Ramón de la Sagra

Biography

Ramón de la Sagra was born on 8 April 1798 in A Coruña, a province of Spain. His father Lorenzo Martínez de la Sagra came from a noble merchant family, which became wealthy through trade with the Spanish colonies in America. His mother was Antonia Rodríguez Perís, who met his father in Saint Augustine. His brother migrated to Uruguay to start a business there, when Sagra was three years old.

Ramón de la Sagra studied physics for one year in Nautical School of A Coruña. Afterwards he attended the military college of Santiago de Compostela until reaching adulthood. Afterwards he joined the local university, where he studied anatomy, medicine, mathematics and pharmaceuticals. There he started spreading liberal ideas. For these actions the Inquisition started threatening him, until he was transferred at the University of Madrid. In 1821 he migrated to Cuba as an assistant of Agustìn Rodriguez. One year later he was appointed to the position of Professor of Natural History of Cuba. In 1822 he married Manuela Turnes del Rìo. For the next ten years he would travel in the Americas, until settling in Paris in 1835.

There he became a disciple of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and founded the world's first anarchist journal El Porvenir, which was closed by Ramón María Narváez, Duke of Galicia. In Spain he was elected member of the parliament four times (1838, 1840, 1845, 1854) as a representative of the Liberal Party. After the French Revolution of 1848, he created with Proudhon the Peoples' Bank of France. In 1849 he was expelled from France, because he was spreading Socialist ideas. In 1856 he was expelled from Spain to France by Ramón María Narváez, because he was spreading radical ideas. In Paris he met Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. There he worked as the consul of Uruguay. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he went to Switzerland, where he died on 23 May 1871 at the age of seventy-three.