When thinking about the topic of this essay, I was puzzled by the astonishing amount of material written concerning the state (Spain) and its relationship with its regional parts: of course I use the term “regional” without any intention of hurting anyone's sensibility. On the contrary, if you want to study the Iberian peninsula on an equal basis (without considering the whole superior or better than its parts and vice versa), then the quantity of material drops dramatically.
Francisco María Tubino, far from being an intellectual or politician involved in some independence project, is an outstanding voice of a special kind of federalism and even Iberianism in nineteenth-century Spain. The aim of this chapter is to examine, sometimes just allusively, two of his many published works, perhaps the most important in connection with the proposal of a new political deal for nineteenth-century Spain, Pátria [sic] y Federalismo (Madrid, 1873) and Historia del renacimiento literario, contemporáneo en Cataluña, Baleares y Valencia (Madrid, 1880). We should note that the first, which was written some years before the Historia, contains the “outcomes,” and the second, published in 1880, the cultural background for those outcomes. After having examined their actual contents of both books, I hope that Tubino's creed, placed somewhere between federalism and Iberianism, will be clearer.
First of all it must be emphasized that there are not many scholarly papers on his work. His name has often been mis-spelled, even recently, Francisco María Tubino y Rada instead of Francisco María Tubino y Oliva. The entry devoted to Tubino in the Espasa-Calpe Encyclopaedia started this incorrect tradition which has continued right up to Acosta's recent essay (Acosta Sánchez 257), as Matilde Revuelta Tubino pointed out. That points, of course, to a lack of proper philological procedures in studying his works and his political actions even nowadays, which is an indisputable sign that his opinions are not widely known either. Actually, his theories are not really dangerous for Spanish national unity nor can they be suspected of destabilizing its political frame, as we shall see right away. The best recent works on this Andalusian politician and intellectual come from Catalan scholars who emphasized the actual content (not the fictional interpretations) of his Historia del renacimiento literario, contemporáneo en Cataluña, Baleares y Valencia, perhaps his most celebrated book.