OBJECTIVE OF RESEARCH
This work is part of an investigation that began eight years ago. A work that will culminate in a doctoral thesis that will focus in part on the biography of Joan Mañé and Flaquer, will end with the events of 1868, after the Gloriosa revolution. The final work has as starting point the analysis of how and why a particular press from the nineteenth century was imposed in Spain and Catalonia. This journalism not only focused its attention on the political world, which was the main frame of its struggles, but also had, in the cultural and intellectual world, a point of reference and that it was able to orchestrate everything A conservative Catalanist speech from its pages. A whole world, these of the mass media, who had, throughout the century, their own icons.
Joan Mañé i Flaquer became one of these icons. A character that has been a reference for many of his contemporaries and for many later studies. He has also become a personality many times unknown to most of us, especially as regards the first years of his life, his arrival in Barcelona and his ideological evolution (1823-1847). An ignorance that has been motivated by the will of our biography of not letting anyone penetrate the walls of their most personal life, coupled with the voluntary oblivion of the years of their own youth.
One hundred and seven years after his death, we face a biographical study devoted to rediscovering this journalist, not only from a professional career but also from his personal, family, cultural and political sphere. This fact, at no time, meant that we did not go through the pages of the newspapers and magazines where it was linked over these years, on the contrary, we stopped at the time of its entry into the writing of the Diario de Barcelona in 1847, because it became the beginning of a new stage of his life, perhaps the most important but surely the most remarkable.
THE STRUCTURE
The work has been structured into three main sections:
1 - Childhood and youth: In this first section, we have addressed the early years of the young Mañé. We have analyzed both the family environment and its closest geography (Torredembarra and Tarragona), where we can see how political events, the return of absolutism and the later Carlist war, marked the day to day of your family and your community.
2 - The discovery of Barcelona: This study begins exposing the reasons that led him to decide to move to the city of Barcelona. Based on this premise, we have drawn the path, both professional and personal, that followed throughout the period included in this chapter. A tour that we will explore with the personal relationships that marked their future.
3 - Culture versus journalism: In this last section, we have done an analysis of the cultural currents where it was gradually involved. We refer, therefore, to Romanticism. A movement that was just in those moments an important internal struggle between the continuist sectors of the first romanticism in front of those letters that began to follow the different schools that came from the north. Thanks to this exhibition we can understand and continue the evolution of Mañé in the different headers where he participated during these first years. This evolution would lead him to phase out his progressive positioning until he embraced conservative doctrines. Now we will see how, from the beginning, we can already observe the first features of Catalanism that, throughout their entire life, accompanied him and that, from the pages of the Diario de Barcelona, he was spreading and consolidating .
