Money, power, positions: the liberal's perverse incentives in Luis Arias de León's Peñadura (1823)

Abstract

Luis Arias de León’s Historia del valeroso caballero don Rodrigo de Peñadura (Marseille, 1823) is a satirical-reactionary novel that emulates the structure of Don Quixote to mock the liberals of the Constitutional Triennium (1820-1823). This article analyzes how the text accuses the Spanish liberal (as well as his French counterpart) of acting in accordance with a series of perverse, socio-professional incentives. In particular, Peñadura implies that liberals took advantage of the political situation brought about by the return of constitutionalism to enrich themselves, obtain public positions, and accumulate power. Such self-serving instrumentalization of their ideology was camouflaged under the cloak of Enlightenment like philanthropic speech. The work of the satirist consists of exposing this alleged mechanism of concealment and revealing the «true» nature of the Hispanic/French liberal; a parasitic, selfish, deceitful subject. To prove my thesis, I discuss a series of passages dealing with the taxation imposed by the new political class, the careerism within Freemasonry, and Touquet’s publishing business.