Escuelas Mayores of the University of Salamanca

Behind the carved façade of the Escuelas Mayores lies the historic heart of the university. Around the inner courtyard were the classrooms of the higher faculties—law, theology, medicine, and philosophy. The Paraninfo, the university's assembly hall, is also here. In it, the rector opened the academic year, gathered the professors, and received official guests.

On October twelfth, nineteen thirty-six, Miguel de Unamuno—a writer and rector for life—occupied the chair in the Paraninfo. He was to lead the celebration of the Day of the Race, then a holiday of Spanish unity and ties with America. At the ceremony, he represented Francisco Franco, the leader of the rebel generals.

Unamuno had been given this role after a choice he already regretted. In the summer, he had supported the military uprising, hoping that the generals would set right the order of the Second Spanish Republic, which had disappointed him. The Republican government removed him from the rectorship, and the junta created by the rebels restored the post. Unamuno entered the Paraninfo as a man who owed his new position precisely to those he now wanted to oppose.

In his pocket was a letter from Enriqueta Carbonell. Her husband, Atiliano Coco, a Protestant pastor, schoolteacher, and friend of the rector, had been arrested by the rebels. Enriqueta asked Unamuno to find out what had happened to her husband and help him get out of prison. The rector had already tried to use his connections, but had not secured his release.

During the speeches, Unamuno took out the letter and began writing in pencil on its back. The speakers justified the war, spoke of enemies within the country, and attacked the Basques and Catalans. Unamuno, who was from Bilbao, wrote down the words “to conquer” and “to persuade,” called what was happening a fratricidal war, and recalled José Rizal—the Filipino writer whom the Spanish military shot for taking part in the movement against colonial rule.

When the rector rose and began to speak, General José Millán-Astray, founder of the Spanish Legion and one of the most prominent defenders of the uprising, interrupted him. Shouts and threats began in the hall. Unamuno left the Paraninfo on the arm of Carmen Polo, Franco's wife.

The familiar dialogue of this scene, in which Millán-Astray supposedly cries out for the death of the intelligentsia and Unamuno replies, “You will conquer, but you will not persuade,” was not recorded word for word. The rector's speech was improvised, local newspapers almost concealed the confrontation the next day, and the polished text appeared five years later in a work by Luis Portillo, who was not present at the ceremony. Witnesses and documents confirm the confrontation itself; the exact words cannot be reconstructed. Unamuno's genuine notes preserve only brief key words and the contrast between conquest and persuasion.

The consequences came faster than the legend took shape. The next day, the city council stripped Unamuno of his honorary posts. Two days later, the university council unanimously refused its own rector a vote of confidence. On October twenty-second, Franco signed a decree dismissing him; on the twenty-eighth, the document was published. Police surveillance was posted outside Unamuno's house. He almost stopped going out and died on December thirty-first of that same year.

Enriqueta's letter did not save Atiliano Coco. On the night of December eighth to ninth, he was taken out of prison and killed without trial; the place of his burial remained unknown.

The Paraninfo behind this façade still serves as the university's assembly hall. Only the chairman's table now stands against the opposite wall: in a photograph from nineteen thirty-six, Unamuno sits at the other end of the same room. And the letter covered in his writing is kept nearby, in the Unamuno House Museum.