The work of Emilio La Parra on Fernando VII, Comillas de History Award.

vnyrox (9)in #history • 6 years ago

The historian Emilio La Parra, who had already published in Tusquets a political biography of Godoy, won yesterday the Comillas biography prize of the same publisher with a work on Fernando VII, called the Desired and considered by many the worst king in the history of Spain.

How are both things reconciled? "At the beginning of the war against Napoleon, Fernando has just gained access to the throne, and the Spaniards who oppose the emperor take him as a reference for that struggle, as the symbol that unites all the patriots.
At the moment this reference is needed and a very positive image of him is built, like an innocent prince, that image, promoted by all means of propaganda, is maintained during the war and quite some time after. There are liberals, even, who do not attribute him He, but his counselors, the persecutions he undertakes, that positive image ends up undoing himself with his actions in recent years, and ends hated by both liberals and ultras, "explains the historian on one of the aspects novelties of his book.

As for being the worst king in the history of Spain, La Parra does not dare to say so much, "but it was the worst of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries". Emilio La Parra agrees that the personality of the so-called felon king is complex. "His education was not bad, he had a bad teacher, Juan Escóiquiz, but others were better, the problem was his own character, he was very hypocritical, arrogant with the weak and submissive with the powerful, whether these were his parents Godoy or Napoleón.

Fernando VII made famous a phrase about how he wanted to eradicate the measures of the Cortes of Cádiz: remove them "from the middle of time." "Like any personalist, he tries to impose his will", explains Emilio La Parra, "and if something it contradicts it, even if it is time, it is erased.

That is typical of many tyrants, in that sense it is very modern. "Fernando VII was, perhaps, the most absolutist king, which is why La Parra resists qualifying him so as not to assimilate him to other absolutists who, at the end of the day, they submitted to certain political norms and limits. "What was tyrannical," he says. "He ruled in a personal capacity, imposing his will, in a way that his predecessors did not do, nor, of course, his successors, which were already constitutional.And he carried out a permanent sweep of all political dissidence, wherever he came from.

"He lived, like all contemporary kings, with the fear of literally losing his head - like his relative, Louis XVI, in the guillotine - and he, above all , with the fear of losing the throne, even at the hands of his father, with his parents he had a strained relationship, and the mother, Maria Luisa, complains in a letter that Fernando was not affable, grateful, and not He was a good person, as was his father.

Thanks for reading :)