Eduardo González
Next April marks the 200th anniversary of the overthrow and death of Lieutenant Colonel Rafael del Riego, who only three years earlier had successfully led a liberal revolution against the absolutist regime of Ferdinand VII and whose death turned him into a martyr for freedom precisely in the country that had contributed most to its downfall, France.
It all began on January 1, 1820, when a contingent of troops preparing to leave for America under the command of Riego revolted against the absolutist regime in the Sevillian town of Cabezas de San Juan. The sending of that contingent was part of Ferdinand VII’s decision to order the “reconquest” of America, a decision that concealed a double objective: on the one hand, to recover the colonies and their contributions to an absolutely ruined Treasury; on the other (a less obvious objective, although probably more important for the Monarch), to send to the other side of the sea tens of thousands of soldiers and officers who had participated in the war against Napoleon and who were particularly inclined to pronounce themselves in favor of the liberal regime of 1812.
The origin of the King’s misgivings lay in one of the most relevant reforms of the Cortes of Cadiz -the same Cortes that in 1812 approved the first liberal Constitution in the history of Spain-: the abolition of the nobility test for access to the army officers. That change, undoubtedly linked to the needs of the fight against Napoleon, not only contributed to create a new class of officers promoted by authentic war merits, but also turned the Armed Forces into one of the main bulwarks of the liberal regime.
Thus, after demonstrating his true intentions through a self-coup and the subsequent reinstatement of absolutism, Ferdinand VII decided to get rid of about 40,000 potentially revolutionary soldiers and officers by sending them overseas. Many of them (possibly the majority) never returned and some even joined the rebel forces.
It was during one of these dispatches that the uprising of Riego’s troops took place under the notes of the march that would eventually become the official anthem of Spain during the Second Republic. In his proclamation, Riego openly declared himself against the war of “reconquest” and assured that “the Constitution alone is enough to appease our brothers in America”.
That adventure, called the Liberal Triennium and which forced Ferdinand VII to swear the Constitution of 1812, only lasted three years. In April 1823, the Hundred Thousand Sons of St. Louis sent by Bourbon France overthrew the liberal regime and restored absolutism. Rafael del Riego (elected president of the Cortes in 1822 and promoted to captain general) was hanged in November in the Plaza de la Cebada in Madrid. America was never reconquered.
France “mourns Riego”
By those curiosities of history, Riego’s death made him a martyr not only in Spain, but even in the country that had led the Spanish counterrevolution, France. In fact, if anything differentiates Riego from other mythical Spanish heroes, it was precisely his international dimension. As an excellent study by the historian Alberto Cañas de Pablos, of the Spanish School of History and Archaeology in Rome-CSIC (on which much of this article is based), the Spanish Liberal Triennium had become one of the great hopes of European liberals in countries such as France or even Russia, who elevated Riego to the altars of their own national struggles.
Shortly after the action of the Hundred Thousand Sons of St. Louis, an anonymous text was published in France, entitled Procès du général Raphael del Riégo, in which the Spanish liberal leader was described as a “martyr of political reactions”. For his part, General Frédéric Guillaume de Vaudoncourt, who had not only fought under Napoleon’s orders in the Russian campaign, but had even participated in the liberal revolutions of Piedmont and of Riego himself during his exile in Spain (which forced him to go into exile again, this time to London), wrote that same year that “the sacrifice of Riego is one of the most atrocious political crimes of which history has memory; his assassins can only be compared to tigers, since they shed his blood for no apparent cause, but for the pleasure of shedding it.
Another outstanding French revolutionary of the time was the carbonary Cugnet de Montarlot, who also during his exile in Spain, in the midst of the Liberal Triennium, went so far as to plan with Riego himself an attempted uprising of the French troops stationed in the Pyrenees and even designed in 1824, with the Spanish leader already dead, a plan of revolution from Morocco clearly inspired by that of Cabezas de San Juan.
Even a character of the renown of the Marquis de La Fayette, the “Hero of Two Worlds” for his outstanding role both in the independence of the United States and in the two French revolutions of 1789 and 1830 (and liberal deputy during the Bourbon Restoration of 1814), recalled in his memoirs how he himself had “toasted the martyr Riego” and Simón de Bolívar during his trip to the United States in 1824, at the invitation of President James Monroe.
As was to be expected, Riego not only became a positive reference for French liberals, but was also adopted as the personification of evil for French absolutists. An example of this was an article published by the realist newspaper La Quotidienne in which the liberals who had decided to “mourn Riego” and belittle the “honor” that the French invasion of the Hundred Thousand Sons of St. Louis brought to France were described as “anti-French traitors”. The conservative newspaper Le Drapeau Blanc expressed a similar sentiment.
Years after his death, the memory of Rafael del Riego still experienced some moments of glory in France, especially during the overthrow of the Bourbons in 1830, which took place after a revolutionary movement in which many French liberals were expressly inspired by the memory of the Spanish leader. In those years, a play about Riego’s life premiered in Paris, and Spaniards exiled in France rescued Riego’s Hymn as they paraded through the streets to celebrate the fall of the French Monarchy in July 1848.
Even as late as 1870, the great Victor Hugo remembered Riego in a plea for liberty and against the advance of Prussian forces on Paris: “All the illustrious men, Leonidas, Brutus, Arminius, Dante, Rienzi, Washington, Danton, Riego, Manin, are there smiling and proud of you; for it is time to show the universe that virtue exists, that duty exists, and that the fatherland exists.” In the eighties of the 19th century, a proposal was even debated in the Paris Municipal Chamber to replace the name of the Place du Trocadéro (which commemorated a battle against the Spanish liberals in 1823) with that of Place de Riego. The idea did not prosper, but it allowed to recover, more than half a century after his death, the name of Rafael del Riego in the internal political debates of the country that had most directly contributed to his downfall.
