The war was also very significant as it placed
Carlism at the centre of Spanish political history.
Against such stirrings of modernization in Spain, what chance did the "feudal soul" of
Carlism have?
His broken existence thus questions the viciousness of war, the ignorance of martial domination, and the disenchantment with
Carlism. Cara-rajada (which literally means "cracked face") signifies a tragic residue of the "Good Cause," the novel's unforgiving lash at the pretentious nobility of the Carlists.
His numerous books include Spanish
Carlism and Polish Nationalism: The Borderlands of Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries (2003); and After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Relations in the Wake of World War II (2003).
To understand Opus Dei and the Catholic Right agenda, we need to understand Spanish "
Carlism", "...
These tensions were now triggered not only by the coexistence of disparate ideologies such as Falangism and
Carlism, but also by differing responses to the socio-economic changes consequent on the abandonment of autarky and the process of industrialization initiated by the Opus Dei technocrats' Plan de Estabilizaci on of 1959.
Nevertheless, the Buckley circle was heavily Catholic and included his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, an American follower of Spanish
Carlism (the Carlists were the Catholic answer to the American Likudniks).
I refer to its Carlist setting and subject matter, which make this novel a bridge between the Sonatas and the Carlist War trilogy published between 1908 and 1909, Right from the first description at Carlos VII in the church of San Juan, the narrator exhibits an allegiance to the Pretender that is no less effective for having an aesthetic basis an origin acknowledged explicitly in a well-known passage in which Bradomin confesses that he has always found fallen majesty more attractive than majesty enthroned, and that he defends tradition on aesthetic grounds, seeing in
Carlism the solemn charm of the great cathedrals.