Un demòcrata heterodox, federalista i devot del magnetism

Abstract

The aim of this article is to elaborate a biographical story of Juan Antonio Llinas i de Ortiz which remarks two unknown aspects of his life: firstly, the confidence he had in the romantic formulation of science in an emotional logic as the magnetism and, secondly, the conviction that a federal republic was the only regime that would have ensured the democracy in Spain. His confidence in a federal democracy was the same that he had in the predictive and healing powers of the mediums and sleepwalkers, and both questions arose multiple times in the letters he exchanged with his nephew, Frederic Llinas, while his exile in Paris. The story of the democrats exiled during the first half of the 19th century has focused in the political demands of those exiled and has left out which their worries were and which activities they did during the exile. Llinas was fascinated by the new scientific disciplines and by the new political proposals and when he had to look for solutions to his pain and to Spain’s suffering, he did not hesitate to use the new solutions used by the new kinds of knowledge based on the emotion, both from a medical and from a political point of view. The federal democracy of the 1940s decade is based in different kinds of knowledge which have often been lost because the biographers have omitted them while creating the biographies. The interest of Juan Antonio Llinas’ biography lies in the distance from the historiography regarding the liberal exile from the first part of the 19th century, which is based on the creation of a political community of different classes which acts together without taking into account their ideological differences in order to provoke the creation of a liberal regime in Spain which would have helped them to return and, at the same time, to help spread the democratic principles. His ideas about the federalism and about the magnetism were denigrated by his compatriots. As a result, he was kept away from the centers of decision. However, he was close to the intellectual French centers, so he became a respected character in the matter of the democratic Spanish cause. That way, while the historiography made the exile a catalyst for the political change in Spain during the thirties, the story of those exiled who explored the paths of the new scientific disciplines related to the romantic cultural world has been left out.