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| Francisco Elías de Tejada y Spínola Gómez (1917-1978) |
By Domenico Bonvegna
Two events have highlighted the crisis of democracy: the coronavirus pandemic, which has forced our governments to suspend the most elemental democratic liberties; and then the latest American presidential elections, where one has not managed to understand whether Biden or Trump won. Certainly there will be other signals whereby the limits of democracy are manifest. Limits which were well highlighted in an excellent pamphlet by Raffaele Simone, “The Democratic Fiction” (Garzanti 2015)(1), that I presented some time ago, where the author, not a reactionary at all, analyzes the sickness in which democratic institutions are wallowing today.
This debacle of democracy has prompted me to reread the worthy work of the Spanish scholar Francisco Elias de Tejada, “Traditional Monarchy,” of which I possess the one published by Edizioni dell’Albero (1966). For the record the study had been reprinted by the Neapolitan publishing house Controcorrente in 2001 and, starting in 1999, the same publisher also offered by the same Spanish author a translation of the monumental work “Spanish Naples,” in six volumes. In Italy little by the Spanish philosopher has been published; something has been published by the worthy Edizioni Thule of Tommaso Romano, such as a few brief essays (The Myth of Marxism and For a Natural Law Culture) as well as the ideological work “Qué es el Carlismo?” (Italian transl. “Il Carlismo” Palermo, 1979) written under the direction of Elias de Tejada who wanted it as a collective work and expression of the Comunión Carlista. Tejada has been an eminent political exponent of Spanish Carlismo. In this regard his friend Franco Maestrelli, an expert on the history of Carlismo, writes: « The premise of the Comunión Carlista “God, Fatherland, King, Fueros [territorial charters]” well identifies the pillars of this traditionalism: integralist Catholicism, patriotism as a link to the local communities and well differentiated from nationalism, organic and legitimate monarchy by birth and in practice and the application of the principle of subsidiarity through the intermediate fuero bodies. In Spain today Carlist thought is carried forth in the students of Elias de Tejada reunited in the Foundation which bears his name. The Comunión Carlista “normalized” first by the Franco regime, then split by internal divisions and weakened by the years of socialist and popular governments, even lacking, by choice, party representation, survives today as a think tank of anti-liberal, anti-socialist, anti-secular, anti-utopian and in a word, anti-modern thought.» (Franco Maestrelli, Forgotten Masters: Francisco Elias de Tejada, between Naples and the Imperial Spains, 19.1.2017, destra.it)
Having died prematurely in 1978, our Master Tejada, has left us some three hundred works in the areas of law, history and politics. To immediately remove any mistake, de Tejada proposed traditional, federative monarchy, which has nothing to do with monarchical absolutism identified by many writers of official history as the only monarchical political form existing. The 1966 edition, dedicated to the Italian public bore the writing on the dust jacket:“Fascism Outmoded on the Right.” In fact Tejada’s study, does not stop only at the analysis of the institution of monarchy, but proposes also wide ranging historical reflections, such as those on the Twentieth Century and in particular on the so-called nationalisms.
The first obstacle was the lack of a correct ideological formation in Mussolini’s thought. He came from socialism and was the son of Romagna anticlericalism. He therefore was hostile out of principle to any universalist Catholic perspective. He was fighting liberalism and Marxism with the only weapons which enriched his intellectual patrimony: Rénan, Sorel, Hegel.
«Between the Christian, Catholic, and Papal essence, of the Italian traditions and the influence of his Garibaldino, socialist and noncatholic spirit there was an abyss which he did not manage to fill […] He did not understand Italian Tradition because he believed that it lay in that which constituted its most profound negation: the spirit of the Risorgimento». For Tejada, Mussolini, thirsting for traditionalism «was not capable of understanding the authentic tradition of the peoples of his peninsula».
The second obstacle was the apparent lack of an Italian tradition. To the nationalists, it seemed an impossible undertaking to unite at the same time the living memories of the Kingdom of Naples and those of the minuscule fief of Correggio of the Most Serene Venetian Republic, or the Florentine Medici. In this political mosaic that had characterized many centuries of national history, Mussolini did not know who to see a true Italy and therefore he made recourse to the Risorgimento.
«From this error of perspective, together with a disordered intellectual formation, it turned out Mussolini saw Italian Tradition in the pathway of Rome, that, for the Italians of the XX century, could not be anything other than remote and venerated archeological remains. By ignoring the Catholic tradition of Italy he immersed himself in the dream of a resurrection of the pagan tradition of Rome, measuring its empire with the meter of Theodosius’ empire; a mistake which made him fall into that unreality from which he himself was fleeing. He wanted a Roman Italy, forgetting or ignoring that between him and Augustus were running some 20 centuries of Christianity, a universal religion whose seat continued to be in Rome».
Practically, Mussolini looked to the distant Rome, to the distant Empire, but forgot the close by Italy. «He skipped from the ancient Empire to the very recent Risorgimento cancelling in a flash the universal undertaking of the true tradition of the Italian peoples: the universal gesta of the Catholic Counter Reformation». Tejada realizes that it is difficult to overcome the nationalist mentality, our generations after having received teaching based on nationalism, do not conceive «either the universal or the national», they comprehend only the national as an executed political reality. Above all, clarifies the Spanish scholar, «when one thinks that the idea of Italy constituted for centuries the ideal of cultivated minorities, and not a general feeling of the popular masses».
The Spanish scholar was convinced that this Italy was born in the second half of the XIX century, the one which was «the song of poets, erudite yeast of humanists and the taste for the Tuscan idiom artificially cultivated by castes of literati from all of the peninsula while the various peoples were speaking their respective languages which had nothing in common with those cultivated by these elect minorities».
Italy was there already before the Garibaldini red shirts, it was there in the Most Exulted poet Dante Alighieri. Therefore according to Tejada, «literature decreed the death of the Italian peoples». Attention however, the Spanish writer with his reasoning, does not want to fragment, in the name of traditionalism, Italy, and not even Spain. Rather he wants to make one note that the historical, cultural, political and juridical reality of Catalonia or of Naples, of Sicily or of Navarre, means to place oneself in the line of authentic Tradition. Therefore according to Tejada «the demolishing action of Castilianization in the Iberian lands and of the Piedmontesization in the Italian lands» is to be rejected. Tejada invites us to reconstruct the true history of Italian and Spanish tradition, to go to the source of History, in order to recognize their personalities suffocated in the name of nationalism, born to the sound of the drums of the French Revolution.
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| Coat of arms of the King of Spain |
One does not need to impose or homogenize, as the Piedmontese did with the Sardinians or the Neapolitans with the Sicilians. «The slow and progressive Piedmontesization of the island of Sardinia and the attacks on the sacred autonomy of Sicily are realities born from the tendency toward uniformity of the XVIII century, the fruit of Protestant abstractism and the antithesis of authentic Tradition».
The author maintains that the monarchy of Spain of the XVI and XVII centuries, the one before the «deleterious invasion of European abstractism, was founded on the respect of the autonomous realities of each of the peoples comprising the gigantic monarchy». The Sicilians as Pietro Gritti says, were «caressed as an ancient element of this Crown».
On this question the Spanish scholar makes a long quotation of historian Francesco Di Stefano who describes the “History of Sicily from the XI to the XIX century”. I do not intend to set it forth, but it should be read in order to ascertain how the Sicilian people, its Parliament, in particular Messina and Palermo, managed to defend its own autonomy vis-á-vis the Viceroy. The requests of the Sicilian Parliament of 1574 as those of 1798, sought the same thing: «the confirmation of the authority granted by good old kings, from those who governed according to Sicilian Tradition, from Philip II in particular». Then with Ferdinando IV, one had the assault on the parliament in the name of French style absolutism, by imposing taxes contrary to Sicilian liberty.
The same thing happened for Sardinia with the Savoy occupation, which sought to annul little by little Sardinian traditions of autonomy and freedom which were lovingly cultivated by the traditional kings of Sardinia. We can not discuss at length the various measures and countermeasures which characterized the governments of those still autonomous peoples. It would be interesting to examine them in depth with serious studies.
Peoples linked to their own traditions which were attacked by the principles of absolutism which then generated the liberalism of the XIX century, up to the Marxism of the XX century. Therefore for Francisco Elias de Tejada one can not reject liberalism or marxism in the name «of the absolutism which generated them, but with the banner of the concrete liberties concrete our respective traditions». To do this one must liberate oneself from the nationalist assignations in vogue in the XIX century, «by seeking to understand the manifold reality, fruit of history, formed in the personality of each of the Spanish or Italian peoples». For the Spanish scholar one must approach Giambattista Vico in order to comprehend History, by rejecting the abstractions of Grotius, and the claimed universal national law of Wolff.
Tejada wishes for a federalistic perspective that unites the diversity of the various Italian and Spanish peoples. United by the Christian sense of life, of Roman Catholicism. Peoples united in the iron block, with various and fertile diversities, from the Counter Reformation of Trent. «That fervent and intransigent Catholicism of ours sustained the battles of the Lord and gave us consciousness of our common destiny». Surely people may be different in History, precisely because they are united in the faith. Therefore, «the kings that governed in Madrid or in Cagliari, in Lima, in Naples, in Goa and in Mexico, gave a banner to that undertaking knowing well that they were not kings of Castile, but of each of their numerous fiefs politically well differentiated among themselves».
It happened that these kings were at times “more Papist than the Pope.” Their conviction of being missionary paladins of the faith, authorized them to nip abuses of an imperious clergy. Tejada reminds us debunking the black legend of foreign oppressions, that under Charles V or Philip II, the Neapolitans, the Milanese, the Sardinians, the Sicilians, «had access to the government of their peoples and even governed peoples of the Iberian peninsula or the American continent». As one can ascertain from the Historia general written by the Sassarese Francisco Angel de Vico, who governed the Spains as regent of the Supreme Council of Aragon.
Tejada specifies, that «thus as Castilians and Catalans were going as viceroys or governors in the Italian states, the peoples of Sicily, Milan, Naples or Sardinia were governed by their natural kings, it is absurd to speak of Spanish domination, because similarly Catalans and Galicians could call the government of numerous viceroys of Neapolitan origin Neapolitan domination ».
He completes the chapter harkening back to the characteristics of the “Italies” of the XVI century, where there did not exist the oppression of minority peoples, incorporated in the gigantic Catholic monarchy of the King of Sicily, of Sardinia and of Naples, the dukes of Milan. It is here for Tejada that resides the key of Italian Tradition. Convinced that the past can not repeat itself in the same terms, in order to understand, however, one must free oneself from the “subsequent Europeanizations,” the absolutist one, the liberal one, and the Marxist one.
For our author both the Italians and Spaniards have a common destiny. Naturally he was writing in the 1960’s, but looking at History, and our common Faith (recover the consciousness of our universal destiny as paladins of Catholicism, soldiers of Christ on a missionary crusade) and it is an admonishment which is always valid. The admirable study is composed of another six chapters, all to be read and studied with fundamental themes to be understood, Europe, the tradition of the Spains, Christendom, the protestantization of Europe, the absolutist liberal Europeanization. And then the worthy experience, the political lesson of the Fueros as systems of concrete liberty in the region of Navarre. Federative Monarchy. They are all topics worthy of being addressed and studied.
The Spanish scholar, but whom we may also call a Neapolitan, dedicated the last chapter to the true essence of the Tradition of Naples, to its long monarchical centuries, the importance of becoming a Kingdom, when it entered into the great confederation of the Spains. I pause here and promise to take up the subject on another occasion.
Contact: domenico_bonvegna@libero.it
(1) Various titles of works cited herein are translated for convenience of English readers, but do not imply that the works have been translated and published in English.
