Alfredo Brañas Menéndez (Carballo 1859 – Santiago de Compostela 1900), who from 1888 held the chair of political economy and public finances at the University of Santiago de Compostela, was the political and intellectual leader of the traditionalist Catholic branch of Galician regionalism. This school of early Galicianist thought clashed more and more forcefully with the prevailing liberal sector, led by Manuel Murguía, that championed modernization. Catholic, anti-modernist and anti-liberal, they celebrated rural-based communitarianism; in addition, their marked anti-parliamentarism translated into a defence of corporate, rather than electoral representation; their monarchism was traditionalist and anti-centralist, invoking the tradition of local privileges and freedoms. Brañas targeted his political programme mainly at the petty rural nobility and the traditional clergy.
Brañas’s radical opposition to modernity also determined his economic views; witness writings such as A crise económica na época presente e a descentralización rexional (“The economic crisis in the present times and regional decentralization”, 1893). His hatred of capitalism (barely incipient in Galicia at that time), was laid down in detail in various postulates, such as the return to pre-industrial guilds (which had been abolished in Spain in 1836) as a “natural entity between the family and the State”. In Fundamentos del derecho de propiedad (“Fundamentals of property law”, 1887) or Curso de hacienda pública (“Course in public finances”, 1896), he equated feudal dues and taxes, criticized the confiscation of Church assets and champions pre-capitalist forms of land ownership. Brañas was always radically opposed to the industrialization of Galicia, a land he imagined as a happy, uncontaminated Arcadia based on traditional agriculture and crafts.
Brañas’s reactionary, Catholic Galicianism invokes the classical opposition between an idyllic Gemeinschaft (a rustic, small-scale, traditional, stable and faith-based community) as opposed to an alienating Gesellschaft (an urban, large-scale, modernizing and conflict-ridden society); its values throughout his writings invoke, accordingly, a foundational myth that was starkly different from Murguía’s Celticism: that of a medieval Golden Age.
This medievalist Golden Age-myth sees political Galicianism as a fence against Spanish and European modernity and its evils: secularization, capitalism, urbanization, liberalism, parliamentarism, etc. Accordingly, the self-government model that Brañas proposed includes a traditional monarchy and regional privileges following local legal customs. As he gradually moved in the direction of Carlism, his elaborate projects to decentralize the Spanish State gradually evolved from modest administrative regionalism (O rexionalismo, 1889), to the monarchist, anti-parliamentary Organización do Reino de Galicia (“Organization of the Kingdom of Galicia”, 1889).
In 1893, Brañas attended the Catalan Jocs Florals in Barcelona; he subsequently published articles on Galician and Catalan regionalism in the Barcelonese periodical La Renaixença.
The tension between Brañas’s traditionalist Catholic sector, based in Santiago de Compostela, and the liberal trend, led by Murguía and mainly based in A Coruña, developed into a permanent crisis and the eventual split of the two most important organizations of turn-of-the-century Galician regionalism: the Asociación Regionalista Gallega (“Galician Regionalist Association”, 1890-94) and regionalist leagues (1894-1907). For all his intellectual prestige, brilliant oratory and moral authority, Brañas’s influence waned after his early death in 1900. The uneven economic modernization of Spain and Galicia and the gradual integration of the lower levels of Galician nobility into the political system of the Restoration eventually left traditionalist-Catholic Galicianism without a target audience.
Brañas is buried in the Galician Pantheon in Santiago de Compostela, where he died in 1900.
