Mystery surrounds the Basques, their language and their history. Much of this is because their tongue is older than the Indo-European from which all the other languages of Europe descended, and because the earliest Basque written texts do not emerge till the late Middle Ages, having been passed on orally from successive generations for millennia. Some of the mystery, it must be admitted, comes from the unwillingness of the Basques themselves to tell foreigners too much.Hardly had Basque self-awareness finally crystallised at the end of the nineteenth century than Francisco Franco, the “Caudillo”, launched his bid for power in Spain by a coup d’état. Then in 1936, with the assistance of Mussolini and Hitler, he unleashed a blitzkrieg which aimed at destroying Basqu