The Tribune

In the plot of The Tribune (La tribuna), by Emilia Pardo Bazán, the love story between a proletarian and worker leader, the cigar maker Amparo, and a bourgeois, the young lieutenant Baltasar, is joined. A relationship that culminates in the birth of their child; and on the other, the story of the process of gestation and “birth”, in February 1873, of the First Spanish Republic, because when the son of the cigar maker Amparo and the young lieutenant Baltasar were born, a voice shouted in the street: “Long live the Federal Republic!”
In The Tribune, Pardo Bazán addresses the labor problem of working women of the time, illustrated by its protagonist Amparo who, little by little, becomes a labor leader who defends the republic with passion. Amparo is not only a character in love, but a woman with social, political and trade union aspirations, and exemplifies the tenacity and courage of Spanish women of the time.
The protagonist reads daily the republican press to her co-workers, inciting them in this way, to be participants in the workers’ struggle for their rights as workers. This representation of women involved with their social environment anticipates the incessant struggle of Spanish women for their dignity as workers and as women.
Through the characters, descriptions and voice of Amparo, there is also an implacable criticism of the working conditions of the working class and the frivolity of the upper classes, dedicated to gossip and various mockery, while they walk oblivious to the atmosphere of social upheaval of the moment.
The Tribune (1883) is a timeless, pioneering and visionary novel, but it also represents the cornerstone of the literature of Emilia Pardo Bazán, the second Spanish naturalist novel and the first to have as its protagonist a working woman with political will and involvement.

“When I wrote La Tribuna I didn’t want to do political satire; Satire is a genre that I admit without being able to cultivate it; I serve little or nothing for that matter. But just as I deny the satirical intention, I do not know how to hide that in this book, almost in spite of myself, enters a purpose that can be called teaching. Suffice it to excuse him to declare that he was born of the very spectacle of things, and came to me, uncalled, by his own impulse. The artist who only aspired to portray the picturesque and characteristic aspect of a social layer, was presented with the moral in addition, and it would be as systematic to reject it as to have sought it.