Ramón de la Sagra was born on 8 April 1798 in
A Coruña, a province of Spain. His father Lorenzo Martínez de la Sagra came from a noble merchant family, which became wealthy through trade with the Spanish colonies in America. His mother was Antonia Rodríguez Perís, who met his father in Saint Augustine. His brother migrated to
Uruguay to start a business there, when Sagra was three years old. Ramón de la Sagra studied physics for one year in Nautical School of A Coruña. Afterwards he attended the military college of Santiago de Compostela until reaching adulthood. Afterwards he joined the local university, where he studied anatomy, medicine, mathematics and pharmaceuticals. There he started spreading liberal ideas. For these actions the
Inquisition started threatening him, until he was transferred at the University of Madrid. There he contributed to the liberal newspaper
El Conservador, the name being a case of
antiphrasis. In 1821 he migrated to
Cuba as an assistant of Agustìn Rodriguez. One year later he was appointed to the position of Professor of Natural History of Cuba. In 1822 he married Manuela Turnes del Rìo. For the next ten years he would travel in the
Americas, until settling in Paris in 1835. After the
French Revolution of 1848, he created with Proudhon the Peoples' Bank of France. In Brussels he met Heinrich Ahrens, disciple of Krause, whose doctrines he proclaimed in Spain before Julian Sanz del Rio. He continued to publish economic, geographic, political, social, and prison reform studies. In 1849 he was expelled from France, because he was spreading Socialist ideas. In 1856 he was expelled from Spain to France by Ramón María Narváez, because he was spreading radical ideas. In Paris he met
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels. There he worked as the consul of Uruguay. He returned to Cuba between 1859 and 1860 and published numerous studies and essays there. At the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he went to Switzerland, where he died on 23 May 1871 at the age of seventy-three. ==Legacy==