2 The Contradictions of Bourbon Spain

On 10 March 1766 the Marquis of Esquilache, who was minister to that paradigm of an Enlightened Despot, Charles III, and who had installed novel street lamps in the capital, re-enacted an ancient and forgotten law, which forbade men in Madrid to wear the common broad-brimmed slouch hat and long cape, alleging that the style sheltered the anonymity of criminals. In response to this assault on the traditions of the pueblo , Madrid exploded into riot, going into action, very properly, on Palm Sunday. Uncontrollable crowds yelled through the streets, attacking the houses of ministers; they smashed the street lamps. They raged irresistibly around the royal palace. Over twenty towns and cities in the provinces imitated them. The king was forced to surrender. The order was revoked, Esquilache bundled into exile. Rational and cultivated foreigners turned with a certain gloomy satisfaction to the appropriate entry in the French Encyclopedia (banned by the Spanish Inquisition in 1759); Black Spain had once again triumphed over Enlightenment.

It was not so simple. In the first place, Esquilache was a foreigner, an Italian. He, like his fellow Grimaldi, had been brought to benighted Spain by Charles III on his transfer from Naples in 1759, to help in the arduous work of modernization. The first impact of royal, rational and bureaucratic reform was rather brutal. Grimaldi engineered the Family Compact with Bourbon France, which resulted in the loss of Florida in the Seven Years’ War. The renewed inflow of American silver at the peace intensified an already severe inflation. New street lamps meant new taxes. Esquilache, in good reforming fashion, decreed free trade in grain, according to the best principles of the new economics, in time for the bad harvests of 1766. 1

The breakdown in order was the most serious internal crisis the Spanish Bourbons had to face before the French

Revolution. The Count of Aranda was called in. He was, in truth, much more of an intellectual radical than any Neapolitan secretary, a friend to philosophes and an enemy to clerical pretensions. But he was a grande of Aragon and an experienced general. Helped by a good harvest, he rode the tide and within a year was able to revoke the concessions of 1766.

The outcome was paradox. Who had whipped up the plebs? Clearly the enemies of regalist progress. A royal commission unmasked the ‘conspirators’ in the Company of Jesus, Spain’s original contribution to the Counter-Reformation, already at grips with royal reformers in church and university. In April 1767 the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish world.

Seventeen years later Aranda, now ambassador to France, played a different role. As the spokesman of an enraged Spain, and in particular of the selectively ‘enlightened’ Spain which had emerged, at least into print, over the past seventeen years, he delivered a thunderous rebuke to the French government, demanding official apologies for and official action against a Paris publisher, Charles Joseph Panckouke. Panckouke had decided to bring out a less tendentious encyclopedia, the Encyclopedie methodique. The undertaking was blessed by the Spanish government, which warranted a translation. But the first volume in 1783 carried an article on Spain by Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers. To Masson, Spain typified everything the philosophes were struggling against: ignorance, sloth, superstition, a bigoted clergy, a futile government, economic incapacity, a cruel and tyrannical Inquisition. ‘What do we owe to Spain? What has it done for Europe in the last two centuries, in the last four, or ten?’

The Spanish world of letters was convulsed. Traditionalists, naturally, seized on further proof of the inherently evil nature of modern philosophy and Catholic conservative Spain moved to the attack, not least on the imitative Enlightenment of the Spanish monarchy and its agents. The Inquisition confiscated 1,681 copies of the offending book in Madrid alone and fed them to the worms of its archives. More central was the response of the official Spanish Enlightenment. The minister Floridablanca pushed through a census in 1786 to prove that Spain’s population had increased by a million and a half, while the numbers of priests, monks, privileged, the ‘useless classes’, had declined. Author after author moved to defend the reforming achievements of Charles III. The officially sponsored Juan Pablo Forner, however, normally a defender of cautious improvement, carried his attack to the principles of Enlightenment itself, and was shortly to pen an impassioned

defence of Catholicism. The argument came to focus on the historic character of Spain itself, that autentico ser , the authentic essence of Spain, which was to plague so many Spaniards in later years.

For Forner’s ‘defence’ was no defence at all to such as Luis Canuelo, whose satirical journal, El Censor , preached an enlightenment a good deal more radical than that cultivated in court circles. Discourse 113 of the Censor mocked the enemies of modern learning. True science, for them, asserted Canuelo, was that which assured eternal life, those sciences, in short, which promoted subjection, weakness, hunger, nakedness, above all that poverty which ensured entry into Heaven. ‘Hence the true sciences have flourished among us as in no other part of Europe.’ Despite their natural wealth, Spaniards had laboured consistently for the victory of this true science until they had succeeded in reaching a nearly perfect state of poverty under Charles II, lowest point of the seventeenth- century Decadence. Unfortunately, with the coming of French Bourbons to Spain, false science was producing a detestable growth of commerce and agriculture. ‘But let us console ourselves ... we still have apologists to maintain our ignorance . . .’ 2

The Masson controversy delineated those celebrated Two (and more than Two!) Spains whose conflict was to assume fatal virulence after the outbreak of the French Revolution a few years later.

Castilla miserable, ayer dominadora,

Envuelta en sus andrajos, desprecia cuanto ignora . . . wrote Antonio Machado, victim of a twentieth-century confrontation of two Spains. 3 It was this vision of a wretched Castile, stripped of power, wrapped in its rags, despising everything it was ignorant of, that the incoming Bourbons set themselves to eradicate. Their eighteenth-century achievement has largely escaped the attention of English-language historians. By the 1790s, the commercial renaissance of Spain was threatening to break the grip of English merchants on its empire. Pitt’s Board of Trade grew alarmed and cold-bloodedly planned a war to stop it. The contradictions of Spain’s Bourbon century were contradictions, not of decline, but of recovery. 4

Contradictions they remained, and the paradoxical consequence of national recovery was a crisis of national identity.

The century of the ‘lights’ {luces) was shaped by the interaction between an intrusive and busy monarchy and the

pulses of European growth. 5 Demographic and economic revival had in fact begun from the 1680s, at the trough of the Decadence. In the early years of the century, under Philip V (1700-46), progress was slow enough to be invisible.

An estimate of 1724 put Spain’s population at about 7 million, lower than it had been in the sixteenth century. By the reign of Ferdinand VI (1746-59) an increase was registering and the population may have topped the 8 million mark.

Under Charles III (1759-88) the upward curve began to turn more sharply; by 1768 the total climbed to over 9 million.

It was from about 1770 that the rhythm of Spanish population growth approximated to the European norm. The rate of increase accelerated and at the time of the Napoleonic invasion, Spanish population was probably approaching 12 million, though its rhythm of growth was being interrupted by recurrent crises.

Growth in industry, agriculture and commerce followed a similar pattern. Spanish rural life was imprisoned in apparently insoluble problems: the low level of productivity and general primitiveness, the crippling weakness of a mule-based communication system in the second most mountainous country in Europe, the arid wastes of ‘dry Spain’. Regions of peasant stability like the Basque lands and Navarre were islands in a sea of insecurity, ranging from the ‘Irish’ over-population of the minifundia of Galicia, through the rural proletariat and endemic banditry of the vast under-developed latifundia of Andalusia and Extremadura, to the depopulated misery of central Castile. Nevertheless, pulses of growth registered from the 1730s; there was an extension of cultivation and the introduction of new crops. Between 1760 and 1775 there appears to have been something of an agricultural price revolution which benefitted proprietors. It was precisely this upsurge which directed hungry eyes upon the vast mortmain properties of the Church and the entailed estates of the nobility. It generated a climate favourable to modernizers anxious to apply the physiocratic theories of France, committed to the introduction of what were, in effect, capitalist, individualist and bourgeois mores into a pre-capitalist society through the agency of the state. The monarchy, certainly, pressed for modernization as hard as it could in a culture still rooted in the values of an older, Catholic, military and aristocratic order. It clumsily intervened with settlement and education schemes, fostered economic societies, gave prizes for innovation, planted solid Germans in the Sierra Morena (where they in turn duly produced their bandit

clans!). Modernization began to register by the end of the century. The archaic sheep-herders guild, the Mesta, crumbled; the livestock population increased fourfold, production rose. But with it rose crises of modernization, land- hunger, frustration. The failure of the state to modernize its revenues threatened it with bankruptcy, drove it into an attack on clerical wealth and privileges, into an abusive exploitation of its granary and loan services to the rural population.

In the dislocations and wars of the revolutionary period, there were severe subsistence crises. By 1808 there seems to have been a pre-revolutionary situation in some regions.

It was the problems of a modernization which was too slow and tentative which engaged the attention of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, archetype of the earnestly reforming lesser nobleman who was episodically a royal reforming bureaucrat. His celebrated Report on Spanish agriculture, the Informe of 1795, which pressed for the opening up of traditional sectors to a measured but remorseless advance of commercial farming in ihe interest of social hygiene, became the bible of nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism.

The contradictions in industry and commerce were even more striking. The monarchy intervened directly and continuously. Its state-sponsored industries achieved only patchy success, but it gradually began to loosen the monopolistic grip of Cadiz on the America trade and to grind upon the clusters of interests which served as a comprador bourgeoisie to English and French capital. A slow process of opening up the America trade through the multiplication of companies reached a climax in the great Reglamento of 1778 which virtually threw open the colonial trade to all Spaniards.

A parallel process of reform in the Americas began to recapture the trade for Spain, creating new economic polities - and new social stresses. After 1778 Spanish exports multiplied tenfold, Spanish merchants began to recapture their own trade in a second Reconquista. Already in the early years of the century Catalonia had begun to rebuild its economy, growing around the vine and the brandy trade; its strengthening connection with the Americas proved to be as vital as Lancashire’s Atlantic focus. In the last years of the century, in parallel to Lancashire, there was something of an industrial revolution in textiles in Catalonia, as new life surged into the maritime centres, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Bilbao, in a thrust of modernization symbolized by the creation of the state bank of San Carlos in 1782. 6

Modernization brought new contradictions, ran into its own

ceiling. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars periods of almost frenetic commercial expansion were punctuated by total stops as the British navy cut off the Americas. Remarkable though the commercial revival was, it could not escape sufficiently from the stranglehold of the great maritime powers, it could not create a fleet which could stand up to the English. The outbreak of war between the major powers of England and France reduced Spain almost immediately to the status of satellite, at the mercy of a desperate inflation and economic subjection.

Internally, growth shifted the economic centre of gravity of Spain massively into the peripheral provinces. Barcelona tripled its population to approach the 150,000 of shuffling Madrid. It was in the dynamic peripheral provinces that population growth focused, in Valencia, Seville, the ports of the northern littoral. The centre stagnated and declined.

This development in economic and social life among provinces long celebrated for their particularist outlook ran directly counter to the strong centralizing thrust of the Bourbon monarchy bent on eradicating all archaic obstacles to its regenerating power. An artificial capital riveted an artificial political unity on a country where economic and social initiative had passed to the periphery. Political Spain had Castile as its hollow heart.

For there had been nothing resembling a ‘bourgeois revolution’. Only in Barcelona, Cadiz and a few other mercantile centres did a structured bourgeoisie approximating the English or French model emerge. It was precisely the absence of that European archetype which gave Spanish modernization its peculiar climate. The commercial bourgeois was something of a solitary figure among the thickening ‘middle orders’, largely professional, military and bureaucratic, in Madrid and other cities. What elsewhere took the form of bourgeois modernization was in Spain a measured, monarchical innovation, grounded in a bureaucracy staffed from and supported by a lesser ‘working’ nobility and gentry, which tried to mobilize a ‘public opinion’ (in large part its own creation) around bien-pensant improvement societies and reform schemes. It inched forward its utilitarian ‘enlightenment’ among the directive classes and slowly forming middle and largely dependent sectors, tentatively probing at rooted and archaic interests warranted by what had become Spanish ‘tradition’. Inevitably the major impact of this enlightened monarchy was precisely on ‘tradition’, on ideology, on notions of the autentico ser of Spain.

In the Spain of the 1797 census, with its 10 million inhabitants, the active population was a meagre 25 per cent of the whole. There were still 400,000 ‘aristocrats’; the ideology of the hidalgo was still hegemonic and found a populist echo in an urban plebs still largely inhabiting a pre-industrial, indeed pre-capitalist world of casual labour, semi-beggary and precarious artisans, with its heroes the strutting, picaresque majos and majas , to whom life was a style lived out on a knife-edge. There were still 170,000 clergy. There were still 2,000 monasteries, 1,000 convents and a small army of 85,000 monks and nuns. The great seventeenth-century Church with its democratic recruitment and ambience, its immensely popular Inquisition, was hardening into privilege and aristocracy, its stranglehold on wealth increasingly resented. But it was not until 1834, after the traumatic experience of war and civil war, that people began to burn churches. Church and nobility could still command large client proletariats; the mendicant orders were immensely popular in the cities; the Holy Office was feared and respected. And there were still 150,000 officially recognized beggars in a society racked by land-hunger.

Popular Spain was rooted in the 1,800,000 rural proletarians and peasants often not far removed from them. Among working people the largest formed group were, symptomatically, the 280,000 servants; artisans, in all their infinite variety, totalled perhaps 300,000. And among the middle sectors the 25,000 traders were dwarfed by 110,000 military and bureaucratic personnel.

There had to be a ceiling to royal reform in a stratified and under-developed country. The crown never got a sufficiently strong grip on local authority, the real focus of effective government, to force its measures through. Besides, no monarchy, however ‘enlightened’, could destroy its own social base. Nevertheless, Spain had been propelled into a slow shuffle towards modernization, was being dragged out of its ‘traditional’ identity. Between 1768 and 1797, as a result of royal restrictions on recruitment and promotion, the number of ‘aristocrats’ was cut by nearly half, that of clerics by a third. The effects of Charles Ill’s reforms and the thrust of European development were generating crises of growth.

The accession of his successor coincided with the outbreak of the French Revolution. Panic reaction brought royal reform to a full stop and revivified the restive forces of tradition.

The reforms of Charles III probably represent the limit to which an enlightened monarchy in Spain could go. Further

‘regeneration’ would demand a radicalism which traditional Spain could not stomach. Tensions were already visible before Charles III died; at the ‘ceiling’ of regalist reform, informed opinion was already splintering. The challenge of the French Revolution immeasurably sharpened and deepened the conflict. As the Revolution spilled across Europe, Spain was caught between its force and the rival naval and economic power of England. Its satellite monarchy fell to a favourite, Godoy, as unwelcome as unexpected, whose mafia system affronted all classes. The concern for the autentico ser of Spain became an obsession among the literate classes as Spanish politics disintegrated into a dervish dance of factions around the court. The confrontation of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘tradition’ became mortal, in an atmosphere of deepening crisis, and when Napoleon took control in 1808, Spain lurched into that war of independence which was also the first of its modern civil wars, a war that destroyed its Old Regime.

The ideological influence of the Bourbon monarchy thus far outran its practical achievement. The early years were very French. The aim was administrative efficiency and political uniformity. The ancient fueros or regional privileges were eliminated. Valencia’s went in 1707, to be followed by those of Aragon, Catalonia and Majorca by 1716. Only the Basque lands and Navarre, which had taken the winning side during the War of the Spanish Succession, were permitted their privileges. The conciliar system of government was eroded by ministries; Captains-General ruling the provinces with the aid of judicial-executive audiencias were strengthened by royal officers imposed upon spiky municipalities and a new official, the intendant , borrowed directly from French example.

The royal power assumed unwonted initiative. Reality proved recalcitrant; Spain of the patria chica survived beneath this cold and somewhat alien structure, but royal absolutism was in legal terms virtually total.

Only one power retained a measure of autonomy: the Church with its Holy Office of the Inquisition, to many the very embodiment of Spanish identity, that purist, monolithic, hermetic, militant, military and at the popular level often deeply superstitious Catholic Spain of the Counter-Reformation. Ultramontanism was rooted in the Jesuits, who controlled the Inquisition and the elite colegios mayores of the moribund and routinized universities and who operated efficaciously in the upper ranges of society. Two thirds of Church appointments were in the hands of the Pope.

Central to this edifice of what the directive classes had

come to think of as Spanish tradition was the Inquisition.

The Inquisitor-General with his Council presided over fourteen regional tribunals and their troops of under-paid but active agents. The Inquisition policed the Spanish polity, preserved its purity from any threat, from sodomy to Voltaire. During the eighteenth century, as the cult of Reason penetrated even the Hispanic fortress of faith, it grew less fierce; burnings and tortures became infrequent. Its monstrous apparatus of censorship and punishment, supplementing a close-knit royal machinery of preventive censorship, became less and less effective until the 1780s; Voltaire, Rousseau, Volney found their Spanish readers. The illegal book trade was profitable. The Spanish Index was in some ways more liberal than the Papal. But the apparatus was monstrous and it grated horribly on the sensibilities of the growing number of Spaniards who succumbed to the charms of enlightenment. By the end of the century, as the Inquisition’s power grew again in reaction to the French Revolution, these ilustrados were seized by an obsessive hatred of the Holy Office in which shame was as much a motor force as anger. For around the Holy office clustered those hordes of popular preachers from the Orders, bigoted and ignorant charlatans whose farandoles held the pueblo immune to the rather clinical improvement preached at them by the best minds in Spain.

Moreover, the Inquisition’s power was not restricted to the popular classes. It broke Philip V’s official Macanaz. Even in the mid-century years of its eclipse, it could ruin the career of university teacher, lesser bureaucrat, publisher. In the late 1770s it began to revive, to ride the swelling opposition to royal reform. To break Pablo de Olavide, the radical royal bureaucrat who figured in Spanish legend as the first afrancesado , it deployed the full paraphernalia of its archaic ritual, with which it intimidated the plebs, against the governing classes. The trial of Olavide in 1778 sent a shudder of fear, shame and anger through the literary world and from the 1790s the Inquisition was once more a real, if limited threat. 7 No royal servant, however eminent, was safe- Aranda, Floridablanca, Jovellanos were menaced or punished and among the lesser ilustrados , it could work havoc. Goya’s friends Bernardo and Tomas de Iriarte were among the sufferers. In Spain the fashionable late eighteenth-century interest in witchcraft assumed deeper significance among the enlightened minority [11, 13].

At first, however, the Crown made relatively easy headway against inertia. It was supported by opponents of the Jesuits

11. The Inquisition, c.1812-19

among the clergy whom their enemies nicknamed Jansenists. The Spanish Jansenists in fact had little or no connection with the French heretics of that name; the epithet implied a readiness to deny papal infallibility and support regalist control of the church, an openness to reform and a measure of controlled enlightenment. As the Bourbons inched their way forward, the battle between Jesuits and Jansenists grew fierce in the universities. By the Concordat of 1753, the Crown assumed power over the church, but the ultramontanes offered resistance. The Esquilache riots of 1766 gave the monarchy its opportunity. Charles III drove the Jesuits out, moved into the universities to cleanse the colegios mayores and imposed liberal-minded Inquisitors-General on the Inquisition, which tried to prolong the struggle, under the influence of the Dominicans.

It was this conflict which was the point of entry for the Enlightenment into respectable Spain. Clearly that enlightenment was selective. 8 Not even the most radical Spaniard seriously questioned the Catholic faith. The royal administration and the improvers it sponsored were concerned above all with scientific and technical skills, with modernization. Their attitude to the more sceptical and searching philosophes was ambivalent or hostile. But enlightenment proved indivisible.

Picture #15

The tone of Spanish illuminism was set by the epic achievement of Benito Feijoo, a Benedictine who between 1720 and 1759 published his multivolume Teatro Critical.

In pious but resolute style, Feijoo remorselessly exposed fallacies and superstitions by the light of the (carefully selected) advances of eighteenth-century science. The work scored a remarkable success. By 1780, fifteen editions had appeared; it won the weighty approval of the court. No less than thirty-seven replies were provoked by its attack on the medical profession alone. Only the ever-popular Don Quixote could rival it. ‘Thanks to the immortal Feijoo,’ wrote one admirer, ‘spirits no longer trouble our houses, witches have fled our towns, the evil eye does not plague the tender child, and an eclipse does not dismay us.’

He was a trifle over-optimistic, but Feijoo set a fashion which was copied. The Jesuit Padre Isla brought out a novel, Fray Gerundio , which savaged popular preaching so mercilessly that the book ended up on the Index. By the 1780s scathing criticism of the Black Spain of ignorant bigotry was commonplace in the new periodical press. That press received its first fillip from El Pensador , published by Joseph Clavijo between 1761 and 1767 in direct imitation of the English Spectator. It developed the general ilustrado criticism of nobility and clergy as ‘useless classes’.

Utility was certainly the guide-line of the monarchy.

It subsidized periodicals to popularize the latest improving science, pressed forward the study of economics, medicine, modern philosophy. Among a minority of universities it achieved something of a breakthrough, establishing chairs of natural law. The University of Valencia went over solidly to the new learning; elsewhere it was a minority phenomenon, but even at the traditional elite university of Salamanca there was effervescence and the formation of a radical new generation.

Under Charles III this royal pressure intensified. The court was peopled by ilustrados , personified in the ubiquitous Campomanes, whose restless mind bit at every Spanish social problem. From the 1760s the crown began to build up an apparatus for the mobilization of public opinion, in the economic societies, the Amigos del Pais. The initiative came originally and appropriately from the periphery, from the Basque lands, where improvement groups coalesced into an economic society in 1765. From that point on, under royal encouragement, their numbers grew. By 1804 there were seventy-three of them. They recruited heavily from the lesser

nobility, the middle orders and liberal clergy. Their efforts ranged from well-meaning but often comic amateur ‘improvement’ to serious plans for technical and popular education. Urged on by Campomanes in his myriad pamphlets, by royal encouragement and example, by the increasing commitment of noble houses to the cause, they proved a powerful propaganda instrument. In 1784 the society of Goya’s Saragossa founded the first chair of Economics in Spain.

Caroline enlightenment reached its climax in the 1780s.

Not only did a measured and prudent illuminism set the tone at court. Households among the nobility succumbed to the fashion of enlightenment, launched salons, presided over economic societies, sent promising young men on scholarships to France and England. In Salamanca and elsewhere clusters of new men emerged, the generation of Jovellanos, men like the historian Cean Bermudez, the radical banker Cabarrus, the poet Melendez Valdes, the dramatist Moratin-the ‘European’ Spaniard, the afrancesado. Their numbers must not be exaggerated. A third of the meagre book production of Spain was still devoted to religion; the majority of the universities still trudged a dreary tramp around banality; it is doubtful whether the ilustrados were more than one per cent of the population. But they were concentrated at the growth points and their ideology was becoming dominant. Resistance there was: the Inquisition grumbled and growled and sometimes hurled a bolt. In the 1770s it lurched clumsily into action against Olavide. In the same decade Zevallos launched a campaign against the new learning which found an echo among popular preachers; Forner followed up in the 1780s. In that decade indeed, the argument was carried increasingly to the pueblo and there appeared, for the first time, denials of the value of the whole Caroline enterprise.

But before 1789 such arguments could not stem the advance. The dustrados were thin on the ground; they were dependent on the benevolence of monarchy. But they were building up strength among the peripheral bourgeoisie and there was a scatter of them in every province. In the 1780s, in fact, this minority enlightenment was naturalized in Spain, finding characteristic expression in the small but lively periodical press of Madrid and a few other cities. It was in 1781 that the Censor appeared, edited by Luis Canuelo, a lawyer with friends in high places. ‘All that departs in any way from reason hurts me,’ proclaimed Canuelo, and he set out, in his Discourses, to scourge the villains, the idle aristocrats and obscurantist clergy. The Censor represents Spain’s nearest

approach to a radical Enlightenment. The journal got into trouble with the Court. It was ultimately suppressed and Canuelo was haled before the Inquisition. But it had recruited the (often anonymous) services of the strongest spirits in Spain and it celebrated the advent of a New Spain and the New Spaniard.

To the pueblo however, the new Spaniard was a Frenchman. In the late eighteenth century, the customary cleavage between popular and elite culture threatened to become an abyss.

As the directive classes yielded increasingly to the imported styles and manners of luces , there was a visible hardening of a Spanish, a resistant and often an archaic personality among the popular classes. The popular theatre with its pantomime tonadillas, full of the grotesque, the fantastic, monsters, duende , flourished and attracted increasing support. So did the popular verse interludes, the sainetes, which built up a lucrative market for such writers as Ramon de la Cruz. The long underground tradition of the Spanish pueblo, stretching back to the Celestina and the Libro de buen amor, was not responsive to the rather clinical humanitarianism of those ilustrados who wished to serve it. A certain social radicalism implicit in it, which was to become explicit in the generation of the War of Independence, found expression in anti-authoritarian impulse and rebellious folklore: its heroes were the eternal bandit, the eternal smuggler, the bullfighter. The tonadilla on Francisco Esteban el Guapo, the celebrated Andalusian smuggler, was a stage success without precedent. And as these people made melodrama out of their theatre, so they made a theatre out of their lives. The tradition of the seventeenth- century picaro assumed new form in the cult of the majo and his maja, the plebeian aristocrats in their distinctive style of dress, slouch hat, cape, their strict but anti-establishment moral code, their counter-culture, their anti-authoritarianism, xenophobia, their simplist and ambivalent Church-and-King loyalty which could mask a social rebelliousness [10]. This was the world which broke Esquilache. 9 This world, interpenetrating with the world of the bullfight and the imported flamenco, the potent popular universe of the preachers, the ilustrados failed to penetrate. Moratin the dramatist, one of the few of them with any sense of or feeling for the popular, waged a long fight in the theatre but was deeply pessimistic. His friend the poet Melendez Valdes was nearly killed by the plebs of Asturias in 1808 as a ‘French traitor’. Most of the enlightened could only denounce the spiritual prison of pan y toros (bread and bulls).

Other sectors of society, however, proved remarkably susceptible. Through the last quarter of the eighteenth century a rising tide of majismo began to engulf much of the aristocracy. As in so many other instances, a European fashion - the shepherdesses of Marie Antoinette - acquired a deeper meaning in Spain. House after house among the nobility began to ape the styles of majo and maja , to talk their language, to cultivate bullfighters and flamenco singers.

A classic case was the future Ferdinand VII himself, who cultivated Madrid cockney and mixed with the underworld through the agency of his low-born clerical camarilla (the clerics were old hands at turning out a mob). In Spain the process was a visible reaction against the French styles of the ilustrados. Ortega y Gasset goes so far as to assert that Castile, drowning in French influence, found a new identity for itself in Andalusia. Certainly this aristocratic cultivation of popular styles in which they detected an irreducible tradition of Spanishness ( costumbrismo ) interacted with an intensification of the cult of casticismo, national purity, originally racist in concept, in the eighteenth century expressing a species of cultural nationalism. From the 1780s onwards, as the Inquisition began to recover its nerve, there was a developing tension among the Spanish elite, a tension which the impact of the French Revolution and Napoleon transformed into a mortal socio-political schizophrenia. The tension was that between ‘Reason’ with a French accent and ‘tradition’ increasingly interpreted in populist and folklorist terms - the peculiar Spanish liberty. It was precisely this tension which was to stretch the mind and spirit of Francisco Goya on a rack almost as fearful as that of the Holy Office.

For Goya was a man of the pueblo} 0 He was born in 1746

in the village of Fuendetodos in Aragon, but his family seems

to have lived in Saragossa. He is sometimes called a peasant.

This is nonsense. His father was a master gilder, an artisan.

His mother, Gracia Lucientes, came from the multitudinous

petty ‘aristocracy’ of Aragon with their long pedigrees and

extremely short purses. Goya’s father was ultimately of

Basque descent but the ambience of Goya’s life was

thoroughly Aragonese. Critics have detected in him the

toughness, obstinacy, harshness, cold centre of those

Aragonese whom their fellow-Spaniards nicknamed baturros -

evoking the legendary and mulish obstinacy of the people of

the parched and implacable sierra under the unremitting howl

*

of their north-easterly Cierzo wind, a people whose houses turned their backs on the street and who were said to drive

nails into stone walls with their heads. . . .

The family was not rich. Goya’s father died intestate in 1781. But he was an artisan, a man who ‘knew the fine points’, and he and his wife inhabited that amorphous region of preindustrial society which in France, Britain and America was the nursery of a democratic ideology and spirit. This was Spain, where such artisans were enmeshed in a more traditional clientele system, but there is ample evidence that Goya shared to the full in the characteristic tastes of the pueblo. The legendary ‘history’ of his ‘wild youth’ is romantic nonsense, but he was evidently an aficionado of the bullfight.

He adored the tonadillas , not to mention the tonadilleras.

He was fascinated by majos and street life, revelled in pigeon-shooting and hunting. While court painter, he once confessed to his friend Martin Zapater that he got more fun out of hunting. His attitude to his painting before his personal crisis in 1792 at the age of forty-six often seems curiously off-hand to many critics. In fact he treated it as a job.

From the beginning he displayed unusual and original talents. He was quite prepared to suppress them and work in a conventional manner in order to get on. His schooling at the Escuelas Pias, which he remembered in later life with some affection, seems to have been conventional. He was hardly a cultivated man in his youth and early middle age. By 1812 he had a library of several hundred volumes, but this was after many years of friendship with the leading ilustrados. Before his personal crisis of the 1790s there was very little of the intellectual about him. There never was much at any time.

He was interested in his job, worked hard at it, took inordinate pride in it. But before his success, a job it was.

He was, until his fortieth year, the quintessential artisan.

This was an artisan, however, who made good, and in the 1780s he crows and boasts like any vulgar nouveau riche.

‘Martin mio,’ he wrote to Zapater, ‘ya soy Pintor del Rey con quince mil reales!’ - ‘Martin boy, now I’m King’s Painter with 15,000 reales!’ He was probably an obnoxious young climber notable chiefly for the beady eye of ambition.

Even at the beginning, however, there was a certain distinctiveness. This artisan son of an artisan father climbed through a particular Aragonese network. The lord of Fuendetodos was Ramon de Pignatelli, a count immersed in the bien-pensant Caroline reform. He was a prime mover in the cutting of the Imperial Canal in Aragon, founder of the Royal Economic Society and rector of that university in Saragossa which created the first chair of Economics in Spain.

It was he who patronized the studio of Jose Luzan, which Goya entered at the age of fourteen. Another friend and patron was Juan Martin de Goicoechea, also of distant Basque descent, who became one of the most celebrated merchants in Spain. He founded an economic society and launched a spinning factory in Saragossa in imitation of that of Lyon.

A favourite of Charles III, his cousinage supplied Goya’s son with a wife. Men like Goicoechea found themselves Jacobins in the France of 1792. In Spain the Aragonese clans of Goicoechea, Galarza and Zorrilla with whom the Goyas were enmeshed became afrancesados almost to a man. Most of them rallied to Joseph Bonaparte after 1808 and trailed off with the French army into exile in 1814. Goya was to die among them in Bordeaux.

From a pueblo immersed in that costumbrismo which the anti-Enlightenment aristocracy was to embrace, the young Goya climbed, in the teeth of repeated failure, through an Aragonese mafia impregnated with the life-style of the ilustrados y to the court of Charles III. That court was inevitably the target. Charles III as part of his campaign to make Spain respectable in European eyes had imported the great Venetian painter Tiepolo with his sons together with the younger master Anton Raphael Mengs. It was Mengs who set the tone, with his strict adherence to the neo-classical principles of Winckelmann. Ambitious young aspirants had to adjust. Francisco Bayeu, a fellow baturro of Goya, did so without difficulty. He got to the court in 1763 and worked his younger brother in as well. Goya had more trouble.

He failed to enter the Academy in 1764 and again in 1766. Leaving Madrid to the Bayeus, he lived through five years of obscurity. In 1770 he tried his hand in Italy, where he achieved some recognition from the Parma academy and in 1771 scored his first major success with some work for the Aula Dei in Saragossa. By now something of a local celebrity in Aragon, he promptly married Bayeu’s sister and moved to Madrid. The marriage was presumably a calculation, but it seems to have been comfortable.

Prompted no doubt by Bayeu, Mengs called Goya to the service of the royal tapestry works in 1774. Buckling down to serious production, broken only by an illness in 1777-8 which first turned him towards engraving, he broke through to brilliant success in the 1780s. By 1786 he was King’s Painter; by 1789, painter to the royal household. And the household he served was that of Charles III at the apogee of ilustrado achievement. It was in these years that Goya made friends

with the leading spirits of luces , notably with Jovellanos.

Goya’s career, in short, moved along the rising curve of ilustrado success,

Its moment of truth, no less, coincided with theirs. Symptoms of a change of direction, indeed of character, appear in Goya’s work and life around 1790. In 1792-3 he fell victim to a desperate illness at the very moment of public crisis for the ilustrados. For in 1789 the Bastille fell and France was gripped by a revolution escalating towards democracy. In 1791 a Bourbon fled from the new order in France, was recaptured and paraded before an unforgiving plebs. In that same year Floridablanca, at a stroke, suspended the entire Spanish periodical press and tried to stop the inflow of French publications. In the following year the French monarchy was overthrown and the popular, republican, terrorist sans-culottes erupted into the French Republic. In 1793 Spain went to war with France in a crusade against atheist republicanism, the preachers unleashed a massive popular reaction; ilustrados went into eclipse.

The shock of the French Revolution disrupted the Spanish Enlightenment and set in train a process of dissociation in Spanish society which was to culminate in civil war.

The surface of Spanish political life in these years presents a scene of complexity and almost inexplicable confusion. 11 These were the politics of a regime which had been transformed into a satellite. The underlying and contradictory drives are, however, visible. In the first place, reaction to the French Revolution threw the official classes back from Enlightenment. The forces of traditional conservatism generated a new strength. The crusade of 1793 mobilized whole sectors of the middle and popular classes. In 1794 the reactionary Archbishop of Toledo became Inquisitor-General and the Holy Office ground heavily into confident action once more.

On the other hand, the war with France precipitated a severe economic crisis. By 1795 there was serious trouble in the universities and downright disaffection, enamoured of French example, found public expression in the streets.

Spain was forced to make peace. But little could be done to stop the menacing polarization of opinion. France compelled Spain to join the war against Britain in 1796. This made more difficult the erection of a sanitary cordon against French ideas and at the same time exposed the Spanish empire to the power of the British. Economic disaster sharpened tempers still further.

To complete the disillusionment, there was an abrupt decline

in the quality of the Spanish monarchy. Power passed in 1792 to a favourite of the royal family, Manuel Godoy, a young guardsman, a senorito from Extremadura, the ‘sausage-maker’. Godoy remained in virtual control of the royal machine, overtly or covertly, for fifteen years. He packed the administration with his nominees, picked up titles and honours wholesale and erected what was virtually a semi- dictatorial system. Every class in society was repelled.

It seemed like a reversion to the worst days of the Decadence. Godoy himself was vaguely ‘liberal’; he at least tried to maintain the outward show of Caroline reformism after the first shocks of the French Revolution had passed. But his freedom of action was severely restricted by the power of France, whose changing rulers looked upon him with a deep and unchanging suspicion. Every effective political force in Spain, from hidebound aristocrats, black clerics, xenophobic plebeians to the most radical of the ilustrados, was driven into opposition.

For the first time the regeneration drive of enlightenment broke out of the framework of the Spanish monarchy.

Some began to call for the French to come, to finish the job that Spaniards were incapable of finishing. Others retreated to the deepest fastnesses of casticismo. In the circumstances, a concern for the autentico ser of their homeland became obsessional and increasingly focused on Spanish history.

In these years there was an upsurge of interest in the history of Spain among the literate classes. The classic history of Mariana was reprinted as were many texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jovellanos wrote his historical play Pelayo, following Nicolas Fernandez de Moratin and anticipating Quintana. Increasingly attention came to focus on the establishment of absolutism in Spain and the loss of those parliamentary liberties which had flourished in the Cortes of medieval Aragon and Castile. Almost inevitably the villain of Spanish history emerged as the Emperor Charles V and his suppression of the Comuneros in 1521. Juan de Padilla, hero of the Comuneros revolt, grew in stature in minds revolted by the spectacle of the court of Charles IV and desperate to establish controls over it. Reactionaries and radicals alike found their refuge in this history - Forner, yearning for a ‘traditional’ and balanced constitution which would restrain unworthy monarchs and preserve the essence of Spanish tradition; the liberal Quintana, addressing a poem to Padilla in 1797; Jose Marchena, the radical linguist, running to France in 1792 and from Bayonne calling upon his

compatriots to marry their ‘democratic’ past to their democratic future - ‘Let Cortes, Cortes be the universal cry, Sons of Padilla!’

In the making here was a powerful historical myth, strictly parallel and in many ways analogous to the English myth of the Ancient Constitution, the Norman Yoke and the Freeborn Saxons. It set uneasily with the largely unhistorical thrust of much ilustrado thinking. Implicit in it was a revolutionary assertion of the sovereignty of the people which offended ilustrados reared in the traditions of Caroline bureaucracy.

A complex of reactions and responses grew more complex as they grew fiercer. It was Karl Marx who was among the first to indicate the strength of this Padilla myth in the radically democratic Constitution of 1812 proclaimed from besieged Cadiz at the height of the war against Napoleon. 12 But a myth deriving from the same source powered the traditionalists who, in the service of their ‘ancient constitution’, overthrew that Constitution of 1812 and restored, unwittingly, the absolutism of Ferdinand VII.

The battle of the traditions grew heated as in book, pamphlet and sermon the protagonists appealed to a wider audience, itself trapped in the inflation and developing economic crisis of a Spain caught between the French and the English. Political fortunes were strictly dependent on the interplay between foreign pressure and native faction. In 1798, in the face of monetary crisis and the pressure of a French Directory which had just crushed its own royalists, Godoy withdrew and the leading ilustrados came to power, headed by Jovellanos himself. At once the old Jansenist-ultramontane controversy took on new life as Jovellanos moved to an attack on the Inquisition. In an occult and complex faction struggle around the court bedevilled by harangues from Abbe Gregoire and the Constitutional Church in France, the reformers were defeated in 1798. A momentary equilibrium between reformers and reactionaries was broken by further conflict precipitated by the election of a new Pope. In 1800 power passed decisively to the traditionalists. Ilustrados were ejected; many, including Jovellanos, were imprisoned; their confreres withdrew from public life.

But the brief and prosperous respite of the Peace of Amiens was soon ended by the resumption of war, and the disaster of Trafalgar in 1805 dislocated the Spanish economy as French troops moved in for a campaign against Portugal.

In a last move to save himself, Godoy turned once more to the liberals; but it was too late. The prince, Ferdinand, working

in collusion with military conspirators, rebelled against his father and mobilized the Madrid plebeians in his cause. The divided Spanish royal family appealed to Napoleon. His solution was to throw them all out and to impose his brother Joseph as king, complete with radically regenerative constitution. A massive popular insurrection, directed in the first instance at the Godoy system, turned on the French in 1808. The heroic and horrifying war of liberation, as complex and as contradictory as the crisis which precipitated it, plunged Spain into six bloody years. The travail of the Spanish people began - that travail which Goya was to make universal in his Disasters of War.

The first paroxysm of this national crisis was the sudden reversal of direction in the 1790s. This too, marked the onset of Goya’s own personal crisis. After premonitory symptoms in 1790 Goya collapsed in 1792-3. In the years which immediately followed he, too, took a new direction and shaped a new vision. That new vision achieved a certain permanence in the first of his great series of engravings, made ready for publication in 1797, but postponed as the ilustrados were given their last chance, thrown into the public arena after the defeat of Jovellanos. In those engravings Goya found himself, found what was to be his historic identity.

The historic identity of Goya crystallizes in the Caprichos of 1799.

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12. And still they won’t go! Caprichos, 59, 1799