Mariana Pineda
Mariana Pineda Muñoz (Granada, September 1, 1804-Granada, May 26, 1831) was a Spanish liberal of the 18th century XIX executed in the Ominous Decade, during the reign of Ferdinand VII.
Biography
She was the daughter of Mariano de Pineda y Ramírez, captain of a ship from Granada and knight of the Order of Calatrava, who never married for unknown reasons, the much younger María de los Dolores Muñoz y Bueno, de Lucena and of lesser condition than him. The couple had a first daughter in Seville, where she lived for a while, but she died shortly after birth, and after moving to Granada, where they lived in separate houses, they had a second daughter, Mariana. After the birth, the mother and daughter went to live in the house of the father, Don Mariano, who a few months later, due to the chronic illness he suffered from, signed a document granting the mother all the rights about the daughter. But shortly after Don Mariano denounced his partner for having appropriated certain assets placed in his daughter's name and María Dolores fled from the common house with the girl, being arrested and forced to return the girl to her father on November 12. of 1805. After the death of Don Mariano, Mariana passed into the guardianship of one of his brothers, who was blind, single and forty-seven years old. However, after marrying a woman much younger than him, she handed over the responsibilities of her guardian to some young dependents of hers, José de Mesa and Úrsula de la Presa, in whose charge the girl remained throughout her childhood. she.
When her guardian died, he bequeathed to his own daughter part of the property that belonged to Mariana by inheritance from her father, for which she had to fight throughout her life to get it returned to her, although apparently she never succeeded. —in 1828 there is evidence that he was still in a lawsuit to recover a vineyard inherited from his father.
When she was fifteen, she married Manuel de Peralta y Valle, eleven years her senior and who had just left the army —it is not known what he lived on. The wedding took place in October 1819 in a "stealthy" manner, in the words of her main biographer Antonina Rodrigo, due to the condition of Mariana's illegitimate daughter. In March of the following year she gave birth to a boy, José María, and in May 1821 to a girl, Úrsula María. Two years later, in August 1822, her husband died, leaving his eighteen-year-old widow with two small children. Apparently it was in those years of their marriage, which coincide with the Liberal Triennium, when Mariana adhered to the liberal cause and after the new restoration of absolutism by Fernando VII in 1823, as a widow she welcomed persecuted liberals into her home. In these circles she met the military man with a brilliant record, Casimiro Brodett y Carbone, whom she was about to marry but the marriage was frustrated because Brodett did not obtain the required royal dispensation due to his liberal affiliation and was "unpurified" and was forced to leave the army, then leaving for Cuba. Mariana, for her part, during the following two years disappeared from Granada and it is unknown where she was and what she did during that time.
When he returned to Granada, he helped a cousin of his, Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor Ramírez, escape from prison where he had been serving a sentence since 1827 for having participated in various liberal conspiracies organized by exiles from Gibraltar. The ploy he used to free his cousin in 1828 was to introduce some robes into the prison and hand them over to Fernando, who, disguised as a friar, left the prison without much difficulty because, as Mariana had observed, the many clergymen who entered and They left the establishment and were never controlled by the guards. He initially took refuge in Mariana's house and when the mayor of Granada, Ramón Pedrosa Andrade, went to look for him there, he was already in Gibraltar. there is no proof. What has been proven is that after his return he had the twenty-eight-year-old lawyer José de la Peña as a lover, and that according to his biographer Antonina Rodrigo, quoted by Carlos Serrano, he was possibly united with Mariana "by a secret marriage of the so-called of "conscience", celebrated in the church of Santa Ana». From this marriage, a girl would be born in January 1829, whom Mariana recognized as a natural daughter despite the fact that they did not live together, although José de la Peña did not, who waited until 1836 to "adopt" her, until 1846 to recognize her as his daughter and 1852 to recognize her as heir.
On some other occasion, she also attracted the attention of the crime mayor Pedrosa because of the complaint filed against her by a certain Romero Tejada for alleged connections with the "anarchists" -which was the name then also used by the absolutists to refer to the liberal revolutionaries—of Gibraltar. More serious was the case in which her faithful servant Antonio Buriel was involved —who had served under the orders of Rafael del Riego— who was arrested by Pedrosa for having brought compromising letters and which earned Mariana being confined in the house her. The case was never tried, although Mariana in prevention had already requested the services of the lawyer José María Escalera. The investigation in the police archives has shown that the Granada police were convinced that Mariana Pineda was directly or indirectly involved in the preliminaries of a insurrection and that his servant Antonio Buriel "had prepared a dozen determined men to throw them into the streets".
The absolutist police of Minister Francisco Calomarde had been alert since they learned that General José María Torrijos, who together with General Francisco Espoz y Mina, was the leader of the exiled Liberals, had arrived in Gibraltar at the beginning of September 1830 In fact, the first attempt at an anti-absolutist insurrection took place in January 1831 when Torrijos and his group tried to march on La Línea de la Concepción from Gibraltar, with the aim of reaching Algeciras. A few weeks later, without knowing if they had a direct relationship with Torrijos, a group of liberals ended the life of the governor of Cádiz, which was mistakenly interpreted by the San Fernando garrison to start an uprising that turned out to be a failure. at the same time that a group of about 200 men had left the Campo de Gibraltar and traveled through the Serranía de Ronda until they were captured by the royalist Volunteers. These movements seemed to indicate that a generalized uprising was being prepared throughout Andalusia that would be led by Torrijos and Espoz y Mina, and coordinated from Madrid by Salustiano de Olózaga. The date of March 20, 1831 was even set for the uprising, but the Calomarde police were aware of the preparations —some of their agents were in Gibraltar following Torrijos and his group— and managed to thwart the attempt. Two days before the scheduled date for the uprising, Mariana Pineda was arrested at her home in Granada.
The trial against Mariana Pineda (1831)
The arrest
On March 18, 1831, the police under the command of the crime mayor Pedrosa broke into his home, number 6 of the house 77 Calle del Águila in Granada, and when they found themselves "inside the house that Doña Mariana Pineda lived there, head or principal of it" a "flag, undoubted sign of the uprising that was forged" was "apprehended... having it legally... as the author of the horrific crime" , according to the account of the prosecutor who presented in the trial to which she was subjected. According to Carlos Serrano, the conditions in which the "flag" was found in Mariana's house "make one suspect that she introduced it into she was some agent manipulated by the police, undoubtedly one of the embroiderers of the Albaicín to whom she had entrusted the work and who, discovered or denounced, would have been more or less forced to introduce the famous banner into her house so that it could be "discovered" later there and served as the basis for the accusation".
At the moment, she was confined to her own home, under the custody of a guard, from where she escaped three days later, taking advantage of an oversight by the guard disguised as an old woman, but the guard managed to catch up with her on the street and Mariana begged him not to report her and to try to soften him up, he suggested that she accompany him on the run. This fact would be used by the prosecutor to charge him with an alleged second crime, in addition to preparing an uprising against "the sovereignty of King N.S.", that of "having undertaken his escape from prison that it was established for her in her house", trying to "seduce or bribe the clerk who was guarding her and who caught up with her as she fled, telling him to leave her, offering him to go with her and would make you happy». Because of this escape attempt, she was confined in the prison for women of bad life of the Arrecogidas Santa María Egipcíaca convent.
Today it seems clear that the absolutist authorities, given her condition as a woman, did not consider her one of the leaders of the liberal conspiracy that they believed was under way in Granada —in fact, none of them in the liberal pronouncements at the end of the reign of Fernando VII, there were women directly involved, but they arrested her so that she denounced her accomplices, the real heads of the conspiracy in which she would be nothing more than a troupe. Proof of this would be that Pedrosa, the chief of the Granada police, was empowered to pardon her even after the trial if she agreed to testify about her accomplices, something she refused to do until the end —a firmness that on the other hand she had not shown his cousin Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, whom Mariana had helped to escape from prison, who informed the absolutist authorities of the activities of José María Torrijos' group in Gibraltar in exchange for pardon.
On the other hand, it was speculated that Mariana's arrest and death sentence was due to the spite suffered by the mayor of crime Ramón Pedrosa who would be in love with her. This theory was expounded in a veiled manner during the trial by her defense attorney when referring to "certain fatal events and circumstances" that had caused the aforementioned [Mariana] to "become held by some in a concept" that it did not deserve, among which was "not having acceded to the claims of other subjects" who "would not be strange if they have proposed take their resentment and revenge to the point of ruining it». Much more explicit were the couplets that circulated around the city, and that lasted a long time, like this one:
Sad Granada
Because Mariana Pineda
To the gallows
Because Pedrosa and his
His executioners are,
And this has been his revenge.
Because Mariana de Pineda
His love didn't give him
There is no proof of Pedrosa's alleged infatuation with Mariana, although it can be affirmed that the crime mayor of Granada took the process as a personal matter, pressuring her to expose her alleged accomplices, all of which was reinforced by the The fact that Pedrosa had received from the Minister of Grace and Justice Calomar full powers to investigate all the "conspiracies" that occurred in Granada, which granted him a right of life or death over the defendants since no one could interfere in his decisions. Thus, three weeks after the arrest of Mariana, the administration of Justice of Granada decided that her cause would pass into the hands of Pedrosa.
The trial
Mariana Pineda's criminal file was stolen at the beginning of the XX century, although fortunately the most important pieces of it — the prosecutor's accusation and the defense lawyer's argument—had been reproduced in a book published in 1836, after the death of Fernando VII, by his first biographer and one of his lovers, the lawyer José de la Peña y Aguayo. From these documents we know that the basis of her accusation was to have found in her house "the most decisive and definitive sign of an uprising against the sovereignty of King N.S. and the monarchical and paternal government of him ». The "sign" consisted of:
three signs written with incarnated paper, apparently of marquilla, which say: the one, Equality; Freedom, the other, and the third, Law, and 13 letters cut from paper marquilla, and are L, I, T, A, D, Y, G, V, D, J, J, J, all capital letters, [and a] tafetan purple from the width of two countries and long
With this evidence —a supposed half-embroidered flag and on which the words of a possible motto were sketched— the prosecutor accused him of the crime of rebellion against order and the monarch, which according to the recent decree of Fernando VII de October 1 of the previous year was punishable by the death penalty, as established in its article 7:
Any machining within the realm for acts of rebellion against my sovereign authority or stirring up popular shocks that will come to manifest themselves for preparatory acts of execution will be punished in the perpetrators and accomplices with the death penalty
As expected, the defense based itself on dismantling the "evidence" that constituted the supposed "flag", first questioning that it was such, based on the police report itself, which spoke of a cloth mounted on some racks, not on a flag, and secondly that the supposed flag was "revolutionary", arguing that it was actually an ensign intended for Freemasonry -"the emblem of the green triangle fixed in its center shows that its destination was rather for adornment of some Freemason lodge"— and since women could not belong to Freemasonry, her client was free of guilt, or at most she could only be sentenced to a short prison term for complicity with Freemasons, a "sect" prohibited. The defender was right because in Spain there were no female Masonic lodges until much later, at the end of the XIX century d. C., and because indeed, as corroborated by an expert on the subject, cited by Carlos Serrano, «the triangle where the motto Liberty, Equality, Law appears indisputably corresponds to the Masonic motto, since 1746. The colors purple and green, during the 19th century d. C., correspond to the 22nd degree of Freemasonry, that is, that of Knight of the Royal Ax according to the ancient Scottish rite.
Thus, according to Carlos Serrano, «the defense lawyer's argument is very likely to be the one that comes closest to the truth of what Mariana's actions had actually been in the first months of the fateful year of 1831: being contact masons and prepare some insignia for their lodges». However, the Freemasons "in turn were undoubtedly related, when they were not confused, with the groups of liberal conspirators who were plotting a generalized uprising throughout the south of Andalusia in those months", so that "Mariana was effectively related to that revolution that the police of Fernando VII and Calomarde tried to prevent with such zeal around 1830».
The Execution
Despite a convincing defense by her lawyer, Mariana Pineda was sentenced to death. On the day of her execution, he had apparently prepared an operation aimed at freeing her during the journey that led from the convent of the Arrecogidas Santa María Egipcíaca, where she had been hospitalized, to the Campo del Triunfo where the cross was mounted., but for unknown reasons it did not take place. So nothing prevented her from being executed on May 26, 1831, at twenty-six years of age.
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She is said to have maintained her dignity until preparing for execution by refusing to have her garters removed so as not to "go to the gallows with her stockings down."
Her execution was intended to punish the cause of the liberals, which made her a martyr for them and a popular symbol of the fight against the lack of freedoms, as a result of which she became the main character in several pieces plays, poems and essays.
Burial
The remains of Mariana de Pineda were buried in the Almengor cemetery, a place close to the execution site, located next to the Beiro River, in front of which in the XX was Provincial Prison of Granada. In 1836 they were exhumed and deposited successively in the basilica of the Virgen de las Angustias, in the chapel of the oratory of the town hall and in the church of the Sagrario, between 1844 and 1854. On September 9 of this last year they were exhumed again, placing the ballot box again in municipal offices. Finally, in 1856, the remains of Mariana de Pineda were deposited in the crypt of the Granada Cathedral, where they remain, under a simple tombstone, with the following epitaph:
† D.O.M. Ad perpetuam memoriam. Reliquiæ mortales Marianæ a Pineda, quam, sæva morte, percussit tyrannus, Granatæ septimo kalendas junii, anni millesimi octogentesimi trigesimi primi. Requiescat in peace. Patria grata ejus memoriam colit. Anno M.DCCCLVI.
Historical memory
«In May 26, 1831, the young woman Mariana Pineda was sacrificed in this place for the punishment of the criminals because she longed for the freedom of her homeland. The Constitutional Council and the Territorial Hearing were in 1840 that in memory of such an illustrious victim the Sacred Sign of our Holy Religion was placed in this place and that they would not do justice executions in the. »
After the triumph of the Spanish liberal revolution, Mariana Pineda was turned into a heroine of the cause of freedom, and numerous authors dealt with her figure in whose works «the glorification of the combatant for the political cause predominates, of the fighter for freedom, but also the innocent victim of repression and absolutism. On this last point, Mariana's feminine condition is used as an aggravating factor... (“Only cowardly slaves could / immolate a weak woman”, says one of the many poems written in her honor, compiled by Antonina Rodrigo)". he will pass a pension to his children.
During the reign of Elizabeth II, interest in her declined. She was rediscovered with the advent of the Democratic Six-Year Period and, above all, with the First Spanish Republic, which erected a public monument in her memory in 1873 in Granada. With the Restoration she returned to oblivion to be once again recognized and exalted as her person during the Second Republic. In May 1931, barely a month after its proclamation, the Republic celebrated the centenary of the execution of Mariana Pineda through a series of military honors established in a decree of the Provisional Government chaired by Niceto Alcalá-Zamora at the proposal of the Minister of War, Manuel Azaña. Later, the Republican government approved the issuance of a postage stamp with his effigy.
In the recovery of the historical memory of Mariana Pineda in the 1920s and 1930s, the socialist Fernando de los Ríos played an essential role, who was Minister of Justice in the provisional government, and who since 1911 had been a professor in Granada. He was the one who apparently awoke in his friend, the poet Federico García Lorca, an interest in a then-forgotten figure and which led him to write the play Mariana Pineda in 1925. Popular romance in three prints that, after overcoming certain problems with the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, was released two years later, in 1927. In the work, Lorca flees from the liberal myth and what he shows instead, according to Carlos Serrano, " It is her historical nonconformity, her intimate impossibility of agreeing to Fernandino's absolutism, the springs of her private rebellion that leads her to public torture».
Currently, both the square where she was executed and the cross that was erected in her memory are often vandalized with graffiti displaying anti-system symbols and slogans.
Literary works about Mariana Pineda
- Francisco Villanueva and Madrid, The heroism of a lady or tyranny in her strength. Original historical drama in four acts dedicated to the immortal Mariana Pineda, victim for freedom in Granada. Reinado de Fernando VII, and Ministerio de Calomarde. Lisbon: Na Impr. From J. M. R. e Castro, Rua Formosa, 67, 1837.
- Francisco de Paula Lasso de la Vega, Mariana Pineda. Drama in four acts1838.
- Federico García Lorca, Mariana Pineda, 1925.
- José Martín Remembers, The Retreats of the Blessed Virgin Mary Egyptian1970.
- José Ramón Fernández Domínguez, Mariana1991.
- Antonio Carvajal, Mariana in shadows, 2002.
- Isabel Pisano, The Papiro of Sept2009
Musical works about Mariana Pineda
- Alberto García Demestres, Mariana in shadows, 2001. Opera with Antonio Carvajal libretto.
Mariana Pineda on television
- «Mariana Pineda», episode of the series Landscape with figures produced by RTVE with script by Antonio Gala, direction of Antonio Betancourt and interpreted by Blanca Estrada, was issued on December 13, 1976.
- Process to Mariana Pineda (1984), by Rafael Moreno Alba, RTVE series starring Pepa Flores, Germán Cobos, Juanjo Puigcorbé, Carlos Larrañaga, etc.
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