«I like the unexpected, the uncertain; I am interested in the unknown; the charm of the unread book and its unheard note. I don’t understand the existence of people who get up at the same time every day and eat casserole in the same place. If I were rich, I wouldn’t have a house. A big suitcase and always travel. Standing where I want, avoiding the things that bother me… Inhaling the smells of things without analyzing them. Building a palace with a cemetery and doing everything to live and die in the same place makes us look like mollusks” (Autobiography. Prometeo Magazine, August 1909).
Carmen de Burgos, Colombine (Almería 1867-Madrid 1932), writer, journalist, translator, war correspondent and tireless women’s rights fighter. His existential trajectory and literary career combine strong beliefs and a firm, vindictive and independent character.
From her early decision to leave her husband, who was so inept in assuming responsibilities, to her death and burial in the Madrid Civil Cemetery; Going on a journey without rest to defend his ethical principles, Colombine’s biography takes place in a world dominated by men.
He wrote Divorce in Spain in 1903; Brave material for the time, and as director of Revista Critica, he compensated the Jews expelled by the Catholic Monarchs without stopping to defend the Sephardic cause.
As the first war correspondent in the summer of 1909, he covered the disasters of the war in North Africa. He exudes warmongering from his diaries in Melilla. After a trip to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, in 1912 he published Letters Without an Address in Flanders, in which he showed – always at the forefront – his interest in nationalism. On his third trip to Europe with his daughter, World War I broke out and he was arrested in Germany on suspicion of spying for the Russian Empire.
A novelist published La rampa, whose protagonist is a long-suffering middle-class woman, in 1917. The importance of women reflected in her novels causes legal discontent and a first distance in her. Although he has already been acquitted, Colombine knows: “To live means to fight. Let’s live!”
When his health began to play tricks on him (he had a heart condition, Madrid winters did not suit him), he settled in Portugal until debts forced him to sell the villa built by Ramón Gómez de la Serna in Estoril, and they left. to live in Naples.
Back in Madrid, she wrote Quiero vivir mi vida—with a foreword by Gregorio Marañón—his most innovative novel in terms of style and plot, dealing with the intersex.
Her militancy led to her being ahead of her time on the defensive—along with Clara de Campoamor—to get the female vote. In 1921 she directed the first women’s demonstration—before the Congress of Representatives—to demand legal equality with men. Before her death, she founded the Adoption Love lodge in 1931.
The first professional journalist wrote for Diario Universal, ABC, La Correspondencia de España, El Heraldo de Madrid and El Globo (Madrid), as well as El Campeón del Magisterio (Valencia).
His extensive literary legacy (324 entries, including books, magazines and letters) has been digitized thanks to the efforts of Roberto Cermeño, president of Ateneo’s Carmen de Burgos Society and creator of a valuable work. Get to know a better woman, an outstanding patriot.
His work was censored at the end of the Civil War. In the forties, he began to be prosecuted by the Special Court Against Freemasonry and Communism.
With the Spanish democratic Transition, the atonement of a country woman who was admired internationally as a teacher, journalist, writer and intellectual began very timidly – a mixture of disdain for her ideas, then considered bizarre and deliberately discredited.
The oblivion and long-lasting injury he was the object of in his country was nothing but the tribute he had to pay to an unmanageable woman for her headstrong and unyielding independence.
Asunción Valdés, Chonín, author of Revive. La nueva Carmen de Burgos (published by the Juan Gil-Albert Cultural Institute in Alicante) has taken on a giant task with her book, like rescuing the memory of Carmen de Burgos (CdB) in two volumes. A detailed tour of the work, life and miracles of the “red lady”.
We will also find meeting points with the protagonist of Revive in Chonin, a pioneer in the struggle for women’s civil rights. As APM’s general secretary, Mónica Touron, said in her eulogy: “I’m sure they’ll be good friends.”
As a journalist, researcher and historian, everything happened in the press (Patrica from Granada; INFORMACIÓN and La Verdad from Alicante; El País) and television (the first female editor of a news bulletin and director of En Portada). There’s nothing like hand-picking Colombine’s biography to know the exact figure and measure her height of a polyglot woman who was the first professional journalist, war correspondent, and pioneer who fought for women’s suffrage, divorce law, and equality between the children born in her. or out of wedlock.
Columbine’s indisputable and radical independence and her tendency to get into every conceivable puddle that made her an angry anti-clerical, militant Freemason; along with their loves, adventures, torments… -along with Unamuno, Ganivet, Baroja, Azorín, Maeztu, Valle-Inclán, Blasco Ibáñez, Antonio Machado- it didn’t help that he was on the ‘Generation’ list. 98.
Leaving an enormous legacy, Carmen de Burgos has amassed much worth to be a part of this historic generation that brought together those affected by the moral, political and social crisis that unfolded in Spain following the military defeat in the Spanish-American War. consequent loss of colonies (Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines).
Even after his death, Franco’s memory, buried by censorship, was retaliated, which, along with his expulsion from the socialist biosphere, contributed to a long solar eclipse.
Asunción Valdés, Master of the College of Europe (Bruges) and director of the Office of the European Parliament in Spain, was the first Director of Communications at His Majesty the King’s House.
He worked as the General Manager of Foreign Relations in the Iberian Press and continues to write a column there. He has a privilege on his resume that he is proud of. A street in his hometown of Alicante is named after him: “Journalist Asunción Valdés.”