Sovereign Births, Empire and War in Benito Pérez Galdós’s First Series of Episodios nacionales (original) (raw)

2009, Vanderbilt e-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies

An imperial power invades and occupies an authoritarian country in the name of more enlightened, liberal, democratic values. The occupation initially seems successful, and many of the political elites of the invaded nation realign themselves with the new regime. The vast majority of the natives, however, are far less hospitable than the occupier might have imagined, and while the empire"s military forces easily seize and control key cities, throughout the country resistance to occupation quickly erupts into a popular insurgency characterized by guerrilla warfare. Longstanding assumptions governing the legitimate uses of violence are abruptly rewritten, and the empire is slowly bogged down in a war it will ultimately lose. At the same time, as insurgent violence escalates, native representative assemblies gather to imagine the political future of the nation in the form of a new constitution. These are the first decades of the 1800s, the occupied nation is Spain, and the enlightened empire is Napoleon"s. The almost uncanny resonance of this tale throughout much of the twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, marked as they have been by questions of invasion, occupation, liberation, non-state violence, insurgency, and nation-building, speaks eloquently to the potential value of revisiting representations of the Napoleonic era. 1 Indeed, my interest in beginning with this particular evocation of Napoleonic imperialism is primarily to focus on war and empire and their relationship to the symbolic birth of modern Spain as narrated in the ten novels comprising the first series of Benito Pérez Galdós"s Episodios nacionales. Arguably Spain"s most highly regarded novelist after Miguel de Cervantes, Galdós publishes the series between 1873 and 1875, and the novels focus on historical events from 1805 to 1814. The series is the most protracted nineteenth-century Spanish novelistic treatment of the Napoleonic occupation and Spanish War of Independence, surpassing even Tolstoy"s War and Peace in extension, and it continues to garner critical attention today, as readers venture beyond Galdós"s betterknown novelas contemporáneas in order to understand more fully his complex, evolving conception of history and its relationship to the novel-genre. 2 In keeping with the classic features of the historical novel, the Episodios artfully blend meticulously researched historical narrative with the fictional adventures of the series" protagonistnarrator, Gabriel Araceli, and it is precisely the characteristic interplay between historical verisimilitude and fictional invention that imbues these novels with a curiously contemporary resonance for our own, putatively postmodern age in which the distinctions between history and fiction seem to have become