Module 6

• Simoun


  A friend of Spain outwardly, but secretly plotting revenge against the Spanish authorities
• Simoun's obsessions


  • Rescue his paramour Maria Clara from the nunnery of Santa Clara
  • Foment a Philippine revolution against Spain
• The story of El Filibusterismo begins on board a steamer ship sailing up the Pasig River from Manila to Laguna de Bay
• Passengers on the steamer ship

  • Simoun
  • Doña Victorina, a pro-Spanish native woman
  • Paulita Gomez, Doña Victorina's beautiful niece
  • Ben-Zayb, a Spanish journalist
  • Padre Sibyla, vice-rector of the University of Santo Tomas
  • Padre Camorra, the parish priest of the town of Tiani
  • Don Custodio, a pro-Spanish Filipino
  • Padre Salvi, thin Franciscan friar
  • Padre Irene, a kind friar
  • Padre Florentino, a retired scholarly and patriotic Filipino priest
  • Isagani, a poet-nephew of Padre Florentino and a lover of Paulita
  • Basilio, son of Sisa and promising medical student
• Simoun


  A man of wealth and mystery, very close friend and confidante of the Spanish governor general, called the "Brown Cardinal" or the "Black Eminence"
• Simoun's plan to overthrow the government

  1. Encourages corruption in the government

  2. Promotes the oppression of the masses

  3. Hastens the moral degradation of the country so that the people may become desperate and fight

  4. Smuggles arms into the country with the help of a rich Chinese merchant, Quiroga

  5. Gives a wedding gift of a beautiful lamp with a secret compartment containing nitroglycerine to Paulita Gomez and Juanito Pelaez, which will explode and destroy the house where the wedding feast is going on, killing all the guests, including the governor general, the friars, and the government officials

  6. Simultaneously, all the government buildings in Manila will be blown by Simoun's followers
• Isagani, who has been rejected by Paulita because of his liberal ideas, is standing outside the house

  Basilio, his friend, warns him to go away because the lightened lamp will soon explode
• José Rizal was born


  June 19, 1861
• José Rizal


  A brilliant polymath, doctor, fencer, essayist, and novelist from an upper-class Filipino family
• Teodora Alonso


  Rizal's highly educated mother who exerted a powerful influence on his intellectual development
• By the late nineteenth century, the Spanish empire was in irreversible decline
• Spain had ruled the islands since 1565, except for a brief hiatus when the British occupied them in 1762
• The colonial government was unresponsive and often cruel, with the religious establishment wielding as much power as the state
• Clerical abuses, European ideas of liberalism, and growing international trade fueled a burgeoning national consciousness
• The 1872 Cavite Mutiny, in which three native priests were accused of treason and publicly executed, provided both inspiration and a cautionary tale for Rizal and his generation
• Rizal


  Studied medicine and the liberal arts in Spain, Paris and Heidelberg
• Propaganda Movement


  Filipino expatriates advocating, through its newspaper La Solidaridad, various reforms such as the integration of the Philippines as a province of Spain, representation in the Spanish Cortes, the Filipinization of the clergy, and equality of Filipinos and Spaniards before the law
• Rizal's view on the main impediment to reform

  Laid not so much with the civil government but with the reactionary and powerful Franciscan, Augustinian, and Dominican friars, who constituted a state within a state
• Rizal published his first novel Noli Me Tangere, a searing indictment of friar abuse as well as of colonial rule's shortcomings


  1887
• Rizal went to Europe and wrote the sequel El Filibusterismo (The Subversive)


  1888
• Rizal annotated an edition of Antonio Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, showing that the Philippines had had a long history before the advent of the Spaniards
• Rizal returned to Manila and founded a reform society, La Liga Filipina, before being exiled to Dapitan, in Mindanao, Southern Philippines


  1892
• In Dapitan, Rizal devoted himself to scientific research and public works
• Josephine Bracken


  Rizal's last and most serious romantic involvement
• The Katipunan, a nationalist secret society, launched the revolution against Spain


  August 1896
• Rizal refused to join the Katipunan, convinced that the time was not yet ripe for armed struggle
• Rizal volunteered to serve as a doctor with the Spanish forces fighting against Cuban revolutionaries
• Rizal, at the age of thirty-five, was shot at dawn


  December 30, 1896
• Rizal: 'Mi Ultimo Adios ("My Last Farewell"), considered a masterpiece of nineteenth-century Spanish verse'
• Rizal's martyrdom only intensified the ultimately successful fight for independence from Spain
• José Rizal is often described as the "First Filipino" and has since served as an inspiration to countless nationalists and intellectuals