José María de Torrijos y Uriarte

José María de Torrijos y Uriarte
Engraving by General Torrijos
Born	March 20, 1791
Died	December 11, 1831
Place of birth	Madrid, Spain Spain
Place of death	Málaga, Spain Spain
Rank	General
Battles/wars	Peninsular War

Jose Maria Torrijos y Uriarte (March 20, 1791 - December 11, 1831), Count of Torrijos, a title granted posthumously by the Queen Governor, also known as General Torrijos, was a Spanish Liberal soldier. He fought in the Spanish War of Independence and after the restoration of absolutism by Ferdinand VII in 1814 he participated in the pronouncement of John Van Halen of 1817 that sought to restore the Constitution of 1812, reason why he spent two years in prison until he was released after Triumph of the pronouncement of Irrigation in 1820. He returned to fight the French when the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis invaded Spain to restore the absolute power of Ferdinand VII and when those triumphed ending the liberal triennium exiled to England. There he prepared a statement which he himself led, landing on the coast of Malaga from Gibraltar on December 2, 1831, along with sixty men accompanying him, but they fell into the trap that had been laid before him by the absolutist authorities and were arrested. Nine days later, on December 11, Torrijos and 48 of his fellow survivors were shot without trial on the beach of San Andres de Málaga, a fact that was immortalized by a sonnet of José de Espronceda entitled To the death of Torrijos and his Companions and by a famous painting that painted in 1888 Antonio Gisbert. "The tragic outcome of his life explains what has happened to history, in all fairness, as a great symbol of the struggle against despotism and tyranny, with the traits of epic nobility and serenity typical of the romantic hero, eternalized in The famous painting Antonio Gisbert." The city of Malaga erected a monument to Torrijos and his companions in the Plaza de la Merced, next to the birthplace of the painter Pablo Picasso. Under the monument to Torrijos in the middle of the square are the tombs of 48 of the 49 men shot; One of them, British, was buried in the English cemetery (Malaga).

Biography

Childhood and youth

Torrijos was born March 20, 1791, in Madrid to a family of Andalusian bureaucrats in the service of the Monarchy. He was the third of four children to Cristóbal de Torrijos and Chacón, of Seville, and Maria Petronila Uriarte and Borja, born in the Port of Santa Maria. His paternal grandfather, Bernardo de Torrijos, was from Malaga, and belonged to the Royal Council and was prosecutor of the Royal Chancery of Granada. His father was knight of the Order of Carlos III and help of camera of the king Carlos IV. Thanks to the position he held, he succeeded in making the ten years Jose Maria be named king's page. He immediately decided on a military career and at the age of thirteen he entered the Academy of Engineers, where he specialized in engineering.

War of Independence (1808-1814)

Torrijos participation in the War of Independence began the same day that the war began, May 2, 1808, He came to the aid of the officers Luis Daoiz and Torres and Pedro Velarde who were without ammunition in the artillery park of Madrid. They sent him to negotiate with the French general Gobert but in full mission it explodes the anti-French popular revolt of the capital, reason why it is stopped and only saves of being shot by the intervention of a helper of field of Joaquin Murat whom he knew. At that time he was seventeen and had the rank of captain.

He later joined the defense of Valencia and Murcia and those of Catalonia, being "one of the few military cadres of the old army who put themselves at the head of the national resistance in the name of the liberal principles of freedom and independence. He detached him from the French and collaborationist camp chosen by many illustrated and clearly confronted him with absolutism. " In 1810, at his nineteen years, he reached the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was taken prisoner of the French, after being wounded, but escapes and returns to fight in the war, "consecrating like a military of great boldness and value", appreciated by the two sides - the French general Suchet offered Change of side, and the British Doyle asked to the Cortes of Cadiz that he orténgaran a distinguished command in the reorganized forces in the Island of Leon. It was under the orders of the [Duke of Wellington] in the decisive Battle of Vitoria, that was going to give place to the end of the war. Three months earlier, in March 1813, he had married Luisa Carlota Sáenz de Viniegra, daughter of an honorary intendant of the army, with whom he would have a daughter in 1815 who died shortly after birth. Torrijos ends the war with the rank of brigadier general, only twenty-three years old.

Failed pronouncement against Ferdinand VII and prison (1817-1820)

After the return of Ferdinand VII and the restoration of the Absolute Monarchy in 1814, Torrijos was appointed military governor of Murcia, Cartagena and Alicante, receiving in 1816 the great cross of San Fernando Their military merits. But Torrijos soon became involved in the conspiratorial plot liberal is that they intended to end at last with the absolute power of the king and reinstate the Constitution of Cadiz. In order to do so, he apparently joined the Masonry by adopting the name "Aristogiton."

The conspiracy in which it participated directly was the attempt of pronouncement headed by the also military Juan Van Halen and that was going to take place in the zone that was militarily under his command. He engaged in the attempt to regiment Lorraine who was in charge, with the help of his friend the Lieutenant Colonel Juan López Pinto, and contacted various clandestine liberal groups in his territory. But Torrijos was discovered and detained on December 26, 1817, first enclosed in the Santa Barbara Castle Alicante and then in the prison of the Inquisition of Murcia. There he would spend the next two years, although he did not give up conspiratorial activity thanks to his wife who visited him in jail and sent him the clandestine papers, as she narrated herself, " either putting the papers inside the bones of the flesh , Or in the handle of the silver knives or in the hem of the tablecloths and napkins. For his part Van Halen escaped in 1818 Of the prisons of the Holy Office.

The liberal triennium (1820-1823)

He left the prison thanks to the triumph of the Irrigation pronouncement and on February 29, 1820 led the proclamation of the Constitution of 1812 in Murcia. King Fernando VII after being forced to accept the Constitutional Monarchy tried to attract Torrijos to his side and offered the transfer to Madrid to occupy the position of colonel of the regiment that bore his name, but Torrijos flatly refused. Which was worth the marginalization of any responsibility on the part of the "moderate" liberal governments.

It supported the patriotic societies defended by the liberals "exaltados" and was integrated in June 1820 in the famous Fontana de Oro and in the Lovers of the Constitutional Order. Torrijos and other "exalted" Liberals created a secret society known as La Comunería, whose purpose was to defend the Constitution, and which shortly before the end of Trienio was split between a A "radical" sector linked to the newspaper "Zurriago" and that of the "constitutional comuneros", in which Torrijos was integrated.

When the uprisings took place Torrijos participated in the war against the realistic games in Navarre and in Catalonia - where it was lieutenant of the general Espoz and Mina -, which was worth to him the promotion to marshal Of field by order of the government "exalted" of Evaristo San Miguel. Shortly after, the 28 of February 1823, was named War minister of Spain but did not get to occupy the position when revoking the king the government "exalted" of which Torrijos formed part.

When in May 1823 the invasion of the [one hundred thousand children of San Luis] sent by the Holy Alliance to restore the absolute power of the king Ferdinand VII, acted under the orders of the [general Ballesteros] ] But this, so that Torrijos did not bother to him in its intended maneuver of not offering any resistance to the enemy, sent it destined for Cartagena to the control of the VIII military District. There he defended the plaza along with Francisco Valdés and Juan López Pinto until a month after the government and the Cortes had capitulated before the Duke of Angoulême in September Of 1823 after the fall of the fort Trocadero of Cadiz, that would end up giving name to a celebrated square of Paris. Thus Torrijos in Cartagena, along with Espoz and Mina in Barcelona, were the last military that resisted. In the act of surrender to the French troops signed on November 3, 1823-it had been a month since Ferdinand VII had restored absolutism-Torrijos got the officers who went into exile to collect their salaries in the emigration, according to their condition of Refugees, not political prisoners. "It surrendered with all the honors: the arms were seized, but no one was shot, neither were prisoners nor reprisals. In the few days, on November 7, 1823, Rafael del Riego was Executed on the Plaza de la Cebada in Madrid, was the sad symbol of the defeat of the liberals at the hands of the Holy Alliance, and on November 18 Torrijos and his wife embarked for Marseilles, where they arrived on 1 December. Thus began an exile that would irreversibly change their lives. "

Exile in England (1824-1830)

In France he stayed only five months because of the hostility shown by his government to the Spanish liberal exiles, who were heavily guarded by the police and who were not allowed to reside in the border departments with Spain. At that time Torrijos claimed for him and for his subordinates the salary stipulated in the agreement of surrender of Cartagena and that the government refused to pay - they would only collect after the revolution of 1830] triumphed in France - and entered in Contact with the general Lafayette, deputy and one of the main leaders of the liberal opposition to the [Monarchy] of Louis XVIII, with which it would maintain an active correspondence of the one that arose A long friendship.

On April 24, 1824 Torrijos and his wife embarked for England and during the first two years lived in a modest house of Blackheath until at the end of 1826 they moved to London. During that time he lived on the help of his former boss the Duke of Wellington, then British Prime Minister, who held until July 1829 when he was withdrawn because of the increase in his conspiratorial activity. As this grant was not very large had to devote to translation. Thus he translated from French into Castilian the Napoleon's Memories, preceded by an introduction - in which he showed his admiration for Bonaparte as a forger of a "national" army, among other reasons - and supplemented by numerous notes, And from English into Spanish the "Memoirs of General Miller," who had participated in the Peruvian war, and which Torrijos had personally met in 1812 during the campaigns of the [[War of Independence] Spanish]]. In the prologue of the latter Torrijos emphasized that Miller had left his land to fight for the freedom "of South America", without even knowing the language, and that "it always served to the homeland that had adopted, doing as it should abstraction of people And matches. "

A few months after going to live in London, the most radical Spanish liberal exiles created on 1 February 1827 a "Board of the uprising in Spain" that was presided over by Torrijos, thus becoming the top leader of this liberal sector " Exalted "who had distanced himself from the more moderate positions of Francisco Espoz and Mina, who until then had been the leader of liberals exiled in England and who at the time was quite skeptical about the chances of success of a [pronouncement] In Spain against the of Fernando VII.

The pronouncement of 1831

Main article: Torrijos pronunciation

Rock of Gibraltar during the times of Torrijos. In May of 1830 Torrijos presented his plan for the insurrection consisting in the penetration "in circumference" in the Peninsula to attack the center, Madrid, from several points, that would begin with the "break", that is to say, with the entrance in Spain Of the conspirators in London led by himself and who would be the signal for the uprising. On July 16, 1830, the Board of London was dissolved and appointed on an interim basis, Until the nation was "freely assembled," an Executive Commission of the uprising led by Torrijos himself, as the chief military officer, and by [Manuel Flores Calderón], former president of the Cortes del Trienio Liberal As a civil authority. Torrijos and his followers arrived in Gibraltar at the beginning of September via Paris and Marseilles. In Gibraltar they would remain for a whole year until the end of November 1831, and from there Torrijos promoted several insurrectional conquests in February and March 1831, which were answered by a brutal repression of the absolutist government of Ferdinand VII, whose most famous victim was [ Mariana Pineda, executed in Granada the 26 of May of that year.

Drawing of Vicente González Moreno, Viriato , by Isidoro Magués

In September 1831 the [captain general] of Andalusia proposed to the government "to seize the revolutionary caudillo Torrijos by surprise or stratagem". The main protagonist of this one would be the governor of Malaga, Vicente González Moreno, who from the previous month had initiated an active correspondence with Torrijos under the pseudonym of 'Viriato' ', posing as a liberal Who assured him that the best place for the landing would be the coast of Malaga, where he would have secured the support of the garrisons and where all the liberals were willing to second him. "

Unfortunately Torrijos paid more attention to "Viriato", and to some genuine liberal who also wrote him encouraging him, than to the Junta de Málaga that tried to dissuade him from landing on those shores if he did not have enough forces.

On November 30, two boats with sixty men headed by Torrijos, who were sufficient for the project since the landing did not have a military character, only intended to tread Spanish land and "pronounce", which would constitute the "break" that would trigger the Liberal uprising throughout Spain. They had printed a Manifesto to the Nation, in addition to several proclamations. "As symbolic elements, uniforms, tricolor flags (red and yellow, with two blue-blue stripes) and emblems with arms of Spain. Their mottos:" Patria, Libertad e Independencia ", and the cry of" Long live the Freedom! "

Torrijos and his companions on the beaches of Málaga in the beach of San Andrés (Málaga) by Antonio Gisbert Pérez, in 1888 (Museum of the Prado).

On the morning of December 2, they see the land of Malaga, after almost forty hours of travel. Arriving at the coast they are surprised by the ship Neptune , which opens fire on the liberals. With no more shelter than the land itself, Torrijos and his men hurry to the beach of El Charcón. Then the group of Torrijos begins its way towards the Sierra de Mijas, but when they are near the town of Mijas they see formations arranged to cut the passage to them and to capture them by what Torrijos orders its men that border the town. After several days of walking, they descend along the north slope of the Sierra de Mijas and enter the [Guadalhorce valley] towards Alhaurín de la Torre, located twenty kilometers from Malaga. They took refuge in Torrealquería of the Count of Mollina in Alhaurín de la Torre. With the first light of day December 4, 1831, Coin Realist Volunteers fired their weapons to imply the liberals who were already located and who had been surrounded . Then the attack began. The Liberals, for their part, opened fire from within. Torrijos finally decided to surrender and hope that in Malaga the course of events changed.

The group was taken prisoner to the Convent of San Andrés (Málaga) | Convento de los Carmelitas Descalzos de San Andrés, where they would spend their last hours. At 11:30 in the morning on Sunday 11 December, Torrijos and his 48 companions "In the first one was Torrijos, who was not allowed to send the execution squad, as he had requested."

Bibliography

• Castells, Irene (2000). "José María Torrijos (1791-1831). Romantic Conspirator". Liberals, agitators and conspirators. Unorthodox biographies of the nineteenth century. Burdiel. ISBN 84-239-6048-X. 
• Del Pino Chica, Enrique (2001). Editorial Alhulia. ed. Retama Field. ISBN 8495136759.