Miguel de Unamuno

• 1. Introduction

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  Miguel de Unamuno died on the 31st of December 1936, the last day of the last year of his life, under house arrest in Salamanca. He was seventy-two years old, a former rector of the university he had served for decades, and he had spent the final months of his life being removed from positions, stripped from street signs, and pulled between two warring factions he had ultimately denounced in equal measure. His last recorded letter, dated the 13th of December, contained words that would be quoted for generations: "They will win, but they will not convince; they will conquer, but they will not convert."

  How does a man who helped establish the Second Spanish Republic end up under arrest by the military government he initially supported? How does a philosopher who devoted his life to the idea that death makes life tragic wind up dying in ambiguous circumstances, in a room with a brazier, with a visitor whose identity and motives remain disputed to this day? And how did a confrontation in a university auditorium on the 12th of October 1936 become one of the most contested scenes in modern Spanish history? These are the questions that a life as restless and contradictory as Unamuno's keeps asking.

• 2. Bilbao to Salamanca

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  Unamuno was born in Bilbao on the 29th of September 1864, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo, in a port city he would spend a lifetime interpreting. As a young man he could speak the Basque language and competed for a teaching post at the Instituto de Bilbao against Sabino Arana, a figure who would become the founding father of Basque nationalism. The post went to neither of them; it was won by the Basque scholar Resurrección María de Azkue.

  Unamuno had wanted a professorship in philosophy, but no appointment came. In 1891, he accepted a chair in Greek at the University of Salamanca instead. It was a compromise that turned into a vocation. By 1900 he was rector of the university, a role he would hold for two distinct periods spanning more than three decades of Spanish public life.

  Bilbao stayed with him as an idea rather than just a city. He connected his liberalism to its port culture, arguing that commerce with the wider world had given Bilbao an individualism and openness that stood sharply against what he called the narrow-mindedness of Carlist traditionalism. When José Canalejas was assassinated by an anarchist in 1912, Unamuno blamed the absence of a true liberal democratic party in Spain. Two years later, he attacked the Spanish nobility for what he called their philistinism. His politics were forming rapidly and loudly, with Salamanca as the platform.

• 3. The Tragic Philosopher

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  In the late nineteenth century, Unamuno passed through a religious crisis that permanently changed his thinking. He had grown up under the influence of rationalism and positivism, but by the early twentieth century he had moved toward existentialism in a way that was distinctly his own. Life was tragic, he argued, not as a rhetorical stance but as a philosophical premise: the knowledge that we will die is the central fact of human existence, and most human activity is an attempt to survive in some form after death.

  His own summary of his creed was direct: "My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live." The men he admired most were those he called burdened with wisdom rather than knowledge: he named Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, and others in that list.

  The full statement of these ideas appeared in Tragic Sense of Life in 1913. The book examines the tension between faith and reason. It was not the first time he had approached the question: his concept of intrahistoria, first introduced in the 1895 essay En torno al casticismo, proposed that history was best understood through the small stories of anonymous people rather than through wars and political pacts. The concept carried that same suspicion of grand systems. Along with The Agony of Christianity, published in 1931, and his novella Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, Tragic Sense of Life was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

• 4. Genres and Forms

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  Paz en la guerra, published in 1897, drew on Unamuno's own childhood memories of the Carlist siege of Bilbao during the Third Carlist War. It was his first novel, and it explored the relationship between the self and death, a preoccupation that would run through everything he wrote.

  By 1914 he had published Mist, which The Literary Encyclopedia calls "the most acclaimed Spanish Modernist novel." Unamuno invented a new word for the form: nivola, to distinguish it from the fixed form of the novel, or novela. The same year he published Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, which is often cited as one of the earliest works applying existential thinking to Cervantes. Unamuno felt that Cervantes had not told the story well, cluttering it with unrelated material. He considered himself, as a quijotista, superior to Cervantes in understanding the material. It is, on his own admission, a work of mixed genre: personal essay, philosophy, and fiction in one volume.

  He coined the word cocotología to describe the art of paper folding, a practice he pursued from childhood to his final days. He folded origami figures to express philosophical positions, including views on Platonism and scholasticism, often using the traditional Spanish pajarita as a vehicle. After the conclusion of Love and Pedagogy in 1902, he included a fictional treatise on cocotología, attributing it to one of the characters.

  His theatre stripped drama to its essentials: no artifice, only the conflicts and passions internal to characters. He credited classical Greek theatre as the influence. His 1930 novella Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, which he described as synthesizing virtually all of his thought, centers on a priest who has lost his faith in immortality but keeps his doubts from his parishioners because he recognizes that faith is a necessary support for their lives.

• 5. Exile and Return

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  General Miguel Primo de Rivera came to power and in 1924 stripped Unamuno of both his university chairs. The protests of other Spanish intellectuals did not change the outcome. Unamuno was banished to Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands. His house there is now a museum, as is his house in Salamanca.

  From Fuerteventura he escaped to France. The journey became the subject of his book De Fuerteventura a Paris. After a year in Paris, he settled in Hendaye, a border town in the French Basque Country, choosing it specifically because it placed him as close to Spain as possible while keeping him on French soil.

  Primo de Rivera's dictatorship fell in 1930, and Unamuno returned. The story told in Salamanca is that on the day he walked back into the university, he opened his lecture with the same words Fray Luis de León had used after four years of imprisonment by the Spanish Inquisition: "As we were saying yesterday." In Spanish: Decíamos ayer.

  He ran on the Republican/Socialist ticket, was elected, and led a large demonstration in the Plaza Mayor where he raised the Republic's flag. But his relationship with the Republic quickly soured. In a speech at the Madrid Ateneo on the 28th of November 1932, he attacked Manuel Azaña's anti-clerical policies by comparing them unfavorably to the Inquisition: even the Inquisition, he said, had been limited by legal guarantees. By June 1936 he had gone so far as to tell a journalist, in a statement published by El Adelanto, that Azaña should commit suicide as a patriotic act. On the 22nd of August 1936, the Republican government removed him from the rectorship and erased his name from streets, replacing it with that of Simón Bolívar.

• 6. The Day in Salamanca

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  On the 12th of October 1936, the University of Salamanca hosted a celebration of the discovery of America. Three months into the Civil War, the auditorium held a politically diverse crowd. Carmen Polo Martínez-Valdés, Franco's wife, was present. So was Enrique Pla y Deniel, the Archbishop of Salamanca, and General José Millán Astray, founder and first commander of the Spanish Legion. Unamuno was representing General Franco at the event; the rebel government had just restored his rectorship after the Republic had removed him.

  What happened next exists in at least two distinct versions. In the account given by British historian Hugh Thomas in his 1961 book The Spanish Civil War, a professor named Francisco Maldonado called Catalonia and the Basque Country cancers on the body of the nation, and someone in the crowd cried the Legion's motto, Viva la Muerte. Millán Astray led a call-and-response cheer. Unamuno then rose and addressed the crowd directly, saying that Millán Astray was a cripple, as Cervantes had been, but lacked Cervantes' spiritual greatness. He ended: "You will win, because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince."

  In 2018, historian and librarian Severiano Delgado published a book titled Archeology of a Myth, arguing that the famous speech was invented and written by Luis Portillo in a 1941 article in the British magazine Horizon. Portillo had not been present. Delgado says a photograph published in a newspaper on the 13th of October 1936, discovered in the National Library in 2018, shows Millán Astray and Unamuno calmly saying goodbye in the presence of the Bishop, with no visible tension. Delgado does not deny that a fierce verbal confrontation occurred; he argues only that the specific words attributed to Unamuno were Portillo's literary invention. Hugh Thomas, who was thirty when he wrote the book, had encountered the Portillo piece in a Horizon anthology and, according to Delgado, mistakenly treated it as a primary source.

• 7. Final Hours

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  After the October confrontation, Unamuno was removed as rector for the second time. He confided to the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis: "I am neither fascist nor Bolshevik. I am alone. Like Croce in Italy, I am alone." On the 21st of November he wrote to the Italian philosopher Lorenzo Giusso that the barbarism was unanimous and that a regime of terror existed on both sides.

  Unamuno died on the 31st of December 1936 under house arrest in Salamanca. The official cause was the inhalation of gases from a brazier during an interview with a visitor. No autopsy was performed, though one was legally required for a sudden death attributed to intracranial bleeding. His maid reported hearing two screams during the visit. Discrepancies were noted between the time of death recorded by the coroner and by the authorities.

  The visitor was Bartolomé Aragón. A theory advanced in a 2020 book suggests Aragón may have killed Unamuno, noting that he falsely claimed to be a former student, was a fascist militant with opposing political views, and had previously worked in Nationalist propaganda. The authors of that book have since clarified they did not defend the murder theory, as no new evidence supports it. Aragón and Unamuno had, in fact, a prior intellectual relationship, a detail known since 1936. The circumstances remain unresolved. Among Unamuno's final words on record was the letter to Giusso, written eighteen days before he died, condemning what he called the unanimous barbarism of the war.