Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

  Such was the Spain that the Bourbons came from France to rule.

  II. PHILIP V: 1700-46

  Felipe Quinto was a good man within his lights, which had been limited by his education. As a younger son to the Dauphin he had been trained to modesty, piety, and obedience, and he never overcame these virtues sufficiently to meet half a century of challenges in government and war. His piety led him to accept in Spain a religious obscurantism that was dying in France; his docility made him malleable by his ministers and his wives.

  María Luisa Gabriela, daughter of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, was only thirteen when she married Philip (1701), but she was already adept in feminine wiles; her beauty and vivacity, her tantrums and tears reduced the King to an exhausted subjection, while she and her chief lady in waiting manipulated the politics of their adopted land. Marie Anne de La Trémoille, Princesse des Ursins, French widow of a Spanish grandee, had helped the girl Queen to marriage and power. Ambitious but tactful, she became for a decade a power behind the throne. She could not rely upon beauty, for she was fifty-nine in 1701, but she provided the knowledge and subtlety lacking in the Queen, and after 1705 she determined policy. In 1714 María Luisa, aged twenty-six, died, and Philip, who had learned to love her devotedly, sank into a morbid melancholy. Mme. des Ursins thought to salvage her power by arranging his marriage with Isabella (Elizabeth) Farnese, daughter of Duke Odoardo II of Parma and Piacenza. She went to meet the new Queen at the Spanish border, but Isabella curtly ordered her to leave Spain. She withdrew to Rome and died eight years later in wealth and oblivion.

  Isabella did not admit that the Renaissance was over; she had all the force of will, keenness of intellect, fire of temper, and scorn of scruples that had marked the women, as well as the men, who had dominated sixteenth-century Italy. She found in Philip a man who could not make up his mind, and who could not sleep alone; their bed became her throne, from which she ruled a nation, directed armies, and won Italian principalities. She had known almost nothing of Spain, nor did she ever take to the Spanish character, but she studied that character, she made herself familiar with the needs of the country, and the King was surprised to find her as informed and resourceful as his ministers.

  In his first years of rule Philip had used Jean Orry and other French aides to reorganize the government on lines set by Louis XIV: centralized and audited administration and finance, with a trained bureaucracy and provincial intendants, all under the legislative, judicial, and executive authority of the royal council, here called the Consejo de Castilla. Corruption diminished, extravagance was checked—except in the building operations of the King. To these French ministers there succeeded in 1714 an able and ambitious Italian, the Abate Giulio Alberoni, whose energy made the Spanish shudder. Son of a Piacenza gardener, he had reached Spain as secretary to the Duc de Vendôme. He had been the first to suggest Isabella Farnese as Philip’s second wife; grateful, she eased his way to power. Together they kept the King away from affairs, and from any counsel but their own. Together they planned to build up Spain’s armed forces, and use them to drive the Austrians out of Italy, restore Spanish ascendancy in Naples and Milan, and set up ducal thrones to be graced, someday, by the farseeing Isabella’s sons.

  Alberoni asked five years for preparation. He replaced titled sluggards with middle-class ability in the leading posts; he taxed the clergy and imprisoned rebellious priests;13 he scrapped worn-out vessels and built better ones; he set up forts and arsenals along coasts and frontiers; he subsidized industry, opened up roads, accelerated communication, abolished sales taxes and traffic tolls. The British ambassador in Madrid warned his government that with a few more years of such advances Spain would be a danger to other European powers.14 To soothe such fears Alberoni pretended that he was raising forces to help Venice and the papacy against the Turks. Indeed, he sent six galleys to Clement XI, who rewarded him with a red hat (1717). “The Spanish monarchy,” wrote Voltaire, “has resumed new life under Cardinal Alberoni.”15

  Everything was granted him but time. He hoped to win French and English consent to Spanish aims in Italy, and offered substantial concessions in return, but the careless King spoiled these maneuvers by revealing his desire to replace Philippe d’Orléans as ruler of France. Philippe turned against Felipe, and joined England and the United Provinces in a pact to maintain the territorial arrangements fixed by the Treaty of Utrecht. Austria violated that treaty by compelling Savoy to give her Sicily in exchange for Sardinia. Alberoni protested that this placed athwart the Mediterranean a power whose head still claimed the crown of Spain. Cursing the undue acceleration of events, he resigned himself to premature war. His newborn fleet captured Palermo (1718), and his troops soon brought all Sicily under Spanish control. Austria thereupon joined England, France, and Holland in a Quadruple Alliance against Spain. On August 11, 1718, a British squadron under Admiral Byng destroyed the Spanish fleet off the coast of Sicily; Spain’s best troops were bottled up in that island while French armies invaded Spain. Philip and Isabella sued for peace; it was granted on condition of Alberoni’s banishment. He fled to Genoa (1719), made his way in disguise through Austrian-held Lombardy to Rome, took part in the conclave that elected Innocent XIII, and died in 1752, aged eighty-eight. On February 17, 1720, a Spanish envoy signed in London a treaty by which Philip resigned all claim to the throne of France, Spain surrendered Sicily to Austria, England promised to restore Gibraltar to Spain, and the Allies pledged to Isabella’s offspring the right of succession to Parma and Tuscany.

  In the kaleidoscope of international politics allies soon become enemies, and foes may formally become friends. To cement peace with France, Philip had betrothed his two-year-old daughter, Maria Ana Victoria, to Louis XV in 1721, and had sent her—all wondering—to France (1722). But in 1725 France sent her back so that Louis might marry a woman who could at once undertake the task of giving him an heir. Insulted, Spain allied herself with Austria; the Emperor Charles VI promised to help recapture Gibraltar; when a Spanish army tried to take that bastion Austrian help did not come; the attempt failed, and Spain not only made peace with England, but restored to her the Asiento monopoly of selling slaves to Spanish colonies; in return Britain pledged to put Isabella’s son Don Carlos on the ducal throne of Parma. In 1731 Carlos and six thousand Spanish troops were escorted to Italy by an English fleet. Austria, to secure British and Spanish support for the accession of Maria Theresa to the Imperial throne, yielded Parma and Piacenza to Carlos. In 1734 Carlos promoted himself to Naples. Isabella’s triumph was complete.

  Philip, however, sank into a melancholy mood that, after 1736, lapsed now and then into insanity. He shrank into a corner of his room, thinking that all who entered planned to kill him. He was loath to eat for fear of being poisoned. For a long time he refused to leave his bed or be shaved. Isabella tried a hundred ways to heal or soothe him; all failed but one. In 1737 she coaxed Farinelli to come to Spain. One night, in an apartment adjoining the King’s, she arranged a concert in which the great castrato sang two arias by Hasse. Philip rose from his bed to look through a doorway and see what agency could make such captivating sounds. Isabella brought Farinelli to him; the monarch praised and caressed him, and bade him name his reward; nothing would be refused. Previously instructed by the Queen, the singer asked only that Philip should let himself be shaved and dressed, and should appear at the royal council. The King consented; his fears subsided; he seemed miraculously healed. But when the next evening came he called for Farinelli, and begged him to sing those same two songs again; only so could he be calmed to sleep. So it continued, night after night, for ten years. Farinelli was paid 200,000 reales a year, but was not allowed to sing except at the court. He accepted the condition gracefully, and though his power over the King was greater than that of any minister, he never abused it, always used it for good; he remained untouched by venality, and won the admiration of all.16

  In 1746 Philip ordered 100,000 Masses to be said for his salvation; if so many should
not be needed to get him into heaven the surplus should be applied to poor souls for whom no such provision had been made.17 In that year he died.

  III. FERDINAND VI: 1746-59

  His second son by his first wife succeeded him, and gave Spain thirteen years of healing rule. Isabella survived till 1766; she was treated with kindness and courtesy by her stepson, but she lost her power to influence events. Ferdinand’s wife, Maria Barbara, Scarlatti’s pupil, was now the woman behind the throne; though she loved food and money beyond reason, she was a gentler spirit than Isabella, and gave most of her energies to encouraging music and art. Farinelli continued to sing for the new rulers, and Scarlatti’s harpsichord could not rival him. King and Queen worked to end the War of the Austrian Succession; they accepted the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), though it gave Tuscany to Austria; and a year later they terminated the 136-year-old Asiento by paying £100,000 to the South Sea Company for the loss of its privileges in the slave trade.

  Ferdinand was a man of good will, kindly and honest, but he had inherited a delicate constitution and was subject to fits of passion, of which he was painfully ashamed.18 Conscious of his limitations, he left administration to two able ministers—Don José de Carvajal and Zenón de Somodevilla, Marqués de la Ensenada. Ensenada improved agricultural methods, subsidized mining and industry, built roads and canals, abolished internal tolls, rebuilt the navy, replaced the hated sales tax by a tax on income and property, reorganized the finances, and broke down the intellectual isolation of Spain by sending students abroad. Partly through Ensenada’s diplomacy a concordat was signed with the papacy (1753), reserving to the King the right to tax ecclesiastical property and to appoint bishops to Spanish sees. The power of the Church was reduced, the Inquisition was subdued, public autos-da-fé were abolished.

  The two ministers diverged in foreign policy. Carvajal felt the charm of the devoted British ambassador, Sir Benjamin Keene, and took a peaceful pro-British line; Ensenada favored France, and moved toward war with England. Ferdinand, appreciating his energy and ability, was long patient with him, but finally dismissed him. While nearly all Europe fell into seven years of war, Ferdinand gave his people a longer period of tranquillity and prosperity than Spain had enjoyed since Philip II.

  In 1758 Maria Barbara died. The King, who had loved her as if politics had had nothing to do with their marriage, fell into a state of melancholy and unshaved dishevelment strangely recalling that of his father; in his final year he too was insane. Toward the end he refused to go to bed, fearing that he would never get up again. He died in his chair, August 10, 1759. Everyone mourned the royal lovers, for their rule had been a rare blessing to Spain.

  IV. THE ENLIGHTENMENT ENTERS SPAIN

  The story of the Enlightenment in Spain is a case of a resistible force encountering an immovable body. The Spanish character, and its blood-written pledge to its medieval faith, turned back sooner or later all winds of heresy or doubt, all alien forms of dress or manners or economy. Only one economic force favored foreign thought—Spanish merchants who daily dealt with strangers, and who knew to what power and wealth their like had risen in England and France. They were willing to import ideas if these could weaken the hold that nobles and clergy had inherited on the land, life, and mind of Spain. They knew that religion had lost its power in England; some had heard of Newton and Locke; even Gibbon was to find a few readers in Spain.19

  Of course the strongest Enlightenment breezes came from France. The French aristocrats who followed Philip V to Madrid were already touched by the irreligion that hid its head under Louis XIV but ran rampant during the Regency. In 1714 some scholars founded the Real Academia Española in emulation of the French Academy; soon it began work on a dictionary; in 1737 the Diario de los literatos de España undertook to rival the Journal des savants. The Duke of Alba, who directed the Real Academia for twenty years (1756-76), was a warm admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.20 In 1773 he subscribed eight louis d’or for Pigalle’s statue of Voltaire; “Condemned to cultivate my reason in secret,” he wrote to d’Alembert, “I take this opportunity to give public testimony to my gratitude and admiration for the great man who first showed me the way.”21

  Gratuitous advertisement was given to Rousseau’s Émile by its ceremonious burning in a Madrid church (1765).22 Young Spaniards acquainted with Paris, like the Marqués de Mora who loved Julie de Lespinasse, came back to Spain with some rubbing of the skepticism that they had encountered in the salons. Copies of works by Voltaire, Diderot, or Raynal were smuggled into Spain, and aroused some innovating minds. A Spanish journalist wrote in 1763: “Through the effect of many pernicious books that have become the fashion, such as those of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Helvétius, much cooling of faith has been felt in this country.”23 Pablo Olavide openly expressed Voltairean ideas in his Madrid salon (c. 1766).24 On the shelves of the Sociedades Económicas de los Amigos del País in Madrid were works by Voltaire, Rousseau, Bayle, d’Alembert, Montesquieu, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume.25 Abbé Clément, touring Spain in 1768, reported a wide spread of religious indifference, even unbelief, covered with external observance of Catholic ritual.26 In 1778 the Inquisition was informed that the highest officials of the court read the French philosophes.27

  It was of considerable importance to Spanish history that Pedro Abarca, Conde de Aranda, traveling in France, became a friend of Voltaire. We may judge of his connections by his later activity as Spanish ambassador to Versailles; he mixed freely with the Encyclopedists in Paris, formed an admiring intimacy with d’Alembert, and crossed France to visit Voltaire at Ferney. In Spain he professed fidelity to the Church, but it was he who persuaded Charles III to expel the Jesuits. Under his guidance Charles joined the ranks of those “enlightened despots” to whom the philosophes were looking as their likeliest aides in the spread of education, liberty, and reason.

  V. CHARLES III: 1759-88

  1. The New Government

  When he arrived from Naples he was forty-three years old. He was welcomed by all but the Jesuits,28 who resented the sale of their Paraguayan settlements by Spain to Portugal (1750). Otherwise he won all hearts by remitting arrears of taxes, and restoring some of the privileges that the provinces had lost under the centralizing policy of Philip V. His first year as king of Spain was saddened by the death of his wife, Maria Amalia. He never married again. It is to the credit of the Spanish Bourbons of the eighteenth century that they gave the monarchs of Europe an example of marital devotion and stability.

  A British diplomat drew a British picture of Charles, who had had some encounters with the English in Naples:

  The King has a very odd appearance in person and dress. He is of diminutive stature, with a complexion the color of mahogany. He has not been measured for a coat these thirty years, so that it sits on him like a sack. His waistcoat and breeches are generally leather, with a pair of cloth spatterdashes on his legs. … He goes out a-sporting every day of the year, rain or blow.29

  But the Earl of Bristol added, in 1761:

  The Catholic King has good talents, a happy memory, and uncommon command of himself on all occasions. His having been often deceived renders him suspicious. He ever prefers carrying a point by gentle means, and has the patience to repeat exhortations rather than exert his authority. . . Yet, with the greatest air of gentleness, he keeps his ministers and attendants in the utmost awe.30

  His personal piety gave no warning that he would attack the Jesuits or undertake religious reforms. He heard Mass daily. His “honest and obstinate adherence to all his treaties, principles, and engagements” astonished an English enemy.31 He devoted a large part of each weekday to governmental affairs. He rose at six, visited his children, breakfasted, worked from eight to eleven, sat in council, received dignitaries, dined in public, gave several hours to hunting, supped at nine-thirty, fed his dogs, said his prayers, and went to bed. His hunting was probably a health measure, aimed to dispel the melancholy that ran in the family.

  He began with some seriou
s mistakes. Unfamiliar with Spain, which he had not seen since his sixteenth year, he took as his first aides two” Italians who had served him well in Naples: the Marchese de’ Grimaldi in foreign policy, the Marchese de’ Squillaci in domestic affairs.

  The Earl of Bristol described Squillaci as “not bright. He is fond of business, and never complains of having too much, notwithstanding the variety of departments that center in him.... I believe he is incapable of taking any bribes, but I would not be equally responsible for his wife.”32 Squillaci did not like the crime, odor, and gloom of Madrid; he organized a zealous police and a street-cleaning squad, and lighted the capital with five thousand lamps. He legalized monopolies for supplying the city with oil, bread, and other necessities; a drought raised prices, and the populace called for Squillaci’s head. He offended the clergy by regulations that checked their privileges and power. He lost a thousand supporters by banning concealed weapons. Finally he stirred up a revolution by attempting to change the dress of the people. He persuaded the King that the long cape, which hid the figure, and the broad hat with turned-down rim, which hid much of the face, made it easier to conceal weapons, and harder for the police to recognize criminals. A succession of royal decrees forbade the cape and the hat, and officers were equipped with shears to cut the offending garments down to legal size.33 This was more government than the proud Madrilenos could stand. On Palm Sunday, March 23, 1766, they rose in revolt, captured ammunition stores, emptied the prisons, overwhelmed soldiers and police, attacked Squillaci’s home, stoned Grimaldi, killed the Walloon guards of the royal palace, and paraded with the heads of these hated foreigners held aloft on pikes and crowned with broad-rimmed hats. For two days the mob slaughtered and pillaged. Charles yielded, repealed the decrees, and sent Squillaci, safely escorted, back to Italy. Meanwhile he had discovered the talents of the Conde de Aranda, and appointed him president of the Council of Castile. Aranda made the long cape and wide sombrero the official costume of the hangman; the new connotation made the old garb unfashionable; most Madrilenos adopted French dress.