The Middle Ages: Bidache within Navarre

During the northward expansion of the kingdom of Navarre in the 13th century, which included the annexation of the Pays de Mixe, Bidache came under the sovereignty of the King of Navarre. At first this was somewhat ambiguous. On 22 September 1329, when Arnaud-Guillaume III, lord of Gramont, first paid homage to the King of Navarre for his castle of Bidache, it was stipulated that “if the castle should not be found to lie in Navarre, or if anyone should object, the pact would be void as regards him, but valid for the lord of Gramont”.

Thereafter the position appears clearer: the acts of homage repeated in 1385, 1409, 1429 and 1434 by later lords of Gramont carry no restrictive clause. After 1434, however, there is no further trace of any homage for Bidache to the King of Navarre. The status of the parish therefore remained for more than a century in a state of uncertainty carefully maintained by the Gramont family.

The establishment of the sovereignty

The key date in the history of the sovereignty of Bidache is 1570, and more precisely 21 October. On that day Antoine I de Gramont, acting in his capacity as mayor of Bayonne, declared before the city council the existence of a right of asylum for those wishing to flee the kingdoms of France and Navarre, and named in particular two categories of people who might have good reason to do so: wrongdoers and Jews.

The challenge of 1710

A serious challenge to that position came on 9 May 1710. Examining a case concerning Bidache, the attorney general of the Parlement of Navarre concluded that the Parlement had jurisdiction. The ruling handed down gave weight to those conclusions: without expressly adopting them, it opened an enquiry and ordered the judge of Bidache to appear before the Parlement to “answer the conclusions of the attorney general, who has claimed that the lordship of Bidache is situated in Navarre, that appeals may be made against what is decided and settled by the judges of that lordship, and that such appeals must be brought before the Parlement of Navarre”.

The Gramont family took the matter very seriously and immediately began proceedings against a ruling that called their claim to sovereignty into question. Memoranda were exchanged and the case was eventually brought before the Council of Regency.

It ended in a most unusual way. Historians studying the question in the 20th century found no trace whatsoever of any council ruling settling the dispute. Raymond Ritter offers a plausible explanation: no ruling was ever handed down at all. Legally heretical, this was nevertheless a skilful way of acknowledging the sovereign rights of the Duke of Gramont without risking a dangerous precedent.

The end of the sovereignty

The year 1789 passed without either the inhabitants of Bidache or the Duke of Gramont reacting to the potential consequences for their sovereignty of the reforms being considered by the Constituent Assembly.

On 4 January 1790, Bidache, which had not been represented at the Estates General, instructed a leading local figure, the lawyer Louis Perret, “to go to Paris to see the Duke of Gramont in order to learn whether the sovereignty of Bidache is to remain as it stands, and to see the National Assembly, in the event that, the sovereignty no longer existing, Bidache should form part of one of the recently created departments”.

This was leaving things rather late. The work of the committee responsible for the new administrative map of France was already well advanced, and there is no sign that the sovereignty of Bidache posed any problem for it.

On 4 March 1790 the department of the Basses-Pyrénées was officially constituted.

On 3 April, Antoine VII de Gramont replied to the community of local notables, reminding them of the exemption from taxes and charges that the sovereignty had secured for them, and of the care he had taken, like his predecessors, not to abuse his sovereign power. He told them that on constitutional matters he would defer to their wishes.

Perret expressed the town’s wish to be attached to the sovereignty of the Kingdom of France. Against the two principal attributes of Bidache’s sovereignty, namely the right to legislate in civil and criminal matters with justice rendered without appeal, and the right of asylum granted to Huguenots, Catholic officers and wrongdoers, he argued that Bidache had served as a refuge for criminals and as a staging post for the tobacco trade, while bearing a heavy taille and a tax on the sale of wine.

Before it had time to decide whether or not it wished to remain a sovereign entity, Bidache learned on 16 April of its attachment to France, on hearing a reading of the King’s letters patent on the division of the kingdom into departments, together with the decree setting out the new boundaries. Bidache had been annexed to the Basses-Pyrénées, where it became a canton seat, joined to the Labourd district of Ustaritz.

The sovereignty was extinguished for good.