Nicholas Salmeron
Nicolás Salmerón Alonso (Alhama la Seca, April 10, 1838-Pau, September 20, 1908), was a Spanish politician, lawyer and philosopher, president of the Executive Branch of the First Republic for a month and a half in 1873.
He resigned from the presidency of the First Republic alleging conscience problems before signing some death sentences. He was an eloquent parliamentary speaker and professor of Metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid, as well as a student of Krause's theories —krausismo— that inspired the Institución Libre de Enseñanza.
Biography
Born in Alhama la Seca, Almeria, he was the son of the rural doctor Francisco Salmerón López and Rosalía Alonso García. His father was known for his conviction of his liberal ideas and together with his uncle had participated in 1824 in the attempt to make a liberal statement in Almería, known as Los Coloraos during the Ominous Decade. Baptized as Nicolás María del Carmen , his mother died shortly after he was born and his rigid and pious older sister took care of his upbringing. He was the brother of the also progressive politician Francisco Salmerón, sixteen years older, who was president of the Congress of Deputies and overseas minister.
Salmerón began his baccalaureate studies at the Instituto de Enseñanza Secundaria de Almería and until 1855 he studied Law and Philosophy and Letters at the University of Granada, where he became a lifelong friendship with Francisco Giner de los Ríos. He finished his Philosophy studies in Madrid in 1858 receiving the teachings of Julián Sanz del Río. From a very young age he knew Krausism that decisively influenced him in his later life until he evolved towards positivism. In 1859 he was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at the San Isidro Institute in Madrid and in 1860, also as an assistant, he obtained a position in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Central University of Madrid, which he resigned in 1865 so as not to replace Emilio Castelar. In 1864, after obtaining his doctorate, he won the chair of Universal History at the University of Oviedo, although he never held the post. His life was spent in Madrid, teaching being his main interest and livelihood. Together with José Llanes, he was the promoter of the International College (1866), the predecessor of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, and in 1867 he obtained the chair of Philosophy at the Central University of Madrid by competitive examination.
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He exposed his democratic ideas by participating in gatherings at the Universal café as well as in debates at the Philosophical Circle on Cañizares street. Affiliated with the Democratic Party, he published various political articles in the newspapers La Discusión and La Democracia. In June 1867, during the final crisis of the reign of Elizabeth II, he was arrested and imprisoned for five months in the Saladero prison for his participation in conspiracies with Pi y Margall, among others. With the Revolution of 1868 he moved from Alhama again to Madrid, where he was reinstated in his profession as a teacher and in the chair of the one that had been separated at the beginning of the year and participated in the revolutionary juntas.
He actively developed his political career during the hectic Six-Year Democratic Party. In the 1869 elections he ran for deputy for the province of Almería, without success. Unlike his brother Francisco Salmerón, Nicolás never managed to win an election in his native province. He was a supporter of moderate republicanism, participating in the refounding of the Democratic Party in the Federal Democratic Republican Party. In 1869 he obtained the chair of Metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. In the elections of 1871 he is elected deputy for which he accesses the Cortes Generales for the province of Badajoz for the first time. He was a defender of a unitary model against the federalist theses. His well-known position in defense of the extension of democracy would lead him to defend in 1871 the legality, within the Constitution of 1869, of the First International before the events of the Paris Commune and the right of workers to freely associate.
the right thing is not to proscribe to the international society of workers, but to offer them the protection of the lawNicolás Salmerón, speech of October 26-27, 1871
During the reign of Amadeo I, he gained popularity among the Republicans for his oratorical skills and bombastic and academic interventions that would be a hallmark of his identity. After the abdication of Amadeo I, the First Republic was proclaimed in February 1873 and Salmerón was appointed Minister of Grace and Justice in the government of Estanislao Figueras and his brother Francisco Salmerón Minister of Overseas. In this period he promoted the abolition of the death penalty. Within the political instability that characterized the First Republic, on June 13 he was elected president of the Cortes Generales. After the resignation of Pi y Margall, the Constituent Cortes named him President of the Executive Power of the Republic on July 18, 1873. In this way, he became the third president, in just five months, of the First Republic. During the During the period of the government of Nicolás Salmerón, he had to face three civil wars, the Cuban war, the cantonal rebellion and the third Carlist war under the unrealizable motto "rule of law" as well as the most absolute political instability. At the head of the Spanish army he arranged the generals Arsenio Martínez Campos and Manuel Pavía. In the cantonal rebellion the cantons of Seville, Valencia and Cádiz fell into government hands and, although the cantonalist troops from Cartagena were victorious by taking Orihuela, they were soon defeated at Chinchilla and withdrew their advance. On September 7, a month and a half after his appointment, Salmerón presented his resignation as President of the First Republic, alleging his refusal to sign the death sentences of some soldiers who had been tried for collaborating with the cantonalists. He was elected president of the Congress of Deputies two days after his resignation. Some historians such as Vicente Palacio Attard pointed out that his resignation was also due to an internal conflict within his party due to the opposition of Eduardo Palanca and Pi y Margall to the military intervention against the canton of Malaga in the face of the need to reestablish the order manifested by General Pavía, who threatened to resign. Faced with the added problem of facing Palanca, Pi y Margall and Pavía, the president would have finally decided to resign.
With the Pronunciamiento de Sagunto in 1874, which marked the end of the First Republic and the Bourbon Restoration, Salmerón returned for a brief period to teaching in his chair of Metaphysics to be separated on July 17, 1875 in a broad process of university purge during the government of Cánovas del Castillo that affected other Krausistas such as Giner and Azcárate. In 1876, the subscription together with Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla of the founding manifesto of the Progressive Republican Party meant a long exile of nine years in Paris. During this time he practiced as a lawyer and became friends with Clemenceau while organizing gatherings at his home attended by Bernardino Machado or Victor Hugo. Both Salmerón and especially Ruiz Zorrilla received tributes as the absent leaders in exile of the Spanish progressive republicans.He returned to Madrid in 1885 after the amnesty of the liberal government of Práxedes Mateo Sagasta and was able to recover his chair at the Central University.
After twelve years out of Congress, his return to politics happened in the 1886 elections when Salmerón, Azcárate and Pi y Margall won seats again. In 1886 he distanced himself from Ruiz Zorrilla to defend, also against the rest of the Republicans in Congress, the peaceful procedures before Villacampa's Republican uprising, for which reason Salmerón's followers abandoned the Progressive Party. In 1887 he founded the Centralist Republican Party, with which he participated in the 1891 elections, obtaining the act of deputy for the province of Barcelona, later in the Republican Fusion coalition (1893) being a parliamentarian for Barcelona until 1907. In During this time, he maintained a clear republican political vocation, pursuing the idea of a unitary party, a position that distanced him from the federals and the radicals. In the words of Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, he will become "the shadow of the Republic that one day will arrive". His incessant activity leads him to direct the newspaper La Justicia. Diario Republicano (1888-1897) in which the proposals of liberal progressivism and the founding of the Unión Republicana party (1903) appeared to bring together all the republican parties in Spain, achieving notable success in the 1903 elections, especially in Catalonia. In 1889 he was the defense lawyer in the process of the crime of Fuencarral street in Madrid. In his last years, he modified his first unitary convictions for a support for moderate Catalanism, tirelessly presiding at the age of seventy over the electoral coalition Solidaridad Catalana, which obtained resounding electoral success in the 07 elections and whose consequence would be the beginning of the crisis. of caciquismo and the turno system.
He died in the French city of Pau on September 20, 1908, while on vacation. In 1915 his remains were transferred to the funerary monument erected in the civil cemetery of Madrid, to the right of the Francisco Pi y Margall mausoleum. In his epitaph there is a gloss made by Georges Clemenceau and it is recalled that he "left power for not signing a death sentence."
With Salmerón, the political man has disappeared; the speaker has immortalized; Salmerón enters in his own right to occupy a position in the very high Senate that make up in the history of the peoples those truly superior, truly exceptional men, who helped to increase the intellectual treasure of the human raceI remember Nicolás Salmerón in Eduardo Dato's speech of thanks in his election as president of the House of 12-10-1908
In 2008 the centenary of the death of Salmerón took place with tributes from the Ateneo de Madrid, the Diputación de Almería, the city council of Alhama and the University of Almería due to the absence of commemorations by the Congress of Deputies under the government from José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero or the Complutense University of Madrid to the man from Almeria who was President of the Executive Power of the Republic.
Nicolás Salmerón Human Rights Award
Since 2009, the Nicolás Salmerón Human Rights Prize has been awarded, created at the initiative of the Ateneo de Madrid. The award is organized by the International Human Rights Foundation and delivered at the Ateneo headquarters every December 10 on the anniversary of the approval by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among the winners in the different categories are Lula da Silva (2020), José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2009), Casa Sefarad-Israel (2010), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2011), El Intermedio and El Gran Wyoming (2012)., Jesús Caldera (2012), Jordi Évole (2013), Pedro González Zerolo and Marcos Ana (2014).
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