DONOSO CORTÉS, Juan. — Marquis of Valdegamas, Spanish statesman and Christian philosopher of history, b. at Valle de la Serena in Estremadura on 3 May 1809, d. at Paris on 3 May 1853. From 1820 to 1828 he studied at Salamanca, Cáceres, Seville and Madrid. Professor of literature at Cáceres from 1829 to 1832, he married but soon lost his wife.
He revealed his strong philosophical and historical grounding in a *Memoria sobre la situación actual de la monarquía* of 1832. That same year he began his popular activity within the ranks of moderate liberalism. He defended his ideas in the Cortes as a deputy (1838) and in various writings, especially in the newspapers *Avenir* and *El Piloto*, which he founded, and in the *Revista de Madrid*. A supporter of Maria Cristina, he followed her into exile in Paris as her private secretary (1840–43). Deeply shaken by the Parisian revolution of 1848 (he would say that «revolutions are the lanterns of Providence and of history»), he abandoned liberalism to return to the practice of Catholicism, straightforward and open as befitted his character. Re-elected deputy to the Cortes, he delivered speeches that gained European resonance, such as those on dictatorship (1849) and on the condition of Europe (1850).
His principal work, which sums up his political, philosophical and religious thought, is the *Ensayo sobre el Catolicismo, el Liberalismo y el Socialismo* (Madrid 1851), divided into three books: in the first he expounded the miracle of the Church in itself; in the second the solutions offered by the Church to the problem of good and evil, of necessity and freedom, in opposition to the contradictions of liberalism and the absurdities of socialism; in the third he examined, by the same criterion, the Church’s stance on social questions, especially concerning family, national and human solidarity and the tragic experience of pain and sacrifice in history. The writing bears the imprint of the ideas of the traditionalist school of De Maistre and De Bonald, which so strongly influenced C.’s inner development at the moment of his conversion. *La Civiltà Cattolica* took stock of the inevitable polemics in Apr. 1853. In 1849 C. was also Spanish ambassador to Berlin and from 1851 to 1853 to Paris.