Cartas Marruecas

Belonging to a wealthy family, a career military man, an enlightened man, and a forerunner of romanticism, José Cadalso, always guided by the desire for a more educated, fairer, and more European Spain, reflected in this work on our history, and also on the uses and the customs of his time. With a balance between reason and sensitivity, and taking Montesquieu's Persian Letters as a model, the author's critique, born from direct observation, thus configures a fully realistic altarpiece. These letters include brief essays on their own, patriotism well and badly understood, the variety of Spain and its regions, the praise of France, the war and its evils, the ideal of modern man, the tyranny of fashions or the false erudition. And he also proposes, even, solutions; many of them are completely modern: work, scientific progress, economic strengthening, improvements in social life and the renewal of education. For all these reasons, this is not only the first manifestation in Spanish letters of brief, incisive and ironic thought, but a fundamental text to illuminate many of the vicissitudes of our current society.