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The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire were long gone and the last attempt of the Bourbons to restore the dynasty had been a fiasco. People revolted on July 28, 29 and 30, 1830, in what became known as the three glorious days. It fell on old and spent Marquis de Lafayette to promote the new French sovereign at the Hôtel de Ville: Louis Philippe d’Orleans, son of Philippe Egalité, Louis XVI’s cousin, who had voted to send him to the guillotine. He took and oath as King of the French, but not King of France. His times soon became known as the Monarchie de Juillet.
Paris was leaving behind the last vestiges of its medieval past and France was slowly losing its grip as the center of Western Civilization. They were nevertheless extraordinary times. Victor Hugo, Honoré Balzac, Chateaubriand, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Alexander Dumas, father and son, Flaubert, Stendhal, Lamartine, the Goncourts and Augusto Comte were best sellers in Paris at the same time. Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Gounod, Wagner, Schumann, Offenbach and occasionally Paganini, were all making music and competing for the same public. In politics, the men of the hour were Casimir Perrier, Jacques Laffitte, François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers.
The issues of the day: slavery, universal suffrage, colonialism, independence, feminism and the recovery of La Louisiane from the American Republic. The world of ideas was flourishing. Alex de Tocqueville had just published his “Of Democracy in America”, Karl Marx was writing his “Communist Manifesto”, and Charles Fourier was trying to popularize the utopian socialism of Henri le Duc de Saint Simon.In the midst of all this, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada and his wife Maria del Carmen moved to Paris and soon welcomed as their guests four of the finest minds in Cuba, the last remaining Spanish colony in the Americas: Domingo del Monte and his wife Rosa, Miguel Aldama, Rosa’s brother, and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a young best seller poet living in Madrid. This is the extraordinary story of the times they spent together in the City of Lights.
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