Ponderable Quote from ‘La Monarchia Tradizionale’ by Francisco Elías de Tejada

Translated from the Italian*

Memory of the federative monarchies

Historical variety is above all social variety. The trend towards legislative uniformity is a concept that was born in the bowels of abstract Protestant natural law, committed to denying the living reality of history. The Catholic thought of the Counter-Reformation, admirably reaffirmed by Giambattista Vico, did not deny history, on the contrary it assumed historical variety in the fullness of its political consequences. Instead, the children of European Protestantism deny it in politics: the absolutism of the eighteenth century, the liberalism of the nineteenth and the totalitarianisms of the twentieth. Faced with them, the first quality of the traditionalist is that of rejecting the nationalistic impositions of one people on another; it is, if one is Castilian, to affirm the promotion of Catalan or Basque social realities and, if Piedmontese, to advocate the flourishing of Neapolitan or Sardinian social entities. Only a true Spanish or Italian traditionalist will respect the historical and social personality of the various peninsular peoples, without letting themselves be carried away by proud passion and exclusivity.

This does not imply that we must deny the hierarchy of cultures nor that we must fall into the narrow circle of the universal idioms of Petrarch or Cervantes; simply that they should be reduced to their grandiose function of superior cultural tools, without expanding their scope with forced impositions. The traditions of each people, and it is a Castilian who speaks, are common treasures that all of us, brothers of the same chosen family, must keep with love. Castilian or Tuscan will be common denominators, not exclusive entities. The delight that my soul feels as a traditionalist in reading Eduardo Fondai's poems in Galician or Peppino Mereu's Sardinian verses is the essential prerequisite for understanding, with an intellect of love, the traditional approach to cultural or political issues.

The major Italian political clashes of the nineteenth century derive precisely from the criteria of imposition adopted by the Piedmontese with the Sardinians and by the Neapolitans with the Sicilians. The slow and progressive Piedmonteseization of the island of Sardinia and the attacks on the sacred autonomy of Sicily arose from the tendency towards uniformity of the eighteenth century, the result of Protestant abstractionism and the antithesis of authentic Tradition.

As proof of what has been said, contrast the respect that the traditional sovereigns of Spain had for the legislations and for the autonomous political systems of Sardinia and Sicily with the attacks by the sovereigns of Turin and the Bourbons of Naples. In the years of the true Italian tradition it was possible to discuss the details of the application of the respective legislation on those islands, a human and natural thing because men are not carved in the wood of angels; but no one ever questioned the existence of Sicily or Sardinia as independent kingdoms. The traditional spirit that united the Italian peoples with the Spaniards was then alive, respecting the peculiarities of each of the peoples, associated in a living confederation under the sign of the federative monarchy.

* Capitolo Primo, La Tradizione Italiana, “Memoria dell monarchie federative,” La monarchia tradizionale, Francisco Elías de Tejada, Controcorrente Edizioni, 2001, p. 24-26