Land and power in Arcadia: Navarre in the early twentieth century

Let us begin with a stubborn myth. The Navarrese, wrote the British historian Hugh Thomas a quarter of a century ago, were before the Spanish Civil War ‘a contented group of peasant proprietors nestling in the foothills of the Pyrenees…. A journey to Navarre was still an expedition to the middle ages.’1 Thomas’s words present, albeit in extreme terms, a vision of Navarrese rural society which was for long accepted and indeed perpetuated by both Navarrese conservatives and anglophone historians: one of Navarre as a kind of rural Arcadia, populated by a prosperous, self-sufficient peasantry and blessed by a general and enduring social harmony.2