Rafael del Riego

Rafael del Riego y Flórez (Tuña, April 7, 1784 – Madrid, November 7, 1823) was a Spanish monarchist soldier and liberal politician who in 1820 led the pronouncement that bears his name, which put an end to the absolutism of Ferdinand VII and gave way to a constitutional regime in Spain. Riego also gave its name to the famous nineteenth-century hymn known as Himno de Riego, adopted by the liberals during the constitutional monarchy and, later, by the Spanish republicans. He was hanged after the restoration of absolutism that put an end to the Liberal Triennium (1820-1823).

Biography

Early Years

Commemorative plaque at home in Tuña (Asturias)

Rafael del Riego Flórez was born into an Asturian noble family on April 7, 1784. His father, Eugenio del Riego Núñez, was a general post office administrator and a poet. His mother's name was Teresa Flórez Valdés. He studied at the University of Oviedo where he obtained a bachelor's degree and where he also studied part of the Law degree and the first year of Canons.

In 1807 he moved to Madrid to undertake a military career, like so many other sons of the Asturian low nobility come to less (the other alternatives were the civil administration and the Church; the latter is the one chosen by his older brother Miguel del Irrigation, lettuce). After presenting the mandatory tests of purity of blood, he entered the Corps Guard (specifically in the American Company of Royal Person troops). When the mutiny in Aranjuez broke out in March 1808, his unit was there.

War of Independence and captivity in France

When the uprising of May 2 took place in Madrid, Riego was confined in Aranjuez for having disobeyed the orders of Marshal Joaquim Murat, who commanded the Napoleonic troops in Spain. He managed to escape disguised as a shepherd with the intention of reaching Asturias and facing the French invasion from there. When he arrived in Villalpando (Zamora) he was imprisoned accused of being a French spy ("the appearance of a gentleman from a good family that was apparent behind his shepherd's clothing put that group of patriots on their guard"). Thanks to the fact that he was recognized by a Franciscan who had lived in his hometown was able to leave prison and continue his journey to Asturias. In León he met his brother the canon who was there as envoy of the Supreme Board of Asturias that had been created to organize resistance against the French.

Upon arriving in Oviedo, he was appointed captain of the Tineo infantry regiment and, as such, he joined the staff of General Acevedo, who was organizing an army to join the troops commanded by General Blake. At the beginning of November Acevedo's army was defeated in the battle of Espinosa de los Monteros (Burgos) and on November 13 Captain Riego was taken prisoner in Reinosa by French troops who were chasing the remains of the Spanish army. "Apparently, the young officer had the opportunity to flee before the arrival of the French, but he preferred to stay with General Acevedo, seriously wounded, even at the risk of falling into the hands of the enemy, as he did."

He was deported to France where he spent the rest of the war. He was confined in the "warehouses" of Dijon, Mâcon and, finally, Chalon-sur-Saône, near the Swiss border. There he lived with many privations in a regime of semi-freedom - he subsisted thanks to the money that his family sent him, when the "desired help" actually arrived -. "It was an existence similar to that of a political exile." It is disputed if it was during the captivity in France when Riego adopted the ideology of liberalism and even if he entered Freemasonry. The historian Juan Francisco Fuentes recalls that "enlightenment ideas and a certain liberal culture were part of the family environment in which he had been educated" Rafael del Riego and regarding his affiliation with Freemasonry, he points out that there are testimonies for and against. What he did do during his captivity was learn French and English and take some trading lessons.

At the end of 1813 he managed to escape from Chalon-sur-Saône to Switzerland and, after crossing Germany, in Holland he managed to embark to London in January 1814. From London he traveled to Plymouth and there he caught a ship that took him to La Coruña. He arrived in time to swear the Constitution of 1812 before General Lacy, before it was abrogated in May by King Ferdinand VII after his return from captivity in France, thus restoring the absolute monarchy. During the absolutist six-year term (1814-1820) Riego went through various destinations (Madrid, Bilbao, Logroño, La Carolina) until in November 1819, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, he was appointed commander of the 2nd battalion of the Asturias Regiment stationed in Las Cabezas de San Juan, waiting to be embarked for America, in order to quell the rebellion of the colonies. He was then thirty-five years old. "His biographers of him take it for granted that he had already entered secret societies, if he had not done so in France during his captivity," says Juan Francisco Fuentes.

Pronouncement of 1820

Plaza de la Constitución de Las Cabezas de San Juan, con el Ayuntamiento al fondo. It was the place where Lieutenant Colonel Rafael del Riego began his pronouncement.

On January 1, 1820, Rafael del Riego revolted the 2nd battalion of the Asturias Regiment that was stationed in Las Cabezas de San Juan and that was part of the expeditionary force assembled by the government of Fernando VII to quell the uprising of the colonies of America. He launched the following harangue to the officers and soldiers under his command in favor of the Constitution of 1812 —Riego pronounced, hence the term "pronunciamiento" that was born then—:

"Soldiers, my love for you is great. Likewise I could not consent, as your chief, to turn you away from your homeland, into rotten ships, to bring you to make an unjust war to the new world (...). Spain is living at the mercy of an arbitrary and absolute power, exercised without the slightest respect for the fundamental laws of the nation. The king, who owes his throne to all who fought in the War of Independence, has not sworn, however, the Constitution, a covenant between the monarch and the people, the foundation and incarnation of every modern nation. The Spanish Constitution, just and liberal, has been elaborated in Cadiz between blood and suffering. But the king has not sworn it and it is necessary, that Spain be saved, that the king swear and respect the Constitution of 1812, legitimate and civil affirmation of the rights and duties of the Spaniards, of all the Spaniards, from the King to the last husbandman. [...] Yes, yes, soldiers, the Constitution. Long live the Constitution!

Map of the Riego pronunciation. The black line shows the journey that the troops carried out from Las Cabezas de San Juan. There are also cities whose garrisons were added to the pronouncement.

After having failed to take Cádiz (they had previously arrested the commanding general of the expeditionary army, the Count of Calderón, in Arcos de la Frontera), the troops rebelled by Riego began on January 27 a difficult and long march through Andalusia, proclaiming the Constitution of 1812 and deposing the absolutist authorities in the towns they crossed. They did not meet much resistance, but they did not hear from other garrisons that had joined the uprising. To keep morale high, one of the officers, the future General Evaristo Fernández de San Miguel, composed a patriotic hymn that would soon be known as the Himno de Riego (which one hundred and eleven years later would become the hymn official of Spain during the Second Republic). The chorus read:

Soldiers, homeland
He calls us the lid,
We'll swear to her.
defeat or die.

They were wandering around Andalusia for almost two months and when they were heading to Portugal on March 11, giving up the cause as lost —Riego's column had been reduced to about fifty men— they received the news that King Ferdinand VII had two days before he had agreed to restore the Constitution after the absolutist government had been unable to quell the uprisings of various garrisons in the periphery that had followed Riego's example. On March 10, the king published the Manifesto of the King to the Spanish Nation in which he showed his support for the Constitution: «Let us march frankly, and I the first, along the constitutional path». Thus began the Liberal Triennium.

Liberal Triennium

Balcony in Tineo from which General Riego addressed his speech on October 4, 1820.

As Juan Francisco Fuentes has highlighted, after the pronouncement Rafael del Riego went from being «an obscure thirty-five-year-old lieutenant colonel, in command of a detachment about to embark for America, to becoming a living symbol of the Spanish liberal revolution". When he learned on March 13 that King Ferdinand VII had agreed to swear the Constitution, Riego, still convalescing from his wounds, moved to Seville where he was received as a hero. His portrait was paraded in a procession through the streets. After Seville, tributes and civic processions followed, in which on many occasions the march composed by Evaristo San Miguel during the expedition through Andalusia was played and sung and was immediately known like the Hymn of Irrigation. The anthem was also part of the patriotic functions that were organized, such as the one held at La Fontana de Oro in Madrid. In Cádiz, where Riego arrived in early April, a group of people unharnessed the horses of his carriage to pull him through the city. Shortly after, Riego, like other of the rebellious soldiers, was promoted to general ("My King is happy, my homeland is free: this is all my prize," he wrote to Fernando VII trying in vain to reject his new job).

On August 4, 1820, the "Ejército de la Isla", the military force that had led the pronouncement and whose commander-in-chief was Riego, was dissolved by order of the Government (which in compensation had appointed Riego two days before Captain General of Galicia). Riego's reaction was to go to Madrid to try to get the Government to revoke the decision. He presented two separate writings to the Government, the King and the Cortes in which he said:

An enemy hand of good directs the operations of the ministry, and with skill leads to its perdition to the Nation. [...] [The dissolution of the "Army of the Island" is] a project that can only be heard without horror by those bastard children of the Homeland, who wish to see it without support to devour it with the anger that today consumes them and who cannot explain but dissolve the army that has saved it.[.. ]
The Congress knows that the circumstances in which the Nation is located are still difficult and precarious, because it has only begun in its important deliberations, and because the stability of the constitutional institutions cannot ensure them but the time and protective force in which the companies of the discontents are stretched, which cannot fail to increase by experiencing the mutations of a system so contrary to which it has just expired.

He did not occupy the position of Captain General of Galicia because the moderate government accused him of having participated in an act in Madrid in which, in addition to the Himno de Riego, they had sung the tune « subversive» Trágala, and banished him to Oviedo. Riego tried to defend himself in the Cortes but there the moderates falsely accused him of "republicanism." As Juan Francisco Fuentes has highlighted, «the myth of the "hero of the Heads" Thus, for the first time, the aura of a martyr of freedom was added». Finally the government rectified and named Riego Captain General of Aragon and, in addition, the Cortes approved granting him a pension of eighty thousand reales for his deed of Las Cabezas de San Juan, which Riego flatly rejected, showing that, as an adversary of his recognized, Antonio Alcalá Galiano, was "disinterested in terms of profits". He moved on January 8, 1821 to Zaragoza, headquarters of the Captaincy of Aragon.

María Teresa del Riego married Rafael del Riego in 1821.

On September 4, 1821, the "moderate" dismissed him from the position of Captain General of Aragon, again under the false accusation of "republicanism" —this time there is talk that he pulls the strings, new version of the pages of the previous year—, upon discovering in Zaragoza a republican plot directed by a shady character of French origin called Cugnet de Montarlot —“a French military man who took refuge in Zaragoza, quite given to megalomania and charlatanism”— with which Riego nothing it had to do (the hoax was circulated that at the head of a "Russian army" Riego was going to "cut the throat" into the city and "blow up the sanctuary where the Virgen del Pilar is venerated"). On September 8, four days after the arrest of Montarlot and the dismissal of Riego, another alleged conspirator, the liberal Francisco Villamor, was arrested (he is accused of wanting to slit the throat of half of Zaragoza in order to proclaim the Republic). When the news of the dismissal of Riego was known, the Aragonese absolutists celebrated it with shouts of "Death to the Constitution and long live the Christ of the Third Order!" and "Long live the serviles!" —in Alcañiz an anti-liberal (and anti-Jewish) subversive commune was created, but it lasted only a few days. The "exalted" as soon as they found out that Riego had been dismissed and that he was assigned to Lérida —they received the news "with anger and astonishment"— they mobilized. In many cities there were protest demonstrations that in Madrid led to serious clashes on September 18 (the called the battle of the Platerías, after the name of the street where they took place) between "exalted" and the National Militia sent by the political chief of the province, General José Martínez de San Martín, nicknamed Tintín de Navarra by his detractors, who had prohibited the civic procession with the portrait of Riego because "these processions are unusual in the nation [and] condemned by law" and because with it "public tranquility could be compromised." In addition, Martínez de San Martín had ordered the closure of the La Fontana de Oro patriotic society, from which the idea of the procession and the arrest of its owners began. Riego from Lérida appealed to the king to demand justice but received no response. On October 15, he married his niece, María Teresa del Riego y Bustillos, fifteen years his junior by proxy.

General Riego (1820), by Hippolyte Lecomte.

At the end of 1821 he was elected deputy for the Asturias constituency and when the Cortes opened its sessions on March 1, 1822 he was appointed president of the Chamber (a position he would hold for a month). By virtue of this institutional position, he was responsible for responding to the king's inaugural speech in which he made a strange reference to the possibility of a foreign war —the revolutions in Naples and Piedmont had already been crushed by Austrian troops. "The scene was tense. The hero of Las Cabezas de San Juan in front of the monarch of absolutist vocation, face to face, with the plenary session of the chamber as witnesses. The president's response was brief but did not disappoint." Riego referred to the "repeated machinations of the enemies of liberty" and ended by saying that "the power and greatness of a monarch consists solely in the exact fulfillment of the laws."

First from the presidency and then from his seat, Riego worked for reconciliation between the "moderate" liberals and the "exalted" liberals because with "our frank and determined union we will be able to contribute to the consolidation of the system irrevocably." A step in that direction was the declaration by the Cortes on April 7, 1822 of the Himno de Riego as a “national march”. But in July the absolutists tried to put an end to the constitutional regime and failed, taking over the government by the "exalted" ones who had been the protagonists in the defeat of the coup plotters. Doubt then spread as to whether the moderates had participated in the conspiracy, which definitively distanced the two liberal tendencies.For his part, Riego, despite the appeals he received from his followers, never left his constitutional role. "I will never be the Cromwell of my homeland," assured the poet Manuel José Quintana that Riego had said. "My wishes for the benefit of this unfortunate nation are infinite, but I am worth nothing," Riego replied in May 1822 to some liberal ladies from Cartagena who had written to him asking him, as "father of the country par excellence," to act in new, as in Las Cabezas de San Juan.

After leaving his seat as deputy, Riego prepared to take up arms to face the two threats that hung over the constitutional regime: an internal one, the royalist parties that had proclaimed the Regency of Urgell (made up of Baron de Eroles, the Marquis of Mataflorida and the Archbishop of Tarragona); another external one, the French invasion of the One Hundred Thousand Sons of San Luis, secretly claimed from the Holy Alliance by King Ferdinand VII himself, and which began in April 1823. This army, unlike what happened in 1808, advanced towards the interior of the peninsula without producing any popular reaction —rather the opposite: the guerrillas that were formed did so to fight alongside the French troops against the Spanish constitutional army. "Riego lived through those dramatic months in the campaign at the head of his troops" and his principles remained immovable as demonstrated by the proclamation that on August 18, 1823 he directed the third army of operations that concluded with "Long live the Constitution! Long live the constitutional king! Long live the brave defenders of him!” A few days later Riego's wife left Gibraltar for England.

Defeat and execution by hanging

Rigo led by the realistic to La Carolina prison (1835).

On September 15, 1823, Riego, already in retreat, was discovered in a farmhouse in the province of Jaén —near the town of Arquillos— and taken prisoner to La Carolina prison. The absolutist military commander, when he broke the news of Riego's arrest, said: "Will one life be enough, not even a thousand that he had, to erase his heinous crimes with it?" The bishop of Jaén celebrated a Te Deum to celebrate Riego's capture. On October 2, two days after the fall of the constitutional regime, Riego arrived in Madrid heavily guarded. During the trip from La Carolina, taken in a car chained hand and foot, he had been the object of all kinds of humiliation and insults. He was put on trial in which the prosecutor, after stating that to enumerate all his "crimes" "many days and volumes would not suffice", requested the death penalty by hanging and dismemberment of the corpse, distributing his members to the most emblematic places of his biography. The court sentenced him to death for a single crime: the "horrific attack committed by this criminal as a deputy of the so-called courts, voting for the transfer of King Our Lord and his royal family to the Plaza de Cádiz." Dressed in a white tunic and green hat and with his hands tied, he was taken on the morning of November 7 on a serón dragged by a donkey to the gallows raised in the Plaza de la Cebada. He was hanged, although the dismemberment was not finally carried out. produced. In Tudela, Navarra, on October 10, 1823 (a few days before his execution in Madrid) a farce of execution had been made using a doll dressed in the general's clothing.

«The execution of Riego on November 7 in the Plaza de la Cebada had something of an auto-da-fé from the old days of the Holy Office: the clothing of the prisoner —a kind of black skirt held by a rope at the waist—, his dragging himself on a mat through the streets to the gallows, the morbid expectation of the mob, and the sinister accompaniment of some friars whose exhortations "were more terrifying than consoling." This was stated years later by the poet Patricio de la Escosura, a witness to that act, along with other young students, such as José Espronceda, who swore an oath to one day avenge Riego's death. So that nothing was missing, the day after his execution, an alleged retraction written and signed by him before he died was published in Madrid. It was a last attempt —useless as it turned out— to prevent the myth from surviving the character. to those accused of treason, that is, "drag-hang-dismember", although, it seems, the last part of the sentence was not carried out. In his case, the cruelty of physical violence and the exemplarity of public ridicule came together in a kind of cathartic spectacle. It was about annihilating both the man and the symbol of constitutional Spain". However, "by destroying the idol of the people, the myth had been strengthened. The Plaza de la Cebada in Madrid was thus incorporated into the urban cartography of Spanish liberalism as a place of memory of its struggles, celebrations and efforts during the Constitutional Triennium».

According to Josep Fontana, Fernando VII did not want to enter Madrid before Riego had been executed (it was "his first personal revenge"). He did it six days later, on November 13, mounted on a "triumphal chariot" drawn by "24 men dressed in the old Spanish style and 24 royalist volunteers." «The race was brilliant; everywhere was seen an immense crowd, full of joy and enthusiasm; from the balconies and windows, and even on the roofs, they acclaimed us waving their white handkerchiefs in the air", the king himself wrote.

Rehabilitation

The execution of Rafael del Riego, "the Spanish Washington", raised a wave of indignation throughout Europe. In London, he proposed to erect a monument to him and the activist John Cartwright said that Riego represented better than anyone "the common cause of humanity". was his older brother, the canon Miguel del Riego, who only returned to Spain in 1835 to bury Rafael's corpse. This was possible because that year the rehabilitation of General Riego had taken place through a decree of October 21 signed by the Regent María Cristina de Borbón, at the request of the President of the Government Juan Álvarez Mendizábal, a good friend of Riego with whom he had organized the pronouncement of 1820. Invoking the "sacred obligation to repair past errors" and convenience, "in these days of peace and reconciliation for the defenders of the legitimate Throne and of freedom", to erase "as soon as possible, all bitter memories", the regent decreed that General Rafael del Riego be "replaced in his good name, fame and memory" and that his family would henceforth enjoy "the position and widowhood that corresponds to it according to the laws..., under the special protection of my beloved Daughter Dª Isabel II and during her minor age, under mine".

Legacy

Rigo Monument in Oviedo.

Rafael del Riego survived in popular memory as a mythical hero of the fight for freedom; the march played by his troops during the events of 1820, popularly called Himno de Riego, continued to be played as a revolutionary hymn throughout the century XIX and was adopted as Spain's national anthem during the Second Republic (1931-39). Riego has thus remained one of the great defenders of civil liberties in Spain, becoming the martyr par excellence of the political repression exercised by absolutism. Riego's portrait is exhibited in the Cortes Generales along with other paintings alluding to characters and liberal events, such as the Jura de la Constitución de 1812. As Juan Francisco Fuentes has highlighted, «from the progressive liberalism of the 19th century to anarcho-syndicalism and communism in the 20th century, passing, of course, through republicanism, General Riego has nurtured a motley universe of symbols and sentiments of the left. republican and working class and of Spanish democracy in general".

His myth also spread outside of Spain. A year after his death, the exiled Spanish liberal Félix Mejía published in Philadelphia There is no union with tyrants, whoever seeks it will die, that is: the death of Riego and Spain in chains . Also in 1824, the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin dedicated a poem to Riego, while portraits of Riego and Antonio Quiroga were exhibited in a bookstore in downtown Moscow. In 1825 the tragedy of H.M. Milner entitled Spanish Martyrs or Death of Riego!. At the beginning of that same year, the Gazetta di Genova reported that a drum major from the Spanish army was being tried for having made the band of Riego play the Himno de Riego his regiment "and that in broad daylight." The same newspaper reported two months after a man had been sentenced to death for having shouted "death to the king, to his ministers, to the queen and long live Riego."Victor Hugo mentioned Riego in Les Wretched .

One of the few negative evaluations of Riego was that of the writer Benito Pérez Galdós who gave credibility to Riego's supposed retraction before he died —without there being any proof that it was authentic— in his novel El terror from 1824:

A nobleman will have given his figure the historical enhancement that could not reach in three years of agitation and bullanga... The retraction of the hero of the Heads was one of the most noisy victories of the absolutist side... That famous man, the smallest of those who seem grafted without knowing how, in the ranks of the great, medium military and lousy politician, living proof of the madness of fame and usurper of a celebrity that would have framed better other characters and names condemned to oblivion today, finished his short career without decorum or greatness

For his part, the Spanish historian Juan Francisco Fuentes has made the following assessment of the myth of General Riego:

The magnitude that reached the myth of the "Hero of the Heads" is not in proportion to its historical clairvoyance, but to its heroism, its abnegation and its martyrdom. Without that drama of the character, it would not be understood the symbolic dimension he has had throughout our contemporary history.

Historians Ángel Bahamonde and Jesús Antonio Martínez have highlighted that Riego «became to become the first great hero of the revolution and became associated with the liberal ideal. Mythical character who would capitalize on the hallmarks of the liberal impulse through multiple popular expressions, such as the anthem, and who would become part of the heritage of liberal culture and subsequent revolutions".