María Cristina, the queen who explains Spain and the Monarchy two centuries later

To understand the future there is no need for experts or futurologists. Enough with History. At least in Spain, which has been playing hula-hoop for two centuries. Even for epidemics: in 1833 there was an outbreak of cholera that spread from Vigo for lack of hygiene measures. We have made some progress, "but not too much," responds the writer Paula Cifuentes (Madrid, 1985) almost with some modesty. And it does not speak of pandemics, but of the country.

It is the amazement with a bitter aftertaste left by her recently published María Cristina, queen governor (Ariel), at times a historical novel and other biographical and political reviews, which show "the exact trace of what we are living now with what happened in Maria's time Cristina " , the queen consort (1829-1833) of the ominous Fernando VII and the regent until 1840, with the age of majority (13 years) of her daughter Isabel II , who acceded to the throne after repealing the Salic Law.

The character is suggestive, and the author portrays him with folds, appetite and justice , when she never appeared in textbooks more than as a bold title at the head of a short paragraph. Another woman off the hook from history? Inexplicable. Or not, of course. Because María Cristina appeared in the Bourbon court of Fernando VII as the docile and domestic childbirth of an heir, typical of queens, and ended up being "a true conspirator" even in the French court; doing and undoing between moderate and progressive liberals in an effort to procure the throne for their daughter and forbid it to Carlism; grasping the privileges of the nascent bourgeoisie before the limits of the incipient constitutional monarchy and challenging General Espartero himself (who has been given more extensive paragraphs in the manuals). The typical thing that the queens are not forgiven.

He had the honor of starring in "the first memes of history" : the song "María Cristina wants to rule me and I follow him, I follow the current ...", which was popularized in Guaracha by the Cuban Ñico Saquito . "Humor is also a way of vilifying someone and deep down nobody approved of María Cristina's management." A political smear campaign that appealed to emotions. We have not invented anything. Was Maria Cristina so disastrous? " She was less forgiven for being a woman. She almost coincided in time with Queen Victoria [of the United Kingdom], her reverse: the stereotype of a silent, shadowy woman, faithful to her husband, never a slip, taking care of her children ... What the patriarchy has considered that the woman and the queen should embody as the image of a country ".

Machismo undermined María Cristina's project and, consequently, the reign of Elizabeth II (the plurality of lovers was not tolerated by women from two centuries ago), but also because it was "a time of radical changes in Spain" that reach to the present. And in this parallelism, Paula Cifuentes' book is sobering. "The territorial question from the Carlist wars or the alternation and segmentation of the parties with their internal struggles or the creation of bicameralism or the separation of powers, or even the current withdrawal of statues such as that of the Count of Comillas ... So many concomitances that explain the Spain of today ".

The writer dedicates the last chapter to the personal enrichment of the governor, forged with the slave trade in Cuba or the railway business. "Because if there is a queen who took it raw, it was María Cristina." The rest of the biography focuses on that transformation of the country and Europe that the dynasty descended from Louis XIV did not understand.

María Cristina embodies Bourbon virtues and absolutist sins . She was charming, funny and smiling, "there is no historian who does not praise her for it", but also "knew that she could be defenestrated at any time and had a desire to stay in power that goes beyond the lawful ". In fact, she used ministers as currencies of exchange. And as the author warns, "losing the support of the people for such an old institution would make it last nothing." Even more so in Spain, "a country that tends to cainism and where, if the King takes any position, the supporters of Cain or Abel will use the monarchy as a throwing weapon."

The Bourbons have lived surrounded by a political upheaval that even dragged them into exile (María Cristina, on two occasions). However, they have always found their way back. "The nineteenth century is such a troubled time that only the figure of the monarch went back to more stable times. And when there have been republics, they did not fall because monarchs were better, but because republics were not better than monarchs."

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María Cristina was wrong when she tried to do politics: she ignored the people and was guided by her second husband, the military man Agustín Muñoz y Sánchez , who became duke of Riánsares and the head in the shadow of the moderate party, since the formation of a queen did not It went beyond writing exercises, music, some geography, his work and translation from French.

Isabel II suffered the same disaffection with knowledge, with a direct guilt from her mother: "One of the regent's great mistakes was to delegate her daughter's education." But here there is a fabulous disparity. "Isabel II did not know how to do the o with a joint and Princess Leonor watches Kurosawa movies . Letizia is preparing her daughters for everything that has to come." In part, the monolithic submission of the queens has also cracked. "Both María Cristina and Isabel II disrupted the prototype, and Letizia is also breaking molds. For this reason, she will drop sticks exactly like María Cristina, we have not changed so much," the author reiterates with laughter.

Perhaps it does make sense that a woman in her thirties, with a Galdosian vocation and law studies at the Complutense and La Sorbonne, wrote about a monarch of two centuries ago. "There were no recent biographies and it was a key period to understand Spain now." We rolled the hula-hoop , but there are gaps in history to fill.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• culture
• history
• Queen Letizia
• Princess Eleanor
• Spain

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