Francisco Pi y Margall

Francesc Pi i Margall
Portrait by José Sánchez Pescador
2nd President of the Spanish Republic 2nd of the First Spanish Republic (1873–74)
In office 11 June 1873 – 18 July 1873
Preceded by	Estanislao Figueras
Succeeded by	Nicolás Salmerón
Personal details
Born	(1824-04-29)29 April 1824 Barcelona, Spain
Died	29 November 1901(1901-11-29) (aged 77) Madrid, Spain
Political party	Democratic Democratic Federal Republican

Francesc Pi i Margall (Catalan pronunciation: [fɾənˈsɛsk ˈpi i mərˈɣaʎ]; Spanish: Francisco Pi y Margall) (29 April 1824 – 29 November 1901) was a Spanish politician, Catalan federalist and libertarian socialist statesman, historian, and political philosopher and romanticist writer. He was briefly president of the short-lived First Spanish Republic in 1873.

Pi was the son of a working-class textile worker in Barcelona and was born on 29 April 1824. Pi's father enrolled him in a religious school in 1831 where he acquired an education in the humanities and the classics. He was a member of the Societat Filomàtica, enabling him to meet some of the main thinkers and writers of the Catalan romanticist movement. In 1837, he left to study law, graduating with a law degree in 1847. He moved to Madrid that year and began writing as a theater critic for the journal El Renacimiento and for El Correo, in which Pi's first political article was published. In need of further income, Pi also took a job for Martí, a Catalan bank.

In 1848, Pi completed the unfinished Memories and Beauties of Spain by the poet Pau Piferrer, contributing to the sections on Catalonia, Seville, and Granada. At this time, he connected himself with the Republican faction in Spanish politics. In 1851, he wrote a monumental and highly popular history of painting, though it was eventually condemned by the Church and the Spanish state for heterodoxy.

Pi was involved in the revolution of 1854 that brought the liberal caudillo Baldomero Espartero, Count of Luchana back to power. He published La reacción y la revolución in that year, influenced by G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy of history and the thinking of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In 1856 he established a new journal, La Razón, that was closed when the moderate O'Donnell government was overthrown by the reactionary Ramón María Narváez y Campos, Duke of Valencia. Pi fled to Guipúzcoa in the Basque country until 1857, when Nicolás María Rivero asked him to return to Madrid to contribute to the Republican newspaper La Discusión. At La Discusión, Pi became acquainted with a number of leaders of the Spanish republican movement, including another future president of the First Republic, Estanislau Figueras i de Moragas. In 1864 he became the director of the newspaper.