by Will Durant
Aranda came of an old and wealthy family in Aragon. We have seen him imbibing Enlightenment in France; he went also to Prussia, where he studied military organization. He returned to Spain eager to bring his country abreast of those northern states. His Encyclopedist friends rejoiced too publicly over his accession to power; he mourned that they had thereby made his course more difficult,34 and he wished they had studied diplomacy. He defined political diplomacy as the art of
recognizing the strength, resources, interests, rights, fears, and hopes of the different powers, so that, as the occasion warrants it, we may appease these powers, divide them, defeat them, or ally ourselves with them, depending on how they serve our advantage and increase our security.35
The King was in a mood for ecclesiastical reforms because he suspected the clergy of secretly encouraging the revolt against Squillaci.36 He had permitted the government press to print in 1765 an anonymous Tratado de la regalia de l’amortización, which questioned the right of the Church to amass real property, and argued that in all temporal matters the Church should be subject to the state. The author was Conde Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, a member of the Consejo de Castilla. In 1761 Charles had issued an order requiring royal consent for the publication of papal bulls or briefs in Spain; later he rescinded this order; in 1768 he renewed it. Now he supported Aranda and Campomanes in a succession of religious reforms that for one exciting generation remade the intellectual face of Spain.
2. The Spanish Reformation
The Spanish reformers—perhaps excepting Aranda—had no intent to destroy Catholicism in Spain. The long wars to drive out the Moors (like the long struggle for the liberation of Ireland) had made Catholicism a part of patriotism, and had intensified it into a faith too sanctified by the sacrifices of the nation to admit of successful challenge or basic change. The hope of the reformers was to bring the Church under control of the state, and to free the mind of Spain from terror of the Inquisition. They began by attacking the Jesuits.
The Society of Jesus had been born in Spain in the mind and experiences of Ignatius Loyola, and some of its greatest leaders had come from Spain. Here, as in Portugal, France, Italy, and Austria, it controlled secondary education, gave confessors to kings and queens, and shared in forming royal policies. Its expanding power aroused the jealousy, sometimes the enmity, of the secular Catholic clergy. Some of these believed in the superior authority of ecumenical councils over the popes; the Jesuits defended the supreme authority of the popes over councils and kings. Spanish businessmen complained that Jesuits engaging in colonial commerce were underselling regular merchants because of ecclesiastical exemption from taxation; and this, it was pointed out, lessened royal revenues. Charles believed that the Jesuits were still encouraging the resistance of the Paraguayan Indians to the orders of the Spanish government.37 And he was alarmed when Aranda, Campomanes, and others showed him letters which, they alleged, had been found in the correspondence of the Jesuits; one of these letters, supposedly from Father Ricci, general of the order, declared that Charles was a bastard and should be superseded by his brother Luis.38 The authenticity of these letters has been rejected by Catholics and unbelievers alike;39 but Charles thought them genuine, and concluded that the Jesuits were plotting to depose him, perhaps to have him killed.40 He noted that an attempt had been made, allegedly with Jesuit complicity, to assassinate Joseph I of Portugal (1758). He determined to follow Joseph’s example, and expel the order from his realm.
Campomanes warned him that such a move could succeed only through secret preparations followed by a sudden and concerted blow; otherwise the Jesuits, who were revered by the people, could arouse a troublesome furor throughout the nation and its possessions. On Aranda’s suggestion sealed messages, signed by the King, were sent out early in 1767 to officials everywhere in the empire, with orders, on pain of death, to open them only on March 31 in Spain, on April 2 in the colonies. On March 31 the Spanish Jesuits awoke to find their houses and colleges surrounded by troops, and themselves placed under arrest. They were ordered to depart peaceably, taking only such possessions as they could carry with them; all other Jesuit property was confiscated by the state. Each of the exiles was granted a small pension, which was to be discontinued if any Jesuit protested the expulsion. They were taken in carriages under military escort to the nearest port, and shipped to Italy. Charles sent word to Clement XIII that he was transporting them “to the ecclesiastical territories, in order that they may remain under the wise and immediate direction of his Holiness.... I request your Holiness not to regard this resolution otherwise than as an indispensable civil precaution, which I have adopted only after mature examination and profound reflection.”41
When the first vessel, bearing six hundred Jesuits, sought to deposit them at Civitavecchia, Cardinal Torrigiani, papal secretary, refused to let them land, arguing that Italy could not so suddenly take care of so many refugees.42 For weeks the ship roamed the Mediterranean seeking some hospitable port, while its desperate passengers suffered from weather, hunger, and disease. Finally they were allowed to debark in Corsica; and later, in manageable groups, they were absorbed into the Papal States. Meanwhile the Jesuits experienced similar banishment from Naples, Parma, Spanish America, and the Philippines. Clement XIII appealed to Charles III to revoke edicts whose suddenness and cruelty must shock all Christendom. Charles replied: “To spare the world a great scandal I shall ever preserve, as a secret in my heart, the abominable plot that necessitated this rigor. Your Holiness ought to believe my word: the safety of my life exacts of me a profound silence.”43
The King never fully revealed the evidence upon which he had based his decrees. The details are so controverted and obscure that judgment is baffled. D’Alembert, no friend of the Jesuits, questioned the method of their banishment. On May 4, 1767, he wrote to Voltaire:
What do you think of the edict of Charles III, so abruptly expelling the Jesuits? Persuaded as I am that he had good and sufficient reasons, do you not think that he ought to have made them known, and not shut them up in his “royal heart”? Do you not think he ought to have allowed the Jesuits to justify themselves, especially since everyone is sure they could not? Do you not think, too, that it would be very unjust to make them all die of starvation if a single lay brother, who perhaps is cutting cabbage in the kitchen, should say a word, one way or the other, in their favor? … Does it not seem to you that he could act with more common sense in carrying out what, after all, is a reasonable matter?44
Was the expulsion popular? A year after its completion, on the festival of St. Charles, the King showed himself to the people from the balcony of his palace. When, following custom, he asked what gift they desired of him, they cried out “with one voice” that the Jesuits should be allowed to return, and to wear the habit of the secular clergy. Charles refused, and banished the Archbishop of Toledo on charge of having instigated the suspiciously concordant petition.45 When, in 1769, the Pope asked the bishops of Spain for their judgment on the expulsion of the Jesuits, forty-two bishops approved, six opposed, eight gave no opinion.46 Probably the secular clergy were content to be relieved of Jesuit competition. The Augustinian friars of Spain approved the expulsion, and later supported the demand of Charles III that the Society of Jesus be completely dissolved.47
No such summary action could be taken with the Inquisition. Far more deeply than the Society of Jesus it was mortised in the awe and tradition of the people, who ascribed to it the preservation of morals and the purity of their faith—even of their blood. When Charles III came to the throne the Inquisition held the mind of Spain by a severe and watchful censorship. Any book suspected of religious heresy or moral deviation was submitted to calificadores— qualifiers, or examiners; if they thought it dangerous they sent their recommendations to the Consejo de la Inquisición; this could decree the suppression of the book and the punishment of the author. Periodically the Inquisition published an Index of prohibited books; to own or read one of these without ecclesia
stical permission was a crime that only the Inquisition could forgive, and for which the offender could be excommunicated. Priests were required, especially in Lent, to ask all penitents whether they had, or knew anyone who had, a prohibited book. Any person failing to report a violation of the Index was considered as guilty as the violator, and no ties of family or friendship could excuse him.48
Charles’s ministers here accomplished only minor reforms. In 1768 the Inquisitorial censorship was checked by requiring that all edicts prohibiting books should secure royal approval before being put into effect. In 1770 the King ordered the Inquisition’s tribunal to concern itself only with heresy and apostasy, and to imprison no one whose guilt had not been conclusively established. In 1784 he ruled that proceedings of the Inquisition regarding grandees, cabinet ministers, and royal servants must be submitted to him for review. He appointed Inquisitor generals who showed a more liberal attitude toward diversities of thought.49
These modest measures had some effect, for in 1782 the Inquisitor General sadly reported that fear of ecclesiastical censure for reading forbidden books was “nearly extinct.”50 In general the agents of the Inquisition, after 1770, were milder, its penalties more humane, than before. Toleration was granted to Protestants under Charles III, and in 1779 to Moslems, though not to Jews.51 There were four autos-da-fé during the reign of Charles III, the last in 1780 at Seville, of an old woman accused of witchcraft; and this execution aroused such criticism throughout Europe52 that the way was prepared for the suppression of the Spanish Inquisition in 1813.
Nevertheless even under Charles III freedom of thought, if expressed, was still legally punishable with death. In 1768 Pablo Olavide was denounced to the Inquisition as having pornographic paintings in his Madrid home—perhaps some copies of Boucher’s nudes, for Olavide had traveled in France, even to Ferney. A more serious charge was laid against him in 1774—that in the model villages established by him in Sierra Morena he had allowed no monasteries, and had forbidden the clergy to say Mass on weekdays, or beg for alms. The Inquisition notified the King that these and other offenses had been proved by the testimony of eighty witnesses. In 1778 Olavide was summoned to trial; he was accused of upholding the Copernican astronomy, and of corresponding with Voltaire and Rousseau. He abjured his errors, was “reconciled” with the Church, suffered confiscation of all his property, and was sentenced to confinement in a monastery for eight years. In 1780 his health collapsed, and he was allowed to take the waters at a spa in Catalonia. He escaped to France, and received a hero’s welcome from his philosophic friends in Paris. But after some years of exile he grew unbearably lonesome for his Spanish haunts. He composed a pious work, The Gospel Triumphant, or The Philosopher Converted, and the Inquisition permitted his return.53
We note that the trial of Olavide occurred after the fall of Aranda from his place at the head of the Consejo de Castilla. In his final years of power Aranda founded new schools, taught by secular clergy, to supply the void left by the Jesuits; and he reformed the currency by replacing debased coins with money of good quality and superior design (1770). However, his sense of his superior enlightenment made him in time irritable, overbearing, and presumptuous. After making the power of the king absolute, he sought to limit it by increasing the authority of the ministers. He lost perspective and measure, and dreamed of bringing Spain, in one generation, out of its contented Catholicity into the stream of French philosophy. He expressed too boldly his heretical ideas, even to his confessor. Though many of the secular clergy supported some of his ecclesiastical reforms as beneficial to the Church,54 he frightened many more by disclosing his hope of completely disbanding the Inquisition.55 He became so unpopular that he did not dare go out of his palace without a bodyguard. He complained so often of the burdens of office that at last Charles took him at his word and sent him as ambassador to France (1773-87). There he predicted that the English colonies in America, which were beginning their revolt, would in time become one of the great powers of the world.56
3. The New Economy
Three able men dominated the ministry after Aranda’s departure. José Monino, Conde de Floridablanca, succeeded Grimaldi as secretary of state for foreign affairs (1776), and dominated the cabinet till 1792. Like Aranda, but in less degree, he felt the influence of the philosophes . He guided the King in measures for improving agriculture, commerce, education, science, and art; but the French Revolution frightened him into conservatism, and he led Spain into the first coalition against Revolutionary France (1792). Pedro de Campomanes presided over the Council of Castile for five years, and was the prime mover in economic reform. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, “the most eminent Spaniard of his age,”57 came into public view as a humane and incorruptible judge in Seville (1767) and Madrid (1778). Most of his activity in the central government followed 1789, but he contributed powerfully to economic policy under Charles III with his Informe sobre un proyecto de ley agraria (1787); this proposal for a revision of agricultural law, written with almost Ciceronian elegance, gave him a European reputation. These three men, with Aranda, were the fathers of the Spanish Enlightenment and the new economy. On the whole, in the judgment of an English scholar, their “result for good rivals that achieved in an equally short time in any other country; and in the history of Spain there is certainly no period which can compare with the reign of Charles III.”58
The obstacles to reform in Spain were as great in economy as in religion. The concentration of inalienable ownership in titled families or ecclesiastical corporations, and the monopoly of wool production by the Mesta seemed to be insurmountable barriers to economic change. Millions of Spaniards took pride in indolence, and showed no shame in begging; change was distrusted as a threat to idleness.* Money was hoarded in palace coffers and church treasuries instead of being invested in commerce or industry. The expulsion of Moors, Jews, and Moriscos had removed many sources of agricultural betterment and commercial development. Difficulties of internal communication and transport left the interior a century behind Barcelona, Seville, and Madrid.
Despite these deterrents, in Madrid and other centers men of good will—nobles, priests, and commoners, without distinction of sex—formed Sociedades Económicas de los Amigos del País to study and promote education, science, industry, commerce, and art. They founded schools and libraries, translated foreign treatises, offered prizes for essays and ideas, and raised money for progressive economic undertakings and experiments. Acknowledging the influence of French physiocrats and Adam Smith, they condemned the national accumulation of gold as a monument to stagnation, and one of them asserted: “The nation that has the most gold is the poorest, … as Spain has shown.”60 Jovellanos hailed “the science of civil economy” as “the true science of the state.”61 Economic treatises multiplied. Campomanes’ Discurso sobre el fomento de la industria popular inspired thousands, including the King.
Charles began by importing grain and seed for regions where agriculture had decayed. He urged towns to lease their uncultivated common lands to peasants at the lowest practical rent. Floridablanca, using crown revenues from vacant ecclesiastical benefices, established in Valencia and Málaga montes píos (pious funds) for lending money to farmers at low interest. To check deforestation and erosion, Charles ordered all communes to plant, each year, a fixed number of trees; hence came that annual celebration of “Arbor Day” which was still, in both hemispheres, a wholesome custom in our youth. He encouraged the disregard of old entails, discouraged new ones, and thereby facilitated the breakup of large estates into peasant properties. The privileges of the Mesta sheep monopoly were sharply reduced; large tracts of land formerly reserved by it for pasturage were opened to cultivation. Foreign colonists were brought in to people sparsely inhabited areas; so, in the Sierra Morena region of southwestern Spain, hitherto abandoned to robbers and wild beasts, Olavide created (1767 f.) forty-four villages and eleven towns of French or German immigrants; these settlements became famous for their prosperity. Extensive canals
were dug to connect rivers and irrigate large tracts of formerly arid land. A network of new roads, which for a time were the best in Europe,62 bound the villages and the towns in a quickened facility of communication, transport, and trade.
Governmental aid went to industry. To remove the stigma traditionally attached to manual labor, a royal decree declared that craft occupations were compatible with noble rank, and that craftsmen were henceforth eligible to governmental posts. Model factories were established: for textiles at Guadalajara and Segovia; for hats at San Fernando; for silks at Talavera; for porcelain at Buen Retiro; for glass at San Ildefonso; for glass, cabinetry, and tapestry at Madrid. Royal edicts favored the development of large-scale capitalistic production, especially in the textile industry. Guadalajara in 1780 had eight hundred looms employing four thousand weavers; one company at Barcelona managed sixty factories with 2,162 cotton-weaving looms; Valencia had four thousand looms weaving silk, and, favored by its facilities for export, was cutting into the silk trade of Lyons. By 1792 Barcelona had eighty thousand weavers, and ranked second only to the English Midlands in the production of cotton cloth.