Inquisition

  What all these denunciations of Olavide really revealed were the growing divisions within Spanish society. This was no longer a society of one faith, attitude and purpose. The arrival of the Bourbons in the 18th century had led to the creation of an influential minority of intellectuals touched by the French Enlightenment.86 Olavide was representative of this class: he openly mocked the Spanish mode of prayer and said that enlightened nations were right to laugh at it; he called preachers fanatics and confessors fatuous, and was widely known as ‘the great Voltaire’.87 The Inquisition decided to make an example of him.

  The depositions against Olavide accumulated throughout the 1770s like kindling for a fire. The extraordinary detail of the case which was eventually mounted reveals the extent to which the bureaucracy of the institution was stifling it. There were eleven files in the trial, each meticulously handwritten and containing an average of around 500 pages; over 140 witnesses were called to prosecute a man who was, in the final analysis, a blasphemer. At last, in October 1775, the Suprema wrote to the king outlining the crimes of which it wished to accuse Olavide.88

  Not only was Olavide a blasphemer and a doubter in miracles, affirmed the Inquisition, he had declared that if the authors of the Gospels had never written them the world would be a better place. He was ‘contaminated by the errors of Voltaire, Rousseau and others who have constituted the greatest infamy of our century’. Worse still, he had introduced public dances and masked parties to the towns of the brown hills of the Sierra Morena, north of Seville. His mockery of the Catholic hierarchy was epitomized by his sudden question to a priest in the town of Nueva Carolina: ‘What does your grace think of fornication?’89 The scandalized priest did not deign to record his reply.

  The arrest warrant for Don Pablo de Olavide was finally issued on 14 November 1776.90 He was taken to the inquisitorial jail in Madrid and his goods sequestered: his white silk socks, golden tobacco box, his purse filled with gold coins. Olavide was eventually reconciled in a humiliating auto in 1777, before spending three years performing penances in various monasteries. In 1780 he managed to flee to France, where he would spend most of the rest of his life in exile.

  The Inquisition had channelled its fight against Enlightenment ideas into this one battle, having, in the words of one historian, ‘chosen Olavide’.91 This meant that many people in Spain saw him as the repository of all evil. One witness described how Olavide was commonly reputed at court to be a ‘heretic or a Jew’.92 A song was heard that epitomized the scapegoating process and the shifting but constant threat which Spanish society believed itself to have been under for the last 300 years:

  Olavide is a Lutheran,

  A Freemason, an Atheist;

  He’s a Gentile, a Calvinist,

  He’s Jewish, and he’s Aryan.93

  Of course Olavide’s ideas were threatening to the Inquisition, yet the way in which the threat was inflated, as shown in this song, to encompass all known ills is revealing of the paranoia which the Inquisition had created.

  Everyone experiences moments of paranoia in their lives. We develop unfounded fears that people do not like us. We worry about things we have said long after those we have said them to have forgotten them. We see threats where there are none. But then, when we recover our sense of proportion, we recognize the paranoia for what it was, and our own part in it.

  Historically, there has often been a connection between authoritarianism and paranoia. The violent dictator of the west African nation of Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s, Sékou Touré, was convinced there was a permanent plot against his regime. In Chile, meanwhile, some in the police believed that while under Pinochet the main threat had been posed by communists, in the 1990s the danger came from drug traffickers. The demise of Pinochet (and the communists) did not, sadly, mean that the threat to society had gone.

  ON 18 MAY 1776 Ignacio Ximénez, the notary of the Inquisition of Cordoba, received a letter from the priest of Nueva Carolina, the town in which Pablo de Olavide had scandalized the local priest. The letter denounced Olavide for sowing dangerous ideas among the farmers of Nueva Carolina from a book which he had brought from France: ‘It was proposed’, the priest wrote, ‘to teach in the Agricultural and Industrial Society some chapters from the Dictionary relating to industry, factories, and trade’. The priest was outraged, since, as he pointed out ‘I knew that according to the French prohibitions there were dangerous chapters in this work . . . and it was my obligation to oppose such a reading’.94

  Fear of enlightened ideas was such in inquisitorial circles that books advancing new scientific and technical ideas were often suppressed. When in 1748 the mathematician Juan Jorge wrote a book defending the idea that the sun was at the centre of the solar system, Inquisitor Pérez Prado sought to ban it on the basis of the trial in Rome the previous century of Galileo.95 Meanwhile, in tandem with this fear of science, the inquisitorial censors, the calificadores, wrote disapprovingly of countries where there was ‘freedom of conscience’96 as if such freedom was intolerable. Phrases in books were denounced as being, as one friar, Andrés de la Asunción, put it in 1783, ‘accomplices in tolerance’.97

  Asunción was symbolic of the anger felt by many of his class in the late 18th century. He censored thoroughly a book called The Clamour of Truth, published in Madrid in 1776. In this book Asunción objected particularly to the injunction, ‘Tolerate your brothers whatever their religion, in the same way that God tolerates them’. This meant that a true Catholic had to ‘dissimulate, silence themselves, suffer their mockery of the monastic life, of the clergy, of the Inquisition . . . you have to eat with them, live with them, talk with them’.98 Asunción’s hackles were also raised by, ‘Patience and meekness . . . are the strongest of weapons . . . and their use can never be excessive’. Was this not to desire ‘the extinction of anger in dealing with the impious, that is the strangling of a holy anger which satisfies a holy vengeance on he who offends the creator’? Asunción was clearly a member of that class that felt permanently hot under the collar.

  This anger sprang from the feeling that Spain was a society under siege. The intellectual weapons of its enlightened enemies in France were becoming sharper and sharper, and censorship became the main preoccupation of the Inquisition in the second half of the 18th century. Between 1746 and 1755 Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau all wrote key works, and the Inquisition responded by banning their entire oeuvres in 1756.99 Thirty-six edicts banning books were promulgated between 1747 and 1787, to be posted on the doors of churches and convents, with sixty books banned in the edict of 1750 alone.100

  By 1797 it was clear to supporters of the Enlightenment in Spain such as Gaspar de Jovellanos – by then minister of justice – that the Inquisition derived most of the power it still had from its role in the censorship of books.101 The calificadores of books were usually of very mediocre intellectual calibre. Many of them could not read any language but Spanish, even though most of the works they censored were written in French; in Logroño French books had to be sent to Madrid as no one there could understand them.102

  The increasingly hysterical banning of works central to the modernizing world beyond the Pyrenees sank Spain into an ideological pit of its own making. The enlightened classes from which people such as Jovellanos sprang had no difficulty in getting hold of the books103 as the censors became increasingly incapable of holding back the tide,104 but the edicts polarized society and meant that most people remained ignorant of new ideas. Spain was dividing into two camps: a bourgeois liberal faction and a conservative non-bourgeois wing,105 a division that would take centuries to heal.

  The new divisions were encapsulated in the trial of two brothers, Bernardo and Thomas Iriarte, whose cases began in Madrid in 1778. The Iriartes were successful figures in Madrileño society in the 18th century, with Thomas a novelist and Bernardo having served as a diplomat in London before joining the Ministry of State on his return.106 The brothers ran a sort of salon in Madrid where religious ideas were discussed
, causing scandal to the more orthodox who came across them. One of these, Joseph Antonio de Roxas from Chile, noted how he had heard them say to one another that the ignorance of Spain derived only from the Inquisition.107

  This was a perennial refrain among the enlightened classes in Spain in the 18th century. There were many who supported the Inquisition, as Jovellanos himself admitted, but influential figures in the arts and politics saw it as responsible for the growing material and intellectual backwardness of Spain in comparison with the rest of Europe. That such people scorned the pro-inquisitorial masses of Spain and its priests emerges from the accusations made against the Iriartes by none other than their brother, the friar Juan Iriarte, a Dominican in the Canaries.

  Juan found the mockery of his brothers too much to bear. They enjoyed nothing more than laughing at his religious beliefs and his claim that he was able to perform exorcisms. They also inveighed against the truth of the gospels and the pointlessness of saying mass.108 The ideological divisions which were beginning to surface in Spanish society are revealed no better than in Juan Iriarte’s statement that he often ‘provoked discussions on religion to see if his suspicions [of the faithlessness of his brothers] were well-founded’.109

  There is no doubt that the Iriarte brothers delighted in provoking the faithful. One November in the early 1770s Bernardo, talking with the friar Felix de la Guardia in the library of the El Escorial palace built by Philip II, asked la Guardia if he spoke French; on hearing that he did he shared with him a book which he was reading on the subject of onanism or masturbation – an activity which it is fair to assume not all friars abstained from. La Guardia was understandably offended, and said that such books ought to be burnt. Not at all, joked Iriarte; the book taught nothing bad, only about a sin of nature, that of voluntary ejaculation – and it was for this precise reason after all that he had had thirty-six noble ladies put to the sword, rather than be tempted by this vice any more himself.110

  Bernardo Iriarte’s behaviour was indeed intolerable, but the weight of his scorn and of the anger of his accusers reveals a society where neither side had any time for the other. For those interested in new ideas, the stagnant intellectual environment of the time must itself have been intolerable. One of Bernardo Iriarte’s accusers was the librarian of El Escorial, the friar Juan Núñez. El Escorial was the most important library in Spain, but Núñez described a conversation he had had with Iriarte in which he had declared that he was a great supporter of the Inquisition’s prohibition of books. ‘I wish they would prohibit more’, the great librarian had said to Iriarte.111

  This fear of new ideas was, at bottom, a sort of self-realization. The Inquisition knew that the Enlightenment heralded its destruction, and, like all institutions, it would do everything it could to stave off its demise. Yet this process in itself required a certain amount of self-knowledge to develop.

  Thus, as we have seen, secrecy was one of the institutional characteristics of the Inquisition, but in 1751 the Inquisition’s supporter, Francisco Rávago, railed against ‘the horrible oath that the Masons swear to keep secrets’.112 Or, as Rávago’s Jesuit colleague Luengo put it in 1786, ‘the quality of these [Masons] can only be perverse . . . it is enough to see their desire to hide everything . . . if everything is innocent, good and irreproachable, and offends no one, neither the State nor religion, what does it matter if everything is known?’113 What was true of the Masons also held for the Inquisition.

  Such unconscious self-knowledge had also dawned in Portugal, where in the last code of practice of the Inquisition, written in 1774, the inquisitors wrote, ‘Madness . . . [can exist] in the fixation in the imagination of the madman on a certain point of view to which he is an irrevocable adherent, so much so that he only shows his insanity when the said point is mentioned, while speaking otherwise in an ordinary and correct manner’.114 What was the essence of the Inquisition, if not the irrational pursuit of often invented heresies in people who otherwise spoke reasonably about many things? This disquisition on insanity and the denunciations of secrecy reveal a slow, unconscious dawning of self-knowledge. But it was too late. The Inquisition could not be saved from the collapse which had been provoked largely by its own view of the world.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE FAILURE OF FEAR AND THE FEAR OF FAILURE

  . . . opposed to the sovereignty and independence of the nation and to the civil freedom of Spaniards . . .

  IN 1789 REVOLUTIN swept across France. Over the next twenty-five years Iberia would be overrun by the forces which were unleashed. The Portuguese royal family was forced to flee to Brazil in November 1807 as a result of the Napoleonic invasions; the following year the Spanish monarchy was replaced by a puppet king; and the first liberal constitution in Spanish history was proclaimed at the southern port of Cádiz in 1812. The entire imperial edifice disintegrated in a puff of Napoleonic smoke, its American colonies breaking away in independence movements led by Simón Bolívar, Bernardo O’Higgins and José de San Martín.

  It was not just political change which turned Portugal and Spain upside down. The new freedoms swept away centuries of ideological and sexual repression. The Inquisition, recognizing itself in mortal peril, lashed out like a wounded beast at the liberties fanning out from France across Europe. On 13 December 1789 the Spanish Inquisition declared war on all books and ideas originating in France, noting how the leaders of the Revolution championed everything which it opposed:

  Under the specious guise of defenders of freedom, they really work against it by destroying the social and political order, and thereby the hierarchy of the Christian religion ... in this way they pretend to found this chimerical freedom on the ruins of religion, a freedom which they erroneously suppose to have been given to all men by nature, and which, they say with temerity, has made all individuals equal and dependent on one another.1

  Thus we can summarize the enemies and friends of the Inquisition in 1789: its enemies were freedom, equality and interdependence; its friends were the status quo and the hierarchy. The institution proceeded earnestly with its attempts at censorship. The banning of books and the searching of libraries became its main function. Its secret archives swelled with vast numbers of case files, as more and more books were published promoting what it saw as outrageous ideas.

  The sheer range of books banned in those years is testament both to the boom in publishing and the incapacity of the Inquisition to do anything to stem the tide. A two-page pamphlet entitled ‘A Burlesque Sermon to Laugh and Pass the Time’ was censored in 1802 for its quips such as ‘Firewater has more virtue than holy water’ and its description of the carriage driver who ‘thinks himself in eternal damnation whenever he is not at his drinking station’.2 Lascivious books recounting ‘profane loves’ were banned in their entirety.3 The Barber of Seville was prohibited for its mockery of the joyless life of upstanding moral virtue.4 Works lampooning and demonizing the Inquisition proliferated, and were denounced as ‘impious, full of temerity, seditious, and injurious’.5 But these works were increasingly popular.

  Libertinage and mockery of the Inquisition, and of everything it held dear, became unstoppable. Fans imported from France were censured in 1803, as by opening and closing them a Capuchin friar and a woman could be seen in ‘indecent postures’; the fans were sold around the Plaza Mayor and the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, and there was ‘barely a woman who did not have one, since they are the height of fashion’.6 And when a friar protested some years later at the sale of some china ornaments depicting indecent figures, the vendor refused to give them up to him, and her son added, ‘Perhaps the good father would like to entertain himself with them in his room’.7

  Nothing was sacred any longer. In 1799 a play was put on about Christ’s Passion during Lent in Barcelona. The Inquisition was appalled at the idea of a mortal man playing Christ and succeeded in having the play prohibited, but the very fact that it had been staged in the first place reveals the atmosphere of the times, and the growing divisions
between supporters and opponents of the inquisitorial world view.8 These divisions increasingly reflected tensions within Spanish society. They pitted rural against urban, liberal against conservative. The Inquisition, through such doctrines as limpieza de sangre and its steadfast refusal to accommodate any new ideas, was as responsible for the divisions as anyone.

  In an article by Nicolás Morvilliers published in 1782 in Paris he described Spain as ‘today a nation in paralysis’.9 The cause, in Morvilliers’ eyes, was the fear of knowledge and science as expressed through inquisitorial censorship of books.

  ‘The proud and noble Spaniard is ashamed of educating himself, travelling, of having anything to do with other peoples’, Morvilliers wrote.10 ‘The Spaniard has scientific ability’, he added, ‘and there are many books for him to read, and yet this is probably the most ignorant nation in Europe . . . every foreign work is impounded, tried and judged . . . a book printed in Spain goes through six acts of censorship before seeing the light of day’.11 The result, in Morvilliers’ view, was the stagnation of the natural sciences in Spain at a time when they were all the rage in the rest of Europe. ‘What is owed to Spain? . . . Art, science and commerce have been extinguished . . . In Spain there are no mathematicians, physicists, astronomers or naturalists’.12