Javier de Burgos

Francisco Javier de Burgos y del Olmo (Motril, October 22, 1778-Madrid, January 22, 1848) was a Spanish politician, journalist, playwright and translator.

Origins

He was born in the Andalusian town of Motril on October 22, 1778. From a noble and wealthy family, although not wealthy,^{[citation required]} he was destined to serve the Church, but he soon abandoned his religious studies in Granada, moving to Madrid to dedicate himself to studying jurisprudence. With the Napoleonic invasion he passed into his service, occupying different positions in Andalusia.

Given his French status, in 1812 he moved to Paris where he completed his training by studying the classics, focusing on Horace, whose works he translated into Spanish. Said translation was commented on in turn by Andrés Bello in a celebrated article. Bello describes Javier de Burgos as a "weak translator and excellent commentator on Horacio".^{[citation needed]} Years later, in 1844, he published a review of this work that with its imperfections continues to be a benchmark, among other things due to the use of the sapphic stanza in individual verses. He stood out early as a comediographer and one of his pieces in the genre, Los tres iguales , was the cause of the exile of the actor Isidoro Máiquez.

Political career

He returned to Madrid in 1819 and in 1822 he was appointed director of El Imparcial, a newspaper around which the French-born bearers of the new ideas gathered. His work as a journalist was combined with extensive work as a writer, highlighting his Ancient and Modern Universal Biography, a translation from French that he published greatly reformed and expanded in several volumes.

Key in his career will be his "Exposition addressed to H.M. Mr. Fernando VII from Paris on January 24, 1826 by the Hon. Mr. Don Burgos... about the evils that afflicted Spain at that time and measures that the government should adopt to remedy them". One of those measures, the fundamental one, would be the proposal to create a Ministry of Interior that really amounted to creating what we understand today as an active public administration. It was governed on the basis of the Council system, the polisinodial regime, headed by the Council of Castilla, which only had advisory and judicial functions. To create the Ministry of the Interior was to create a "workshop of national prosperity", an Administration in the modern sense, executive and manager.

From 1827 to 1833 Javier de Burgos held various important positions in the incipient administration that was beginning to emerge.

On October 21, 1833, at the beginning of the reign of Isabel II, under the regency of María Cristina de Borbón, he was appointed Secretary of State and General Development of the Kingdom in the government of Cea Bermúdez. He was appointed with the “commission that he dedicate himself first of all to proposing and proposing to me, with the agreement of the Council of Ministers, the civil division of the territory as the basis of internal administration, and a means to obtain the benefits that I meditate doing to the peoples ”. Two days after his appointment, the Administration Journal was created, an official publication established by royal decree of October 23, 1833.

As he had been entrusted, Javier de Burgos promoted the territorial division by provinces, based on the approaches of the New Regime but taking as a basis the old constitution into kingdoms of Spain. The decree was approved on November 30, 1833 and on December 22 of that same year he was appointed Minister of Finance. He was a senator and royal adviser and in 1846 with the first government of Narváez, he returned to the Ministry of Development, now called "of the Government", a position he left that same year when Francisco Javier de Istúriz was appointed head of the government.

Withdrawal

During his last years he returned to cultivating poetry and, in addition to the revision of the translation of Horace already mentioned, he wrote poetry of circumstances, notable being a funeral song for the death of Queen Isabella of Braganza, an ode to marriage of King Ferdinand VII with María Cristina de Borbón, although he highlighted among all of them his Ode to Reason and Al porvenir. When he died, he left unfinished some Annals of the reign of Doña Isabel II , published posthumously in Madrid in 1850.