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El caballero de Erlaiz is one of the novels by Pío Baroja that have been most neglected. Written after his return from exile in Paris during the Spanish war, it contains an embarrassing incursion in the 18th century and the War of the Pyrenees, that is, in events more distant than the ones he had usually written about in trilogies like La selva oscura, pieces such as Zalacaín el aventurero or the series Memorias de un hombre de acción, which deal with the 19th and the 20th centuries. In this paper I suggest that below this journey in History Baroja was not only praising the spirit of the Enlightenment but also developing a criticism of the present, through a reconsideration of History and the genre of historical novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]