The thesis presented below, entitled: Gonzalo de Reparaz: “wandering intellectual”, is a study of the life and work of the geographer, journalist, writer and technical specialist of the State Gonzalo de Reparaz in the form of a political biography. Starting from his extensive bibliographic work and his, even more extensive, journalistic work, this work tries to reconstruct the life and, above all, the intervention of Gonzalo de Reparaz in the different political and social movements with which he was linked throughout of his life and, in particular, during the period between 1860, the year of his birth, and 1913, being the time when his capacity for influence and political intervention from the press reached a greater development, coinciding with the strong current of development of the imperialist colonialism that was being lived in Western Europe, while Spain was living in parallel the disappearance of its own overseas empire. Gonzalo de Reparaz will be integrated in this process and will try to turn the situation around, based on his Portuguese experience, defending the conservation of what could be saved from the old empire and the abandonment of its already condemned parts, but, above all, betting on the creation of a colonial alternative in Africa. Gonzalo de Reparaz participated alongside Joaquín Costa in the claim of the creation of a Spanish Empire in Africa; he became a journalist of some prestige in the main Madrid newspapers of the 1890s; vehemently protests against the mistake that it means for Spain to be stubborn in the Cuban War (before the Disaster); meets and conspires with General Polavieja in the confusing context of the Cuban War; negotiates in the Spanish embassy in Paris the division of Morocco between Spain and France, (in the period of intense diplomatic activity at the beginning of the century that will foreshadow the alliances that will clash in World War I); maintains contacts with prominent members of political Catalanism in the early years of the twentieth century, betting on this movement as a force for peninsular regeneration; is deeply involved in Spanish management in Morocco in the years immediately preceding the establishment of the Protectorate, a fact that will eventually lead to a deep rejection of the Spanish colonizing model despite having dedicated his entire life to defending the acquisition of colonies, and to break with the Spanish state in self-exile in South America. of Germanophile propagandist during World War I; in the 1920s Reparaz returned to Spain, where he was part of the journalistic environment of Ortega and Gasset in the editorial office of the newspaper El Sol; and, at the end of the 1930s, and in spite of his advanced age, he participated with the anarchists in the Spanish Revolution of 1936, defending with his last energies the creation of a new anarchist Spain. Throughout this life he will write twenty books, some of which are considered reference works for the study of Africanism and Spanish colonialism of the early twentieth century, and literally thousands of press articles. Gonzalo de Reparaz will therefore be, throughout his long career, and from the semi-hidden position, although sometimes clearly public, spokesman for political causes through the press and literature, in this sense, Reparaz will stand out as an Africanist publicist , but also as a political spokesman, and will try to promote a series of reforms, based on the effects he thought would have in Spain the establishment of an important colonial dynamic with the creation of an African empire, which should take the country out of its backwardness. secularize with respect to the great European powers and put it on the path of modernization in the midst of a political crisis, common to southern Europe, caused by the difficult integration of the masses into the liberal political system.
