El Filibusterismo Study Guide

José Rizal was born to a wealthy mestizo family in Laguna province. A precocious child and high-achieving student, he moved to Manila to study as a teenager. Rizal initially prepared for law school before becoming an ophthalmologist instead. He completed his medical studies in Madrid from 1882 to 1887. In Spain, Rizal met other Filipino exiles and advocates of independence and wrote his first book, Noli Me Tangere. He briefly returned to the Philippines in 1888, but suspicions of treason forced him into exile in Europe and Hong Kong. Rizal returned again in 1892, at which point the authorities quickly sent to the remote town of Dapitan. In 1896, Rizal volunteered to go to Cuba, which was in the midst of a violent revolution, to serve as a doctor. On his way through Manila, however, he was detained, convicted of treason, and executed in a brief show trial.

Rizal wrote El Filibusterismo in the context of a rapidly declining Spanish empire, whose colonial rule was threatened by growing independence not only in the Philippines but across the world. Spain’s American colonies collectively rejected its rule in the early 19th century, weakening its grip on its remaining territories in the Caribbean and Pacific. The mid-19th century saw a liberal revolution in Spain and economic pressure forced the authorities to open the Philippines to foreign trade, rapidly spreading ideas of constitutionalism and self-determination. While Rizal was executed before the Filipino revolution would succeed, he saw the rapid disintegration of colonial power, as well as Spain’s inability to simultaneously liberalize in Spain and maintain its repressive control of the Philippines unaltered, developments Rizal carefully tracks in El Filibusterismo.

El Filibusterismo was heavily influenced by literary realism, which Rizal was first introduced to in Spain, as well as political events and Filipino folk culture. The colonial government’s strict censorship and refusal to support cultural development in the Philippines meant that the modern novel as a form was largely untouched. Instead, Rizal looked for inspiration to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, and Spanish author Benito Pérez Galdos’s Doña Perfecta. His adaption of the realist novel to heady political turmoil reflected international changes in the form, as his contemporaries like Émile Zola and Leo Tolstoy depicted social upheaval in novels and novellas like Germinal and Hadji Murat, respectively.