Juan Donoso Cortés

gigatos | June 3, 2022

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Summary

Juan Francisco María de la Salud Donoso Cortés y Fernández Canedo, first Marquis of Valdegamas, born on May 6, 1809 in Valle de la Serena, near Badajoz (Extremadura), and died on May 3, 1853 in Paris, was a Spanish writer and politician. He developed an original, pessimistic, providentialist philosophy of history, which by the end of his life had become a theology of history; it blends the influence of Giambattista Vico with that of several great Christian authors, notably Saint Augustine and Bossuet. Historians of political thought generally place him in the counter-revolutionary current, alongside Edmund Burke, Louis de Bonald, and especially Joseph de Maistre, to whom he is closest.

As a politician, he played an important role in Spain in the 1830s and 1840s: he advised and supported the regent Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies, even after her exile in France. He later supported General Narváez, who corresponded to his ideal of a military dictatorship in times of crisis. During his lifetime, Donoso Cortés was famous all over Europe for his oratorical skills, which he used in his speeches in the Cortes, which were often long and full of references to religion and universal history. Today, he is best known for having influenced the thinking of the German jurist and legal philosopher Carl Schmitt, who dedicated a study to him.

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Youth

The eldest son of Pedro Donoso Cortés, a lawyer and landowner from Extremadura, a distant descendant of the conquistador Hernán Cortés, and María Elena Fernández Canedo y Fernández Canedo, he first studied with a tutor, before leaving at the age of eleven to study in Salamanca and then at the San Pedro College in Caceres, where he proved to be particularly gifted in logic and metaphysics. In October 1823, he went to the University of Seville, where he met Nicomedes Pastor Díaz, another future journalist and politician. He finished his law studies at the age of nineteen; too young to be a lawyer, he turned to teaching, and in the fall of 1828 he obtained a chair of literature at the college of Cáceres, recommended by the writer Manuel Quintana. Quintana, a poet with a liberal political orientation, made him read the works of Rousseau, Condorcet and Destutt de Tracy. In Caceres, Donoso Cortés met Teresa Carrasco, whom he married in 1830.

That same year, Donoso Cortés moved to Madrid, where he worked with his father as a lawyer. His poems are appreciated, but he is best known for his Memoir on the current situation of the monarchy, addressed to King Ferdinand VII, which allows him to obtain a job in the secretariat of the Minister of Justice. It was a text of liberal and conservative orientation, in which he defended the rights of Ferdinand VII to occupy the throne against the supporters of Don Carlos. On the death of the king, he sided with Queen Isabella II and the regency of her mother Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies.

Journalist and politician

He wrote in 1834 the Considerations on diplomacy and its influence on the political and social situation of Europe, from the Revolution of July to the treaty of the Quadruple alliance. He exposes there his admiration for the Constitution of 1812, and shows himself partisan of a government “in the name of the intelligence”. Visibly inspired by the reading of certain French doctrinaires like Royer-Collard, he bases the principle of the legitimacy of the sovereign not on his election by the people, but on the conformity of his acts with justice.

His only daughter and his wife both died in the summer of 1835. In November of the same year, he participated in the recreation of the Madrid Athenaeum with Salustiano Olózaga and Ángel de Saavedra. In 1837, he was elected deputy for the district of Cadiz and was appointed secretary of the Council of Ministers presided over by Mendizábal, although he disagreed with Mendizábal and resigned shortly afterwards.

In order to spread his ideas, he founded the newspaper El Porvenir, while contributing to, among others, Piloto, the Revista de Madrid and Correo Nacional. In 1836-1837 he gave a course on public law at the Madrid Athenaeum, which provoked numerous reactions, most of them unfavorable. In 1840, when Espartero became regent, he had to leave Spain, and accompanied the former regent Maria Cristina in her exile in France, from where he wrote the different manifestos that she addressed to the Spaniards.

In 1843, when Espartero was overthrown by Narváez, Donoso Cortés returned to Spain, and Maria Cristina entrusted him with the education of her daughter, Queen Isabella II. He took part again in the debates of the Cortes, where he was known for his oratorical talents, and played a great role in the drafting of the Constitution of 1845. He made a name for himself by pleading in favor of the Spanish marriages, which saw Isabella and his sister marry respectively the infant François d”Assise and the duke of Montpensier; he was named Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor by Louis-Philippe on this occasion. Deeply affected by the death of his brother Pedro in 1847, he became interested in Catholic mystics, notably Teresa of Avila and Louis of Granada. In 1848, he entered the Spanish Royal Academy, and on this occasion gave his speech on the Bible.

A counter-revolutionary intellectual

In the same year, Donoso Cortés was appointed ambassador to Berlin, to Prussia; the events related to the Spring of the Peoples undoubtedly contributed significantly to the evolution of his political ideas. It was at this time that he definitively rejected liberalism and moved towards the traditionalism of the Savoy philosopher Joseph de Maistre and the Frenchman Louis de Bonald. This change was made public in his Speech on the Dictatorship, delivered on January 4, 1849 before the Spanish Cortes, in which he praised the dictatorial government established by General Narváez, defending the legality of government dictatorship as the only alternative to the dictatorship of the revolution.

In 1851, he had the Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism published in French and Spanish, which was widely commented on in the European press; some Catholics attacked the work, which led Louis Veuillot to defend it in his newspaper l”Univers; the latter was to remain the sole publisher of Donoso Cortés” works after his death. Thereafter, he puts without success his intellectual authority at the service of the reconciliation between the partisans of Charles V and Isabella II who dispute the throne of Spain.

In the months preceding his death, his pessimism only increased. He goes so far as to write, in a letter of November 12: “I will say nothing about what is possible now; I believe, in my soul and conscience, that nothing is possible. The great crime of liberalism is to have so destroyed the temperament of society that it can support nothing, neither good nor evil.” Appointed ambassador in Paris, he died there in 1853. In France, Louis Veuillot and Charles de Montalembert eulogized him in the Universe and the Correspondent; Montalembert, however, was more reserved than Veuillot and criticized the absolute rejection of liberalism expressed by Donoso Cortés in his last writings.

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Posterity

On April 3, 1873, the Duke of Aumale (Henri d”Orléans), in his election speech to the French Academy, paid tribute to his predecessor, the Count of Montalembert, by repeating the latter”s words about Donoso Cortes: “He darted into fame”. A complete edition of his works was published in Madrid after his death. In the 20th century, his thought has been studied by a great number of political philosophers, sociologists, and historians of ideas, especially Germans (Carl Schmitt, Stuart Schram, Ludwig Fischer, Erich Przywara), but also French (Jules Chaix-Ruy), Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, etc.

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