El legado de la Ilustración en Hombres buenos de Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze how Arturo Pérez-Reverte claims the legacy of the Enlightenment in his historical novel Hombres buenos (2015). The history of two members of the Real Academia Española, in charge of travelling to Paris in the hopes of obtaining all the volumes of the Encyclopedia and bringing them to Spain, allows Pérez-Reverte to create an original account of eighteenth-century Spain. Pérez-Reverte belongs to an intellectual tradition that depicts the Hispanic Enlightenment as inexistent, incomplete, insufficient, or unoriginal. At the same time, however, he keeps his distance from such tradition, by questioning the consensual image of a civilized and enlightened France, and by showing that Spaniards also participated in the creation and dissemination of the Enlightenment. This paper also analyzes how the fictitious account of the eighteenth century is nor only a defense of enlightened Spaniards, but also a way to express desires for the twenty-first century, especially regarding the political and linguistic unity of Spain.