France

The Maison Basque de Paris is the house of the young Basques of the post-war years, housemaids and waiters who put down a deposit on it without having the money, kept it going from 1956 on the rue Duban and in 2002 took it to Saint-Ouen, next to Paris. Before it, the Basques of the city already had places to meet.

Before the Maison: Eskualduna, Eskualzaleen Biltzarra and the fronton

When those young people arrived, Eskualduna had been running for forty years. It had been founded in 1912 by some thirty Basques, its first president was Doctor Iribarne, from La Bastide-Clairence, and it was devoted to mutual aid. It organised the Sunday evening dance in the salle de l’Horticulture, on the rue de Grenelle, where many couples met, and the “holiday trains”, which took Basque children to Iparralde at a reduced fare. Every All Saints’ Day it had a Mass said in Basque in the chapel of the Médaille miraculeuse, on the rue du Bac. Its 1925 list records 343 members, 204 of them from Zuberoa; in 1955 it had 1,200.²

The Basque language had its own association from 1933, when the Paris section of Eskualzaleen Biltzarra was founded. Since 1932 it had had a dance and song group that brought together Basques from both sides of the Bidasoa and which, after the bombing of Gernika in 1937, took the town’s name. From its circle came Elgar, the newspaper of the Basques of Paris, which began publication in 1934 and reappeared in November 1947.²

Pelota had its own space. In 1923 the City of Paris granted the Fédération Française de Pelote Basque the use of a plot on the quai Saint-Exupéry for sixty years, for a fronton, which was destroyed during the war, rebuilt, and in 1952 given the name Fronton Chiquito de Cambo.²

Two letters of 1952 and a laundry on the rue Duban

The Maison Basque began with two letters. In 1952 Jeanne Idiart, a housemaid, and Pierre Charriton, a waiter, each wrote separately to the chaplain of Eskualdun Gazteria, the Catholic youth movement of Iparralde, worried about the poor conditions in which the newcomers to Paris lived. Those letters led to retreats and gatherings. In 1953, at the Feast of Corpus Christi, the basilica of the Sacré-Cœur brought together 2,000 Basques, and that same year the Paris section of Eskualdun Gazteria was set up around the priest Piarres Charriton, who was studying at the Sorbonne.²

For their first meetings, those young domestic workers used the rooms lent to them by the lehendakari (president of the Basque Government) Aguirre at the Basque Government’s headquarters on the rue Singer. That is why, according to Camus Etchecopar, many regard those headquarters as the starting point of the Maison.²

At the beginning of 1955 they set about looking for a building. Through the parishes of Iparralde they gathered more than 2,000 addresses of Basques in Paris, and between 60% and 70% lived in the eighth, sixteenth and seventeenth arrondissements. At the end of June 1955 they put down a deposit on an old laundry at 10 rue Duban, in the sixteenth arrondissement, without having the money to pay for it.² The purchase and the building work were paid for with loans from the BNCI bank, which they finished repaying in 1965, from the diocese of Bayonne and from private individuals, and with the help of the Asociación de Amigos de la Maison Basque, created in 1956.²

The house opened its doors on 22 April 1956. On 17 May Eskualdun Gazteria, the owner of the building, gave up sole ownership: it changed its statutes and the association was renamed Pariseko Eskual Etxea, run by a committee that included the Basque associations of Paris and the chaplain. On 10 June it was inaugurated with the Bishop of Bayonne, who was welcomed by the Gernika choir.² The diocese of Bayonne appointed the first chaplain of the Basques of Paris, Abbé Auguste Larre, and the house’s chapel was inaugurated in March 1959.²

The Basques from the south and the refugees (1965-1983)

Between 1965 and 1983, according to Camus Etchecopar, the Maison went through its most active period, and it did so with new people. The young people of Iparralde were joined by Navarrese and by Basques from the south exiled for political reasons. For the refugees, the house organised French classes, and in 1973 and 1975 the dance groups Xiberotarrak and Garaztarrak were born, made up of people from Zuberoa and from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port.² The arrival in France of ETA militants as refugees and the Burgos trial of 1970 multiplied the debates about the refugees, who were received, according to the author, somewhere between solidarity and mistrust.²

Then the return began. In December 1979 the lehendakari Leizaola left Paris to go back to the Basque Country for good, and many refugees left after him.²³

Saint-Ouen (2002)

From 1983 onwards the Maison gradually lost attendance, and its members decided to sell the historic building. A committee visited more than forty premises and in 2000 chose a group of five buildings at 59 avenue Gabriel-Péri, in Saint-Ouen, next to Paris. The purchase was signed at the end of June 2002, and the same developer offered to buy the rue Duban building, which had housed the Basques since 1956.² According to euskalkultura.eus, the house moved in 2003, and in 2010 it had a hostel with 20 rooms and 30 beds for Basques under thirty.⁴

By then the house already had ties with the Basque Government. They had begun with the visit of the lehendakari Ardanza on 9 March 1994; the Maison entered the official register of Basque centres on 7 May 1996, and between 1994 and 2001 it received grants totalling 752,000 francs.²