Javier Cercas

Javier Cercas’s new book recounts the last fifty years of Spanish history—the same fifty years as the newspaper El País—through a personal journey and a lucid reflection on the ties between journalism, literature, politics, and freedom.

El País first appeared on newsstands on May 4, 1976, less than six months after Franco’s death, when the path toward democracy was only just beginning to emerge. The idea for the newspaper took shape among a group of publishers and intellectuals who, in the final years of the Franco regime, sought an instrument for reform—liberal in spirit and European in outlook—that would help heal the wounds inflicted by the Civil War and the dictatorship and find a smooth transition away from Francoism. Its success was meteoric.

Fifty years after that founding moment in Spain’s recent history, Javier Cercas took on the challenge of telling the story of a country through that of its leading newspaper. But The Newspaper of Democracy is more than a personal history of that period: it is also a reflection on the relationship between journalism and literature, a chronicle of a writer’s intellectual formation, and a tribute to the importance of the press in building and safeguarding freedom.