Ramón de la Sagra


Ramón Dionisio José de la Sagra y Peris was a Spanish anarchist, politician, writer, and botanist who founded the world's first anarchist journal, El Porvenir.

Biography

Ramón de la Sagra was born on 8 April 1798 in A Coruña, a province of Spain. His father Lorenzo Martínez de la Sagra came from a noble merchant family, which became wealthy through trade with the Spanish colonies in America. His mother was Antonia Rodríguez Perís, who met his father in Saint Augustine. His brother migrated to Uruguay to start a business there, when Sagra was three years old.
Ramón de la Sagra studied physics for one year in Nautical School of A Coruña. Afterwards he attended the military college of Santiago de Compostela until reaching adulthood. Afterwards he joined the local university, where he studied anatomy, medicine, mathematics and pharmaceuticals. There he started spreading liberal ideas. For these actions the Inquisition started threatening him, until he was transferred at the University of Madrid. There he contributed to the liberal newspaper El Conservador, the name being a case of antiphrasis. In 1821 he migrated to Cuba as an assistant of Agustìn Rodriguez. One year later he was appointed to the position of Professor of Natural History of Cuba.
In 1822 he married Manuela Turnes del Rìo. For the next ten years he would travel in the Americas, until settling in Paris in 1835. He traveled to the United States from April 20 to September 23 of 1835 and the following year published Five Monthes in the United States of North America in Paris based on his experiences there. He also accumulated several volumes of pamphlets and economic and scientific reports while traveling in the United States.
In Paris he became a disciple of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He returned to Spain in 1837 and was elected a member of the parliament four times as a representative of the Liberal Party. At the same time he began publishing a thirteen volume history on the political and natural history of Cuba which he would complete in 1857. In 1939 he published Voyage en Hollande et en Belgique sous le rapport de l’instruction primaire, des établissements de bien faisance et des prisons, dans les deux pays. In 1845 he founded the world's first anarchist journal El Porvenir, which was closed by Ramón María Narváez, Duke of Galicia. After the French Revolution of 1848, he created with Proudhon the Peoples' Bank of France. In Brussels he met Heinrich Ahrens, disciple of Krause, whose doctrines he proclaimed in Spain before Julian Sanz del Rio. He continued to publish economic, geographic, political, social, and prison reform studies. In 1849 he was expelled from France, because he was spreading Socialist ideas. In 1856 he was expelled from Spain to France by Ramón María Narváez, because he was spreading radical ideas. In Paris he met Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. There he worked as the consul of Uruguay. He returned to Cuba between 1859 and 1860 and published numerous studies and essays there. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he went to Switzerland, where he died on 23 May 1871 at the age of seventy-three.

Legacy

Ramón de la Sagra is commemorated in the scientific name of two species of Cuban lizards, Anolis sagrei and Diploglossus delasagra.

Books