Spain

Domestic reforms

The domestic reforms of Charles III are more interesting for what they intended than for what they accomplished. They were not, as has often been maintained, directed at fostering a “bourgeois revolution.” The middle classes were too weak, in a predominantly agrarian country, for the role of a modernizing elite; nor did Charles III contemplate a frontal attack on the traditional nobility. The purpose of reform was to remove what seemed to civil servants to be “traditional” constrictions on economic growth and administrative anachronisms that prevented the efficient exercise of royal power. The reformers’ view of the inadequacy of the existing system was well expressed by Pablo de Olavide, an active administrator who would later fall afoul of the Inquisition:

Reorganizations of the machinery of central government made for greater executive efficiency, but complete rationalization was never achieved; the old machinery of the councils persisted, with the Council of Castile as the ultimate decision-making body. An attempt to establish royal control of municipalities (without which reforms could not get past the oligarchic councils) was likewise only a partial success. Most of the public works that characterized the late 18th century were the achievement of vigorous captains general. The extensive civil functions of these military officials were the first signs of a hybrid military-civilian government that, in another form, was to be developed in the 19th century.

Spain’s agrarian economic structure also was not modified. All the chief reformers believed that the great and extensively cultivated estates, especially in Andalusia and Extremadura, constituted the greatest bar to agricultural prosperity. The landless underemployed proletariat who worked the large estates began to alarm reformers. The statesman and author Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos asked:

It was felt that property should be more widely distributed and that there should be a free market in land. Yet none of the reformers was radical enough to push through a wholesale assault on private property or on the civil entail (the juridical instrument by which the latifundios, or large estates, were preserved intact). Acts such as the limitation of future entail, which preserved great estates intact over generations (1789), the limitation of the privileges of the Mesta (1779), and the right to enclose olive groves and irrigated land (1788) showed that the reformers believed primarily in the right of private individuals to do what they liked with their own property; the unrestricted pursuit of private profit, they believed, would bring public prosperity. The enemy was corporate property. Hence, it was proposed that common lands owned by municipalities and the crown should be sold for individual cultivation and that ecclesiastical entail (mortmain) be ended.

The attack on the privileges of the greatest corporation in Spain, the church, was less radical than has sometimes been maintained. Charles III himself was a devoted Catholic who dedicated Spain to the Immaculate Conception. While some of his servants were fashionable anticlericals, most were regalists; that is, they asserted the right of the crown to control over the church in civil matters. In the extreme regalists’ view, the state should take care of charity and education, and it should subject priests to civil jurisdiction for civil crimes and assert the traditional rights of the crown over church appointments.

The main attack of the regalists fell on the Jesuit order. In 1766 a serious riot in Madrid revealed some of the difficulties confronting the reformers. The abolition of fixed wheat prices during a bad harvest (a step that reflected the reformers’ belief in the virtues of a free market) and an attempt to reform outlandish fashions in popular dress brought out the mob in Madrid. The Jesuits were alleged to have fostered the riot and were expelled from both Spain and America in 1767. The importance of this expulsion, however, has been overestimated. Already expelled from France and Portugal, the Jesuits were bitterly criticized by rival orders as well as by the secular clergy: 42 of the 56 bishops approved of the expulsion. Again, the expulsion was a negative achievement; more ambitious plans to establish a state university system and a state welfare organization failed.

The question arises of the extent to which the policies of Charles III resulted from the acceptance by his servants of the precepts of the Enlightenment. Certainly Aranda, the “Hammer of the Jesuits,” and Olavide were what were called esprits forts (“strong spirits”; i.e., French-influenced radicals); their views gave a sharp edge to traditional regalism. Jovellanos was a disciple of Adam Smith. Although his famous Informe sobre la ley agraria (“Report on the Agrarian Law”) is not original, the book is significant in that it attempts to apply dogmatic laissez-faire ideology to Spanish conditions and is one of the foundations of Spanish liberalism.

One of the aims of the Enlightenment was to produce a society in which no traditional prejudices or institutions should inhibit economic activity. This was the motive behind the attempt to encourage the nobility to engage in commerce by making it “honourable.” Patriotic societies, organized with government encouragement from 1765 onward, were meant to provide the provincial basis for a progressive society and to familiarize Spaniards with European advances in technology and agriculture. However, this attempt did not progress much beyond the status of local reading rooms and debating societies.

Traditional Roman Catholic society was still strong, if under attack from a minority of intellectuals and civil servants. As the reaction of the countryside after 1808 was to show, the church was still a great social power. Arthur Wellesley, the duke of Wellington, observed that “the real power in Spain is in the clergy. They kept the people right against France.” Although a number of bishops could be counted among the “enlightened” and supported much of the reform program, most of the clergy viewed the new ideas of the Enlightenment as “foreign” and dangerous. There could be no such thing as moderate progress encouraged by the king himself—the notion of a “revolution from above” that was to haunt subsequent Spanish history. Voltaire, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were quite simply dangerous heretics, though the Inquisition proved powerless to prevent the clandestine circulation of their works. It was the clerical attacks on heretics as much as the subversive works themselves that familiarized a narrow stratum of society with new ideas. When the French Revolution exposed the dangers of progressive thought, the traditionalist cause was immensely strengthened, and the Inquisition appeared to the crown itself to be a useful instrument to control the spread of dangerous ideas.