The Black Revolution

Jon Nelson
Jan 17
6 min read

Updated: Jan 18

On August 8, 1971, a book by Lafferty received a rare notice in The New York Times Book Review. The review drew attention to the heady blend of “politics, poetry, [and] magic” in The Flame Is Green and noted the bright splashes of humor threaded through its moral symbolism. Unfortunately, the final two volumes of the Cosucin tetralogy remain unpublished. Taken as a whole, the Cosucin novels constitute a major work, worthy of being set alongside Argo and Green Tree. Until that triangle is fully available to all readers, Lafferty’s ambition as a writer won't be apprehended by many people.

The first Coscuin book follows Dana Coscuin, an Irishman recruited in 1845 into the service of the mysterious Count Cyril (sometimes styled Count Cyril Prasinos). Dana heads from Bantry Bay to Hendaye and into the Carlist hills in the first part of his adventure, moving between the Carlist “Black” traditionalists and the parasitic “Red” blight while groping toward an as-yet unformulated “Green Revolution.” After an entanglement with Elena Prado y Bosca—the “Muerte de Boscaje,” death-witch of the Red—he joins a select company of eccentric revolutionaries. This includes his mentor Malandrino Brume, the giant Kemper Gruenland, and the Sardinian Tancredi Cima. Their campaign carries them through the upheavals of 1848, moving from Paris to Kraków. There, Dana marries the brilliant revolutionary Catherine Dembinska. She is brutally murdered by Dana’s arch-nemesis, Ifreann Chortovitch, the Son of the Devil, and the father of Papadiabolus I and II from The Devil is Dead. Dana tracks Ifreann into the mountains. In a wonderfully written duel, he kills him and receives a single copper penny as his final reward, though later Coscuin material complicates just how final that killing is:

"Prendko, prendko, quickly, quickly!” the winter raven screamed, and Dana was onto the split second when the chalk ledge crumbled under the heavy forward-shifting foot of Ifreann. The big creature slipped on one foot and came down within reach, and Dana drove the rapier point under the leather lorica or breast shield. The big creature came all the way down, and the point went all the way through, protruding from the back. Ifreann lay at Dana’s feet now. He rattled in his throat, he gushed dark blood, he twitched; then he was silent and motionless.

Today I want to think a little about the meaning of Black Revolution and Carlism, and ask why Lafferty himself was thinking about it in the 1960s and early 1970s. One of the curiosities of The Flame Is Green is that it takes place in a lull between the first and second Carlist Wars of the 19th century in Spain, setting up a choice for Dana. Will Dana be sucked into the inflexibly traditionalist Black Revolution, which Lafferty respects but sees as, in some ways, unsuited to the times? The Carlist cause is one of reaction. Will he betray both the Black and the Green Revolution?

Dana fell philosophically. That is bad. He fell carnally. That is also bad . . . Dana Coscuin tried to have it both ways. He couldn’t. He should have stood firm in the first statement [that there is a God]; that has enough flesh in it, but not flesh alone. Elena was not of ordinary flesh. She was of flesh gone absolutely fetishistic, and with no place for any other central thing . . . He traded off his soul philosophically, and adhered, by silent assent to the last statement rather than the first.

What will it even mean for Dana to become a revolutionary of the Green Revolution? One of the most important aspects of The Flame Is Green is that it says goodbye to the Black Revolution. The Black Revolution of Spain is Lafferty’s depiction of the most principled outright rejection of liberalism, and the Black Revolution is, in this case, Carlism.

Lafferty’s Grolier set depicted Carlism as “Reaction Triumphant in the Latin States.” Its pages are certainly worth reading as a quick primer for anyone who wants to read or reread The Flame Is Green, as is the Carlist material in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s entry on Spain. That would give a reader some context for what Lafferty is doing. Suffice it to say that Carlism is a traditionalist, legitimist political movement. It was rooted in a dynastic dispute over the succession to the Spanish throne after 1833.

If you want the absolutely bone-simple version: after 1833, a dynastic dispute broke out because Ferdinand VII changed the succession rules (the 1830 Pragmatic Sanction) to allow his daughter Isabella to inherit. That stole the throne from his brother Don Carlos. Carlists backed Don Carlos as the legitimate heir and, over time, the movement became a broader traditionalist rejection of liberal constitutionalism in favor of a Catholic monarchist order that defended tradition and regional fueros. Its strongest support was concentrated in particular regions and rural milieus, not uniformly across Spain.

Carlism itself persisted into the 20th century and still existed when Lafferty’s The Flame Is Green appeared in 1971, though by then it was fragmented and far from its earlier mass strength. Under Franco it survived in divided currents. This included small pro-regime and oppositional strands. In the late Franco and early transition period, the Carlist Party (founded 1970) adopted a left-wing, self-management socialist line very much at odds with the anti-socialist Lafferty. Franco’s death in 1975 opened a new phase marked by legalization (1977), reorganization, fragmentation, and long-term decline in broad influence.

Carlism was being discussed by Catholics in the 1960s. It might have been on Lafferty's mind because the topic sometimes came up in the 1960s pages of National Review. Lafferty read The National Review, and he submitted a poem to it. William F. Buckley Jr.'s first language was Spanish. He taught Spanish for a while at Yale and had been a CIA agent at the Mexico City station. Brent Bozell self-identified as a Carlist and moved to Spain. Hilaire Belloc’s spiritual son, the brilliant and unusual Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, thought of himself as a Carlist. All were influential Catholic thinkers in their own ways.

In Citizen of Rome (1980), Wilhelmsen gives a sense of how Carlism was being thought about. He calls Carlism a “lyrically Catholic” and quixotic traditionalist movement, and he sees it as the last vital remnant of medieval Christendom in the West, which fits Lafferty's depiction of Carlist reaction as quixotic. It was centered in the Spanish province of Navarre. Wilhemsen thinks it is epitomized by the red-bereted Requeté volunteers who fought in the 1936 “Crusade” against Communism. Like Belloc, Wilhelmsen has a philosophical view of the Crusades. Finally, for Wilhelmsen, Carlism has two central planks: an uncompromising allegiance to the “Sovereignty of Christ the King” (Christ the King was also the name of Lafferty’s parish) and the legitimate monarchical line, in opposition to the liberal state.

In this regard, one should remember the sermon of the Black Pope in The Flame Is Green:

“For the Carlist Thing is the King Thing, the Bold Thing, the Sky Thing. It is the tree with some of its branches in our hills and with its roots in Heaven. Every King is really a King Charles, since Charles means King. But no King will rule us on Earth unless he is in the image of the King Himself.”

I would not be surprised if Lafferty had read Wilhelmsen on Carlism in National Review. For Wilhelmsen, the Carlist movement—because Carlism, for him, is not over—is a profound rejection of modern secularism and rationalism. This polical philosophy is Wilhemsen’s. It favors an organic, familial political order and defends local liberties (fueros) against the centralized power of the modern state. As he later wrote in Citizen of Rome, its “hatred for Nazi paganism was only matched by its hatred for Communist atheism,” which positioned Carlism as a model of “Incarnational Politics,” a sacral way of life in which the Cross is a Sword and political action is an extension of religious faith. In this way, Carlism remained alive in the 1960s as an intellectual struggle. Lafferty rejects it by having Dana move toward the Green Revolution.

For anyone interested, I include two interesting resources for understanding all this. The first is Among the Carlists, which belongs later to the century than Dana’s adventures in Spain, but which might have been a source used by Lafferty. It is a first-hand depiction of 19th-century Carlism from the 1870s. In it, one meets an Irishman imprisoned in a castle.

The other is Juan Donoso Cortés's Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism. Cortés (1809–1853) was a Spanish diplomat and conservative political theorist. Early in his life, he had been a rampant champion of liberalism. His later critique of nineteenth-century liberalism held that only Catholic moral authority could avert social and political collapse. Known today for his influence on Carl Schmitt (Schmitt admired his thought), Cortés also shaped twentieth-century Carlism. Wihelmsen wrote about this several times. The Catholicism–Liberalism–Socialism continuum in Cortés articulates a political imaginary very close to that of The Flame is Green, before the Green Revolution opens up possibilities for Dana. Because it is the quintessential form of Catholic reaction in the Catholic imagination of Lafferty’s time, and because Dana rejects it, this is another reason not to label Lafferty reactionary.