48. This maybe the appropriate moment to bring up something Rizal wrote in a letter to Blumentritt from London on November 8, 1888. He told his friend that the problem in the Philippines was not really a lack of books. Booksellers actually did good business. In Calamba itself, a small town with between five and six thousand people, there were six small libraries, and in his own family’s collection there were more than a thousand volumes. “Doch die meisten Bücher die sie verkaufen, sind religiös und narcotisch. Viele haben kleine Biblioteken, zwar nicht grosse, denn die Bücher sind sehr theuer, man liesst Cantú, Laurent, Dumas, Sue, Victor Hugo, Escrich, Schiller und ander mehr.” [Yet most of the books they sell are religious and narcotic. Many people have small libraries, not large, since books are very expensive. People read Cantú (a then-famous Italian Catholic writer on world history), Laurent (perhaps the great French chemist Auguste Laurent), Dumas, Sue, Victor Hugo, Escrich, Schiller, and many others]. See Cartas entre Rizal y el Profesor Fernando Blumentritt, 1888–1890, in Correspondencia epistolar, Tomo II, Libro 2, Parte 2, pp. 374–80.

  Another international point should also be made. The persons who built the 1,000-book family library were obviously Rizal’s parents. We can get an idea of their broad culture from four letters sent home by Rizal between June 21 and August 2, 1883 during his first trip to Paris. He describes going to Nôtre-Dame, and being reminded of Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name. He loves the Titians, Raphaels and Vincis in the Palais Luxembourg. He makes a pilgrimage to the tombs of Rousseau and Voltaire at the Panthéon. He wanders round the Louvre, casually noting that part of it was burned by the Commune in 1871, and admiring the Titians, Correggios, Ruisdaels, Rubenses, Murillos, Velasquezes, Riveras, Van Dykes, Raphaels and Vincis, as well as the Venus de Milo. He even goes to the Musée de Grevin to see the waxworks of Hugo, “Alphonso” Daudet, “Emilio” Zola, Arabi (Pasha), Bismarck, Garibaldi, and Tsars “Alejandro” II and III. The striking thing is that he explains none of these names, and obviously feels no need to do so. His parents are already perfectly familiar with them. See Cartas á sus padres y hermanos, in Tomo I of Escritos de José Rizal cited in note 25, pp. 90–106.

  In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel

  By the time El Filibusterismo was published (1891) Rizal had been in Europe for almost ten years, and had learned the two master-languages of the subcontinent—German and French—as well as some English. He had also lived for extended periods in Paris, Berlin, and London. He subtitled his second major fiction novela filipina with good political reason, as will be shown later on. But, seen from another angle, it is Noli me tangere that is filipina, while El Filibusterismo could well be termed a novela mundial. The former has no characters who are not either colonizers or colonized; but in the latter, we have already noted the appearance of a French vaudeville troupe in Manila, as well as that of Mr Leeds, the verdadero yankee, who is said to be fluent in Spanish because of long residence in South America. A key character is the vastly rich “Chinaman” Quiroga, who plans to set up a local consulate for his nación. Furthermore, the book is littered with casual references to Egypt, Poland, Peru, Germany, Russia, Cuba, Persia, the Carolines, Ceylon, the Moluccas, Libya, France, China, and Japan, as well as Arabs and Portuguese, Canton and Constantinople.

  Yet, compared with Noli me tangere, which has been translated into a good number of languages and is widely known and loved in the Philippines, El Filibusterismo is relatively unregarded. At one level, this neglect is easy to understand. The novel has no real hero, while Noli me tangere has at least one, and perhaps three. Women play no central role, and are barely sketched as characters, while three of the most powerfully imagined figures in Noli me tangere belong to what Rizal called the “bello sexo.” The plot and subplots of El Filibusterismo are stories of failure, defeat, and death. The moral tone is darker, the politics more central, and the style more sardonic. One might say that if the Father of the Philippine Nation had not written it, the book would have had few readers in the Philippines, let alone elsewhere, up till today. Yet it is an astonishing work in many ways. For Filipino intellectuals and scholars it has been a puzzle, not least because they have been distressed by its apparent lack of correspondence with what is known about Philippine colonial society in the 1880s. The temptation therefore has been to analyze it “morally” in terms of its author’s real-life ambivalence toward anticolonial revolution and political violence (which will be touched on later). But at least some of these difficulties may be reduced if we consider the text as global, no less than local.

  To create such a multicentered perspective, the narrative technique must inevitably be that of montage. The analyst must begin with the political experience of the young Rizal before he set off to Europe in 1882. Afterward? Three intersecting “worlds.” The first, only in time, is the inter-state world-system of 1860–90, which was dominated by Bismarck. Crushing Prussian military victories over Austro-Hungary at Königgrätz in 1866, and over France at Sedan in 1870, not only made his Prussia the master of continental Europe and created the German Empire, but put an end to monarchism in France, destroyed the temporal power of the Papacy, and launched his country as a late-comer imperialist in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Rizal’s Noli me tangere was published in Berlin only three years before the world-arbiter finally fell from power. Yet at the same time, on the periphery, post-Tokugawa Japan and post-Civil War America were preparing themselves to overthrow, from different directions, Europe’s world-hegemony.

  The second world was that of the global Left. Thanks in part to Bismarck, 1871 saw something that has never happened again—the fall of the (then) symbolic “capital of world civilization” into the hands of its populace. The Paris Commune sent reverberations all over the planet. Its savage suppression by a French government far more afraid of the communards than of Bismarck, followed by the death of Marx, opened the way for the rise of international anarchism, which up to the end of the century was the main vehicle of global opposition to industrial capitalism, autocracy, latifundism, and imperialism. To this upsurge, the Swedish businessman-scientist Alfred Nobel unwittingly made a signal contribution by inventing the first-ever weapon of mass destruction readily available to energetic members of the oppressed classes almost anywhere across the globe.

  Third was the narrower world of the decaying, residual Spanish empire into which Rizal was born. The metropole itself was wracked by dynastic civil war, fierce competition between ethno-regions, class conflicts, and ideological struggles of many kinds. In the far-flung colonies, stretching from the Caribbean through northern Africa to the rim of the Pacific, anticolonial movements, led by that of Cuba, were steadily increasing in vehemence and social support, while at the same time beginning to have serious contacts with one another.

  Three Worlds 1: The Mediterranean

  As the chapter proceeds towards its concluding political analysis of El Filibusterismo, the intercalation between these worlds becomes more and more intricate, and requires a crosscutting between Spain, France, Italy, Russia, the Caribbean, the United States, and the Philippines—even if this tries the reader’s patience.

  PASSAGE TO EUROPE

  In 1833 a dynastic crisis occurred in Spain that gave rise to two successive civil wars and haunted the country to the end of the century. In that year the ferociously reactionary Fernando VII, imprisoned and deposed by Napoléon, but restored by the Unholy Alliance after 1815, died, leaving the crown to his only child, the three-year-old Infanta Isabel; her Neapolitan mother became Regent. Fernando’s younger brother Carlos, however, disputed the succession, claiming that the 1830 public abrogation of the Salic law prohibiting women from becoming sovereigns was a manipulation designed to rob him of his inheritance. Raising an army in the ultraconservative North (Navarre, Aragon, and the Basque Country), he opened a war that lasted the rest of the decade and ended only in an uneasy truce. The Regent and her circle turned, for financial as well as political reasons, to the liberals for support, and by a measure of far-reaching consequences, as we shall see, expropriated the property of all the powerful Orders. At sixteen, Isabel was married off to the “effeminate” Duke of Cádiz, and soon became accustomed to finding her pleasures elsewhere. On coming of age, she moved away from her mother’s policies, fell under the sway of some diehard conservative clerics, and presided over an increasingly corrupt and ramshackle regime.

  In the last months before this regime finally fell, in September 1868, the Queen ordered the deportation of a number of her republican enemies to the Philippines, where they were incarcerated on the fortified island of Corregidor in Manila Bay. In the exhilaration that followed her abdication and flight to France, some well-off, liberal-minded Manileño creoles and mestizos, including Joaquín Pardo de Tavera, Antonio María Regidor, and José María Basa—the latter two later to become good friends of Rizal—organized a public subscription on behalf of the suffering prisoners.1 In June 1869, the rich and liberal Andalusian General Carlos María de la Torre took over as the new Captain-General, and horrified much of the Peninsular colonial elite by inviting creoles and mestizos into his palace to drink to “Liberty,” and strolling about on the streets of Manila in everyday clothes. He then proceeded to abolish press censorship, encouraged freedom of speech and assembly, stopped flogging as a punishment in the military, and ended an agrarian revolt in Manila’s neighboring province of Cavite by pardoning the rebels and organizing them into a special police force.2 The following year, the liberal Overseas Minister Segismundo Moret issued decrees putting the ancient Dominican University of Santo Tomás under state control and encouraging friars to secularize themselves, while assuring them, if they did so, of continued control of their parishes in defiance of their religious superiors.3 The same exhilaration set off what became a ten-year insurrection (1868–78) in Cuba under the capable leadership of the well-to-do landowner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who at one point controlled the eastern half of the wealthy colony.4

  But in Madrid, with the decision to install Amadeo of Savoy as the new (unpopular) sovereign, the political winds started to shift.5 In December 1870, prime minister General Juan Prim y Prats, who had led the assault on Isabel and then largely engineered Amadeo’s accession, was assassinated. Accordingly, in April 1871, de la Torre was replaced by the conservative General Rafael de Izquierdo, who had Moret’s decrees suspended, and then abolished the traditional exemption from corvee labor for workers in the naval shipyards of Cavite. On February 20, 1872 a mutiny broke out there in which seven Spanish officers were killed. It was quickly suppressed, but Izquierdo followed up by arresting hundreds of creoles and mestizos—secular priests, merchants, lawyers, and even members of the colonial administration.6 Most of these people, including Basa, Regidor, and Pardo, were eventually deported to the Marianas and beyond. But the regime, abetted by some conservative friars, decided to make a terrifying public example of three liberal, secular priests. After a brief kangaroo trial, the creoles José Burgos and Jacinto Zamora, and the aged Chinese mestizo Mariano Gómez, were garroted in the presence of, it is said, forty thousand people. Rizal’s beloved ten-years-older brother Paciano, who had been living in Burgos’s house, was forced to go into hiding and forswear any further formal education.7

  Six months later, on September 2, almost 1,200 workers in the Cavite shipyards and arsenal went on the first recorded strike in Philippine history. Numerous people were arrested and interrogated but the regime failed to find an arrestable mastermind, and eventually all were released. William Henry Scott quotes Izquierdo’s ruminations on this unpleasant surprise. Since “more than a thousand men could not share exactly the same thoughts without some machiavellian leadership,” the general concluded that “the International has spread its black wings to cast its nefarious shadow over the most remote lands.” Unlikely as this perhaps sounds, the fact is that the International had only been banned by the Cortes in November 1871, and the Bakuninist Madrid section had made special mention in the maiden issue (January 15, 1870) of its official organ La Solidaridad, devoted to arousing the workers of the world, of “Virgin Oceania and you who inhabit the rich, wide regions of Asia.”8

  Many years afterward Rizal wrote: “Sin 1872, Rizal sería ahora jesuita y en vez de escribir Noli me tangere, habría escrito lo contrario” (Had it not been for 1872, Rizal would now be a Jesuit, and instead of writing Noli me tangere would have written its opposite).9 With Paciano on the blacklist, Rizal’s prime family name, Mercado, would have closed for little José any chance of a good education; he was therefore enrolled at the Ateneo under the secondary family name Rizal. In 1891, he dedicated El Filibusterismo to the memory of the three martyred priests. When asked in 1887 by his Austrian friend the ethnologist Ferdinand Blumentritt what the meaning was of the odd word filibustero, he replied:

  Das Wort Filibustero ist noch auf den Philippinen sehr wenig bekannt worden; die niedrige Bevölkerung kennt es noch nicht. Als ich dieser Wort zum ersten Mal hörte, war es in 1872, wann die Hinrichtungen stattgefunden haben. Ich erinnere mich noch das Erschrecken welches dieses Wort weckte. Unser Vater hat uns verboten dieses Wort auszusprechen … ein gefährlicher Patriote, welcher in junger Zeit aufgehängt wird, oder ein eingebildeter Mensch!

  The word filibustero is still very little known in the Philippines; the common people as yet are unaware of it. The first time I heard it was in 1872 [he was then eleven years old] when the executions took place. I still remember the terror it aroused. Our father forbade us ever to utter it … [It means] a dangerous patriot who will soon be hanged, or a presumptuous fellow!10

  It turns out the word was politically coined around 1850 on one surprising shore of Céspedes’s Caribbean, and from there drifted, via Cuba and Spain, across the Indian Ocean to Manila.11

  In the late spring of 1882, the twenty-year-old Rizal left his country to study in Spain, concealing his plan from his parents, but supported by his adored brother Paciano and a sympathetic uncle. How was this possible? The Mercados were a cultivated, Spanish-and-Tagalog-speaking family of mixed “Malay,” Spanish, and Chinese descent. They were the most prosperous family in their town of Calamba (today an hour’s drive south of Manila), yet their wealth was fragile, as they did not own much land, but rented substantial tracts from the huge local Dominican hacienda. In 1882, world sugar prices were still high, but would crash in the depression that lasted from 1883 to 1886. The family would always send what money they could to José, but it was never enough, and the youngster usually found it hard make ends meet.

  In any case, early in June, Rizal disembarked from the Dutch luxury vessel D’jemnah at Marseilles, before proceeding to Barcelona and then to Madrid to enrol as a student at Central University.12 The first disagreeable downward shock was, as he wrote to his family:

  Yo me paseaba por aquellas calles anchas y limpias adoquinadas como en Manila, llenas de gente, llamando la atención de todo el mundo, quienes me llamaban chino, japonés, americano, etc: ninguno filipino. ¡Pobre país! ¡Nadie tiene noticia de tí!

  José Rizal as a young boy.

  I walked along those wide, clean streets, macademized as in Manila, crowded with people, attracting the attention of everyone; they called me Chinese, Japanese, American [that is, Latin American], etc., but not one Filipino! Unfortunate country—nobody knows a thing about you!13

  In Madrid, he was to be asked by fellow students whether the Philippines was owned by the United Kingdom or by Spain, and another Filipino whether it was very far from Manila.14 Yet the overwhelming Spanish ignorance of, and indifference to, his country was soon to have useful consequences. In the colony—but the Spanish state never called either the Philippines or Cuba a colony, and contained no Colonial Ministry—racial hierarchy, embedded in law, modes of taxation, and sumptuary codes, was of overriding importance to everyone. Peninsulars, creoles, Spanish and Chinese mestizos, “Chinese,” and indios were italicized social strata. In the Philippines, the word filipino referred to the creoles alone. In Spain, however, Rizal and his fellow students quickly discovered that these distinctions were either unknown or seen as irrelevant.15 No matter what their status was back home, here they were all filipinos, just as the Latin Americans in Madrid in the late eighteenth century were americanos, no matter if they were from Lima or Cartagena, or if they were creoles or of mixed ancestry.16 (The same process has produced the contemporary American categories “Asians,” and “Asian Americans”.) On April 13, 1887, Rizal would write to Blumentritt thus:

  Wir müssen alle der Politik etwas opfern, wenn auch wir keine Lust daran haben. Dies verstehen meine Freunde welche in Madrid unsere Zeitung herausgeben; diese Freunde sind alle Jünglingen, creolen, mestizen und malaien, wir nennen uns nur Philippiner.

  All of us have to make sacrifices for political purposes, even when we have no inclination to do so. This is understood by my friends, who publish our newspaper in Madrid; these friends are all youngsters, creoles, mestizos, and Malays, (but) we call ourselves simply Filipinos.17