Douglas W.

Foard

The Spanish Fichte:

Menéndez y Pelayo

Forty years have now elapsed since the grim-faced soldiers of the
Second Spanish Republic retreated before the Nationalist armies
and crossed the Pyrenees into bitter exile. The demise of the
Republic was no momentary setback for those who aspired to a
democratic Spain. It heralded a generation of the subordination of
the Spanish people to the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who is
conceded even by one of his harshest critics to have been ’unques-
tionably the most powerful single ruler in Spanish history’ .’I
In spite of the singular place occupied by the Franco regime in
the history of modern Spain and the labours of historians to define
it, the nature of ’Franquismo’ remains elusive. Journalists, for ex-
ample, continue to employ the label ’fascist’ in their references to
the dictatorship, although Stanley Payne’s Falange long ago
demonstrated how carefully General Franco had decimated that
element in his ’Movimiento’.
If not fascism, then, what else could have sustained the Caudillo
so long in his domination of a proud nation, except the naked in-
struments of force? A hint of at least a partial answer to that in-
quiry is provided in a scene from the civil war described by the
Spanish historian, Enrique Sanchez Reyes. During the early mon-
ths of the military uprising against the Republic, he reports, Na-
tionalist propaganda officers were charged with rallying civilians to
General Franco’s cause by explaining the ideology which moved the
revolt. For want of any other clear statements of purpose, these of-
ficials read excerpts from a history book, Historia de los
Heterodoxos Espanoles, to inspire the confused and terrified
citizens of remote Spanish pueblos. From memory, the Nationalist

Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills),

Vol. 14 (1979), 83-97.
83-

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84

orators intoned: ’Spain, evangeliser of half the world; Spain, ham-

mer of heretics, light of Trent, Sword of Rome, cradle of Saint Ig-
natius... This is our greatness and our unity; we have no other.&dquo;
The author of these lines, Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo
(1856-1912), had died nearly a quarter of a century before his
words were employed as weapons in the Nationalist arsenal. The
Franco regime, however, seems never to have forgotten this source
of its ideological justification. Its apologists extolled the late
historian as ’the foundation of the national consciousness em-
bodied in the passion of those Spaniards who took part in the 18
July 1936 movement’.3Even before the Second Republic had been
vanquished, Nationalist presses were busy turning out the initial
volumes of the government-directed Obras Completas of
Menendez y Pelayo. The dictator’s first Minister of Education ex-
plained that Don Marcelino’s publications were, ’indispensable
keys for being able to comprehend and profoundly penetrate the
psychology of our people, the national interpretation of their
history and the basic problems of their culture and thought’.’4
As late as 1956 General Franco was demonstrating his esteem for
the author of Los Heterodoxos by participating in services marking
the removal of the historian’s remains to their permanent shrine in
the cathedral of Don Marcelino’s native Santander. He listened ap-
provingly as Jose Maria Peman of the Spanish Academy proclaim-
ed to the dictator: ’Your most illustrious moment was this morning
when you dedicated your sword before the sepulchre of a simple
professor... and said, &dquo;At your command, Maestro&dquo;. This morn-
ing your sword was a ray of light.’5
Sr. Peman’s hyperbole notwithstanding, Menendez y Pelayo was
never a ’simple professor’. His unparalleled academic triumphs
were sponsored by Spain’s conservative elite and punctuated by
stormy public controversy. The eldest son of a provincial
mathematics teacher, Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo performed
such intellectual prodigies as a child in Santander that he was
something of a local celebrity and could choose among Spain’s
finest universities for his higher education. In 1875, he earned his
doctorate in philosophy and literature from the University of
Madrid and a competitive award as that institution’s outstanding
graduate of the year. He was then merely eighteen and had bested
the brilliant Joaquin Costa in oposiciones to gain the prize.
Don Marcelino’s performance in Madrid won for him a con-
siderable grant from the municipal fathers of Santander, enabling

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him to pursue his studies abroad. He had also gained the attention
and friendship of the Marques de Pidal, leader of an ultramontane
political faction later called the Catholic Union. Pidal promoted
Menendez y Pelayo’s scholarly publications and wielded his in-
fluence with the Prime Minister, CAnovas del Castillo, to advance
his young protégé to the forefront of the nation’s academic com-
munity. In 1877 it was the Marques and Prime Minister Canovas
who persuaded a majority of a turbulent session of the Cortes to
reduce the age restriction to twenty-one for those seeking one of the
nation’s highest academic posts the professorship of Spanish
-

literature at the University of Madrid. Menendez y Pelayo had only

recently celebrated that crucial birthday.
The Prime Minister’s favours to Don Marcelino even included an
active interest in securing a favourable committee of academics to
judge the competitors for the post. Menendez y Pelayo faced some
noteworthy opponents, including the future Radical Liberal Prime
Minister, Jose Canalejas. In the end, neither the protests of Spain’ss
liberal press nor the cheers of the spectators for Don Marcelino’s
rivals were sufficient to deny the appointment to Menendez y
Pelayo.
The young professor Was devoted to Spanish nationalism and
hoped to further that cause among his countrymen by retrieving the
nation’s past literary glories from oblivion. In pursuit of this
solitary endeavour, Don Marcelino repeatedly found himself to be
the focus of furious public disputation. In 1881 his extem-
poraneous comments on the poet Calderon produced an outcry in
the press, which demanded his resignation from the university.
Shortly thereafter, the Carlists were condemning his works and ac-
cusing Menendez y Pelayo of conspiring with Masons because he
failed to share their enthusiasm for Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Disheartened with his teaching career, Menendez y Pelayo resigned
from the faculty of the University of Madrid in 1898 to become
Director of Spain’s Biblioteca Nacional, a post which he occupied
until his death in 1912. Not even the catacombs of that great in-
stitution, however, afforded Don Marcelino the sanctuary he crav-
ed. In 1910 the Minister of Public Instruction maligned even his ad-
ministration of the library, charging that Menendez y Pelayo had
notoriously failed to serve the general public and had lavished his
attention on the collection of literary rarities.
Prime Minister Cinovas twice engineered Don Marcelino’s elec-
tion as a delegate to the Cortes, but Menendez y Pelayo rarely at-

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86

tended its sessions or actively pursued a political career. In his first

major publication he had outlined a proposal for the resurrection

of Spain’s literary greatness through a national campaign of educa-
tion and source preservation. Even though CAnovas was an active
member of the ’Society of Spanish Bibliophiles’, Don Marcelino
never lived to see his programme embraced by the government. In-

stead, he felt compelled to dedicate his career to that end. During

his lifetime, Menendez y Pelayo undertook to publish nine major
literary or historical studies of Hispanic writers and his Obras com-
prise some sixty-five volumes. So intense was Don Marcelino’s
dedication to his cause that in his final years he rarely emerged
from his collections of Spain’s literary masterpieces. He resided in
the library of the Spanish Academy of History, worked in the
Biblioteca Nacional, and vacationed in Santander, where his family
had constructed a considerable building to house his private collec-
tion of books and manuscripts.66
Recalling Don Marcelino’s solitary career, Ramiro de Maeztu, a
prominent member of the ’Generation of ’98’, remembered that he
had once criticized Menendez y Pelayo as a ’sad collector of the in-
consequential dead’. Maeztu explained:

When ’98 came and with it the bitterness of defeat at the hands of a people who
had no traditions [the United States], many of us disdained the value of
Menendez y Pelayo’s studies. What good [we asked] are our coats of arms? Of
what value hoary wisdom if a traditionless people can in combat use our wooden
7
ships for targetpractice?7
Eventually, the author of these lines came to regret them and to
join his countrymen in honouring the memory of Don Marcelino.
Spain’s tributes to Menendez y Pelayo began long before his death
in 1912. The Spanish Academy inducted him into their prestigious
membership in 1881 when Don Marcelino was only twenty-four
years old. Two years later he was similarly honoured by the
Academy of History and before the turn of the century had been
elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and the
Academy of Fine Arts as well. The government struck a gold medal
in 1909 to honour his achievements and the Spanish Academy went
so far as to put him forward as a candidate for a Nobel Prize in
literature. The French Republic seconded Spain’s tributes by awar-
ding Don Marcelino the Legion of Honour; England elected him to
honorary membership of the Royal Society of Literature; and in
1905 he was accorded membership of the Hispanic Society of

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 87

America. After his death in 1912 a Society of ’Amigos de

Menendez y Pelayo’ undertook to preserve his place in Spanish
history. Today his works and personal effects are enshrined in San-
tander, housed splendidly in what was once Don Marcelino’s
private library.88
So imposing was Menendez y Pelayo’s presence in the intellectual
life of Spain at the turn of the century that the phrase ’the Spanish
Fichte’ has been repeatedly used by his countrymen to describe his
significance. The comparison between the Spaniard and the
nineteenth-century prophet of strident German nationalism was
first employed not by some Falangist propagandist but by the
distinguished historian, Luis Araquistain. Speaking at the Universi-
ty of Berlin in 1932, Araquistain assured his audience: ’... no other
Spanish writer has equalled Menendez y Pelayo in the resurrection
and renovation of Spanish culture... Without him we Spaniards
would be poorer in our understanding of our own culture.&dquo;
Although Raymond Carr’s Spain recalls Menendez y Pelayo as
’the lay saint of the Falange’, Spanish scholars seem generally
reluctant to concede his memory to any one political faction and
are virtually unanimous in their praise of his intellectual achieve-
ment. Ramon Manendez Pidal, a noteworthy opponent of the
Franco dictatorship, wrote: ’Menendez Pelayo seemed to be able to
turn everything he touched into gold... His immense work remains
like a superb lighthouse whose beacon is a guide for those that
follow his light into tranquil harbours.’¡o Pedro Lain Entralgo,
author of a masterful defence of Menendez y Pelayo’s career, ad-
mits that he is so devoted to his subject that, ’I have tried to
memorize all Menendez Pelayo’s published works.&dquo;’ Similar ex-
pressions of admiration can be found in the writings of such
democratic stalwarts as Americo Castro, Gerardo Diego and
Gregorio Marafion.12
The few English-speaking scholars who have undertaken com-
prehensive studies of Don Marcelino’s career seem to share their
Spanish colleagues’ admiration for his work. Edward Capestany
calls Menendez y Pelayo, ’a universal man of whom the Spanish
ought to be proud’; Manual Olguin concluded that he was ’one of
the most extraordinary scholars of all time’; and William Furlong
proclaimed, ’the name of Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo will be
associated with Spain and Spanish literature as long as they exist,
and he will ever be remembered as the Napoleon of Spanish
science’ .13

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Amidst this torrent of adulation, there is some dissent. Miguel de

Unamuno characteristically rejected the prevailing view: ’What
damage the grandiloquent superficiality of Marcelino Menendez y
Pelayo has caused! [He is] the forger of the white legend.&dquo;4 The
Basque philosopher’s criticism, however, is a discordant note in a
symphony of praise. Guillermo de Torre, a poet living in exile from
the Franco dictatorship, could even register his admiration for ’the
great polygraph’ and concede the Falangist claim upon his
memory. He wrote in 1943:

What little there is of genuine theoretical substance in the current Spamsh regime
-

discounting its alien importations of Nazi-fascism and its imitative gestures -

the programme of restoration so loudly proclaimed by its theorists is nothing but
a consequence of Menendez y Pelayo’s doctrine. 15

In the literature of
a nation whose experience has so often been

punctuated by civil war, this apparent consensus among Spanish

writers on the greatness of Menendez y Pelayo is striking, especially
in view of the Franco dictatorship’s endeavours to legitimize its ac-
tions by evoking his name. This harmony of opinion seems even
more peculiar after examining Menendez y Pelayo’s first major and
most popular publications, La Ciencia Espahvla (1876) and
Historia de los Heterodoxos Espafiples (1880).
La Ciencia Espanpla is a heatedly polemical book. A compila-
tion of Menendez y Pelayo’s articles written in the course of his
public dispute with a liberal academician, the book went through
four editions before Don Marcelino’s death. It bristles with a proud
defence of the Spanish past, refuting his opponent’s argument that
the repressive Spanish state had ’denied scientific liberty... almost
choking off its activity completely in Spain for three centuries’.
Buttressing his arguments with an impressive command of
bibliography, the youthful Menendez y Pelayo replied to the
charges of his rival, Professor Manuel de la Revilla of the Univer-
sity of Madrid, essentially with three counter-arguments: first,
repression and intolerance were not the cause of the decadence of
Spanish science; second, that this decadence was relative and con-
fined to only a few sectors of Spanish thought; and finally, that the
great achievements of the nation’s scientists remain virtually
unknown because of Spain’s fascination with the accomplishments
of foreigners.

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 89

In the course of advancing these propositions, Don Marcelino

felt obliged to apologize for the notorious Inquisition. He wrote:
I sometimes admire the tolerance and leniency of those civil and ecclesiastical
authorities in dealing with certain well-intentioned ideas, which were more or less
suspicious for their materiahsm or subtle pantheism... that Tribunal punished
no one for havmg expressed metaphysical doctrines, whether their own or

others’s, consistent or not with the dominant ideas of the day. One crude pan-
theist [Servetius] did perish in flames, but his torment occurred in Geneva, not
Spain; commanded by John Calvin, not the Tribunal of Faith.

Apparently satisfied that he had adequately expounded this doc-

trine, Menendez y Pelayo then turned to satirizing his opponent’s
argument:

This terrifying name of Inquisition, a bogey-man for infants and a menace for
dolts, is for many the solution for all our problems, a ’deus ex machina’ which
arrives unexpectedly in dangerous situations. Why is there no industry in Spain?
Because of the Inquisition. Why are there bad habits? Because of the Inquisition.
Why are we Spaniards lazy? Because of the Inquisition. Why are there bulls in
Spain? Because of the Inquisition. Why do we take siestas? Because of the In-
quisition.l6
To prove his contention that Spanish science had been only
relatively ’decadent’ in the three previous centuries, Don Marcelino
trotted out the of hundreds of Spanish and Portuguese
names

scholastics, engineers, cartographers, and botanists. Acknowledg-

ing tacitly that no Kepler or Newton appeared in his enumeration,
he retorted:

Revilla seems to believe that the

history of science may be reduced to the
biographies of six, eight prodigious men... forgetting the indefatigable
seven or
labour of those modest cultivators [of science] who opened and widened the road
for the geniuses.

Furthermore, he argued, Spain had produced scientists of the first

order, but they were ignored: ’That our histories of science do not
mention them, or hardly note their existence, is not strange. These
books are for the most part written by foreign authors.’ The name
of Luis Vives, he asserted, should rank along with those of
Descartes, Kant and Hegel. The reason Vives has been overlooked
’is because of a great historical injustice similar to that which has
caused Columbus’s hemisphere still to bear the name of Amerigo
Vespucci’.&dquo;

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Whatever the specific merits of Menendez y Pelayo’s arguments,

the lines quoted above from La Ciencia Espanola clarify
Unamurro’s phrase, ’the white legend’. In seeking to refute those
who portrayed Spanish history as a continuous tale of intolerance
and repression (’the black legend’), Menendez y Pelayo was
creating a counter-image of a hapless Spain, victimized by envious
foreigners and their agents within the nation. The outlines of this
interpretation of the Spanish experience acquired even sharper
definition in Menendez y Pelayo’s next sally into his nation’s past,
La Historia de los Heterodoxos Espanoles. He had already begun
work on this multi-volume essay even before his La Ciencia
Espanvla had come off the presses to spread his fame throughout
his native land.
Los Heterodoxos is more than a catalogue of all the heresies that
have been preached in Spain during the Christian era. It is also an
attempt to define the essence of this nation in terms of Catholic or-
thodoxy. ’The Spanish genius’, he proclaims in the introduction, ’is
eminently Catholic; heterodoxy among us is an accidental and pass-
ing gust of wind’.&dquo; ’Christianity,’ he wrote, ’gave Spain
unity... through it we became a nation and a great nation, instead
of a crowd of assorted peoples.’ The eighteenth century, however,
had witnessed a shattering of his confessional solidarity and for this
reason Spain had fallen upon evil times. His portrayal of contem-
porary Spanish life could hardly have been more critical:

Everything wicked, everything anarchic, everything that is wild in our character

is sanctioned and seems to grow stronger with each day. Every element of in-
tellectual force languishes in sterile isolation or serves only wickedness. To us
there remains neither indigenous science, national politics, or even, saddest of
19
all, our own art and literature.

Authentic Spain, ’the masses of our people’, were innocent of

having reduced the nation to such a state. The country had been
victimized, so runs the burden of his analysis, by northern ’bar-
barians’, alien dynasts, and intellectual turncoats who admired
everything foreign.
Though Spain had known frequent alien invasions, Menendez y
Pelayo saved his pithiest lines for those who had entered the coun-
try from the North. First came the Visigothic hordes, ’who having
previously embraced Arianism, joined to their natural blood-
thirstiness the fanaticism of this sect’. These barbarians had left
Spain ’not one sculpture, not one book, not even a memory’

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 91

because ’the individualism or excessive personalism of the Nor-

thern races... prevents them from comprehending the great
Hellenic and Latin ideas of Fatherland and City’. Thus,
treacherously, the Visigoths allowed the Moors to overrun their
kingdom.&dquo;
Although he did not spare his readers detailed accounts of
Muslim cruelties to Spanish Christians, Menendez y Pelayo’s ver-
sion of the Reconquest is not wholly laudatory. The Cluniac monks
and foreign crusaders brought in their train ’nothing worthwhile
for Spanish civilization’. Worse, their successful repression of the
historic Isidoran rite (1091) still caused him ’regret and anger’. In
spite of this alien intrusion, he noted, ’the irresistible Catholic sen-
timent of the fHispanicjrace suppressed all instincts of wounded na-
tional pride... Schismatic thoughts occurred to no one’. 21
Don Marcelino conceded that the century preceding the Refor-
mation had witnessed ’a recrudescence of barbarity, something
akin to a backward step in the course of civilization’, but he could
not excuse Luther. Both he and Erasmus were, according to
Menendez y Pelayo, ’barbarians lacking the true sense of classic
beauty and demonstrating a wicked and envious will against the
greatness of the South [of Europel. This extraordinary thesis of the
Reformation as yet another invasion of barbarians is not discreetly
tucked away in Los Heterodoxos, but amplified:

The rapid propagation of Protestantism must be attributed, among other causes,

to the inveterate hatred of Northern peoples against Italy, to this enmity of races,
which explains a great part of the history of Europe since the invasion of the bar-
barians... until the Reformation. The blood of Armenius, who destroyed the
legions of Varo, forever runs in the Germans. In them there is a tendency toward
divisiveness, which always collides with Roman and Catholic unity. For this
reason the Southern peoples energetically rejected and reject the Reformation.22

In often beautiful prose, Don Marcelino devoted much of the cen-

tral portion of this study to the suppression of the Protestant heresy
in Spain, offering his readers some glorious passages of tribute to
Philip II, the Inquisition and Saint Ignatius. ’Tolerance,’ he an-
nounced at one point, ’is the sickness of epochs of scepticism.’
Finally, however, he was obliged to discuss the War of Spanish
Succession and its consequences. ’It is not a pleasant task for one
who has Spanish blood in his veins to write of our nation stripped
of its arms, its treasures, its grandeur (to become] a humble satellite
of France’.

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Menendez y Pelayo was frequently favoured by the reigning

Bourbon monarchs of his day, but their patronage did not vitiate
his hostility toward theik ancestors of the previous century. Bour-
bon suppression of the Jesuits, for example, he terms an ’iniquity
which still cries out to heaven’. Its consequence, he alleged, had
been to make of Spain ’the most backward nation in Europe in all
science and serious study’.23
In his account of the nineteenth-century, it is not the Napoleonic
invasion of Spain that captures Don Marcelino’s attention so much
as a later alien onslaught German Idealist philosophy. Many of
-

its proponents were his colleagues at the University of Madrid, but

that fact did not lessen his highly-personal critiques of their works;
rather, he applauded the government’s 1867 purge of this ’focal
point of heterodox and noxious education’.24
The erudition of the author of Los Heterodoxos is undeniable,
even incredible. The product of all that learning, nevertheless, is a
chauvinistic rendering of Spanish history, tinged with xenophobia
noteworthy even by standards of the past century. Spain had not
erred, according to Menendez y Pelayo’s ’White Legend’. The rest
of Europe was at fault either for having opposed Spanish policy or
for abandoning Spain to its enemies. In La Ciencia, for example,
Don Marcelino told his readers that Spain had struggled gloriously
against:

... the twisted spirit of the age and half of Europe united in defence of the
Reformation. In the end, we were defeated because we were alone. But we had
performed well and that is enough since great enterprises in history are not judg-
ed merely by their success... We shed our blood for religion, for culture, for our
nation. We did not, nor should we now, apologize for that fact. 25

Vanquished in war, the nation was helpless to prevent the loss of

its American empire to an international Masonic conspiracy, which
Menendez y Pelayo repeatedly credits for the success of the in-
dependence movement in Spain’s former colonies.26 But neither
military defeat nor the demise of Spain’s empire were sufficient
causes to explain the decadence which Menendez y Pelayo noted in

nearly every aspect of the nation’s culture. An obsession, he believ-

ed, with alien values and institutions afflicted Spain’s intellectual
elite. Their passion for voguish French and German ideas had pro-
duced a sterility in Spanish thought and letters, which permeated
the society. With a fervour unsurpassed in the literature of cultural

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 93

nationalism, Menendez y Pelayo lashed out at his learned contem-

poraries.
Today we stumble along blindly...anxiously chasing after the spectre of every
new doctnne only to find ourselves ndiculed and obliged to begin our chase all
over again. We are always behind and always beaten and mortified by the

knowledge of our backwardness. We shall never be redeemed by hasty importa-

tions, by ill-made remnants [of ideas] already discarded in other places. Much
less shall we be saved by denying our race and heaping upon the honoured
memory of our ancestors curses which we should save for our own stupidity,
lowliness and ignorance.

The traditional society, which Menendez y Pelayo contrasted to

that of his own day, had produced a galaxy of original and pro-
vocative scholars whose works, he maintained, had been celebrated
throughout Europe. Luis Vives, Fox Morcillo and Father Sudrez
had lived in the era of the Inquisition. Don Marcelino championed
them all. Since he believed that the essence of Splanish nationality
was derived from confessional uniformity, Menendez y Pelayo

deprecated tolerance and even mocked civil liberty by quoting

Renan.

True and original ideas ask no one’s permission to be born and care little whether
they gain this or that legal right. Christianity did not need freedom of the press
or the right to free assembly in order to conquer the world.28

Although an apologist for Philip 11’s authoritarian state,

Menendez y Pelayo cannot be regarded as an advocate of any
totalitarian effort to retrieve Spain’s lost glories. The state’s role in
society, he believed, should not be allowed to trespass upon the
church’s traditional functions. For example, in a public letter of
1910, he denounced a proposed system of state-operated schools
as, ’not only a horrible sacrilege but a barbarous step backwards in
the working of civilization’.29 Subsequently, it would be precisely
such limitations on the authority of the Franco dictatorship, which
would induce scholars such as Max Gallo to conclude that: ’Fran-
coism was not a Fascist regime anxious to secure a mass basis (par-
ticularly among the young), but an extreme form of traditional
Spanish reaction which, owing to the circumstances of the time,
borrowed certain features of Fascism. ’30 If, as Gallo asserts, the
Franco dictatorship was essentially a traditionalist, authoritarian
state, then the parallel between Menendez y Pelayo’s aspirations
for Spain and the reality of Franquismo is patent.

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94

How then, could such cosmopolitan writers as Manendez Pidal,

Lain Entralgo, and Luis Araquistain applaud the author of La
Ciencia and Los Heterodoxos along with the apologists for
Franco’s Spain? Was it not obvious to them that the Falangists
were correct in discovering in Menendez y Pelayo the ideological
basis of the dictatorship which these writers so ardently opposed?
In works published at different times over two decades, each of
these critics of the dictatorship would deny the regime’s claim to
Menendez y Pelayo’s memory by maintaining that there had in fact
been two distinct epochs in the historian’s career: the first produced
La Ciencia and Los Heterodoxos; the second, covering the last
three decades of his life, witnessed a considerable broadening and
moderation of his views. Manendez Pidal even assured his readers
that Don Marcelino’s entire career had been characterized by ’a
forever-insatiable quest for rectification’.&dquo; Citing the works of
Menendez y Pelayo’s maturity such as Historia de las Ideas
Esteticas en Espafiq, Antologia de Poetas Líricos Castellanos, and
Obras de Lope de Vega, these writers claim to have encountered a
tolerant and cosmopolitan Don Marcelino.
Not surprisingly, the champions of Franquismo deny this bifur-
cation and stoutly insist on ’the fundamental continuity of the
works of Menendez y Pelayo’ .32 They are able to cite, for example,
the following speech delivered by Don Marcelino at late as 1910,
replete with the imagery of the ’White Legend’:

Today we are witnessing the slow suicide of a nation which, deceived a thousand
times by garrulous sophists, impoverished, wasted and desolate, employs in its
self-destruction the meagre energies it has retained. [Spain] chases after the vain
deceptions of a false and artificial culture instead of cultivating its own spirit,
which alone may ennoble and redeem a race and a people. [It is] permitting a ter-
rifying liquidation of its past, always ridiculing the memory of its ancestors, flee-
ing from any contact with their thoughts, denying whatever elements of their
history once made them great, throwing its artistic heritage to the four winds and
stupidly watching the destruction of the only Spain the world knows, the only
Spain whose recollection is worthy enough to lessen our agony.33
The issue of continuity in Don Marcelino’s thought proved to be
highly debatable and has been the subject of a considerable
literature in Spain. Pedro Sainz Rodriguez, previously cited as the
Franco regime’s first Minister of Education, recently made an in-
teresting comment on this dispute. Speaking of his decision to rush

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 95

Menendez y Pelayo’s Obras to press in the midst of the Civil War,

he confessed:

Menendez y Pelayo has been the object of [political] capture and I am responsi-
ble for it... When I was Minister... I began to fear that this national movement,
which had produced nothing less than civil war, would (when it began to acquire
an intellectual structure) start imitating foreign models instead of seeking its na-
tional roots, finding them in a nationalist philosophy that was neither isolationist
nor anti-European. For this reason I ordered the printing of the national edition

[of Menendez y Pelayo’s Obras]. 34

An outstanding authority on Don Marcelino in his own right,
Sainz Rodriguez’s comments provide a remarkable insight into the
nature and origins of Franquismo. Lacking a coherent ideological
basis to rally mass support for a prolonged civil war, the regime
consciously selected the works of Menendez y Pelayo as the inspira-
tion for its vision of Spain. As Sainz discloses, there were several
’foreign models’ upon which the Burgos government could have
patterned itself, particularly the fascism which Mussolini urged
upon his Spanish allies. Although Sainz had been among the first to
seek Mussolini’s aid in overthrowing the Republic,35 he was a con-
vinced Spanish monarchist who had derived his ’moral con-
sciousness and patriotic ideal’ from his ’maestro’, Menendez y
Pelayo.36 An associate of Ernesto Gimenez Caballero in the
publication of the Gaceta Literaria during the 1920s, Sainz had
abandoned the journal when Don Ernesto publicly proclaimed his
hopes for a fascist Spain. Thereafter, Sainz Rodriguez had joined a
group of influential Alfonsine monarchists in publishing Accion
Espanola. In its inaugural edition, the journal had explained that
its purpose was to propagate the ’universal and positive values’ of
Spanish tradition as enunciated by Menendez y Pelayo.
Throughout the Republican period, Acción Espanola affirmed its
devotion to Don Marcelino’s ideals and sought to commemorate
and preserve his works. In 1937, General Franco would recall that
he had not only been a faithful subscriber to the journal but regard-
ed those who had inspired Acción Espanola as the harbingers of his
own Movimiento Nacional.3’
In the ideological confusion of the first months of the uprising
against the Republic, Sainz confesses that he sought to convert Ac-
ci6n Espanola’s reverence for Don Marcelino into a national cult.
The elaborate tributes paid by Franco’s Spain to the memory of
Menendez y Pelayo would indicate that he was eminently successful

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96

in this undertaking. It would be the author of Los Heterodoxos

that the regime lionized and not the mature, erudite Don Marcelino
who had corresponded with Benedetto Croce and penned
monumental works of literary criticism. Sainz accepts responsibili-
ty for this politicization of the memory of Menendez y Pelayo. He
might also accept some credit for having offered Franquismo an
ideological alternative to fascism.

NOTES

1. Gabriel Jackson, ’The Franco Era in Historical Perspective’ in The Centen-

nial Review (Spring 1976), 104.
2. Enrique Sánchez Reyes, Biografia Critica y Documental de Marcelino
Menéndez Pelayo (Santander 1974), 402-03.
3. Rafael Calvo Serer, Teoria de la Restauración (Madrid 1952), 191.
4. Pedro Sáinz Rodriguez (ed.), Menéndez Pelayo y la Educación Nacional
(Santander 1938), 4.
5. ’El Caudillo preside en Santander el Homenaje Nacional a Menéndez
Pelayo’, in Alerta (28 August 1956).
6. Sánchez Reyes, passim. Two earlier but equally uncritical biographies are:
Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (Madrid 1912); Miguel
Artigas, Menéndez y Pelayo (Santander 1927).
7. Ramiro de Maeztu, ’Hacia la Realización de su Espiritu’, in Estudios sobre
Menéndez Pelayo (Madrid 1956).
8. Sánchez Reyes, op. cit., 292-302.
9. Luis Araquistain, ’Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo y la Cultura Alemana’, in
Estudios, 68.
10. Ramon Manendez Pidal, ’Menéndez y Pelayo’, in Centenario del Nacimiento
de Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (Madrid 1956), 68.
11. Pedro Lain Entralgo, Menéndez Pelayo (Buenos Aires 1952), 14.
12. Americao Castro, ’Homenaje a Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo’, in
Boletin de la Academia Argentina de Letras (1937), 455-61; Gerardo Diego,
’Menéndez y Pelayo y la Historia de la Poesia Española, and Gregorio Maranon,
’Menéndez y Pelayo y Espana’, in Estudios, 171-96, 279-301.
13. Edward Capestany, ’La psicologia intelectual de Menéndez y Pelayo’, in
Boletin de la Biblioteca de Menéndez y Pelayo (1956), 71; Manuel Olguin, Marcelino
Menéndez y Pelayo’s Theory of Art, Aesthetics and Criticism (Berkeley 1950), iii;
and William Furlong, ’Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo’, in American Catholic
Quarterly Review (1913), 151.
14. Guillermo de Torre, Menéndez y Pelayo y Las Dos Españas (Buenos Aires
1943), 5.
15. Ibid., 39.
16. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, La Ciencia Española (Madrid 1876), XIII,
26-27, 88-89.

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17. Ibid., 85-86, 176, 202.

18. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles
(Madrid 1880), Vol I, 29.
19. Ibid., Vol. III, 833-35.
20. Ibid., Vol. I, 166, 215.
21. Ibid., Vol. I, 365-74.
22. Ibid., Vol. I, 488; Vol. II, 12-13.
23. Ibid., Vol. II, 689; Vol. III, 27, 146-47.
24. Ibid., Vol. III, 715-46.
25. Menéndez y Pelayo, La Ciencia, 333, 341.
26. Menéndez y Pelayo, Los Heterodoxos, Vol. III, 537-41. The theme of an anti-
Spanish conspiracy directed internationally by the Masonic Order was one of the
favourites of the Franco propaganda ministry. See: José Antonio Ferrer Benimeli,
’Franco y sus diablos: Los Masones’, in Historia 16 (Julio 1977).
27. As quoted in: Pedro Sáinz Rodriguez, Evolución de las ideas sobre la
decadencia Española (Madrid 1962), 55-56.
28. Ibid., 559.
29. Enrique Sánchez Reyes (ed.), Obras Completas de Marcelino Menéndez y
Pelayo: Varias, Vol. III (Santander 1958).
30. Max Gallo, Spam under Franco (Jean Stewart, trans.) (New York 1974), 132.
31. Manendez Pidal, op. cit., 63; also, Lain, op. cit., 125-42; Araquistain, op.
cit., 263-70.
32. José Gascon y Marin, ’Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo’, in Centenario, 22.
33. Miguel Siguán, ’Cataluña en la Vida de Menéndez y Pelayo’, in Boletin de la
Biblioteca de Menéndez y Pelayo (Enero-Marzo 1949), 47-48.
34. Pedro Sáinz Rodriguez, Menéndez Pelayo, Ese Desconocido (Madrid 1975),
9-10.
35. John F. Coverdale, Italian Intervention in the Spanish Civil War (Princeton
1975), 73.
36. Sáinz Rodriguez, Evolución, 533.
37. Vicente Marrero, La Guerra Española y el Trust de Cerebras (Madrid 1963),
244-45; also, Paul Preston, ’Alfonsist Monarchism and the Coming of the Spanish
Civil War’, in The Journal of Contemporary History (July-October 1972).

Douglas W. Foard
is Professor of History and Chairman of
the Social Science Division at Ferrum Col-
lege, Ferrum, Virginia. He is currently
writing a book on Spain’s ’White
Legend’ .

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