The present work is the result of the critical study of a documentary fund of the highest interest to understand the relations between society, politics and religion in the period of Alfonsina Restoration. The epistolary of Felix Sardá i Salvany, preserved in the Archive of the Jesuits of Barcelona, allows us to approach the mentality, the problems and the initiatives of a generation marked by the confrontation with revolutionary liberalism. Félix Sardá i Salvany is a unique character of this period. He was born in Sabadell in 1841. Ordered a priest in 1865, he dedicated his life to antiliberal propaganda until his death (1916), exerting a great influence as a publicist in the most radical sector of Carlism. Sardá was, perhaps, the most outstanding apologist of anti-liberal integrism. Author of an opuscle that knew numerous editions until well into the twentieth century, El liberalismo es pecado (1884), he was director of three publications, El Diari de Catalunya (1888), Diari Català (1893), and La Revista Popular, long-lived and celebrity newspaper (1871-1916).
Sardá was also the party ideologist integrist, emerged after the split of the Carlist party starring Ramón Nocedal (1888). As a reference point in the journalistic controversies of the eighties, Sardá will be relentless with the position of Catholics admitted by the Canovist regime as a “minor evil.” The historical importance of Sabadell’s publicist resides in being a point of reference for Catholic anti-liberalism in the late 19th century. Sardá was going to contribute to the delay of the entrance of the Catholic forces in the political game. When he changed his attitude, in the mid-1890s, the political system of the Restoration already accused significant wear and tear. At the end of the nineteenth century, the construction of a clandestine party of the Catholic masses will be virtually impossible, with wide scope and purified by false prejudices.
