Alberto Lista

Alberto Lista
Portrait of Alberto Lista by Domingo Valdivieso (Ateneo de Madrid).
Born	October 15, 1775 Seville
Died	October 5, 1848 (aged 73) Seville
Occupations	Mathematician, poet, journalist and literary critic
Parent(s)	Paula Aragón and Francisco Rodríguez de Lista
Signature

Alberto Rodríguez de Lista y Aragón (Seville, October 15, 1775 – ibid., October 5, 1848) was a Spanish mathematician, poet, journalist and literary critic.

The life and work of Alberto Lista reflect a profound dedication to education and letters, as well as a significant influence on the intellectual life and pedagogy of his time. Lista's commitment to liberal ideas earned him political persecution during the periods of absolutist restoration.

After the fall of the Liberal Triennium in 1823, he was forced into exile in France, where he continued his pedagogical and literary work. Lista returned to Spain in 1833, after the death of Ferdinand VII and the establishment of a more liberal regime, resuming his teaching and writing until his death in 1848.

Biography

The son of Francisco Rodríguez de Lista and Paula Aragón, owners of a silk-loom factory in the Sevillian district of Triana, he was a gifted child, skilled in mathematics and the humanities; at only eight years of age he could read and kept the accounts of the customers of his father's loom workshop.

He studied Philosophy and Theology at the University of Seville, as well as Mathematics, a subject in which, at the age of thirteen, he served as substitute in the chair maintained by the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country of Seville; from 1796 he taught this subject at the Royal College of San Telmo in the Sevillian capital.

He was ordained a priest in 1803; he contributed as a poet to El Correo Literario y Económico de Sevilla (1803–1808) and was strongly influenced by the philanthropic ideas of Encyclopedism, for which reason he was an enthusiastic panegyrist of the Count of Floridablanca. Although he enthusiastically sang La victoria de Bailén and edited the Gaceta del Gobierno, directed by Capmany, and El Espectador Sevillano, he embraced the Josephine cause, dedicating, according to Chaves, songs to Marshal Soult and becoming his propagandist, and he even wrote speeches and harangues for the foreign army. But he changed his ideology when he founded the Gaceta Ministerial de Sevilla (1808–1809) with Matute, and he obtained a half-prebend of the Sevillian Cathedral.

As a consequence of all this, he had to go into exile as an afrancesado at the end of the War of Independence; he returned to Spain in 1817; he was in Pamplona and in Bilbao, and finally settled in Madrid with the triumph of the revolution of Rafael del Riego. There he contributed to the Periódico del Ministerio de Gobernación de la Península (1823) and, with two other afrancesados, Sebastián de Miñano and Hermosilla, founded the magazine El Censor (1820–1822), the one with the most intellectual content of its time, and later El Imparcial (1821–1822), as well as the private Colegio Libre de San Mateo; for his students he composed and printed the Colección de trozos escogidos and the Tratado de matemáticas puras y mixtas. However, accused of teaching doctrines contrary to religion and to order, the school was closed (the Academia del Mirto would later take over its activities), and he was forced to go into exile upon the fall of the Liberal Triennium.

He was in Bayonne at the head of the Gaceta de Bayona. He returned in 1827; he remained for some time in San Sebastián as editor of La Estafeta de San Sebastián (1830–1831). With the death of Ferdinand VII he returned definitively to Madrid in 1833 to direct the Gaceta de Madrid until July 1837, on whose editorial staff he had under his orders Hartzenbusch, Cándido Nocedal, Salvá, Eugenio de Ochoa, Pérez Anaya, Francisco de Paula Madrazo, Navarrete and some others. He was offered the bishopric of Astorga, but he declined it. He also directed La Estrella, a newspaper in favor of the cause of Isabella II and Cea Bermúdez, and in 1836 he held a chair at the Ateneo de Madrid and taught mathematics at the Central University; he then went to Cádiz, where he devoted himself to teaching at the Colegio San Felipe Neri of Cádiz and contributed to El Tiempo (1839–1840) of Cádiz.

He then went to Seville and taught at the Academy of Fine Arts and at the University of Seville. There he presided over the Academy of Good Letters and was finally appointed Canon of the Sevillian cathedral. Among his other disciples were José de Espronceda, Antonio Cavanilles, Patricio de la Escosura, José María Tenorio Herrera, Luis de Usoz, Juan Bautista Alonso, López Pelegrín, Mariano José de Larra, Eugenio de Ochoa, Juan de la Pezuela, Mariano Roca de Togores and Ventura de la Vega. In 1847 he entered the Royal Academy of History with a discourse on the Carácter del Feudalismo en España (Character of Feudalism in Spain), in which he denied its existence.

Alberto Lista believed in an open and reformist conception of the church. Alborg denounces the judgments in historiography that state that Lista always conducted himself with an accommodating and opportunistic political attitude, but that when he was allowed to express himself freely he proved to be radically liberal. What is certain is that, as a defender of constitutional monarchy, in his desire to reconcile Catholic doctrine with the Enlightenment, Alborg considers that Alberto Lista saw in the fall of the Ancien Régime the opportunity for a renewal within the Catholic Church, toward greater tolerance. Although his models were classical writers of the 16th century and of Neoclassicism, his work already heralds a Romanticism that would arrive shortly afterward, owing to the great importance he gave to the personal and intimate in his compositions.

Some authors consider that his pedagogical work reveals the contradiction between his ecclesiastical profession and his Masonic tendencies. However, Carbajosa Aguilera, a specialist on the figure of Lista, asserts that his affiliation with Freemasonry was circumstantial. In a letter dated July 25, 1917, Lista declares in relation to this matter: "I attended very little (until I realized how foolish that Association was) and I was received only by communication, that is, without oath or ceremonies (...) I was never anything, and I joined forced by friends rather than of my own will, and I did not attend six times". For this author, Alberto Lista is the principal figure of doctrinaire liberalism in Spain, in which he would coincide with many of the proposals of the moderate liberalism of a conservative character of François Guizot. This involution toward doctrinaire liberalism was experienced by Lista during his exile in France, where he came into contact with the thought of other authors such as Benjamin Constant, Destutt de Tracy and Chateaubriand.

His poems were not republished until 1927; they possess a value far superior to that usually assigned to them by those who have not read them. Hans Juretschke, Fernández Espino, Antonio Ferrer del Río, Pérez Anaya and Manuel Chaves Nogales, among others, have written about Alberto Lista.

Positions

• In 1788, at only thirteen years of age, he held the Chair of Mathematics of the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country of Seville as a substitute
• In 1789 he became Bachelor of Philosophy
• In 1795 he became Bachelor of Theology in Seville
• In 1796 Chair of Mathematics at the Royal College of Navigators of San Telmo
• In 1798 Chair of Mathematics at the College of San Diego of Seville
• In 1808 Chair of Rhetoric and Poetics at the University of Seville.
• In 1818 Chair of Mathematics in Bilbao
• In 1844 Chair of Mathematics at the University of Seville.

• As a cleric he was Canon of Seville Cathedral and professor at the Royal College of San Telmo.

Works

• Elogio del Serenísimo Señor Don José Moñino, Conde de Floridablanca, Presidente de la Suprema Junta Central gubernativa de los Reynos de España e Indias, Seville, Imprenta Real, 1809.
• Tratado elemental de Geometría. Aplicación del Álgebra a la Geometría y Trigonometría rectilíneas. Bilbao: Antonio Apraiz, 1819.
• Reflexiones imparciales sobre la Inquisición, Madrid, 1820.
• Colección de trozos escogidos de los mejores hablistas castellanos, en verso y prosa: hecha para el uso de la Casa de Educación, sita en la calle de San Mateo de la Corte (2 vols.), an anthology of texts of classical Spanish literature in verse and prose.
• Poesías, Madrid, 1822.
• Resumen analítico de la Historia Universal del Conde de Segur, 1838, a summary and translation of Louis-Philippe de Ségur's Histoire universelle, extended by Lista up to the present day.
• Lecciones de literatura dramática española explicadas en el Ateneo Científico, Literario y Artístico (Madrid, 1839)
• Artículos críticos y literarios, Palama, 1840.
• Ensayos literarios y críticos (Seville, 1844, 2 vols., with a prologue by José Joaquín de Mora).

Bibliography

• Manuel Carbajosa Aguilera, Alberto Lista y los orígenes del liberalismo doctrinario en España, Seville, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, doctoral thesis, 2015.
• Manuel Chaves Nogales, Don Alberto Rodríguez de Lista. Conferencia ilustrada con documentos y cartas inéditas acerca de su vida y de sus obras. Seville, 1912.
• Corona poética: dedicada por la Academia de buenas letras de esta ciudad al Sr. D. Alberto Lista y Aragon; precedida de su biografía. Seville, 1849.
• Hans Juretschke: Vida, obra y pensamiento de Alberto Lista. Madrid: Escuela de Historia Moderna, 1951.
• Hans Juretschke: Reflexiones en torno al bicentenario de Alberto Lista: conferencia. Madrid: Fundación Univ. Española, 1977.
• María del Carmen García Tejera: Conceptos y teorías literarias españolas del siglo XIX: Alberto Lista. Cádiz: Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad de Cádiz, 1989.
• José Matías Gil González: Vida y personalidad de Alberto Lista. Seville: Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, Servicio de Publ, 1994. ISBN 84-86810-48-5.
• Various authors, Diccionario Biográfico del Trienio liberal, Madrid: El Museo Universal, 1992.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alberto Lista.

Author:

• Alberto Lista in the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library
• Calle Alberto Lista