El filólogo Pedro Martínez López: un libelista liberal imaginativo

Abstract

In 1830, the philologist Pedro Martinez Lopez was forced to go into exile in France for political reasons. In 1832, he published Representacion a Fernando VII, rey de Espana, a lampoon in which he made a whole string of accusations against the tyrant. At the end of the following year, he published Espana en 1833, al expirar Fernando VII, another lampoon in which he blamed the king's despotic reign for the country's disastrous situation and asserted that such abuses and injustices could only be remedied by re-establishing the Constitution of Cadiz of 1812. In 1834, he ceased to rail against his political enemies, changed strategy, and using his considerable imagination, wrote a kind of fable entitled Una noche en el infierno, vista entre suenos. With a mixture of humour and acid wit, it told of how all the devils in the Kingdom of Darkness, embracing the «sacred» cause of liberalism, vented their anger on the deceased Ferdinand and his followers, who were still in power. It would appear that the work was a success, since it was republished in 1836. In 1835, disillusioned with the tepid and conservative liberal regime of the Estatuto Real, Martinez Lopez wrote another story, Las Brujas en Zugarramurdi, in which different satanic creatures, this time sorceresses, take it upon themselves to defeat moderantismo and establish a progressive regime. After this, he ceased to publish lampoons and political parables and devoted himself to producing learned works, bringing out various dictionaries and grammars which were republished several times.