for the “Fatherland” embodied the Spanish tradition of territorial political independence and their respect for Spain’s organic laws and its principal political institutions, the monarchy and the Cortes. Carlists were not nationalists. They cherished Spain’s traditional laws and especially its historic institutions in contrast to the foreign character of liberal ideas and implementations. While Carlists appreciated the concept of a united Spain, they viewed Spanish political unity as based on a type of federalist system in which each region’s distinctive administrative, cultural, economic, and political institutions were autonomous and respected by the central government. This idea was expressed in their call for “Regional Rights.” Carlists wanted a Bourbon king to reside over Spain’s patchwork of regional political entities. They wanted a sovereign king who “both ruled and governed,” Alexandra Wilhelmsen writes, and who had the “authority and power needed to solve national affairs effectively.”104 The king’s power, though, would be checked and balanced by the Church (as the king was subject to the authority of Christ’s vicar), the Cortes, and regional, political and administrative institutions. In matters of governing and administrating, then, Carlists subscribed to what would be called in Catholic social teaching, subsidiarity.
Carlists believed that Carlos V and his heirs were the legitimate successors to the Spanish throne. In this respect they were legitimists, but Carlist ideology as it evolved also included the concept of the “legitimacy of exercise,” which superseded the “legitimacy of origin.”105 The Carlist ideology—because Carlism was not merely a legitimist claim but a Catholic traditionalistpolitical movement that sought the reinstitution of a sacral order—required that Carlos V’s heirs be much more than representatives of his bloodline, but also adherents of Carlism, exclaimers of the motto “Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey,” defenders of the Church, and archenemies of liberalism. When Carlos VI died, for example, Carlists discarded the natural line of succession, which would have given the crown to his liberal brother, Don Juan. The crown passed instead to Don Juan’s counterrevolutionary son, Carlos María de los Dolores (Carlos VII).106 When the latter was offered the Spanish crown in the1860s by liberal politicians, he refused it, noting that law and tradition had made him king—he proclaimed that “The Revolution knows I cannot be its king.”107
The Carlists did not formulate a specific economic ideology, but they followed the Church’s social encyclicals. They were anti-socialist and were critical of capitalism, and revered private property.
Carlists were not “conservatives” in the literal understanding of the word. They were not interested in conserving eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Spain. They certainly were not fond of the liberal nineteenth century, but they also were wary of eighteenth-century Bourbon absolutism and regalism, even though they were fighting for the succession of a particular Bourbon line.108 Although Carlists first congregated around the defense of the Ancien Règime—a sovereign and legitimate, absolutist Bourbon king—against the rise of liberalism, their ideology evolved into a movement that sought to reinstitute the Kingship of Christ over Spain. It is important to note that if Carlists could not be considered conservative, even in nineteenth-century Catholic Spain—because they had nointention of conserving a liberal monarchy—then Triumph’s editors, who were influenced by the Carlists and sought to institute the Kingship of Christ (but in late-twentieth century America, which had no precedent for such an order), certainly were not conservative, but were radical [Particular note mine: I don´t know what the writer means with the word “radical”. The actual word which should correspond to the Triumph´s editors would be “traditionals”, both in religion and politics].
The last great outburst of Carlist militancy was during the Spanish Civil War, which was the fourth Carlist War. Around 70,000 Carlists—40,000 from Navarre—joined the Nationalist side.109 The requetés—the Carlist militiamen—were fierce fighters. Carr writes that the Navarese Requetés “were to prove Franco’s best troops.”110 Though the Carlists were finally on the winning side, they would be politically marginalized by the Franco regime.
The effort of the Carlist requetés in the Spanish Civil War fostered a crusading mentality in both Bozell and Wilhelmsen. The Carlists were some of the last living examples of men dedicated to fighting for the Christian faith. Wilhelmsen wrote that “typically, each Carlist company in the Spanish Civil War had one man whose duty was to carry a tall cross into battle.”111 Thomaz Da Groomes and Wilhelmsen noted that during the civil war, Carlist militiamen had “Christ the King on their lips, rosaries around their necks,
Sacred Hearts on their tunics, rifles in their hands. Enormous crosses were interspersed in their ranks that made their advances over the shell pocked fields of the Ebro and before Bilbao a moving forest of faith, a cathedral in arms.112
The Carlists were present-day crusaders. Carlism was, Wilhelmsen wrote, “marked by an allegiance to God and Church unmatched anywhere in the world.”113 In addition to admiring its militancy in defense of the faith, Bozell and Wilhelmsen admired Carlism’s call for a sacral society. Like the Carlists, Bozelland Wilhelmsen would seek the reign of Jesus Christ, as Jaime III put it, over the individual and society.
Wilhelmsen eventually would write a political treatise for the Carlist movement—Así pensamos (So We Think) (1977)—and was knighted even by the Carlist Bourbon line, becoming a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Outlawed Legitimacy. Both Bozell and Wilhelmsen would bring Carlist symbolism back with them to America. The first chapter of the Sons of Thunder—a Carlist-inspired organization—was not started coincidentally at the University of Dallas where Wilhelmsen taught.114 Bozell named his estate in Virginia, Montejurra after the mountain top in Navarre where Carlists gathered yearly to commemorate a famous battle.115 Both men donned the red beret at what may have been the first pro-life demonstration in the United States in June, 1970 at the George Washington University Clinic. In a speech to his fellow demonstrators—among them a contingent of Sons of Thunder clad in Carlist uniform—Wilhelmsen shouted out the old Carlist rallying cry: “Viva Cristo Rey!” (Long live Christ the King).116
Bozell’s and Wilhelmsen’s experiences in Spain fostered, in part, the creation of Triumph. In Spain they found “Hispanidad.” Years later, Wilhelmsen explained “Hispanidad” and alluded implicitly to its impact on their lives. Forged in the Reconquest, Spain, Wilhelmsen noted, had a special mission:
Spain was a project before it was a reality, something ‘yet to be made,’ a hope, a promise. And at the heart of that dream there was an adherence to the Catholic Faith. Spain thus enters history as an adventure, a Holy Crusade, a Grail to be won. Small wonder it is that in the heart of every Spaniard, no matter how ignoble or infamous his life, there has always lingered a Don Quixote, a knightin the service of the cross. Centuries passed and the unity of Spain was slowly knit into political existence—and always it was Catholic Spain. Here the nation was not only subordinate to its apostolic mission, but was annealed out of the clash and dust of history by that very mission. There is no Spain without Christ.117
“Spain was formed as a mission and as nothing else,” Wilhelmsen exclaimed.118 In its very being, Spain was missionary—this was “Hispanidad,” a call to “transcendence, a surrender of self and world to their God.”119 “Christus vincit: Christus regnat: Christus imperat—Christ conquers: Christ reigns: Christ rules,” Wilhelmsen wrote; this “is the heart of Hispanidad.”120
In Spain, Bozell and Wilhelmsen had heard the call to subordinate all things to Christ. Bozell’s wife, Patricia, stated that “After Brent and I went to Spain in 1960, Brent’s whole view of the world shifted from the political field to the religious. Religion became the basis of all his thinking, of all his conceptualizing.”121 While in Spain, Bozell resigned from his position as editor at National Review, and exclaimed in an article, in what could be viewed as a farewell declaration, Christ’s words to “‘Go . . . and teach all nations.’”122 “These are the marching orders of Christianity,” Bozell wrote, “and, from a theological viewpoint, its central operational command.”123 He and Patricia were content in Spain and even considered living there for the rest of their lives, but they felt an obligation to “carry Catholicism back to America.”124 Bozell had gone to Spain and had come back bursting with “Hispanidad.” He had returned a crusader. Wilhelmsen noted that history “forged Spain into a living and marching sword in defense of the Church.”125 Bozell, upon his return to America, was ready toforge his own sword to defend the Church and institute the Kingship of Christ—that sword was Triumph.126
75 While Spain’s industrial underdevelopment may have been a sign of its economic backwardness to the liberal establishment in America, this was not a problem for Wilhelmsen or Bozell. For the former, the industrial world was an abomination, a byproduct of the Calvinist and Gnostic heresies. In this way, Spain’s economic underdevelopment was envisioned as a sign of its strength.
76 For the Spanish Civil War, see Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1986.
77 While Franco ultimately kept Spain neutral during the Second World War, the Blue Division, a contingent of volunteer soldiers, fought with Germany on the Eastern Front. Sebastian Balfour, “Spain from 1931 to the Present,” in Spain: A History, ed. Raymond Carr (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 267; and Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923-1977 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 340, 342. After World War II, Franco’s Spain was isolated by the Allied powers, but as the Cold War developed—and due to Franco’s decision to gradually liberalize Spain’s economy—Spain was brought into an alliance in the 1950s with the United States.
78 One of Hugh Thomas’s conclusions, in The Spanish Civil War, is that foreign support, including the Soviet Union’s support for the republican side, had a fundamental impact on the course of the war. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 465-674, 968-969, 974-985.
79 For an examination of fascism in Spain, see Payne, Fascism in Spain.
80 For a brief examination of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime, see Raymond Carr, Modern Spain 1875-1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 135-172; and Balfour, “Spain from 1931 to the Present,” 243-282.
81 In 1938, fifty-eight percent of American Catholics supported the Nationalist forces, whereas eighty-three percent of Protestants supported the Republicans. Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (New York: Random House, 1997), 234.
82 Patricia Bozell, interview by Patrick Allitt, interview transcript, in the possession of Patrick Allitt, Emory University, Atlanta GA. For information on the Buckley family, as children, see John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 17-51.
83 Balfour, “Spain from 1931 to the Present,” 245.
84 Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “The Future of Catholic Spain,” Triumph 10 no. 6 (June 1975): 12.
85 For Wilhelmsen’s view that the Civil War was fought for “the Cross,” see Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “Letter from Spain: Forces at Work in Today’s Spain,” America (September 21, 1963): 306; Wilhelmsen, “The Future of Catholic Spain,” 11-14, 30; and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “Adiós: Francisco Franco—Caudillo de España,” The Wanderer (December 11, 1975): 85-94.
86 Carr, Modern Spain 1875-1980, 148.
87 George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976; Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998), 181-182; and Rafael Calvo-Serer, “They Spoke For Christian Europe,” National Review (July 27, 1957): 109, 112.
88 Bozell, Kendall, and Wilson were converts. Francis Wilson, a distinguished political scientist and longtime professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, was probably the intellectual responsible for Bozell’s and Wilhelmsen’s interest in Spain. Wilson, a Hispanophile, was Willmoore Kendall’s dissertation adviser and probably sparked his interest in Spain. It was Kendall, in turn, who fostered Wilhelmsen’s interest in Spain, and the latter encouraged the Bozells to travel there. Wilson, Patrick Allitt notes, “made a forceful case for the consonance of Catholicism and American conservatism . . . . Both groups [Wilson argued] ‘operate on the principle of an objective moral order and reject secularism based on pragmatic and neo-utilitarian philosophy.’” Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 59-60. Also, see Francis G. Wilson, “Catholics and the New Conservatism,” Social Order (June, 1956): 247. Wilson produced a study on the Spanish political tradition, Political Thought in National Spain (1967). For information on Wilson, see Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 58-60; H. Lee Cheek, Jr., Susan Powers, and Cheek, Kathy B. Cheek, eds., Political Philosophy and Cultural Renewal: Collected Essays (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers, 2001); and M. Susan Power, “A Forgotten Conservative: Francis Graham Wilson,” Modern Age (Winter 1999): 55-62.
89 Editors, “Spain’s Fairest Gem,” Triumph 3 no. 5 (May, 1968): 9.
90 Wilhelmsen, “The Future of Catholic Spain,” 11.
91 Editors, “Spain’s Fairest Gem,” 9.
92 Patricia Bozell, interview with Patrick Allitt.
93 This author’s knowledge of Carlism is derived from the following sources: Martin Blinkhorn, Carlism and Crisis in Spain, 1931-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1-40; Warren H. Carroll, “Carlism in the Spanish Rising of 1936,” in Saints, Sovereigns, and Scholars, ed. R.A. Herrera, James Lehrberger, and M.E. Bradford (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 377-388; Edgar Holt, The Carlist Wars in Spain (London: Putnam, 1967); Jeremy MacClancy, The Decline of Carlism (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000), 1-33, 127-156; Stanley G. Payne, “Spanish Conservatism, 1834-1923,” Journal of Contemporary History 13 no. 4 (October, 1978): 765-789; Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “Carlos VII or an Introduction to Carlism,” Iberian Studies 8 no. 1 (Spring 1979): 29-41; Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “The Carlist Motto, Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey, in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Bulletin 6 (September, 1979): 250-253; Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “The Conspiracy of La Rápita and the Theory of the Two Legitimacies,” Society for Spanish and Portuguese Studies Bulletin 11 (October, 1986): 16-18; Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “Carlisms Defense of the Church in Spain, 1933-1936,” Faith and Reason 14 (Winter, 1990): 355-370; Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “The Theory of Spanish Political Traditionalism (1810-1875): Realism and Carlism,” in Identidad y nacionalismo en la España contemporánea: El Carlismo (1833-1975) Jornadas organizadas por la Universidad de Wisconsin-Madison y la Fundación Hernando de Larramendi, ed. S. G. Payne (Madrid: Actas, 1996), 44-54; Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “Antonio Aparisi y Guijarro: A Nineteenth-Century Carlist Apologist for a Sacral Society in Spain,” in Saints, Sovereigns, and Scholars, ed. R.A. Herrera, James Lehrberger, and M.E. Bradford (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 365-376; Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “Carlism: From Reaction to Counterrevolution, 1833-1876,” in Spanish Carlism and Polish Nationalism: The Borderlands of Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz and John Radilowski (Charlottesville, VA: Leopolis Press, 2003): 9-23. Also, see Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “Forces at Work in Today’s Spain,” 311-313; and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “The Future of Catholic Spain,” 14, 30.
94 They were critical of the Franco regime for marginalizing the political influence of the Carlists despite their significant contribution in the Spanish Civil War, and for acquiescing to pressure for religious freedom, and for designating Prince Juan Carlos—from the liberal line of the Bourbon family—as king and chief of state. Wilhelmsen, “Letter from Spain: Forces at Work in Today’s Spain,” 306-313; Wilhelmsen, “The Future of Catholic Spain,” 11-14, 30; and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “Adiós: Francisco Franco—Caudillo de España,” in Citizen of Rome: Reflections from the Life of a Roman Catholic, by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden and Company, 1980), 222-233.
95 Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1958; Reprint, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969), vii; and Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “Carlism: From Reaction to Counterrevolution, 1833-1876,” 9-10.
96 Blinkhorn, Carlism and Crisis in Spain, 6-7.
97 The five wars were the Constitutional War (1821-1823), the War of the Malcontents (1827), the First Carlist War (1833-1840), the Second Carlist War (1847-1849), and the Third Carlist (1872-1876).
98 Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “Carlism: Reaction to Counterrevolution,” 11. Alexandra Wilhelmsen is the daughter of Frederick D. Wilhelmsen.
99 Ibid.
100 The dates of the Second Carlist War, also referred to as the Matiners War, was from 1847-1849 and the Third Carlist War broke out in 1872 and lasted until 1876. The last two Bourbon pretenders in Carlos V’s direct line were Jamie III (1909-1931) and Alfonso Carlos I (1931-1936).
101 Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “Carlism’s Defense of the Church in Spain, 1833-1936,” 357-358; and Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “Carlism: From Reaction to Counterrevolution, 1833-1876,” 13-14.
102 Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “The Carlist Motto, Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey in the Late Nineteenth Century,” 250-253.
103 Jaime III; quoted in Alexandra Wilhelmsen “Carlisms Defense of the Church in Spain, 1833-1936,” 361-362. María Teresa, the wife of Carlos VII, wrote in 1864 that “the truths, certain and infallible, of the Catholic faith form the very solid foundation of our political, civil, and domestic life.” María Teresa; quoted in Alexandra Wilhelmsen “Carlism’s Defense of the Church in Spain,” 361. The nineteenth-century Carlist political writer Antonio Aparasi y Guijarro wrote in the 1870s that “There will be dissolution in every society in which God is denied or ignored and the origin of sovereignty is vested in man.” Antonio Aparasi; quoted in Alexandra Wilhelmsen “Antonio Aparisi Guijarro: A Nineteenth-Century Carlist Apologist for a Sacral Society in Spain,” 371.
104 Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “The Carlist Motto, Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey in the Late Nineteenth Century,” 252.
105 Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “The Carlist Conspiracy of La Rápita and the Theory of Two Legitimacies,” 16-18.
106 Ibid.
107 Carlos VII; quoted in Alexandra Wilhelmsen, “Carlos VII or an Introduction to Carlism,” 32.
108 Blinkhorn notes this inconsistency. Carlism—“a Bourbon cause”—he writes, was “paradoxically wedded to Spain’s pre-Bourbon past.” Martin Blinkhorn, Carlism and Crisis in Spain, 4.
109 Blinkhorn, Carlism and Crisis in Spain, 256.
110 Carr, Modern Spain, 132.
111 Frederick Wilhelmsen, “The Future of Catholic Spain,” 14.
112 Thomaz Da Groomes and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, Triumph 2 no. 10 (November, 1967): 9.
113 Frederick Wilhelmsen, “Forces at Work in Today’s Spain,” 172.
114 Wilhelmsen was member also of the Muthiko Alaiak, which was basque for “Happy Lads.” “The Muthiko, the editors explained, was “a local society dedicated to Navarre, to Spain, and to Carlism.” Da Groomes and Wilhelmsen, Triumph 2 no. 10 (October, 1967): 9.
115 The Battle of Lácar (1875) pitted the revered Bourbon pretender and Carlist, Carlos VII, against the Bourbon king, Alfonso XII. The former was victorious.
116 Lawrence, “Present Imperfect,” Triumph 5 no. 7 (July, 1970): 9. Eventually five men were arrested, including Bozell, at the Triumph-led pro-life demonstration at the GWU Clinic.
117 Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “Hispanidad,” The Wanderer (February 8, 1990): 10.
118 Ibid.
119 Ibid., 10-11.
120 Ibid.
121 Patricia Bozell, Patrick Allitt interview.
122 L. Brent Bozell, “Freedom or Virtue?” National Review 13 (September, 1962): 184.
123 Ibid. For Bozell’s resignation, see Editor, “In This Issue,” National Review 14 (June 18, 1963): 479.
124 Patricia Bozell, Patrick Allitt interview.
125 Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “Hispanidad,” 10.
126 It should be noted, however, that the entire editorial staff would not be united by any concept of Hispaniphilia or adoration of Carlism. Molnar, who was with the magazine until 1970, and Gary Potter, an editor and longtime contributor, were not interested in Spain or Carlism. Molnar favored the French right, and he admired the French Catholic royalist, Bernanos, who was critical of the nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Thomas Molnar, Bernanos: His Political Thought and Prophecy (New York: Sheed and Ward), 100-108; and Thomas Molnar, “Frederick D. Wilhelmsen—R.I.P.,” Chronicles (June, 1997): 45. Potter was never comfortable with Triumph’s attachment to Carlism. “The Spanish idiom—I had problems with that,” he wrote. “I understand Carlism and if I were Spanish I might be a Carlist too. But I remember saying at a heated editorial meeting one day that we weren’t going to shake down the Anglo-Saxon state by chanting “Viva Christo Rey!” Potter, like Molnar, was much more a Francophile than a Hispanophile. Gary Potter, interview by Patrick Allitt, 4 March 1991, interview transcript, in the possession of Patrick Allitt, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Even Michael Lawrence, a longtime editor, believed that there was “a bit too much” admiration of Spain and Carlism in the journal. Michael Lawrence, interview by Patrick Allitt, interview transcript, in the possession of Patrick Allitt, Emory University, Atlanta GA.
Source: ROMAN CATHOLIC CRUSADING IN TEN YEARS OF TRIUMPH, 1966-1967: A HISTORY OF A LAY-DIRECTED, RADICAL CATHOLIC JOURNAL
