El periódico de la democracia

The newspaper El País hit the streets on May 4, 1976, less than six months after Franco's death, when the path to democracy was just beginning to emerge. The idea for the newspaper was conceived by a group of editors and intellectuals who, in the twilight of the Franco regime, sought an instrument for reforming the system, one with a liberal bent and a pro-European vocation, that would help heal the wounds inflicted by the Civil War and the dictatorship and find a way out of Francoism without further trauma. Its success was immediate. Fifty years after that foundational moment in recent Spanish history, Javier Cercas took on the challenge of telling the story of a country through the story of its flagship newspaper; but The Newspaper of Democracy is not only 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 development, and a tribute to the importance of the press in building and defending freedoms.