The new novel by José Calvo Poyato narrates those few but intense months of the First Spanish Republic

El Año de la República (The Year of the Republic), when Spain was fighting two wars

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Four presidents in barely eleven months succeeded each other at the helm of the seen and unseen First Spanish Republic, the first great attempt at radical change in Spanish society. That 1873 - next year will be the 150th anniversary - was a period as hard as it was intense. Spain was fighting two simultaneous wars: the third Carlist war and the war in Cuba, too much for an exhausted Treasury despite having sold practically all its mining wealth to foreign companies and having invented all kinds of taxes to measure the Spanish people's ribs.

"A short but exciting period in our history, the time of great deputies such as Castelar and Salmerón, giants of oratory who are missed today", declares the historian José Calvo Poyato, author of " El Año de la República" (ed. Harper Collins, 638 pages). He warns us that what we have in our hands is a historical novel, which implies fidelity to the events and a significant dose of creative freedom.

True to these premises, Calvo Poyato once again uses Fernando Besora, editor of the newspaper La Iberia, who already appeared in "Sangre en la calle del turco", revealing the ins and outs that led to the assassination of General Prim, as the protagonist of the novel. 

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On this occasion, it is from the hand of this editor of a Madrid newspaper with liberal political preferences, who comes from Reus and who will achieve his best professional dreams in the capital, that we learn about the tense and unstable political atmosphere of those months. A regular attendee at one of the many great gatherings in Madrid, the Café Suizo, Besora met writers such as Pérez Galdós, who that same year published "Trafalgar", the first of his "Episodios Nacionales", Valera, Zorrilla and Mesonero Romanos. Also with politicians such as Cánovas del Castillo, who for some time had been designing the architecture of the Bourbon monarchical Restoration in the person of the son of the dethroned Isabel II; the moderate federalist Pi y Margall, who was president of the Republic for a few weeks, and Miguel Morayta, also a republican and professor of history at the Central University. The latter was the protagonist of numerous episodes in which he used his teaching to refute historical falsifications that began to proliferate at that time, such as the supposed Catalan-Aragonese crown or the confusion over the lower purple stripe on the Republican flag. The discussion also featured the painter Casado del Alisal, the author of the painting depicting the surrender of the French after the battle of Bailén, and the first director of the Academy of Rome.

The sad departure of Estanislao Figueras

"Gentlemen deputies: I've had enough of all of us", the legend goes that the first president of that ephemeral republic, Estanislao Figueras, said to the Spanish political class as a whole, before leaving for Atocha station and taking the first train to Paris, never to return. That flight which, in the eyes of our many neighbours and not always friends, made us the laughing stock of Europe, is treated by the author as a curious anecdote, featuring a character devastated by the death of his wife, anxious to leave as soon as possible the hubbub and stridency of a Congress whose debates were more typical of a tavern where it was customary to make oneself heard by shouting. 

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As always seems to happen in Spain, the best heads and the most laudable desires are drowned out by envy, intransigence and outburst. Moderate voices are barely heard, rejecting the widespread conviction that the republic is synonymous with doing as one pleases. The novel rescues both the episodes of violence and assassinations "because the Republic has arrived" and the impeccable government programme presented by Pi y Margall: "Beyond drawing up a Constitution that defines us as a federal Republic, my programme is based on five pillars: to put an end to the war that, in certain provinces of Spain, sustains the most recalcitrant absolutism [the third Carlist war]. To carry out the separation of Church and State, because in a modern society it is not admissible that the Church should have a monopoly of beliefs. We will return to the town councils the municipal property of which they were deprived by disentailment. We will bring to the House for its approval, with immediate effect, a law to abolish slavery in our overseas provinces [Cuba and Puerto Rico], a scourge that we cannot and must not tolerate. As you know, slavery was abolished in the peninsular territories, as well as in the Balearic and Canary archipelagos in 1837, although slaves no longer existed because they were seized by the State a little over a century ago and freed. And we will also work to protect women and children in the world of work". A programme that no one in their right mind would stand in the way of, but which found in the comecuras, the overseas landowners, mainly Catalans, the sanctimonious and the cantonalist rebels the greatest and worst opposition to Spain's rejoining the train of modernity in the world, from which it had been excluded at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.

Madrid experienced with intensity and fear all the events that unfolded like a torrent since Amadeo I left in bitterness and convinced that Spain was an ungovernable country whose main enemies were also Spanish, which did not prevent the capital from being a hotbed of popular passions, which exploded in the bullfighting rivalry between Frascuelo and Lagartijo, among many other polarisations. In that year, in addition to the Frascuelistas and the Lagartijistas, the most intransigent republicans, who advocated the prohibition of bullfighting, made their presence felt. They succeeded at least then in delaying the Feria de Madrid, and, above all, in overturning the only ritual in which Spain failed to live up to its well-deserved reputation for never starting anything, absolutely nothing, neither shows nor public services, on time.

Also, in the most intellectual and refined circles, there was speculation about the authorship of the theft of several incunabula from the National Library, including a priceless 15th century edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, a plot whose investigation will form one of the pivots on which this splendid novel is based.  
   

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