The Requeté (; , ) was a Carlist organization, at times with paramilitary units, that operated between the mid-1900s and the early 1970s, though exact dates are not clear.
The Requeté formula differed over the decades, and according to its changes the history of the movement falls into several phases: 1) heterogeneous youth organisation (mid-1900s to mid-1910s); 2) urban street-fighting squads (mid-1910s to early 1920s); 3) dormant structure with no particular direction (early 1920s to early 1930s); 4) paramilitary party militia (1931–1936); 5) army shock units (1936–1939); 6) party branch in-between youth and ex-combatant organisation (1940s–1950s); 7) internal "order of the faithful" (1960s).
The Requeté played a major role in Spanish history in early months of the Civil War, when its units were critical for ensuring Nationalist advantage on some key frontline sections. It is not clear whether there is any Requeté network operational today.
Background
Apart from academic associations, until the end of the 19th century there were no youth organisations in Spain. They started to emerge in the early 1900s as branches of various political movements; in 1903, a first youth socialist group appeared in Bilbao and in 1906 Federación de Juventudes Socialistas staged its national congress. In 1904 the Basque nationalists set up Juventud Vasca. The same year in Barcelona the radical republicans founded Juventud Republicana, operating under a colloquial name of "jóvenes bárbaros"; in 1911 they formed Federación de Juventudes Radicales. In the early 1910s youth conservative Maurista groups started to emerge. At that time also non-political organizations began to appear; the first Boy Scouts group was recorded in 1911, in its Catalanized version as "Exploradores de Barcelona" born in 1912. Though in the early 20th century there were already various sporting, tourist, or other leisure associations operational in Spain, they were oriented towards young adult males and were not specifically intended to group minors.
The first Carlist youth formations started to emerge in the early 1900s, but their origins are highly unclear. Groups named Batallones de la Juventud were recorded in Madrid (1902) and Barcelona (1903) when staging marches and parades, apparently intended to demonstrate prowess of Traditionalism and perhaps also to intimidate political enemies. Some scholars see these initiatives not as part of freshly born political mobilization among the urban youth, but rather as continuation of the old Carlist "tradition of direct action". They claim that "abortive resumption of violence at the turn of the century" – i.e. a series of minor disturbances, staged mostly in Catalonia in 1900 – as their important consequence produced loose "armed squads of Carlists", which engaged in petty urban violence during the following years. These gangs were easily suppressed by forces of order, yet their emergence demonstrated a new phenomenon: mostly urban Carlist militancy, independent of official movement structures and oriented towards street violence.
It is not clear whether birth of Juventud Carlista, a party youth organisation, was supposed to take emerging violence under control or was rather an attempt to institutionalize and enhance the violent strategy. Its first branch was set up at unspecified time in Madrid; since 1903 the organization operated in Barcelona and proved particularly dynamic in the urban Catalan milieu. It soon turned out that Catalonia in general and Barcelona in particular by far outpaced other regions in terms of mobilization of Carlist youth. At that time the region was rapidly undergoing massive social transformation, turning from a mountainous rural area to a region dominated by the industrialized, urban coastal belt; profound social changes proved fertile soil for growth of new urban phenomena. Mushrooming and loosely-organized groups of Juventud engaged in military drills; they also got increasingly involved in street clashes with hit-squads related to Left-wing politics, especially the Radicals and the Anarchists.
Emergence (1907)