Adela and Matilde. Post-imperial memories, pan-hispanism and liberal humanitarianism in a romantic novel (1843)

Abstract

This article offers a historiographical analysis of the novel Adela y Matilde o los últimos cinco años de la dominación española en el Perú, a romantic fiction that aimed to intervene in the political debates surrounding the imperial past of Elizabethan Spain. My analysis will reflect how its author, Colonel Ramón Soler, conceived his work with three objectives. First, he proposed the vindication of the personal and group honour of the royalist soldiers who had participated in the Peruvian War of Independence and who, throughout Espartero’s Regency (1840-1843) and the Moderate Decade (1844-1854), were vilified by liberal-conservative propaganda as the culprits of the imperial schism. Secondly, the novel was postulated as an exercise in political thought. Soler was eager to defend the ideological principles of liberal pan-Hispanism, sifted here by humanitarianism and the vindication of female subjects. Finally, Soler’s account suggested a frustrated counterfactual horizon, according to which the transitional transformation of the Spanish empire into a family of parliamentary monarchies would have avoided the catastrophic geopolitical rupture of the Hispanic world. Adela y Matilde emerged in a liminal space between autobiographical memory, literature and historiography. It socialized highly refined ethical-political representation of the dynamics that had led to the decline of ties between Spain and Latin America. It also proposed keys to repair the links between them.