In the past, save in such periods of international crisis as 1914–19, neither Carlism as a cause nor Carlists as individuals had displayed more than the most general interest in foreign affairs. The insularity of Spanish politics in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was exaggerated in Carlism's case by the peculiarity of being a mass legitimist movement without close counterparts abroad. Catholic universalism, devotion to the idea of hispanidad, and sympathy for foreign legitimist causes lent traces of internationalism to the Traditionalist credo, without seeming to jolt Carlists out of their overwhelmingly inward-looking preoccupations. Ironically, those Carlists most affected by general European currents were the Pretenders themselves, who proved to be continually susceptible to ‘liberal’ and ‘Europeanizing’ influences.

During the five years of the Second Republic, all this changed. If the cataclysmic events of the depression era throughout Europe and beyond were not enough to arouse Carlist interest, then perhaps what did guarantee its arousal was the heightened consciousness of foreign affairs resulting from the wider diffusion of international news via agencies, radio and the cinema. What is inescapable is that during the early 1930s, and more particularly from the start of 1933 onwards, Carlist concern for the fate of Spain came increasingly to be expressed in terms of a broader European or even worldwide political crisis, in which left and right were seen to be hurtling towards a collision, crushing democracy between them.