War, Judgment, and Memory in the Basque Borderlands, 1914-1945

Sandra Ott

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780874177428
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

During the first half of the twentieth century, the French Basque province of Xiberoa was a place of refuge, conflict, and foreign occupation. With the liberation of France in 1944, many Xiberoans faced new conflicts arising from legal and civic judgments made during Vichy and German occupation. War, Judgment, and Memory in the Basque Borderlands traces the roots of their divided memories of the era to local and official interpretations of judgment, behavior, and justice during those troubled times.In order to understand how the Great War affected the Xiberoan Basques' perceptions of themselves, Ott contrasts the experiences of people in four different communities located within a fifteen-mile radius. The author also examines how the disruption during the interwar years affected intracommunity relations during the Occupation, the Liberation, and its aftermath. This narrative reveals the diverse ways in which Basques responded to civil war, world war, and displacement, and to one another.

1: Insiders, Outsiders, and Trans-Pyrenean Relations

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Basques were by no means unique among French citizens in their distrust of strangers and the caution with which they “treated not only the unfamiliar, but everyone who was not part of their community” (M. Weber 1976: 49). Like the people of many other regions in France, the Basques distinguished insiders (natives) from outsiders (strangers) in a variety of ways: in spatial and linguistic terms, in social and symbolic acts, in their customary laws and trans-Pyrenean treaties, and in forms of popular culture that clearly distinguished between “good” people (natives) and “bad” people (foreign charlatans and enemy-outsiders). When war and foreign occupation strike at the heart of what people cherish most in life, they force people to focus on essential matters and alter the ways in which they view themselves and others. How did Xiberoans define themselves and the Other during the first decades of the twentieth century? What perceptions, actions, and appreciations characterized their relations with other borderland citizens of France and Spain during the Great War and interwar years?

No single, homogeneous moral community existed in Xiberoa, owing to long-standing traditions of trans-Pyrenean migration, immigration, and human displacement brought about by civil wars and world wars. Although Xiberoa was relatively isolated geographically, even its most secluded inhabitants had contacts with the world around them, fleetingly in the case of itinerant populations, and continuously in the case of neighboring Pyreneans in whose habitus Xiberoans saw both difference and similarity. A substantial number of Spanish and southern Basque neighbors settled in Xiberoa during the first decades of the twentieth century, and the process by means of which they tried to become insiders forms an important part of Xiberoan contemporary history, especially in relation to the Resistance.

The notion of the moral community developed in this book draws primarily upon departmental archives, fieldwork, and studies of some sixteenth-century Basque customs and norms that still had relevance in the 1940s (Bidart 1977; Desplats 1982; Heiberg 1989; Lauburu 1998). The moral community contains components of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a system of durable, transposable tendencies that integrate past experiences and function as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions (Bourdieu 1977: 82–83). A habitus is a lived environment consisting of practices, rules, inherited expectations, norms, and sanctions imposed by both the law and neighborhood pressures (Thompson 1991: 102).¹ One key component of habitus is central to the notion of the moral community: habitus as social space, as a shared sense of one’s own (and others’) place and role in the lived environment (Hillier and Rooksby 2002: 3, 5).

Xiberoans had a strong sense of attachment to their place of origin, a specific sociophysical space (xokhoa, “the space where one is”) that included not simply their dwellings and other property, but all the communal land, flora, and fauna that came within the geographical-administrative boundaries of their community.² Xiberoans defined their personhood through the house (etxea), the neighborhood (aizoa) and the community in which they were born (herria). Xiberoans shared a habitus, a common culture, and certain customary rights, values and expectations that guided their behavior and shaped their perceptions of what constituted right and wrong in human actions and desires. As happened elsewhere in the Basque Country, membership in a Xiberoan moral community required compliance with certain moral codes, values, and behavioral norms (Heiberg 1989: 146–47). Membership also required validation by public opinion, which served as a primary arbitrator and protector of the Xiberoan house and local norms, values, and morality in all spheres.

Basque-speaking Xiberoans made a fundamental distinction between two categories of people: those who belonged to a particular house (who were etxeko, literally “of the house”) and those who were strangers (arrotzak) to it. An arrotz was someone whose practices and behavior seemed strange and socially unacceptable, whose culture and upbringing were contrary to those of a Xiberoan Basque (Peillen 1997: 453).³ Strangers were perceived as auher (which denotes both “useless” and “lazy”) and as a potential source of danger and harm to the two most powerful institutions in Xiberoan society: the house and the community of inhabitants. Xiberoans who belonged to a community by birth were also classified as “here people” (hebenkuak), an inclusive social category of insiders native to a particular village, commune, or town. A native Xiberoan who emigrated permanently to another place relinquished entitlement to the category of “here people,” which required residency in the community or, in the case of military conscription, seasonal migratory labor or emigration, a widely accepted intention to return permanently to it. Xiberoans classified Basques who resided in a Xiberoan community but came from elsewhere in the province as herriko (“of the community”) and as kanpotarrak (“people who come from the outside”). Such residents had civic rights and duties, but they could never become “here people” in a community that was not their birthplace.

Xiberoan Basques tended to regard their culture as distinct from those of adjacent borderland communities in France and Spain. In the first decades of the twentieth century, they had a reputation for ethnocentricity among people from neighboring pays on both sides of the Pyrenees. Basque-speaking Xiberoans contended that their dialect (üska) was more pure than the dialects spoken by all other Basques (classified as Manex, the Basque word for “Jean,” which also denotes a particular race of black-faced sheep). French Basques from the province of Behe Nafarroa, west of Xiberoa, and the Béarnais, to the north and east, tended to regard Xiberoans as culturally arrogant; Xiberoans, in turn, disdained intermarriage with both groups. One Xiberoan proverb captures their ethnic prejudice against Behe Nafarroan Basques: “Only evil winds and evil wives come from Manex territory” (Manexetik eztela aize tzar eta emazte tzar baizik jiten). Xiberoans often branded Occitans and Gascons as braggarts and nicknamed them “crocodiles” owing to their “big mouths and little feet” (aho handiak eta aztaparra txipiak) (Peillen 1997: 455). In the face of opposition or criticism from the Béarnais and Gascons, however, Xiberoans and Behe Nafarroans united as culturally proud, mutually supportive Basques, especially when their non-Basque neighbors mocked the Basques’ lack of fluency in the French language. Mutual support and camaraderie among Xiberoans and other northern Basques played a particularly important role during the First World War, a major turning point in Basques’ perceptions of themselves in relation to the French state and their understanding of non-Basque French citizens.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, lowland Xiberoans often regarded people of Spanish origin and descent (Espaiñulak) as their racial and ethnic inferiors and as political troublemakers. In Lower Xiberoa, where the largest concentration of Espaiñulak lived, indigenous Basques commonly referred to them as “evil Spaniards” (tzar Espaiñulak) and as “Reds” or “red craws” (Gorriak or papogorriak, les rouge-gorges in French).⁴ Although many of the Spanish workers and day laborers who settled in the industrial town of Maule were socialists and communists in the interwar years, northern Basques often applied the epithet “Red” without regard for the political ideology embraced by the Spaniards in their midst. Relations between Upper Xiberoans and their borderland neighbors in Nafarroa were, by contrast, rarely tinged with racial or ethnic prejudice. Borderland Xiberoans and the Nafarroans of the Erronkari (Roncal) Valley recognized similarities in their cultures, even as they constantly reaffirmed their separate identities and the customary rights attached to the adjacent spaces in which they lived.

In many parts of France, rural people had a long-standing dislike and fear of the laws and law enforcers external to their moral communities. Among the Basques, the concept of justice separated outsiders (police inspectors, gendarmes, and magistrates, among others, who came from elsewhere) from insiders, those who belonged to the pays, to local territory and local, familiar spaces: to the province of Xiberoa, to a particular valley, parish, or community. For the Basques, justice derived from what was good and morally right and was inextricably linked to Basque customary law as a protector and guarantor of the two primordial Basque (and Pyrenean) institutions: the house and the community. Among Xiberoan Basques, where “every community has its law, every house has its custom” (Herriak beren legea, etxeak beren hastüra), a community’s desire to manage its own affairs and system of justice dates back to at least the sixteenth century, when the customary laws of the pays were first codified.

In Xiberoa the common good of the village or valley community took precedence over the interests of any individual, and citizens had a collective obligation to defend the community from both external and internal harm. In order to do so, people exercised a long-standing civic right to make moral judgments about their fellow citizens (insiders and outsiders) and, in certain contexts, to address wrongdoing that threatened to disrupt local society. The roots of legitimate, community-based judgment lay in Xiberoan customary law. Codified on the instructions of Francis I in 1520, this set of laws (la Coutume de la Soule) guaranteed the liberty of all individuals born or permanently resident in Xiberoa and granted them the rights to bear arms in self-defense, to hunt, to fish, to pasture their livestock, and to construct and use their own mills (Cordier 1859; Grosclaude 1993). A substantial part of the Coutume concerned Xiberoans’ jural rights and obligations in relation to rules of succession and inheritance; matrimonial and family matters; free enjoyment (libre jouissance); and free passage (libre passage) in the mountain pastures, the right to use the herding huts there, and the right of carnal, which entitled a shepherding syndicate to confiscate outsiders’ livestock that strayed into Xiberoan territory (Lefebvre 1933: 190; Nussy Saint-Saëns 1955: 66, 90). The Coutume also established legal frameworks for the local administration of justice in both civil and criminal law, granting ordinary citizens the right to vote on matters considered by the Xiberoan general assembly (the Silviet), a democratic institution through which Xiberoans administered their own affairs (Grosclaude 1993; Larrieu 1899: 466; Nussy Saint-Saëns 1955: 99).

The notion of a moral community appears in eighteenth-century judicial and notarial records for territory now within the department of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques and including Xiberoa (Desplats 1982: 59).⁵ During the eighteenth century, a Xiberoan community had a right to intervene in the private lives of citizens and any resident outsiders who broke its moral codes. Citizens mediated relations between the moral community and the official judiciary (jurats and courts) responsible for administering legal justice. If villagers suspected an illegitimate pregnancy, they called upon jurats (insiders to the moral community) to confront the young woman about her alleged moral transgression and to ascertain the identity of the genitor. Such visitations also addressed accusations of adultery, concubinage, and prostitution and served as community-based constraints against improper social and sexual behavior. In the eighteenth century, illegitimate births gave rise to greater community-based concern than adultery, for an external judiciary dictated that a Xiberoan community had a moral responsibility to feed unwed mothers too poor to support themselves and their illegitimate offspring. Citizens were particularly disgruntled when such unwed mothers were outsiders to the community (arrotzak, non-Xiberoans, or kanpotarrak, women from elsewhere in Xiberoa).⁶

Until the French Revolution, every Xiberoan parish had a guardian (sainho), a hereditary position attached to a particular house. The guardian monitored the actions of his fellow citizens, organized parish assemblies, and acted as the local bailiff. According to the Coutume, he did not, however, have the power to administer justice as a judge (Grosclaude 1993: 14–15). Unwritten moral laws placed communal constraints upon citizens, whose private lives came under the scrutiny of the guardian. When public opinion found an individual guilty of immoral behavior, a citizen could legitimately denounce the wrongdoer to the community, for in the Basque Country and neighboring Béarn, the eighteenth-century charters of some valleys condoned and even institutionalized denunciation as a means of social control (Bidart 1977: 55–56). By reporting infractions against written and unwritten laws to the authorities, a citizen fulfilled his civic duty to the moral community.⁷ As intermediaries between community and courts, the guardian could call upon the official judiciary to caution or penalize wrongdoers (Desplats 1982: 59), but according to Xiberoan custom, the community itself had a right to do so as well, in spite of opposition from the legal authorities.

The eighteenth century brought the decline of traditional Xiberoan institutions such as the Silviet (Régnier 1991: 245). In 1790 Xiberoa came under the jurisdiction of the newly created department of the Basses-Pyrénées, which included the Basque provinces of Lapurdi, Behe Nafarroa, Xiberoa, as well as Béarn. The department was further divided into districts (arrondissements), cantons, and communes, each of which corresponded to a village or a valley community of several villages (Gomez-Ibáñez 1975: 59–60). Following the tradition of the medieval Pyrenean valley community, Xiberoan communes were jural entities that could own and administer property. Although the state had in theory suppressed customary law, Xiberoans continued to regard the Coutume as their legal charter, particularly in relation to inheritance practices and communal resources such as the high mountain pastures along the Franco-Spanish border. In an attempt to reconstitute the province of Xiberoa as a corporate sociospatial entity and to regulate the exploitation of natural resources, the departmental prefect created the Syndicate of the pays of Xiberoa in 1836 (Nussy Saint-Saëns 1955: 154). The citizens of two Xiberoan borderland communes (including Urdos) refused to join the Syndicate, which, they argued, contravened the rights and privileges established in Xiberoan customary law. The two communes thus retained ownership of and controlled access to the physical space in which they lived and exploited for their livelihood.

Most of the democratic institutions through which Xiberoans had long administered their own affairs had ceased to exist by the nineteenth century, but with the connivance of local notaries, most citizens still protected the integrity of the house by practicing impartible inheritance, in accordance with Xiberoan customary law but deviating from standard republican practice, which required the equal division of property among all offspring. In Upper Xiberoa, households also continued to exercise four-hundred-year-old pastoral rights granted by customary law (Nussy Saint-Saëns 1955: 89; Ott 1993b: 131–50). These rights were particularly important to borderland communes such as Urdos, not only because their economy revolved around sheep and cheese making; borderland Basques also had a particularly acute sense of attachment to the mountains (F. and M. Eyheralt 2000: pers. comm.). These factors played a major role in shaping local attitudes toward the Germans who occupied the frontier zone from early December 1942 until August 1944. Borderland Xiberoans, in particular, deeply resented the Germans’ presence on territory that was not simply a physical space, but also an inextricable part of their personhood and spirituality and of their community’s identity. That close attachment to the mountains also explains, in part, the tensions that arose between borderland Basques when their livestock strayed across the Franco-Spanish frontier. If the territorial boundaries of Pyrenean Basque communities were mutually respected, trans-Pyrenean relations were characterized by cooperation, mutual aid, and complicity when authorities representing the French and Spanish states confronted borderland Basques.

Flanking the oldest and arguably most stable political boundary in Europe, Xiberoa has long been closely linked to Nafarroa and Aragón, its southern neighbors in Spain, through traditions of trans-Pyrenean socioeconomic exchange and cooperation (Sahlins 1989: 1). Military conscription, political oppression and persecution, opportunities in trade and commerce, and trans-Pyrenean kinship ties have all, at various stages in contemporary Xiberoan history, contributed to a constant two-directional movement of people, goods, and information across that border, which Basques on both sides of the Pyrenees have used to their advantage for centuries (Bray 2004; Douglass 1975; Sahlins 1989). Reaching elevations of more than six thousand feet along the Xiberoan-Navarrese frontier, the Pyrenees have long served as a channel of two-directional communication.

Local people, rather than diplomats, established the boundaries that eventually separated the nation-states of France and Spain (Lafourcade 1998: 340–41). From as early as 1171, but mainly from the fourteenth century, valley communities along what was to become the international boundary drew up pastoral treaties (faceries or traités de lies et passeries) that fixed and marked out the precise limits of communal pasturage on both sides of the Pyrenees.⁸ The conventions regulated the use of water and wood as well as the passage of livestock and established zones of compascuity where livestock from either side of the mountains could graze together (Cavaillès 1986: 11–13; Gomez-Ibáñez 1975: 25, 45). Such valley communities enjoyed a large measure of autonomy as juridical, economic, and relatively isolated geographical entities. Their treaties sought to establish peaceful trans-Pyrenean relations and imposed sanctions upon those who threatened the well-being of people or their property. In order to enforce such sanctions, neighboring valleys appointed one or two local agents to prevent borderland conflict and to oversee the space about which most intervalley arguments arose: pasturage, livestock, and hunting rights.

The most celebrated of all the Pyrenean treaties, drawn up in 1375, obliged the valley of Baretous in Béarn (along the northern and eastern borders of Xiberoa) to pay annual tribute to the Navarrese valley of Erronkari (Roncal). On July 13 the seven mayors of Erronkari’s valley communities met the seven mayors and notary from Baretous at the Rock of St. Martin on the border between Béarn, Nafarroa, and Xiberoa. In an elaborate ceremony, the Béarnais notary swore on a cross that the people of Baretous would uphold their pact with the people of Erronkari and thus ensure peaceful relations between the two Pyrenean valleys. The Baretous mayors presented their Erronkari counterparts with three heifers and then invited the people of Baretous and Erronkari to eat together (Cavaillès 1986: 42–43). Two other treaties linked the Xiberoan borderland communities of Larraiña and Urdos to the Navarrese valleys of Zaraitzu and Erronkari respectively (Gomez-Ibáñez 1975: 46). During the wars of succession in Spain, borderland valleys along the Pyrenees continued to communicate with each other, engage in economic exchange, and protect each other’s interests against those of their sovereigns (Lafourcade 1998: 343).

Drawn up in 1659, the Treaty of the Pyrenees identified that mountain range as the official division between France and Spain and incorporated many trans-Pyrenean treaties (faceries) into the international agreement. In 1856 the Treaty of Bayonne officially recognized the faceries, but only two treaties retained all of their original features: the treaty between the northern Basque pays de Cize and the southern Basque valley of Aezcoa, and the treaty between the Béarnais valley of Baretous and Erronkari Valley in Nafarroa (Lafourcade 1998: 343). In 1868 commissioners in the northern Basque coastal city of Baiona (Bayonne) delimited the Franco-Spanish boundary by establishing an imaginary border between two national territories (Sahlins 1989: 6–7). That international boundary did not, however, interrupt trans-Pyrenean relations.

From at least as early as the mid-nineteenth century, the seasonal migrations of trans-Pyrenean workers strengthened socioeconomic ties between Xiberoa and Béarn and their southern neighbors in Spain, notably the Erronkari Valley in Nafarroa and the valleys of Fago, Hecho, and Ansó in Aragón. In Erronkari the local economy revolved around the lumber industry and transhumance. Erronkari men ...