Ramiro de Maeztu, the black sheep of ’98: War of Morocco and national regeneration (1909-1924)

Abstract

The aim of this work is to know the pivotal arguments of the Africanist reflection of Ramiro de Maeztu, the most important ideologist of the Spanish right-wing policy in the twentieth century. Cosmopolitan, iconoclast and with a hazardous life, he wrote a lot about the Moroccan hornet’s nest. In fact, Morocco and the Africanists played a main role in articulating their conservative thinking. With widely spread and uncompiled journalistic articles, Maeztu went from bitterness to nationalist exaltation in a context of increasing hatred with the long-lasting war in Africa. Heterodox thinker and vocational debater, he defended in 1909 the injustice of the Riff war and criticized the aggressive policy of Antonio Maura as well as its repressive practices peninsular. However, up to 1921, he showed himself a strong supporter of the Spanish presence in North Morocco and empathized with the principles of the Africanist military, heeling progressively towards the defence of the Catholic traditionalism and vitalism as key to national regeneration.