Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo y Maura

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Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo y Maura , short Isabel Álvarez de Toledo (born August 21, 1936 in Estoril ; † March 7, 2008 in Sanlúcar de Barrameda , Cádiz ; baptized Luisa Isabel María del Carmen Cristina Rosalía Joaquina ), was a Spanish noblewoman , 21st Duquesa de Medina Sidonia , 17th Marquesa de Villafranca del Bierzo , 18th Marquesa de los Vélez, 25th Condesa de Niebla and triple Grande de España .

Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo, head of the House of Medina Sidonia, held the oldest title of duke in Spain. Her residence was mostly the family castle Medina Sidonia in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, which houses an important private archive and which she contributed to her foundation Fundación Casa Medina Sidonia . Because of her republican ideals and her resistance to Franquism , she was also called La Duquesa Roja ( The Red Duchess ) in the press . She was a writer and devoted much of her life to preserving, cataloging and researching the family archive Archivo de la Casa de Medina-Sidonia .

Life

Luisa Isabel was the only child of Joaquin Álvarez de Toledo y Caro (1894–1955), the 20th Duque de Medina Sidonia living in exile in Estoril ( Portugal ), and of María del Carmen Maura y Herrera, daughter of Gabriel Maura Gamazo, Montaner y Abarca, 1st Duque de Maura and son of Antonio Maura, five-time President of the Spanish government under Alfonso XIII at the beginning of the 20th century.

As early as October 1936, the family decided to return to the castle in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, which had belonged to the family since 1297, in one of the poorest areas of Spain. The upbringing by her mother, the interaction with the children on the street and the experiences in the hospital run by her mother in the castle as well as the social contrasts of the time shaped her personality. The open resistance to social injustice occupied her for the rest of her life.

Luisa Isabel was 10 years old when her mother died and she moved in with her grandparents, the Condesa de la Mortera and the historian Gabriel Maura Gamazo in Madrid. At 18, she was introduced to society with the Infanta Pilar de Borbón , sister of the former King Juan Carlos I. On July 16, 1955, shortly before her 19th birthday, she married José Leoncio González de Gregorio in Mortera, Cantabria (near Santander ). After the death of her father on December 11, 1955, she returned to Sanlúcar de Barrameda and was declared heiress, head of the house and holder of the title of Duchess of Medina Sidonia. She gave birth to three children, but separated from her husband in 1960. A divorce was not possible in what was then Spain.

In 1962 she had the family archive moved from a warehouse in Madrid to the castle in Sanlúcar de Barrameda and began restoring the castle and cataloging and researching the archives, which she dealt with until the end of her life. As part of a private initiative for land reform, she repeatedly donated parts of the lands belonging to the castle to farming cooperatives until only the castle and 30 hectares of forest remained in her possession. She was close to the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) , which was illegal at the time, and commented positively on Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution , but also clearly against communism on another occasion.

Luisa Isabel led a silent march by the oystercatchers of Sanlucar de Barrameda, who were supposed to be deprived of their customary right to fish, and had to pay a fine as a result. She was deprived of her diplomatic passport, which she was entitled to as a member of the nobility, because in December 1966 she recommended a boycott of a constitutional referendum to the Palomares farmers, who had been damaged by the crash of an American B-52 bomb on January 17, 1966 . When she demonstrated with the farmers of Palomares in 1967 for compensation for the contamination of their fields and fishing grounds, she was sentenced to twelve months in prison, of which she served eight months in Alcalá de Henares prison after receiving a pardon offered by the government had declined against an admission of guilt. This earned her the title of "Red Duchess" in the press, which she herself always avoided.

In 1967 her first novel, La Huelga , was published in France under the title La Grève (The Strike), which dealt with winegrowers whose strike was suppressed by the brutality of the police and partisan justice. Strikes were banned back then, so her book was banned as well. After she was imprisoned, she lost custody of her children, as the court viewed her political activities as evidence of a lack of personal stability. She left Spain on April 5, 1970 after further criminal proceedings were initiated against her over the book La Huelga and various newspaper articles in which she was to be sentenced to several years in prison. She spent her six years in exile in France partly in Paris and partly in Hasparren ( Département Pyrénées-Atlantiques ). She visited numerous countries on lecture tours. After Franco's death and an amnesty , she returned to Madrid from exile on October 15, 1976.

After that, she mainly devoted herself to the archive, which contains around two million documents in over six thousand folders or bundles, the oldest document of which dates from 1228. The archive contains documents about the history of the House of Medina Sidonia and its possessions, but also about other noble houses. It contains documents of various kinds such as judicial and administrative registers, accounts of the domains, contracts, wills and parish registers, but also old Arabic maps from the 16th and 17th centuries and the records of the ships leaving the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, which the Dukes of Medina Sidonia had to lead. From some family documents, Luisa Isabel deduced that America was said to have been discovered long before Columbus by Arab-Andalusian sailors, Moroccans and African Muslims who traded with ports in Brazil , Guyana and Venezuela . She published two books about it, No fuimos nosotros ( We weren't ) and África versus América .

In 1978 it achieved that the castle in Sanlúcar de Barrameda and its contents, especially including the archive, were recognized by the state as a building of cultural interest. On November 16, 1990, she founded the Fundación Casa de Medina Sidonia, to which she transferred the castle and archive and which was approved and registered by the Spanish Ministry of Culture on March 11, 1991. The founding of the archive led to a final falling out with her children. In 2005 she divorced her husband, who died two weeks before her on February 23, 2008. On her deathbed, she married her long-time secretary Liliana Maria Dahlmann on March 7, 2008 and appointed her president of her foundation Fundación Casa Medina Sidonia.

However, the future of the foundation does not appear to be secure due to financial difficulties and legal proceedings brought on by the heirs.

Works

  • La Grève , éditions Hachette, Le Livre de Poche , 1970 ( La Huelga, the strike )
  • La Base , éditions Bernard Grasset, 1971
  • Historia de una Conjura: la supuesta rebelión de Andalucía en el marco de las conspiraciones de Felipe IV y la Indepencia de Portugal , Ed. Diputación de Cádiz, 1985 (only the first volume was published)
  • El Poder y la Opinión bajo Felipe IV , self-published, 1987
  • No fuimos nosotros: del tráfico transoceánico precolombino a la conquista y colonización de América , Nice, Ed. La Tribune des Alpes Maritimes en Espana, 1992
  • Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, General de la Invencible , Ed. Universidad de Cádiz, 1994, two volumes
  • África versus América, La Fuerza Del Paradigma , Ed. Centro de Documentación y Publicaciones Islámicas, 2000

The books are all out of print. The Fundación Casa Medina Sidonia agreed on its website to reprint and bind some of the following works:

Novels

  • La Base
  • La Huelga
  • La Cacería
  • Presente infinito
  • La ilustre degeneración
  • Palomares
  • Mi cárcel

History books:

  • Historia de una Conjura
  • Felipe II en su contexto
  • Felipe II y Portugal
  • Política económica en los estados de Medina Sidonia (1549–1587)
  • De la mar y las Indias. La Armada invencible (1563–1589)
  • La crisis de un Reinado 1590-1615
  • Entre el Corán y el Evangelio
  • África versus América (2 volumes)

Smaller history books:

  • El poder y la opinión bajo Felipe IV
  • Las almadrabas de los Guzmanes
  • El castillo de Santiago and the contienda de los reyes
  • Socorros que se han de dar a los envenenados o asfixiad

History books about the House of Medina Sidonia:

  • El Palacio de los Guzmán
  • El archivo
  • Los Guzmanes I (1283–1492)
  • Los Guzmanes II (1492–1664)
  • Los Guzmanes III (1665–1955)
  • Las casas incorporadas (1400–1774)
  • El Testamento político de Espana (1775). Pedro Alcantara de Guzmán XIV Duque de Medina Sidonia (1724–1779)

Movie

  • Itineraries Andalusia - The Land of the White Villages. Documentation, 45 min., Script and director: Barbara Dickenberger, production: SR , first broadcast: March 28, 2007, summary by SR, (including with Duchess Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo y Maura)

See also

Web links

Commons : Palacio de los duques de Medina Sidonia  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Judgment n ° 106 of the Tribunal de Orden Público of Madrid of October 19, 1967 in copy
  2. ^ Return of the Red Duchess from Exile , El Pais, October 16, 1976 (Spanish)
  3. ↑ Article in the Telegraph (English)
  4. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: Memo on the future of the foundation (Spanish; PDF file; 11 kB)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.chipionanoticias.com
  5. ↑ a b quoted from "La duchesse rouge" Olivier Page, 2003
  6. ↑ a b c d e quoted from "Rapport de recherche: une mission en Espagne", Laura Giraudo digitized on google books
personal data
SURNAME Álvarez de Toledo y Maura, Luisa Isabel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Isabel Álvarez de Toledo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish noblewoman, writer, historian
DATE OF BIRTH August 21, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Estoril
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 2008
Place of death Sanlúcar de Barrameda