Ramiro de Maeztu
Maeztu in 1934
Ambassador to Argentina
In office February 1928 – February 1930
Member of the Cortes
In office 1933–1936
Seat L of the Real Academia Española
In office 30 June 1935 – 29 October 1936
Preceded by	Cipriano Muñoz
Succeeded by	Eugenio Montes [es]
Personal details
Born	Ramiro de Maeztu y Whitney (1875-05-04)4 May 1875 Vitoria, Spain
Died	29 October 1936(1936-10-29) (aged 61) Madrid, Spain
Political party	Patriotic Union National Monarchist Union Spanish Renovation

Ramiro de Maeztu y Whitney (May 4, 1875 – October 29, 1936) was a prolific Spanish essayist, journalist and publicist. His early literary work adscribes him to the Generation of '98. Adept to Nietzschean and Social Darwinist ideas in his youth, he became close to Fabian socialism and later to distributism and social corporatism during his spell as correspondent in London from where he chronicled the Great War. During the years of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship he served as Ambassador to Argentina. A staunch militarist, he became at the end of his ideological path one of the most prominent far-right theorists against the Spanish Republic, leading the reactionary voices calling for a military coup. A member of the cultural group Acción Española, he spread the concept of "Hispanidad" (Spanishness). Imprisoned by Republican authorities after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was killed by leftist militiamen during a saca in the midst of the conflict.

Early life and career

Ramiro de Maeztu y Whitney was born on May 4, 1875, in Vitoria, the capital of Alava province. He was the son of Manuel de Maeztu Rodriguez, a Cuban engineer and landowner born in Cienfuegos with ancestry from Navarre. While in Paris, he had met his mother, Juana Whitney, born in Nice and daughter of a British diplomat, when she was 16 years old.

He was among the young Spanish intellectuals deeply affected by their country's humiliating defeat in the Spanish–American War of 1898, along with José Martínez Ruiz ("Azorín"), Pío Baroja and others forming the literary Generation of '98.^[1] His first collection of essays was published in 1898 under the name Hacia otra España ("Towards a Different Spain").

An early advocate of socialism,^[2] he became disillusioned by the Great War while he was serving as the London correspondent for several Spanish newspapers and travelled in France and Germany.

Move to right

After returning to Spain, Maeztu rejected many of his friends and argued that human reason alone was not enough to solve social problems, and he argued for the importance of strong authority and tradition rooted in the Roman Catholic Church. Those ideas were embodied in his 1916 book, Authority, Liberty, and Function in the Light of the War, first published in English and later in Spanish as La Crisis del Humanismo (1919).

Maeztu became one of the most prominent defenders of the regime of Miguel Primo de Rivera and called for Spain to "recover its 16th-century sense of Roman Catholic mission".^[3] In 1926, his literary essays were published in Don Quijote, Don Juan y La Celestina, and in 1928, he served as Spanish ambassador to Argentina.

In 1930, he joined the National Monarchist Union, the successor party to Primo de Rivera's Patriotic Union, along other defenders of the dictatorship such as the son of the dictator José Antonio and the former ministers José Calvo Sotelo and Eduardo Callejo de la Cuesta.^[4]

Along with Pedro Sainz Rodríguez and others, Maeztu founded the monarchist political movement Acción Española in 1931.^[5] In 1934, his final published book was written, Defensa de la hispanidad ("In Defense of Spanishness"), which advocated "a return to pure Spanishness" and strongly condemned liberalism and the French Revolution's slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity", which he countered by his own motto, duty, hierarchy, and humanity. He thought of Spanishness as a spiritual world that united Spain and its former colonies by the Spanish language and Catholicism, with rationalism and democracy being supposedly alien to the Hispanic ethos.

Since 1932, he made it constant in several articles for Acción Española, La Nación and the ABC newspaper, his admiration for Adolf Hitler, also showing himself to be a supporter of the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party. Also from the pages of ABC, he came to express his desire that a nationalist movement similar to Hitler's would triumph in Spain to confront democracy and Marxism, asking the extremist José María Albiñana to lead the project.^[6]

Death and legacy

On October 29, 1936, Maeztu was executed by Republican soldiers in the early days of the Spanish Civil War near Madrid.^[7] These last words are attributed to him: "You do not know why you kill me, but I know why I'm dying: for your children to be better than you!"^[8] His political thoughts had a profound influence on the Chilean historian Jaime Eyzaguirre.^[9]

His younger sister was the Spanish educator and feminist, María de Maeztu, who founded the Residencia de Señoritas and the Lyceum Club in Madrid, and his younger brother was the painter Gustavo de Maeztu, who has a museum named after him in the Palace of the Kings of Navarre in Estella, Spain.

The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset dedicated his book Meditations on Quixote (1914) to Maeztu — "A Ramiro de Maeztu, con un gesto fraternal."^[10]

Works

• (1899). Hacia otra España
• (1911). La Revolución y los Intelectuales
• (1916). Inglaterra en Armas
• (1919). La Crisis del Humanismo
• (1920). Del Espíritu de los Vascos
• (1926). Don Quijote, Don Juan y La Celestina
• (1934). Defensa de la Hispanidad
• (1935). La Brevedad de la Vida en la Poesía Lírica Española
• Álvarez Chillida, Gonzalo (2002). El Antisemitismo en España. La imagen del judío (1812-2002). Madrid: Marcial Pons. ISBN 978-84-95379-49-8.

Works in English translation