Basque, member of a people who live in both Spain and France in areas bordering the Bay of Biscay and encompassing the western foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. In the late 20th century probably about 850,000 true Basques lived in Spain and 130,000 in France; as many as 170,000 Basques may live in emigrant communities outside Europe, mostly in South America and the United States. In Spain their home is the comunidad autónoma (“autonomous community”) of the Basque Country, which includes the provincias of Álava, Guipúzcoa, and Vizcaya (Biscay); there are also some Basques in Navarra (Navarre). In France, Basques are the chief element of the population in the département of Pyrénées-Atlantiques; the area mainly occupied by Basques is called informally the Pays Basque (Basque Country). In physique the Basques are not notably different from the other peoples of western Europe; their language, however, is not Indo-European (see Basque language).
The land inhabited by the Basques has a mild and damp climate and is largely hilly and wooded. It contains mines of iron ore, which early on favoured the development of industries, particularly shipbuilding. The Basques traditionally farmed small holdings of bottom land and carefully tended slopes of grass, which they cut by hand and fed to stabled cows. Apple orchards and mountainous sheep pastures were also important to their economy. The farmhouses are loosely grouped into villages or are scattered over the lower slopes. The household (including buildings, farm, and family) was an entity of great permanence that was formerly defended by a traditional law of inheritance which ensured the descent of the property intact to a single heir or heiress. Traditional Basque culture therefore revolved around this individual farmstead, called the caserío, the isolation of which resulted in a strong sense of family kinship among its occupants.
Besides being farmers of small acreages and shipbuilders, the Basques were traditionally seafarers. Basques played a leading part in the colonization of the New World, sailing with the conquistadors and being among the first to exploit the whaling grounds of the Bay of Biscay and the cod fisheries off Newfoundland. The Basques’ ethnic solidarity and their position astride the Franco-Spanish frontier also made smuggling one of their traditional occupations. The Basques have a strong allegiance to Roman Catholicism. They were not converted to Christianity until the 10th century, however, and, although they are now among the most observant of Spanish Catholics, animism survives in their folklore.
Traditional Basque culture has declined with the pronounced urban and industrial development of the region, and emigration to France and the Americas has sharply reduced the population living in caseríos. In most of the larger industrial towns, not only Basque customs but also the Basque language tend to be lost. Basque is still spoken in remote inland mountain areas, but in the late 20th century, virtually all Basques spoke French or Spanish, whether or not they spoke Basque.
The early history of the Basques remains a subject for speculation, but Roman authors record the presence of the tribe of Vascones in lands corresponding roughly to the province of Navarra. They appear to have resisted the Visigoths, the Franks, the Normans, and, on occasion, the Moors, who occupied the valley of the Ebro. It was the Basques, not the Moors, as the Chanson de Roland relates, who cut the rear guard of Charlemagne’s army to pieces at the Battle of Roncesvalles in ad 778. The territories of the Basques had been incorporated into the kingdom of Navarre by the 10th century, and by the end of the political turmoil of the Middle Ages, the provinces of Alava, Biscay, and Guipuzcoa had become united with Castile and Aragon. However, in both Spain and France the Basques retained a large measure of local autonomy and privileges in matters of trade, taxation, and military service. These privileges were incorporated in bodies of traditional Basque law known as the fueros, or fors, which determined the rights of the Basques’ popular assemblies and their rules of inheritance. The Basques showed a fierce attachment to their autonomous status, and in Spain the state’s attempts to encroach upon their local privileges prompted the Basques in the 1830s to support the cause of Don Carlos, the conservative pretender to the Spanish throne, with disastrous results. They similarly supported the unsuccessful Carlist rebellion of the 1870s, and as a punishment the government finally abolished the fueros, though the Basques managed to retain some degree of local autonomy.
The advent of the Spanish Republic in 1931 divided the political aspirations of the Basques: Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, and, to a certain extent, Álava were prepared to work for a status of relative autonomy within the republic, and for this reason they remained loyal to it in spite of its anti-Catholic policy. Navarra, on the other hand, was eager to see the republic overthrown and furnished one of the strong points of the Nationalist rebellion in 1936 and some of its best Carlist troops. The city of Bilbao, which had always been a stronghold of liberalism against the Carlists, became at the same time the centre of republican government and also of Basque nationalism. The fighting lasted until September 1937 and outside Spain is chiefly remembered for the bombing, supposedly by German aircraft, of Guernica, the traditional assembly place of the provincia of Vizcaya and a symbol of the Basque nation in Nationalist eyes. After the war, many Basques went into exile as Francisco Franco’s government abolished the Basques’ special privileges.
After the death of Franco and especially after the establishment of the liberal Spanish monarchy in 1975, the Basques engaged in vigorous demonstrations for local autonomy, which the Spanish government granted in some measure in 1978–79. The increased freedoms and home rule, however, did not satisfy the more militant separatists, such as the hard-line “military” wing of the Euzkadi Ta Azkatasuna (ETA; Basque for “Basque Homeland and Liberty”), a terrorist liberation organization seeking Basque self-determination and secession from Spain. The Basques thus continued on an unsettled course in their relations with the dominant Spaniards.