Mariano José de Larra y Sánchez de Castro (Madrid 1809 – Madrid 1837) was a Liberal critic, journalist and satirist who spent his boyhood between the ages of 4 and 9 in France, where his father (who had been a physician for the French army during the occupation of Spain) had gone into exile (first to Bordeaux and then to Paris). Amnestied in 1818, the family returned to Spain and Larra was educated in Madrid and at the University of Valladolid (1824-25; he did not graduate). In 1825 he took a clerical post in the military administration.

His initial efforts at writing poetry were soon abandoned, and he shifted to the press and the theatre, as critic, author and translator. After a stab at musical theatre (El rapto, 1833) and a historical drama (El conde Fernán González y la exención de Castilla, c.1831-32, unpremiered during the author’s lifetime), success came with Macías, written in 1833 and performed, after some censorship problems, in 1834. Produced only a few months after Martínez de la Rosa’s La conjuración de Venecia, Macías was an early landmark in Romantic drama, evoking the medieval Galician troubadour Macías, who becomes an archetype of the Romantic hero. The play’s formula of love, destiny, misfortune and death would be reproduced later in works by the Duke of Rivas, García Gutiérrez and Hartzenbusch. Larra’s only novel, El doncel de don Enrique el Doliente (an “original historical novel”, 4 vols, 1834) also features Macías as a principal character in its love-and-passion narrative. The story is interwoven with Spanish and European influences, stylistic devices derived from Cervantes and formal techniques borrowed from Walter Scott, but has more psychological interest to counterbalance historicist detail.

Larra translated contemporary French theatre pieces, which he amended and adapted for Spanish audiences. This often amounted to a complete re-write: melodramas by Ducange (Robert Dillon o El católico de Irlanda, 1832), comedies by Delavigne (Don Juan de Austria o La vocación, 1834) and, notably, by Scribe (No más mostrador, a major expansion of the vaudeville Les adieux au comptoir; Felipe, 1832; El arte de conspirar, 1835; Tu amor o la muerte, 1836; etc.). Most of Larra’s work as a critic (more than a third of all his reviews) is devoted to the theatre and paints a detailed picture of Spanish and French Romantic theatre in the first half of the 19th century.

Larra’s journalistic work was marked by the professionalization of the journalistic trade and by conflicts between the constraints of the editorial system and his aspirations for independence as a public writer. The highlight of his youthful journalistic writing is El duende satírico del día (1828). Larra was only 19 years old when he launched this first project, of which he was the sole editor, merging the Liberal political journalism of the Cádiz Cortes with the moral press of the 18th century. In the few issues that were published, Larra’s gift for social satire and his critical spirit were already noticeable. His next project was the reformist spectatorial periodical El pobrecito hablador (1832-33), a “satirical review of manners” under the pseudonym Bachiller Juan Pérez de Munguía. Amidst his liberal opinions on state censorship, national education or “well-meaning patriotism”, Larra also spearheaded literature on public manners (costumbrismo). His more militant political journalism, sharply criticizing Carlism and ministerial vagaries, was honed in La revista española from March 1833. It was also the birthplace of his most famous pen name, Fígaro, under which he tackled bourgeois life, lashing out at conservative pieties in society and literature.

While his literary career flourished, Larra went through a divorce in 1834 and incurred notoriety as the result of a liaison with a married woman. Travels took him from Extremadura by way of Lisbon to London, Flanders and Paris. He contributed to Nodier’s and Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques, met Scribe and saw his play Macías translated for the “European Theatre” collection.

On his return, Larra started work on El español, moving from theatrical reviews to political analysis in articles and independent pamphlets. He even stood as a candidate for parliament and was elected in 1836, but the elections were annulled. The political turbulence of the mid-1830’s, together with accusations of opportunism, left Larra in a crisis of dejection and disappointment. The writings of his final months breathe a spirit of melancholy, subjectivity and the drama of a man behind the satirist in conflict with reality. His last translations include Lammenais’s Paroles d’un croyant (El dogma de los hombres libres: Palabras de un creyente, 1836). He committed suicide in early 1837.

Larra’s conflicting ideas and shifting political and literary attitudes reflect the turmoil of Spanish Liberalism in these years and the existential tragedy of the bourgeois cultural revolution. In his criticism, Larra was won over to Romanticism by Martínez de la Rosa’s La conjuración de Venecia, leading him to proclaim a poetics of liberty in literature in the mode of the prologue to Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830). His coolness toward Alexandre Dumas’s Antony (staged in Madrid in 1836) bespeaks a general disenchantment with the Romantic belief in progress. His satire and complex personality earned him admiration and animosity in equal measure, and he was finally canonized on the first centenary of his birth, 1909, as a national literary treasure by the “Generation of 1898”.