Carlism in literature

On March 21, 1890, at a conference dedicated to the siege of Bilbao during the Third Carlist War, Miguel de Unamuno delivered a lecture titled La última guerra carlista como materia poética. It was probably the first-ever attempt to examine the Carlist motive in literature, as for the previous 57 years the subject had been increasingly present in poetry, drama and novel. However, it remains paradoxical that when Unamuno was offering his analysis, the period of great Carlist role in letters was just about to begin. It lasted for some quarter of a century, as until the late 1910s Carlism remained a key theme of numerous monumental works of Spanish literature. Afterward, it lost its appeal as a literary motive, still later reduced to instrumental role during Francoism. Today it enjoys some popularity, though no longer as catalyst of paramount cultural or political discourse; its role is mostly to provide exotic, historical, romantic, and sometimes mysterious setting. The First Carlist War broke out when Spanish Romanticism was in its heyday. The literary response to the conflict was immediate and massive; its key features were propagandistic objectives of both sides and often close follow-up to the events as they were unfolding. Two genres serving as key literary battlefields were poetry and drama, the most adapt ones in terms of responsiveness. On both the Cristinos gained immediate advantage, which in the aftermath of the war became visible also in prose, especially in the nascent novel. On the other hand, the popular oral rural response, which made it to literature once written down in the future, was predominantly pro-Carlist. No Romantic work touching upon the Carlist subject is considered part of the great Spanish literature. The 1833 outbreak of the First Carlist War, usually considered the birth moment of Carlism, has almost immediately triggered a literary response. The literary genre which responded first was drama.