Pedro Sainz Rodríguez

In this Spanish name, the family name is Sainz.

Pedro Sainz Rodríguez (14 January 1897 – 14 December 1986) was a Spanish scholar, bibliographer, publisher, academic and politician, monarchist deputy to the Republican Courts, Minister of National Education in Franco's first government, later exiled to Portugal and political adviser to Juan de Borbón.

Biography

Early life and education

The son and grandson of doctors, he was born in Madrid at Calle Barrionuevo (now Calle Conde de Romanones) No. 7 and 9, on 14 January 1897. His grandfather came from a village in La Rioja and settled in Madrid to practise medicine, a profession that would be continued by his son Agustín Sainz Espinosa, who married the Santander-born Presentación Rodríguez Castillo. The family enjoyed a well-to-do social position. Pedro Sainz Rodríguez was the third of four brothers and a still-born sister.

He studied the baccalaureate as an independent student (he had two private tutors at home, one for science and the other for literature) and took his exams at the San Isidro and Cardenal Cisneros secondary schools in Madrid, excelling in Literature and attracting attention for his precociousness and erudition. He studied Literature by vocation and Law by obligation, following his father's wishes, at the Central University. In 1915 he founded (and in fact edited) the university journal Filosofía y Letras, strongly influenced by the ideas of Menéndez Pelayo, an influence he received through his reading of the Santander-born writer's work and the teaching of Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, of whom he was his most notable disciple. During those years of the Great War, Sainz Rodríguez showed himself "closer by education, friendships and ideas" to the Germanophile tendency. He presided over the Association of Students of Philosophy and Letters and the National Federation of Students and in this capacity he represented Spain at the Congress of Student Associations held in Strasbourg. He obtained his doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the Central University, with an extraordinary prize, with a thesis on the nineteenth-century bibliophile and scholar from Extremadura, Bartolomé José Gallardo.

In 1920, at the age of just twenty-three, he won the competitive examinations for the Chair of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Oviedo, astonishing for his erudition (as he recounts in his autobiography, from the age of fourteen he had the curious diversion of attending examinations for University and Institute chairs in Madrid in order to acquire the necessary skills for when the occasion arose). In Oviedo he opened the academic year 1921–1922 with the speech La obra de Clarín (Clarín's work); he became dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and there he met and befriended the future General Franco.

In Madrid, he was assiduously involved in the work of the Athenæum, where he held the post of secretary of the Historical Sciences Section and Librarian; there he frequented the Count of Romanones when he presided over it. In October 1923 he won the chair of Bibliology at the Central University of Madrid by competitive examination. To celebrate his appointment and pay tribute to him, around a hundred university professors and friends gathered on 3 November at the Molinero restaurant. In his famous speech, entitled Evolución de las ideas sobre la decadencia española (literally, "Evolution of ideas on Spanish decadence"), delivered at the opening of the 1924–1925 university curriculum. Sáinz Rodríguez was not interested in Azorín's comments on Montaigne, Baroja's invective against the "meanness" (roña) of the Spanish people, or Valle-Inclán's singular spirituality; the part of the Generation of '98 that appealed to him, on the other hand, was the part that drew directly on Costa and Giner de los Ríos, in other words, a discourse that tended to favour and immerse itself in what was essentially Hispanic and that put forward a vision of Spanish history that was free of any foreign distortion. Sainz Rodríguez was well aware that the most decisive texts by Unamuno, Maeztu and Azorín were those which, at the same time as demanding Europeanisation, sought to revalorise the Spanish classics by giving them a clearly defined historical meaning.

Career overview

Political and intellectual activities

He was the author and first signatory of the manifesto of the Castilian writers in defence of the Catalan language, submitted to the Military Directory in March 1924. This circumstance and, above all, his speech at the opening of the academic year 1924–1925 on the ideas of Spanish decadence, earned him sudden notoriety and an aura of moderate opposition to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. In 1926 he won the National Literature Prize — which he shared with Manuel Azaña for his studies on Juan Valera — with his work Introducción a la historia de la literatura mística en España, published the following year. In 1927 he took over the literary direction of the powerful Compañía Ibero-Americana de Publicaciones (CIAP), from which he carried out outstanding publishing work until its bankruptcy. Among other initiatives, he created the Biblioteca de Clásicos Olvidados (Library of Forgotten Classics).

When Primo de Rivera convened the National Consultative Assembly in 1927, with the aim of giving institutional continuity to the regime, he appointed him as one of its members. On 29 October 1927, in the Assembly, he criticised the draft decree on the New Plan for Intermediate Education, promulgated on 26 August 1925, which he condemned in terms of its humanist and cultural principles. This criticism of Minister Callejo's action was a preamble to his own 1938 law, which was underpinned by the fundamental idea that specialised technical knowledge was useless before pupils had succeeded in acquiring a satisfactory humanist culture. Sainz Rodríguez felt that the dictator's behaviour undermined the prestige of the Crown and the royalty embodied by Alfonso XIII, institutions that he considered to be the true focal points of communion between all Spaniards. He was therefore one of the instigators of the Democratic League, founded in opposition to the official Patriotic Union party.

In 1929 he eventually resigned from the Assembly: in addition to his disagreements with the dictatorship's educational policy, the closure of the Central University was a decisive event. At the end of January 1930 his name appeared in the press as a possible Minister of Public Instruction in the cabinet formed by General Berenguer when Primo de Rivera resigned, a rumour that never came to fruition.

Once the Second Republic was proclaimed, in the June 1931 elections he was elected as a member of parliament for the Santander constituency, through an Independent Regional Grouping, of right-wing political significance. He obtained 22,490 votes (out of a census of 84,082 voters, of whom 64,755 voted). He was part of the agrarian minority and opposed the draft Republican Constitution, with a speech criticising it in its entirety which he delivered on 8 September 1931.

He was a prominent member of the counter-revolutionary intellectual group Acción Española, from its foundation by Ramiro de Maeztu and Eugenio Vegas Latapié at the end of 1931; although he hardly collaborated in the journal of the same name, he developed a very notable activity as a speaker and lecturer. He was a member of the Spanish Renovation party from its foundation in February 1933 (when a group of prominent Alphonsine monarchists, led by Goicoechea, broke away from Popular Action) and was again elected to parliament — also for Santander — in the November 1933 elections. He inspired the creation of the National Block in 1934, when José Calvo Sotelo returned from exile after the amnesty was granted, and was again a monarchist deputy in the February 1936 elections, again for the Santander constituency.

Civil War

Sainz Rodríguez collaborated in the plotting of the military uprising of 1936, acting as a liaison with General José Sanjurjo. According to an investigation by the historian Ángel Viñas, — who located four contracts in the archives of the Spanish University Foundation, which holds personal documentation of Sainz Rodríguez — it was established that on 1 July 1936 he signed these contracts with the company SIAI (Seaplane Company of Upper Italy) to supply 40 modern Italian bombing, fighter and seaplane aircraft, as well as thousands of bombs, ethylene petrol, machine guns and shells, which would be used in the uprising.

In August 1937 he was appointed National Delegate for Education and Culture, and in October he became a member of the first National Council of FET y de las JONS. This was the prelude to forming part of Franco's first government in January 1938, where he held the portfolio of Public Instruction, which was renamed the Ministry of National Education. His term of office lasted barely fourteen months, until his resignation in April 1939. He established the city of Vitoria as his headquarters and reorganised the ministry with the following services: Higher and Secondary Education, Primary Education, Vocational and Technical Education, and Fine Arts. He had Alfonso García Valdecasas as under-secretary. He sponsored the "National Edition" of the Complete Works of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1938), of whom he was a noted scholar; in 1939 he presented a University Reform Bill. In that post he founded the Civil Order of Alfonso X, the Wise and the Directorate General of Archives and Libraries, and promoted the creation of a humanist-inspired Baccalaureate Plan which remained in force for many years.

From the Ministry of National Education, he directed the entire process of purging the republican education system, a purge that covered all areas of teaching: university, secondary and primary, a process that lasted for a long time and which he avoids mentioning in his memoirs. To this end, he published an Order of the Ministry of National Education on 11 March 1938, which set out the guidelines for the actions of the purge commissions and established the functioning of the administrative apparatus aimed at controlling and centralising the whole process in order to make it more homogeneous; he created a Technical-Administrative Office as a special Section responsible for processing the files, incidents and appeals arising from the aforementioned purge of personnel. Subsequently, by Ministerial Order of 19 March 1939, it created the Special Review Commission; the process was only concluded in 1944.

In his memoirs Testimonio y recuerdos he blamed the Republic for the civil war for having insisted on resisting the July coup d'état and not immediately giving up. According to Sainz Rodríguez, the coup d'état could have been "limited to that, without the need for a three-year war to liquidate the problem", had it not been for "the intransigence of the Republicans who preferred to throw Spain into a bloody conflict rather than sacrifice the regime.... The Republic preferred to throw the nation into a war rather than give up".

Monarchist covert activities

Despite the friendship with Francisco Franco since his youth, Sainz Rodríguez soon disagreed with his policies. When the pretender to the crown Juan de Borbón settled in Estoril, he was one of his closest advisors. Juan de Bourbon, father of Prince Juan Carlos, drew closer to Great Britain and devised a plan with the British whereby the Allies, with the help of the Spanish monarchists, would invade the Canary Islands and proclaim a provisional government of national reconciliation under the leadership of Don Juan, a plan that would have enjoyed the agreement of Sainz Rodríguez, Kindelán, Aranda and the Captain General of the Canary Islands, García Escámez. However, Franco got wind of it, and Sainz Rodríguez, fearing that he would be confined to the Canaries, escaped and took up residence in Lisbon. A member of the Privy Council of the Count of Barcelona, he was responsible for preparing several of the Count's meetings with Franco, and don Juan used to submit his major decisions to him for approval, notably his Lausanne Manifesto of March 1945. Sainz Rodríguez had dealings with political figures in Salazar's government and maintained friendly ties with Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, without however ceasing to devote himself to his incessant research into literary criticism, mystical experience and spirituality.

Later life and death

Sainz Rodríguez return to Spain in 1969 to take up a chair at the Comillas Pontifical University. As the Epistolario had not yet been published in the "National Edition" of Menéndez Pelayo's works, Sainz Rodríguez undertook more than forty years later, when the Bourbon monarchy was finally restored, and in his capacity as Patron-Director of the Spanish University Foundation, the definitive complete edition of the Epistolario, which was entrusted to Manuel Revuelta Sañudo, director of the Menéndez Pelayo Library. Between 1982 and 1990 the 22 volumes that complete the Epistolario were published (all by the Spanish University Foundation, Madrid), and in 1991 a 23rd volume appeared with the indexes, including the corresponding and thematic indexes; it consists of 15,299 letters to and from Menéndez Pelayo.

Sainz Rodríguez was a member of the Spanish Royal Academy and the Royal Academy of History. Although he had held a seat in the latter since 1940, his exile in Portugal prevented him from delivering his inaugural address until November 1985. Due to a combination of circumstances, some of his works on Andrés Marcos Burriel, a scholar of the Spanish Enlightenment, have been lost.

He died in December 1986 at his home at 58 Avenida de América in Madrid, following a heart attack.

Works

• Las polémicas sobre la cultura española (1919)
• Don Bartolomé José Gallardo y la crítica literaria de su tiempo (1921; facsimile edition, with an updated bibliographical appendix, 1986)
• La obra de "Clarín". Discurso leído en la apertura del curso académico 1921-1922 en la Universidad Literaria de Oviedo (1921)
• La evolución de las ideas sobre la decadencia española. Discurso en la apertura del curso académico 1924-1925 en la Universidad Central (1924; 1925)
• La evolución de la política española y el deber social de los intelectuales (1924)
• El padre Burriel, paleógrafo (1926)
• Introducción a la historia de la literatura mística en España (1927; 1984)
• Obras escogidas de Bartolomé José Gallardo (1928; 2 volumes; editing and notes by Pedro Sainz Rodríguez)
• Epistolario de Valera y Menéndez Pelayo (1877-1905) (1930; introduction and notes by Miguel Artigas Ferrando and Pedro Sáinz Rodríguez; expanded edition, 1946)
• La Tradición nacional y el Estado futuro (1935)
• Menéndez Pelayo y la educación nacional (1938)
• Menéndez Pelayo, historiador y crítico literario (1956)
• Espiritualidad española (1961)
• Evolución de las ideas sobre la decadencia española y otros estudios de crítica literaria (1962)
• Menéndez Pelayo, ese desconocido (1975)
• Biblioteca bibliográfica hispánica (1975–1987; 6 volumes; editor)
• Testimonio y recuerdos (1978)
• La conciencia nacional de Lepanto a la Invencible (1979)
• La siembra mística del Cardenal Cisneros y las reformas en la Iglesia. Discurso leído el 10 de junio de 1979, en su recepción pública; y contestación de D. Vicente Enrique y Tarancón (1979)
• Antología de la literatura espiritual española (1980–1985; 4 volumes)
• Un reinado en la sombra (1981)
• Estudios sobre Menéndez Pelayo (1984; introduction by José Luis Varela Iglesias)
• De la retórica a la historia. Discurso leído el 3 de noviembre de 1985 en la Real Academia de la Historia con motivo de su recepción pública (1985)
• Visión de España. Páginas selectas' (1986; with a "Letter of dedication" by Emilio García Gómez)
• Semblanzas (1988; prologue by José María de Areilza; epilogue by Luis María Ansón)
• Historia de la crítica literaria en España (1989; prologue by Fernando Lázaro Carreter)
• Epistolario de Don Pedro Sainz Rodríguez (2007–2015; 8 volumes; edited by Julio Escribano Hernández & Jerónimo Herrera Navarro)

References

• Alted Vigil, Alicia (1981). La revista «Filosofía y Letras». Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española.
• Alted Vigil, Alicia (1984). Política del Nuevo Estado sobre patrimonio cultural y educación durante la guerra civil española. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura.
• Alted Vigil, Alicia (1986). "Notas para la configuración y el análisis de la política cultural del franquismo en sus comienzos: la labor del ministerio de educación nacional durante la guerra." In: Josep Fontana, ed., España bajo el franquismo. Barcelona: Crítica, pp. 215–29.
• Anson, Luis María (1994). Don Juan. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés.
• Escribano Hernández, Julio (1998). Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, de la monarquía a la República. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española.
• Escribano Hernández, Julio (2018). "Pedro Enrique Sainz Rodríguez," Diccionario biográfico español. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia.
• Labandeira, Amancio (1999). "Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, de la monarquía a la República (1897-1938)", Cuadernos para Investigación de la Literatura Hispánica, No. 24, pp. 15–26.
• López Bausela, José Ramón (2011). La contrarrevolución pedagógica en el franquismo de guerra. El proyecto político de Pedro Sainz Rodríguez. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva-Ediciones de la Universidad de Cantabria.
• Navarra Ordoño, Andreu (2013). "Sáinz Rodriguez: Origenes literarios de una ideologia." In: Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer, ed., Falange, las culturas políticas del fascismo en la España de Franco (1936-1975), Vol. 2. Zaragoza: Instituto «Fernando El Católico», pp. 377–93.
• Viñas Martín, Ángel (2013). " La connivencia fascista con la sublevación y otros éxitos de la trama civil." In: Francisco Sánchez Pérez, ed., Los mitos del 18 de julio. Barcelona: Crítica, pp. 79–182.

External links

• Pedro Sainz Rodríguez