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Francisco Elías de Tejada y
Spínola Gómez (1917-1978) |
Translated by Cav. Charles Sant'Elia with permission from Destra.itBy Domenico Bonvegna
I had promised in conclusion of the evocative study Francisco Elias de Tejada, “Traditional Monarchy” to develop the theme of the last chapter Regno di Napoli (Kingdom of Naples). De Tejada, a Spanish scholar and philosopher, as well as an exponent of Spanish political Carlism, lived in Naples for seven years, among other things marrying a Neapolitan woman. In the end of his book, published in Italy for the first time, by Edizioni dell’Albero in 1966, deals with Naples’ traditionalism, which in some measure is a hymn to napoletanità. It is a study that Tejada had already touched upon in his earliest years. It was a call of the blood that had urged him “to seek news of that azure and golden land in which the memories of my ancestors and the curiosity of a magic spell wove legends," in spite of everything he had not set foot in via Toledo. He already felt himself Neapolitan in his heart. His ancestors left Naples three centuries ago in the time of King Philip IV, settling in Estremadura.
Tejada returning in 1956 to Naples, pointed out that he had found another city with respect to the image his parents had passed down to him. “It was not the Kingdom of Naples, but a province dependent upon masters who governed it from Rome, where the official language was Tuscan and the soldiers wore Piedmontese uniforms. It was not the capital of the first of the states of the Italian peninsula […].”
The only thing that was left in Naples “was the popular gracefulness, but unfortunately this gracefulness was scorned by the Neapolitans themselves, the leading actors in the dramatic collective suicide that was reducing Neapolitanism to ‘folklore.’”
It was the Naples of the realism of Salvatore Di Giacomo, “in that disgraced Peppenella that walks the sidewalk without bread or water.”
Tejada is aware that now the Neapolitan people does not know its past, when Naples was free and independent, the Naples of today is wrapped in an Orientalizing fatalism. It is interesting to cite the words of the Spanish philosopher who tallies forth in a tough and unbiased indictment of modern Naples. “Now its middle class, drunk with Garibaldinianism, seeking personal advantages, continues to wonder in the black legend forged in the XIX century against traditional Naples; the fallen and decadent aristocracy, oscillating between the frenzy of denying its own past glories so as to be more in harmony with the times and a deadly isolation; the clergy engaged in Vaticanism of the Democristian brand that dreams of a Guelph republic in which Naples does not count.”
In this chaos Tejada notes that “a few are socialists and others Savoyard monarchists, a few Papalists, a few are Garibaldini, a few look toward Moscow and others toward the Vatican…but nobody thinks of Naples, nobody is Neapolitan.”
Indeed, Tejada arrives at the point of writing that for seven years in the Parthenopean city he felt like a wild beast in a cage, an isolated animal ready to pounce, but sustained by the heritage of his blood (hidalguía) and by the oath made to his ancestors to explain the Neapolitan passion, in what consists the Neapolitan tradition, that is, the soul of my adored Naples.
In brief, Tejada sets forth the history of the Kingdom of Naples starting from the XVI century, from when it began to exist as a social entity, thanks to Ferdinando the Catholic, who “subdued the rebellious nobility and placed the Neapolitan common good above the political ambitions of infinite almost omnipotent little kings, capable of selling the Kingdom even to the Turks, as more than once they had thought of doing.”
Tejada often repeats that Naples is a Kingdom and not a monarchy that sails like a ship without an oarsman. At this point our scholar refers to several passages of the dynasties that ruled the kingdom clashing with the rebellious nobles and princes. Therefore, for Tejada “the Kingdom of Naples acquired a solid structure when its kings subdued the rebellious nobility […] that is, when the Neapolitan kingdom entered into the confederation with the Spains.”
The most evident sign of this political entity above the anarchy of previous epochs were “the presence of the public representatives (procuratori popolari) at the meetings of the ‘Cortes’ introduced by Alfonso the Magnanimous as a Neapolitan adaptation of free Catalan institutions.”
In practice there existed a strong alliance between the Crown and the people, to such a point that when the nobility fomented the uprisings in 1547 against don Pedro of Toledo, they were not revolts against the King of the Spains, but against the injustices of the petty lords, in fact Masaniello’s rebellion, “was a reaction against the abuses of the nobles, as Paolo Antonio di Tarsia testifies to in his ‘Tumultos de la ciudad y reyno de Napoles’, when on one hand he points out that the Neapolitans ‘showed themselves loyal vassals to their King, even amidst the impetus of the revolts and uprisings’ and on the other hand that they rose up due to the ‘highhandedness perpetrated by the powerful upon the poor people.’”
Here is Tejada’s intent to show the existence of a Kingdom with an autonomous political body, with its own institutions, with a particular right, with councils and Court separated, modeled by Ferdinand the Catholic and reinforced by his successors, always in a profound union between Crown and people.
In the third paragraph the Spanish author highlights the characteristics of Neapolitan Culture. It is interesting to read these pages, because one discovers an unknown world of literati and scholars wholly part of Italian culture: the best poet in Tuscan living in Naples was Benito Gamet, born in Barcelona, much more learned than many other well-known poets. Tejada mentions some names: Bernardino Martirano, Fabrizio Luna, Benedetto di Falco, Luigi Tansillo. These Neapolitan writers according to Tejada, “lived in the hope of seeing all of Italy around the throne of their King, and they aspired likewise to the universal monarchy of Charles V.”
From a first habit of employing Tuscan, they then arrived at a subsequent anti-Tuscan offensive, as one may deduce from the writings of other authoritative scholars.
Neapolitan culture is present in the field of Law, juridical science, a characteristic of Naples, in the XVI and XVII centuries, beginning with Andrea d’Isernia. To better know the various Neapolitan schools Tejada invites one to read his Nápoles hispanico (published in Italy, in six volumes by Controcorrente).
“In order to identify the intellectual energy of so many legal minds who made Naples the cradle of juridical science. Thus emerge a series of schools which comprise the richest mosaic of juridical studies in recorded memory, surpassed neither before or after by any people.”
This Neapolitan culture was possible because the kings of the Spains were “steadfast in their traditional credo of respecting the historic personality of the kingdom, even when suggestions from Neapolitans themselves incited them to Castilianize the Neapolitan Kingdom.” Tejada brings up the example of Tommaso Campanella who advised Philip III in his Monarchy of Spain to “Spanishize” the Neapolitan Kingdom with the imposition of the language and customs and the laws of Castile. The good King of the true Naples refused this advice.
With the cultural independence in letters and law the Neapolitan Kingdom had a historical mission: “to defend the Catholic truth of Christ against the enemies from the north and the south, against Protestantism and Islam”. Tejada observes that one is dealing with a task which he calls, “intellectual war," but which one may well understand as a “battle of ideas.” Whatever the case Tejada clarifies that even if it is difficult for some to comprehend this “war," certainly, the historic genius of the period “saved Christendom from being devoured by its enemies, thanks to the sacrifices of the other peoples of the Spanish Confederation, my ancestors courageously faced.”
Tejada at this point can write that those people federated in the Spanish monarchy were instruments of God. “If Protestantism and Islamism were not able to close the circle which would have crushed that Christendom which was still surviving the anthropocentric European revolution, it was because God availed Himself of our peoples as an instrument of His Glory and because our ancestors were able to consecrate themselves completely to the undertaking of fighting the battles of the Lord in the legendary ‘tercios’ or in the cathedras of Trento, in the war fleets or in the publishing of books.”
Tejada’s is a fascinating juxtaposition: “the greatest glory of the Neapolitan tradition is this missionary sense, this intellectual war against Islam and against Europe. To overlook it or to deny it is to want to consciously overlook or deny the essence of the Kingdom of Naples.”
A clarification is useful, the Europa that Tejada contrasts is the one born from Enlightenment ideas, from the French Revolution, the ideas of Voltaire and of Rousseau.
After these affirmations one better understands why in history books the combatants of this federated monarchy, to whom the Spanish author refers, were derided and for centuries considered outcasts of humanity.
In sum, for Tejada traditional Naples fixed itself on three points: “the intransigent defense of Catholicism, the passionate maintenance of the liberties of the Kingdom understood as a perfect and total body politic, the heartfelt service to the King, captain of the undertaking of the Counter Reformation and paladin of missionary Christendom.” It was evident that a Country with this curriculum could not but be opposed by the extollers of the European Revolution.
Therefore, the history of the Spanish peoples of the last three centuries “would be the fight of the respective Spanish traditions against the foreign European spirit.”
In fact, for Tejada, even the development of the Kingdom of Naples, “would be identified with the polemic around its tradition assaulted by French absolutism of the XVIII century, by liberal Garibaldianism in the XIX century and by the ‘Roman’ one of Fascism in the XX which would succeed each other with one fighting the others without ever allowing for an authentically Neapolitan solution.”
The XVIII century saw the triumph of European ideas over the divided and carved up Spains. Even the Neapolitan national soul was tormented. Tejada writes: “the heroic idealism of the defense of Christendom became replaced by the vulgar pragmatism fashionable at the court of Versailles.” Literary men like Genovesi, Beccaria, Filangeri, Pagano, “scorn their history in order to kneel at the feet of their idol Voltaire.” Even in Law, Naples now aped foreign formulas. “Only the people protests and continues to speak Neapolitan, that Neapolitan that the erudite disdain, as they disdain Neapolitan letters, philosophy and jurisprudence, competing with each other to complete a true and proper national suicide […].”
Tejada, applies the sad words of Ferdinando Galiani and glimpses a collective furor of the Neapolitans in renouncing their own traditions. A part of the Neapolitan people abandoned to itself sought to continue to be Neapolitan, among these Giambattista Vico, who “represents the last traditional voice with its aversion to modern culture, with its fight against European thought, faithful to the common Spanish tradition, faithful to Francisco Suarez […] the enemy of Hobbes and Machiavelli, those impious men, destroyers of justice, scandals of thought […].” Giambattista Vico, the final name in Neapolitan Tradition.
Tejada is not tender with the Bourbons, because they caused the loss of the Neapolitans’ love for the Spanish monarchs, precisely due to Neapolitanism, “which remained misunderstood by the French Bourbons.” Back in 1799, Vincenzo Cuoco was able to say, “the people no longer loved their king […] they still loved their religion, their fatherland, and they hated the French.” Tejada again maintains that in the XVIII century “Neapolitan tradition loses its sense of authentic monarchy, but feels nostalgia for Spanish liberties, continues to hate Europe, and believes in the traditional reality of Naples. Its battle cry will be long live the “Holy Faith” and the ‘Neapolitan people.’” So that Antonio Capece Minutolo, the Prince of Canosa, rather than a monarchical solution (harnessed in absolutism) was wishing for an aristocratic republic in union the “knights of the City.” Prince Canosa’s aspiration was to have“a Naples faithful to the national tradition of the Spanish times, tradition rather intuited than known […].” But all those thinkers in Naples as in Spain that wished for a traditional government, based on concrete liberties, not suffocated by liberalism and absolutism, remained unheeded. Therefore, in 1860 declares Tejada, “the liberals triumphed over the absolutists and the Piedmontese replaced the French. Naples was not dying then, it was already dead for 150 years when it had exited the monarchical confederation of the Spains.”
Now of the ancient great ideals, the Neapolitan people conserve only the Catholic faith, and the stupid political minorities, are working to tear down the only bulwark that remains of tradition.
Tejada’s study concludes with a symbolic walk on the old via Toledo, the preferred itinerary of many thoroughbred Neapolitans. And also here strolling with his fraternal friend Silvio Vitale, the last Neapolitan traditionalist, he continues the polemics against those Neapolitans that ignore Neapolitan tradition and even boast of it. Among these Tejada places Commander Achille Lauro who did not create cathedrals, centers of culture, publishing houses, research grants, for a true spiritual revolt, to save the salvageable of Neapolitan tradition. It is the usual deficiency that one finds in all of the so-called policies of the right and pseudo right.
Contact: domenico_bonvegna@libero.it
Also see:
• Forgotten Master/ The Traditional and Federative Monarchy of Francisco Elias de Tejada
