In the nineteenth century, European states regarded the preservation and restoration of the national past as a sign of ‘civilisation’. Disregard for one’s own past was a sign that a nation did not deserve the right to self-determination. Basque scholars worried that the Basque country’s scarce literary production challenged their claim of being a cultural nation and placed it among the ‘peoples without history’. Thus, French Basque scholars worked hand in hand with Spanish Basque ones to invent a Basque literary tradition. Basque elites’ efforts to equip the Basque country with a literary history produced paradoxical results. On the one hand, the construction of a Basque ‘literary renaissance’ was a transnational and international endeavour. It involved European scholars, as well as the concerted effort of French and Spanish Basque savants, whose work strengthened the sense of a shared Basque cultural identity across the Pyrenees. On the other hand, regionalist culture strengthened the relationship between the Basque country and France, because French intellectuals regarded Basque folklore as a means to enrich the cultural patrimony of the French nation. As a result, the Basque opus, despite referring to the Basque country as a nation, was not an attempt to break away from France and Spain. It was a way of providing the Basque country with a literary history which strengthened both the position of the region within the bigger nation and of the nation within the new Europe of nation-states.

Tourism played a crucial role in the codification of a stereotypical Basque identity. While the classic historiography has argued that locals were passive observers of the arrival of tourists, Basque hosts played an active role in the touristic transformation of the region in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, local elites promoted the ‘modernisation’ of Basque spa towns and the standardisation of services and manners, as they believed that the future of the Basque country was cosmopolitan and French-speaking, not local and Euskara-speaking. On the other, they commodified local culture and sold it to tourists as a crucial element of their experience in the Basque country. In this respect, the cosmopolitan and the local, the ‘modern’ and the ‘archaic’ were not at odds with each other. Event organisers embraced the ‘modernity’ that came with tourism as an opportunity to reconceptualise and strengthen Basque tradition, crafting an archetypal identity that was a valuable economic enterprise, as well as a significant political defence vis-à-vis the homogenising pressure of the nation-state.

The study of Euskara in the nineteenth century was a political endeavour. Philologists were not only interested in studying the Basque language per se but studied it in order to prove the antiquity of the Basque nation. While in such stateless nations as Germany the political goal of philological works was national self-determination, in the Basque country scholars were committed to preserving the autonomy of the Basque provinces from the centralising efforts of the French and Spanish nation-states. French Basque scholars relied on similar myths of ethnic descent to their Spanish counterparts, but they responded to specific French concerns that reflected the frequent regime changes in the nineteenth century. Scholars of Euskara in the French Basque country had two primary goals in mind. First, they strove to find a position for the Basques within evolving ideas of what constituted the French nation in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Second, they sought to protect the Basque language from succumbing to the use of French. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the existence of the Basque language became increasingly at odds with French notions of progress and civilisational advance, which considered language uniformity an essential step towards national unity and social evolution.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars contributed to the characterisation of the Basque man as a brave soldier yet resentful of the constraints of authority. Such myth was a product of the Revolutionaries’ creation, in 1792, of the chasseurs basques, an ethnic-specific Basque battalion that was meant to protect the western Pyrenean border from Spanish invasion. The chasseurs basques fought valiantly during the War of the Pyrenees and, although they represented a minority of the Basque population, their heroism came to be identified with the Basque population as a whole, to the point that the chasseurs basques were reinstated in 1813, during the most dramatic phase of the Peninsular War. Paradoxically, at a time when the army became a symbol of patriotic zeal and national unity, Basque soldiers were joined together militarily for the first time and developed a clearer and more structured understanding of the ethnic and cultural component of their identity. Such choice was revealing of the extent to which local particularism still factored in military choices in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, as well as of the degree of pragmatism inherent in the new notion of the citizen-soldier.

The long nineteenth century was a period of both nation- and region-building. As in Spain, in the French Basque country demands for self-government, federalism and decentralisation laid the foundation for a regionalism that was both defensive of local rights and conducive to the strengthening of a French national identity. The symbiotic relationship between nation- and region-building in the nineteenth century produced strong political, socio-economic and cultural ties between France and its regions, which made membership of the French nation-state both economically convenient and ideologically essential for the conceptualisation of the Basque region.

In the nineteenth century, western European travellers regarded the Basque country as a testing ground for ideas of ‘civilisation’, progress and decline. The region, with its ‘noble’ yet ‘savage’ people and its ‘modern’ yet ‘corrupted’ tourist industry, represented perfectly the tensions that littérateurs felt between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’ and progress and decline. On the one hand, writers elevated the ‘primitiveness’ of the Basques to an expression of ancient virtue and morality, which they contrasted with the dissolution of morals of contemporary commercial society, as they witnessed it on the beaches of Biarritz and the spa towns of the Basses-Pyrénées. On the other, they condemned the Basques’ same ‘primitiveness’ by associating it with notions of barbarism, anti-historicism and anti-patriotism. The imagology that derived from travel writing popularised a series of exaggerated stereotypes that came to characterise both the way in which Europeans perceived the Basque country and the manner in which, to an extent, the Basques presented themselves to outsiders.

The French Revolution turned Euskara into an obstacle to national unity by associating French with the language of the Enlightenment, the Rights of Man and the mission civilisatrice, and regional languages with clericalism, superstition and backwardness. Such Revolutionaries as the abbé Grégoire and Bertrand Barère were the first to equate Basque identity with religious fanaticism, a connection that had short- and long-term consequences. In the short term, accusations of fanaticism prompted the représentants en mission to develop a paranoid fear of the counterrevolutionary potential of the Basque clergy, leading them to commit terrorist acts of retaliation against both non-juror priests and the lay population. In the long term, radical republicans at the turn of the twentieth century, seeing themselves as the heirs of the First Republic, associated clericalism and multilingualism with national division and targeted the influence of the Church on education as a major impediment to national unity and patriotism. While from Thermidor to the 1880s the relationship between the clergy and the French state was mostly peaceful, at the beginning of the Third Republic Basque conservatives responded to the perceived war on religion by turning Euskara into the ultimate defender of their Catholic faith and their ancestral traditions against the République sans Dieu.

The French Revolution transformed the notion of ‘Basqueness’ from an economic to a cultural feature. Under the ancien régime, local Basque elites defined the exceptionalism of their respective pays on the basis of such distinctive attributes as their ancient history, their peculiar language and their mœurs, which came to form the basis of Basque cultural identity after 1789. Nevertheless, when facing the French state before the Revolution, they employed such tropes of identity almost exclusively to defend local privileges, in particular fiscal exemption, from the increasing centralisation of the French state. The reforms of the early phase of the Revolution, especially the abolition of privileges and the reconfiguration of administrative France into départements, prompted Basque elites to reimagine the position of the old Basque pays within the new model of nation-state. The result was a transformation of the meaning of Basque exceptionalism from an economic feature within the ancien-régime French state to a separate linguistic and cultural entity within the emerging order founded upon notions of citizenship and nationhood.

By means of archival documents, newspapers and a variety of printed sources, this book studies the French Basque country’s process of acquisition of a folkloric regional identity in the long nineteenth century. It maintains that, albeit originating in pre-‘modern’ customs, such stereotypical identity was not the product of ancestral tradition. It was invented in the nineteenth century as part of France’s process of nation-building. The book analyses the role of local and European intellectuals, state authorities and the Basque population in the creation of a ‘modern’ Basque regional identity in the nineteenth century. It identifies the turning point in the French Revolution of 1789. The replacement of privilege with language as the marker of identity in provincial France prompted the local notability to develop a new interest in local culture. Such transition influenced scholars’ approach to Basque literature and philology, as well as Franco-Basque relations in the army, in education and in the tourist industry. The book contributes to a growing body of historiography that regards Europe’s regional identities as both a product of the age of nationalism and an inherent aspect of nation-building. The relationship between the region and the nation, though, was complicated. On the one hand, regional culture favoured the integration of the French Basque provinces into the French nation-state. On the other, it strengthened local pride and French Basques’ relations with their Spanish Basque neighbours. Since 1789, then, it has created tensions that expose the strengths and weaknesses of the unitary model of French nationhood.

The Basque phase of the First Carlist War (1833–40) popularised a representation of the Basque country as the cradle of such conservative values as collective liberty, religion and tradition. In France, two main figures associated Carlism with the Basques. The first group were the legitimists, who had been ousted from power in 1830 and regarded the Basque country’s pro-Carlist position as their new hope for the restoration of absolutism in Europe. The other, at a local level, was the French Basque political intellectual Augustin Chaho, who supported Carlism as a way of protecting the Basque country from centralisation. Although legitimists and Chaho operated with different goals in mind, they produced a similar characterisation of the Basque country as a land of liberty, faith and tradition, aspects which became key to Basque political identity in the second half of the nineteenth century.