La Correspondència epistolar de la família Burguès (1750-1850)

In 2005 I published La sociabilidad epistolar de la familia Burguès de Girona (1799-1803), a book in which I analysed the personal correspondence of Martí de Burguès, a military man who finished his career with the rank of lieutenant and who was part of a family of the lower Catalan nobility whose main house was in Carrer de la Força in the city of Girona. His collection of letters appeared, unexpectedly, in the Archive of the Cathedral of Girona, in two different files that formed part of the correspondence section, as yet unclassified. From that collection 205 letters were published - almost the totality of the collection - most of which had been addressed to Martí de Burguès between November 1799 and March 1803 by 67 different correspondents. Of the senders, eleven were part of his closest family circle and the rest were friends, acquaintances and bureaucrats who lived mainly in Barcelona and Madrid. Some time after the publication of the study and edition of the epistolary collection of Martí de Burguès, I learned of the existence in the National Library of Catalonia of the ‘Sambola-Burguès’ collection, which includes part of the patrimonial archive of the Burguès family. At the end of the 19th century, the documentation of the Burguès family was integrated, through marriage, with that of the Sambola family, a family of apothecaries and merchants also established in Girona. Of all the documentary material, the correspondence stands out, which serves to complete the history of a family and of some of the individuals who were part of it, some of whom achieved a certain public significance. The epistolary correspondence of the ‘Sambola-Burguès’ collection significantly increases the number of actors and brings in new witnesses. If La sociabilitat epistolar was based on the personal correspondence that Martí de Burguès received during a short period of time, an excellent material for the reconstruction of an egocentric network, this work gathers and interprets the letters of the Burguès house during a century, a material that offers the possibility of deepening the evolution of a family in a parallel way in the course of the general historical events. But the letters of the Burguès family also offer an opportunity to humanise a social caste - that of the knights and landowners - which, in the case of the Girona region, has been the subject of very valuable and precise studies from an economic and sociological point of view. Along with the management of their estates, the great landowners were the guardians of an extended family around which they led a private life that involved certain patterns of behaviour, passions and intimacies that are rarely so closely reflected as in the correspondence.