Álvaro Vega I Córdoba, (EFE) the assets of the Spanish Crown after the departure of Amadeo from Savoy.
This was revealed by the historian Gonzalo J. Herreros Moya (Córdoba, 1986) in his admission speech at the Royal Academy of Córdoba as a corresponding academic in which he addresses the figure of this Cordovan. That he “would come to represent a capital role in Spanish republicanism in the next thirty years.”
For Enrique Pérez de Guzmán, Marquis consort of Santa Marta, “a position is created that did not exist and that no one had ever thought existed in the history of Spain,” Herreros said in an interview with EFE. “That it was someone who had to manage, inventory, recount. And begin to carry out a protection program for all the immense and extremely rich patrimony that the Crown had”.
“So the Republic has the idea that this has to be protected. That it cannot be damaged and cannot be the result of looting and they only trust it to make a complete count of all those assets. And start to put them in value ”, has assured the historian and professor from Córdoba.
The Government delegate for Heritage was in office from March 2, 1873 until he finally resigned on August 6 of the same year. Five months before the military coup that ended the first Spanish republican experience.
An ephemeral initiative but with value
In the opinion of Herreros, the ephemeral nature of the First Republic made that idea not have much significance. Although also “you have to be aware that that new system was concerned that all those assets were not looted or lost. But that it could be taken advantage of from the national point of view of the heritage and even of the culture”.
His services to republicanism did not end here. “Once his political idea declines, he has a fundamental mission and it was as a journalist.” First as a collaborator of two republican newspapers and, later, by founding in 1884 and “maintaining at his expense, that is, a lost fund, a newspaper called ‘La República’. With a clearer title, impossible”.
The newspaper, under the subtitle “Diario Federal” and the ideological inspiration of his friend Pi y Margall, “was one of the few references that remained from the time of republicanism in Spain.” An attempt to “keep alive the flame of republicanism.”
Something that it does, Herreros stressed, “aware that the media, specifically the written press, are one of the few remaining bastions of dissemination. And of support to the republican principles”.
counterintuitive tour
As Herreros explained, his interest in the character arose from studying the history of the Guzmán and Golfín family. When he discovered the hitherto practically unprecedented figure of Enrique Pérez de Guzmán. He was born in Córdoba in 1826 and graduated in Law from the University of Seville at the age of 23 (1849). With a “seems counterintuitive journey” towards republicanism.
“Actually he wasn’t the only noble. There were some more out there, but precisely what he boasts of is that, perhaps with a slightly sui generis reading, the nobility had been the counterweight for centuries of the abuses of royalty ”, he specified.
For the character, “he is not a republican despite being noble. Rather, in his ideology he says that he is a republican, precisely because the nobleman, in his patriotic sentiment and his defense of the values of the Spanish nation, opposes tyrants. And if the tyrant is a king, then he is against the king ”.
This inspiration seems to come from a trip he made in the early 1850s. After being admitted to the Real Maestranza in Seville, by Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, a country where he made contact “with the republican and socialist ideology”.
Relationship with Pi and Maragall
This drew an “ideological bridge” that would lead him to make contact with Pi y Margall once he returned to Spain. With whom he forged an intimate friendship that he would maintain until his death, according to the correspondence that is kept in his personal file. She is guarded at the Tatiana Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno Foundation, great-granddaughter of the character, located in Cáceres.
As he has clarified, “he understands the nobility as a national patriotic responsibility. And the king is above that, even if the king is an enemy.”
“He feels Elizabeth II as an enemy. And if it has to be overthrown and the Republic is the best system, then let it be”, affirms the historian.
At the time of his death in Madrid in 1902, Enrique Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno y Gallego was a “convinced republican”. And “one of the last bastions of that first Spanish republicanism, totally convinced of its principles.” EFE