THE GENERATION OF 1898 AND CERVANTES: THE INVENTION OF DON QUIXOTE AS A NATIONAL SYMBOL

A few months after suffering a humiliating defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the famous novelist Benito Pérez Galdós argued that having lost the last vestiges of its once enormous colonial empire, Spain’s greatest remaining source of pride was its magnifi-cent cultural past, especially the great masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. Con-sequently, Galdós felt ashamed that the author of this brilliant novel was not honored with a worthy monument1. Although he took no further action to amend this situation, some years later a few of his friends —all of them connected to the country’s main liberal news-paper El Imparcial — would take the initiative to celebrate the ter-centenary of the publication of the Don Quixote in May 1905. In the fall of 1903, José Ortega Munilla, editor in chief of El Imparcial and a novelist himself, and his friend and colleague Jacinto Octavio Picón tried to find support for the idea within the Real Academia Española. On 2 December 1903, a full-page article by Mariano de Cavia, the newspaper’s most popular commentator, announced the initiative to a broader public2. Immediately afterwards, Ortega Mu-nilla and Picón tried to win over the government for their plans. As a result, official support was announced by the conservative Prim