12Burke’s Political and Aesthetic Ideas in Spain: A View from the Right?
Considering the longstanding historical rivalry between Spain and Great Britain, it is evident that Anglophilia was peculiar to a fraction of Spanish writers, thinkers or politicians. Even nowadays, a stance of scorn can be perceived towards those who sympathized with the British, as was the case of the clergyman and poet José María Blanco White, who left for England after the French invasion of Spain in 1808, never to return.1 The eminent historian Alberto Gil Novales viewed Blanco White as ‘a character much admired in Spain for his alleged courage of spirit when expatriating himself and becoming an Anglican, as if the Spaniards had nothing better to do for their political and social progress than turning into Anglicans.’2
Generally speaking, until the French Revolution the Spanish aristocracy and intelligentsia tended to be Francophile. If they turned anti-French in the tumultuous decades which followed, it was out of patriotic concern and, especially among the conservatives, a desire to preserve the system of monarchy.
In his Thoughts on French Affairs, Burke foresaw that the political reaction to the threat of the French Revolution in Spain would provide an insight into the country’s history:
As to Spain, it is a nerveless country. It does not possess the use, it only suffers the abuse, of a nobility. For some time, and even before the settlement of the Bourbon dynasty, that body has been systematically lowered, and rendered incapable by exclusion, and for incapacity excluded from affairs …
As to the clergy, they are the only thing in Spain that looks like an independent order, and they are kept in some respect by the Inquisition, the sole but unhappy resource of public tranquillity and order now remaining in Spain. … Its great object is to keep atheistic and republican doctrines from making their way in that kingdom. No French book upon any subject can enter there which does contain such matter …
The several kingdoms which compose Spain, have, perhaps, some features which run through the whole; but they are in many particulars as different as nations who go by different names: the Catalans, for instance, and the Arragonians too, in a great measure have the spirit of the Miquelets, and much more of republicanism than of an attachment to royalty. They are more in the way of trade and intercourse with France; and, upon the least internal movement, will disclose and probably let loose a spirit that may throw the whole Spanish monarchy into convulsions.
It is a melancholy reflection that the spirit of melioration which has been going on in that part of Europe, more or less during this century, and the various schemes very lately on foot for further advancement, are all put a stop to at once.
… At present the only safety of Spain is the old national hatred of the French. How far that can be depended upon, if any great ferments should be excited, it is impossible to say. (Burke 1791, 231–33).
Indeed, fear of the French Revolution crossing the border put an immediate stop to schemes for amelioration.
The century had opened with a dynastic crisis triggering the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1713, the treaty of Utrecht brought the first member of the House of Bourbons to the Spanish throne: Felipe V (d. 1746). He was followed by his eldest son with his first wife María Luisa de Saboya, Fernando VI (1746–59). From 1759 until 1788 his eldest son with his second wife Isabel de Farnesio, Carlos III, reigned: a period which came closest to what was to be called Enlightenment in the rest of Europe, notwithstanding the shadow projected by the Inquisition. The ancien régime was to be overturned by an incipient industrialization, attempts at agricultural reforms, the creation of Societies to promote progress,3 and the limitation of the power of the clergy through the confiscation of Church properties, among other means.
As of 1788, a feeble Carlos IV, overwhelmed by the effects of the French Revolution and court intrigues, left the country’s affairs increasingly under the control of Manuel Godoy, an astute politician and lover of the queen, who managed to position him as prime minister.4 The Napoleonic invasion in 1808, with its army advancing on Madrid, caused the Spanish royal family to flee to France, while Napoleon’s brother Joseph was installed on the throne. Fierce resistance by the people, the first popular uprising in Europe against Napoleon, was brutally put down by the French, provoking a British response which resulted in the Peninsular War.
During the war against the invaders, countrywide negotiations were under way to set up a Constitution and a Parliamentary government; a major role was played by the reforming party, the Liberales. In 1810, the Spanish Cortes fled from the renewed French invasion, establishing itself in Cádiz, where it produced a strikingly modern Constitution in 1812. The defeat of the French in 1814 culminated in the restoration of the Bourbons in the person of Fernando VII, who refused to accept the Constitution and imposed a reactionary regime.
The 1820 uprising managed to hold the king as a hostage of the Cortes in Cádiz. Yet the ‘liberal triennium’ ended abruptly in April 1823 with the aid of an army from France which restored the monarch to his full powers.5 Thus terror reigned anew for another ‘ominous decade’ until the tyrant’s death in 1833, when civil war broke out between supporters of his three-year-old daughter, Isabel, on the one hand, and of his brother Carlos María Isidro on the other.6 The dynastic contest raged until 1843, when Isabel II became queen at the age of 13, and it continued in the background for decades.7 In spite of such turbulence, with one pronunciamiento succeeding another,8 Spain experienced a noteworthy modernization, especially due to the establishment of the railway network and other infrastructures and institutions. Yet a generalized corruption and an extremely poor system of education hampered further progress. After the outbreak of the 1868 ‘Glorious Revolution’, which deprived Queen Isabel II of her throne, forcing her into French exile, the First Spanish Republic was proclaimed on 11 February 1873. A new military pronunciamiento in late 1874 restored the monarchy, with Isabel’s son Alfonso XII proclaimed King of Spain, offering an end to forty years of royal feuding. He was succeeded in 1886 by his son Alfonso XIII.
The decline of the Spanish empire paralleled events in Spain itself: an exception to the nineteenth century trend of colonial growth. The Napoleonic invasion, the ensuing years of intense warfare and the effective isolation of the colonies from their mother country had triggered the eruption of long-smouldering discontents in the Spanish overseas territories, one after the other of which became independent.
Edmund Burke’s reception in Spain is closely linked to the availability of his writings. French was by and large the intermediary language from which translations of English and other European (e.g. German, Russian) writers and philosophers used to be made, or in which they were read. English texts, therefore, including Burke’s, were studied by nineteenth-century Spanish thinkers and politicians through French eyes. Moreover, these translations frequently consisted of abridged or ‘adapted’ versions.
Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was translated into Spanish in 1807, fifty years after publication. But the first full Spanish version of his Reflections on the Revolution in France had to wait over a hundred and fifty years until 1954. More recently, several other of Burke’s works have been translated into Spanish. Under the title Revolución y descontento: selección de escritos políticos de Edmund Burke (Revolution and discontent: a selection of political writings by Edmund Burke), the following essays are now available: ‘Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents’ (1770); ‘Speech to the Electors of Bristol’ (1774); and An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791).9 Burke’s A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) appeared in Spanish in 2009.
The first translation of the full text of Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was carried out by Juan de la Dehesa, a professor of law at the University of Alcalá, in 1807.10 The next edition, sponsored by the Institute of Architects and Master Builders of the region of Murcia, appeared in 1985. A shorter Spanish version followed ten years later, with a preliminary study by the translator, Menene Gras Balaguer, and was reprinted twice (Burke 1995, 1997, 2005). Its reception in Spain had already been mentioned in the Historia de las Ideas Estéticas en España-III: Siglo XVIII (History of the aesthetic ideas in Spain-III: Eighteenth Century) by the eminent cultural historian Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1907).11
Of Dehesa’s Spanish version, he briefly comments that it is ‘faithfully and accurately translated from English’.12 Burke first appears in the introduction, in the context of the debate on the concept of ‘sublime’:
In Longinus (whoever he may be) criticism verges on religious vocation, and the enthusiasm for the ancient models is turned into a kind of poetic inspiration or rhetoric. But even admiring his book as a literary monument, it has to be admitted that he left the aesthetic issue of the sublime untouched, and that he hardly sensed it. And worst of all is that his example and authority, validated in the modern schools through a more elegant than faithful translation of Boileau, in times when the rhetorical skills of the Greeks were a secret to a few, contributed to muddle the ideas on that point, retarding and misleading science, as can be seen in Burke himself until the subtle criticism of Kant came to pervade the essence of what until then had been considered an enigma impossible to solve.13
Further on, Burke is mentioned over a dozen times and lengthily discussed, albeit in a rather unflattering way: his influence on Arteaga is depicted twice (1907, III: 1, 75–81), but it is the superiority of the latter over Burke that is asserted:
Yet the book which beyond doubt emerges as dominating his [i.e. Arteaga’s] entire work, and which presents his oeuvre with the consistency of a constructed theory is Investigaciones filosóficas sobre la belleza ideal, considerada como objeto de todas las artes de imitación (Philosophical enquiries into the ideal beauty considered as an object of imitation by the arts), printed in Madrid, and in the Castilian language, in 1789. Without dispute it has to be taken as the most methodical, complete, and scientific of the purely aesthetic works of the eighteenth-century, and it can compete without disadvantage with any other of its time, not withstanding Burke, Sulzer, and Mendelssohn. The only exception is the Lacconte, which is a work of genius … with infinite horizons and perspectives, yet it cannot be considered a methodical Aesthetics, neither was this on the author’s mind.14
Esteban de Arteaga (Segovia, 1747 – Paris, 1799), a Jesuit scholar, musicologist and expert in aesthetics, studied in Bologna in the 1770s, after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain in 1767, where he was in touch with leading Italian musicologists. In 1783, he published Le Rivoluzioni del Teatro Musicale Italiano (Revolutions in Italian musical theatre). Arteaga was attracted by the aesthetic theories of Locke and apparently also by those of Burke; the influence of the latter has been discussed by experts, and admitted by some. Nevertheless, Arteaga himself never mentions Burke explicitly, not even in his other important work, mentioned above, Investigaciones filosóficas sobre la belleza ideal considerada como objeto de las artes de imitación (Philosophical enquiries into the ideal beauty considered as an object of imitation by the arts) (1789), the title of which is strongly reminiscent of Burke’s Philosophic Enquiry. Yet in his article, ‘Lo bello y lo sublime en la estética de Esteban de Arteaga’ (The beautiful and sublime in the aesthetics of Esteban de Arteaga), Fernando Molina Castillo insists:
Before searching for evidence in Le rivoluzioni, let us see the most direct and evident proof in The ideal beauty (chap. XI) where we come across a most evident testimonial presence of the topic of the sublime according to the Burkean model, in spite of Batllori, who follows Menéndez Pelayo, holding that ‘I don’t think that he was acquainted with the Irish Burke, since besides his never quoting him, when Arteaga reasons about the sublime … he does so with full independence from his Philosophic Enquiry [sic] …’15
If Arteaga read Burke’s treatise, it would have been in English or French, since he died on a diplomatic mission in Paris in 1799, several years before Dehesa’s translation into Spanish. In his work, La Estética inglesa del siglo XVIII (The English aesthetics of the eighteenth century), Francisco Mirabent (1927) makes over forty references to Burke, especially to the Enquiry, although he does not deal explicitly with its reception in Spain.
As to the dissemination of Burke the politician’s views in the Iberian Peninsula, an eighty-eight page set of extracts from his Reflections on the Revolution in France and other writings had been published in a Portuguese translation in Rio de Janeiro as early as 1812 by the Viscount Da Silva Lisboa Cairu, and ten years later found its way to Lisbon in a second revised edition.16 Apparently parts of the text were also available in Mexico in 1826 in a ‘new version, corrected and thoroughly revised’ (although this could have been referring to a French translation).17
The Spanish National Library holds a fourteen-page manuscript summary, handwritten and unsigned, entitled ‘Extracto de una carta de Mister Burke a un miembro de la Asamblea Nacional de Francia’ (Extract of a letter by Mister Burke to a member of the French National Assembly), dated Beaconsfield 19 January 1791, in Spanish.18 Its exact dating is unclear, nor is there evidence of its circulation, let alone its publication around that time, due to the prohibition of any matter dealing with the revolution in France, as explained further on. Only recently (2015) has it been transcribed and published with a lengthy introduction and the facsimile.
The first full published translation of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) took over a century and a half to appear in Spain.19 Carried out by Enrique Tierno Galván,20 with a fourteen-page prologue, it was published in 1954 by an institution specializing in political topics, and subsequently reprinted in 1978, in the wake of the newly emerging democracy in Spain. Vicente Herrero’s 1984 Spanish version, published in Mexico, deserves to be mentioned here, too. And in 1989, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the translation by Esteban Pujals – a pioneering scholar in English philology – appeared. It includes an authoritative introductory study on, and a critical résumé of, the Reflections entitled ‘El pensamiento político de Edmund Burke’ (Edmund Burke’s political thought), first published as an article in 1954.
In the three Spanish versions listed, the title of Burke’s work is (mis)translated, with the equivalent for ‘French Revolution’ employed instead of ‘Revolution in France’. Only Carlos Mellizo’s 2003 version, the most recent in Spanish at the time of writing, annotated and with an introduction, refers to it literally as ‘la revolución en Francia’. The most recent version of Burke’s Reflections available in Spain is a translation by Patxi Ezkiaga Lasa (2010) into Basque, one of the four officially recognized languages of the Spanish state.
There are various reasons for the long absence of a Spanish version of the Reflections. In the first case, there was censorship. Given the desire to suppress debate, the importation and translation of printed matter dealing with revolutions, whether in favour or against them, had to be clandestine since these works were likely to have been blacklisted by the Inquisition. As such, Burke’s main work was first referred to by the ‘Santo Oficio’ (i.e. The Holy Office of the Inquisition) in Logroño in 1792, and eventually prohibited in 1805.21 Furthermore, the government of Manuel Godoy issued four royal decrees, the first of them on 7 June 1793, forbidding anyone ‘to insert any paper or book containing news, favourable or adverse, of the matters concerning the kingdom of France.’22 Nevertheless, the curiosity of the enlightened few found ways to get around this. For example, a diary entry by the statesman Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (Gijón, 1744 – Puerto de Vega, 1811) dating from 21 November 1795 reveals that he had lent Francisco de Paula Caveda y Tenreiro ‘the Burke’.23 In turn, as Jovellanos notes in a diary entry of 7 December 1795, he receives Caveda’s translation of Barruel’s Historia de la persecución del clero de Francia (History of the clergy during the French Revolution), which he promises to read.24 There is some controversy as to which ‘Burke’ Jovellanos was referring to. His library was certainly one of the best stocked in the country;25 he received English newspapers, and his correspondence with foreign politicians and diplomats, such as Lord Holland, constitute a vivid proof of his open-mindedness. Hence it is part of Spain’s tragic history that this key Enlightenment figure, Minister of Justice for eight months in 1797, was soon disgraced under Carlos IV’s Prime Minister, Godoy, and confined in a fortress in Mallorca for seven years.26 He was freed only after the upheavals of 1808, and in the ensuing years played an important role in the making of the liberal Constitution. He would not, however, live to enjoy its fruits as he died seeking refuge from a second invasion of his hometown, Gijón, by the French army in November 1811.27
In the introductory study to his above-mentioned 1989 translation of Burke’s Reflections, Esteban Pujals asserts:
As we study the personality of Burke … inevitably and as a matter of fact a figure comes to mind which, up to a point, turns out to be his equivalent in Spain: this figure is Jovellanos … it simply has to be pointed out that, in general and in many instances his attitude is strikingly similar, and when reading Burke’s works one cannot be but reminded of many pages of Jovellanos.
… Jovellanos’s piety, his liberal conservatism, his attitude towards the French Revolution, even his pre-Romantic literary tendencies, convert him into a character similar to that of Burke. They even converge in values such as sincerity and honesty.
… in him we will see a man whose personality and attitude in Spain is the equivalent to that of Burke in England.28
Burke’s influence on Jovellanos, together with that of Adam Ferguson, is undisputed.29 While involved in the task of drafting the Spanish Constitution, Jovellanos revealed in a letter to Lord Holland:
My endeavour is to set up, by means of our plan, a constitution modelled on the English and as much improved as could be, and to that end the manner of the organization of the Assembly has been devised.30
Jovellanos was truly visionary, as Francisco Carantoña asserts when recognizing the statesman’s ‘admiration of the British political system, shared by all moderate liberals, yet his position was never that of a conservative.’31 According to Ignacio Fernández Sarasola’s study El pensamiento político de Jovellanos (Jovellanos’ political thought) (2011), he seems to share Burke’s constitutional ideas, which gave priority to historical circumstance over abstract reason, in marked contrast to the French Revolutionaries. Moreover, Lord Holland quoted Burke, whom he admired, in his letters to Jovellanos, as well as in a proposal for a meeting of the Cortes, which he drafted together with John Allen for the Spaniard. However, Jovellanos’s convergence with Burke’s thought does not go beyond this: Burke is overtly more modern. The former would neither sense the importance of a cabinet system nor that of political parties, nor even that of the full (not merely normative) mechanism of the so called ‘English Constitution’. Thus, Fernández Sarasola concludes, Jovellanos was closer to Hume than to Burke. Jovellanos’s ascription to an ideological camp remains, however, a disputed matter. In a recent study, Silverio Sánchez Corredera recalls that Jovellanos had applauded the recently established constitution of the American Republic. Furthermore, and contrary to Burke, in the beginning he had supported the ideals of the French Revolution; then he had stepped back at the Jacobin bloodshed, notably around 1793, as had many other intellectuals of his time, and eventually he had welcomed the new French Republican constitution of 1795. Sánchez Corredera concludes:
In any case, in an ideological sense, the place closest to Jovellanos is that of the incipient liberal left. And if we refer strictly to the network of effective ideas, it would have to be asserted that Jovellanos was a ‘proto-liberal’.32
According to Alberto Gil Novales, Burke’s influence on the origins of ‘reactionary thought’ has not been sufficiently assessed.33 Burke’s haltingly favourable reception in Spain seems to be at root a product of a counter-revolutionary fervour, even if it came in enlightened or liberal disguise. Nor did the rise of Burkism at the outset seem to be related to any direct experience of a revolutionary or violent confrontation, but rather to an ideological fear of progress.
While Javier Herrero only mentions Burke incidentally in his work Los orígenes del pensamiento reaccionario español (The origins of Spanish reactionary thought) (1971), and other well-known historians completely ignore him, the British scholar Raymond Carr assures us that Burke was central to moderate ideology around 1836 and 1843, and in the second half of the nineteenth century, he was an influence on the politician and statesman Cánovas del Castillo (Carr 1966, 348). This is also stated by Bernard Looks.34
On the other hand, works dealing with the Spanish American colonies’ struggle for independence rarely mention Burke. Only occasionally, and in more recent studies, do we come across references to the impact he had on certain key figures:
It must be admitted that a new conservative trend emerged which eventually incorporated Burke’s thought. The Venezuelan Andrés Bello was a firm defender thereof since he moved to Chile.35
Probably the first explicit and, at the same time, auspicious public reference to Burke is made by one of the Spanish supporters of the clergyman Barruel, Cardinal Pedro de Inguanzo y Rivero, in a series of letters first published between 1813 and 1814 under the title El dominio sagrado de la Iglesia en sus bienes temporales (The Church’s sacred domain over its worldly treasures). In these epistles, which were reprinted in the liberal triennium 1820–23, Inguanzo refers to the ‘famous letter of the most sensible and most eloquent Edmundo [sic] Burke, the English Protestant, who certainly may neither be accused of prejudice, nor of lack of enlightenment or skills in politics’.36 The author firmly opposes the confiscation of Church properties while attacking those liberal Spanish statesmen who had been promoting it. Furthermore, he praises Burke for criticizing the sacking of temples during the French Revolution, paraphrasing, rather than properly quoting, a very long assortment of his passages, in which the ownership of estates is discussed.37
At the end of this lengthy passage the author calls the attention to the sixth letter, where Burke is mentioned again: as well as in letter eight.38
The former reference to Burke by Cardinal Inguanzo is likewise recollected by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo in his work Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (A history of the heterodox Spaniards), a beacon for generations of historians, written between 1880 and 1882. The following introductory and final comments mention Burke:
[Inguanzo] found backing for this truth, as plain and indisputable, if expediency and wickedness would not insist in twisting it, in the eloquent words of the protestant Burke against the confiscation decreed by the French Assembly, and, against any kind of project to put the clergy on the State payroll as if it were just another body of French civil servants.
These wonderful words by Burke make up the topic glossed by Inguanzo in his fifteen letters.39
Sometime earlier, in the turbulent year of 1820, an anonymous sixteen-page pamphlet circulated, entitled Alocución a los Padres de la Patria (Address to the fathers of the nation). It contained a warning to the country’s politicians and people not to follow the steps that led the French Convention to tyranny and anarchy. In it, Burke’s originality is placed in doubt:
A numerous body will deem itself safe, and not always linked to the code of honour, since each individual believes himself to be entitled to load the hateful part of the adopted measures onto the rest, and thus, in the shadow of the crowd to which it belongs, avoid punishment. This reflection of the Englishman Burk [sic] in his book on the French Revolution, a reflection which has passed as original, was already uttered two centuries ago by one of our sixteenth-century politicians. ‘The crowd’, says Saavedra, ‘neither feigns nor forgives, nor does it show mercy. It is as spirited in the risky resolutions as in the just ones; for when fear, or guilt, is divided amongst many, each and every one thinks that neither danger is going to touch him nor infamy taint him.’40
As mentioned above, José María Blanco Crespo, later Joseph Blanco White (Seville, 1775–Liverpool, 1841),41 took exile in England in 1810, since he opposed both the French invasion and the absolutist monarchy. He adopted his second surname from his paternal Irish grandfather, and even renounced Catholicism to embrace Protestantism. Later in life he found a spiritual home in the Unitarian Community. His excellent English allowed him to write the sonnet Night and Death (1828), which made an impression on Coleridge, who described it as ‘the finest sonnet in the English language’, and found its way into several anthologies of English literature.42 From London, he ran the monthly periodical El Español (1810–14), which supported the struggle for the colonies’ independence and was widely read overseas. This was the final straw and established him as a pariah in his home country, to which he never returned. Through Blanco White’s endeavours, an indirect Burkean stance was conferred on the independence movements, as Martin Murphy acknowledges:
Eloquent, acute, and prophetic, El Español exercised a seminal influence in Spanish America. Its articles were reprinted in Mexico, Lima, Caracas, and Buenos Aires, thereby contributing to the development of a common purpose, and it moved Bolívar’s political thought in a Burkean direction. (Murphy 2004)
Blanco White is probably best known for his work ‘Letters from Spain’ (1825), a set of delicate and colourful epistles in the style of the Lettres persanes, mixing fiction with ‘sketches of Spanish manners, customs and opinions’.43
Parallel to that, in the 1820s, Blanco White wrote a series of articles in Historical Miscellanea, describing English traditions and customs with admiration. Here, Burke appears occasionally, as in the ‘Noticia biográfica de Sir James Mackintosh’ (Biographical note on Sir James Mackintosh):
In 1791 he published a reply to the famous work by Burke on the French Revolution. This reply caught the attention of the illustrious Fox, who offered him his friendship and conversation, as well as Burke himself, with the generosity known only in free countries, where everybody is used to discussions and debates on opinions; he became a friend of his young antagonist.44
When referring to the example of the British Glorious Revolution, Blanco White ends by quoting Burke:
These venerable gentlemen knew that if there was to be a king, it was for him to hold the reins of the government, and as the eloquent Burke says: ‘Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure, – if they had been able to contrive no better remedy against arbitrary power than civil confusion.’45
Furthermore, the Argentinian scholar Óscar Calvelo suggests that Blanco White could be referring to Burke’s aesthetics when making use of the concepts ‘sublime’ and ‘terror’, which, he writes, may be inspired by ‘Hume, Burke, or Kant who [the latter two of whom] developed them in response to the former’s considerations on the aesthetic pleasure produced by the literary genre of tragedy.’46
Burke may also have had an influence on the Leyendas Españolas (Spanish legends) by José Joaquín de Mora (Cádiz, 1783 – Madrid, 1864). Mora was a journalist, poet and politician, exiled after the 1823 overthrow of the constitutional government. He went first to London, then Buenos Aires and finally Chile, where he became the main author of the nation’s 1828 Constitution. In his Leyendas Españolas, which contain allusions to British policies, Burke’s work is quoted explicitly in a footnote of a tale in verse: ‘Zafadola’, based on an ancient chronicle by King Alfonso VII, touching upon the topics of freedom, honour and constitution:
Call it freedom or whatever,
He who praises or vituperates it, is mistaken
If he ignores to whom it is applied and in which case …
The footnote reads:
Edmundo [sic] Burke in his famous ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’ [sic] says: ‘But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances … give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect … Can I now congratulate [a nation] upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights?’47
When comparing Mora’s with Burke’s original text, it becomes clear that it is slightly abridged and ‘modelled’ to the author’s purpose. This lets us infer that he did not use an English original. José Joaquín de Mora also undertook translations of parts of the work of Bentham, a political antagonist of Burke, such as his Four Letters to the Spanish People in which this utterly unflattering passage on Burke appears:
You must, all of you, have heard of Burke, Edmund Burke, the most illustrious of writers among the Whigs. Each of these men published, at different times, his pamphlet on the subject of finance—each of them, such is the depravity of the ruling few, feared not to speak of this as an acknowledged principle. I, for my part, have, at different times, published two Defences of Economy: one against that George Rose, another against that Edmund Burke; for, long before the Tory pamphlet was written or thought of, Burke, adding treachery and imposture to rapacity, had constituted himself an advocate for economy, for the very purpose of betraying it.48
As it turns out, Burke’s ideas served both the liberals’ and the conservatives’ cause in Spain. On the one hand, Tomás Jesús Quintero quotes him striking his American (and thus indeed more liberal) chord in the thirty-two-page pamphlet, Impugnación al número primero del periódico titulado ‘El Censor’ hecha por la Sociedad Patriótica de Amantes del Orden Constitucional (Impugnment of the first issue of the periodical ‘El Censor’, on behalf of the Patriotic Society of Supporters of the Constitutional Order) (1820, 19–20). The fact that Burke’s name is spelt as ‘Edmundo Bourke’ suggests that Quintero read him in French. Moreover, in the wake of the liberal fervour of the Constitutional Triennium (1820–1823), in his ‘Carta del ciudadano Antonio Alcalá Galiano al director de la sociedad patriótica instalada en Cádiz …’ (Letter from the citizen Antonio Alcalá Galiano to the President of the Patriotic Society of Cádiz …), the author includes ‘among the most distinguished Englishmen, a Chatam [sic], a Burke and a Fox’, whom he himself wishes to excel in their ‘love of freedom’,49 yet with a gesture towards the Anglo-American cause. On the other hand, Burke’s counter-revolutionary stance appears most distinctly in the Cádiz newspaper La Constitución y las Leyes (The constitution and the laws), run by Félix José Reinoso (Seville, 1772 – Madrid, 1841), an ‘afrancesado’, or defender of French ideals, who was forced to cross the Pyrenees after the invaders’ defeat. Upon his return he became active for the liberal cause, although leaning to their more conservative side (thus he was to be safe from prosecution upon the restoration of Fernando VII in 1823), and was nicknamed the ‘obispo francés’ (French bishop).
In August 1822, Reinoso’s newspaper published the text ‘Ideas de Edm. Burke sobre las revoluciones’ (Ideas of Edm. Burke on revolutions), with a brief description of the English Revolution of 1688, the French Revolution of 1789, and the Polish Revolution of 1791. It was followed by a commentary praising the ‘sublime and true traits’ with which Burke depicted the revolutionary issues. Yet Reinoso wrongly accuses Burke of not making mention of ‘the disastrous events in his country in the year 1649’, and of neglecting to draw a parallel between the first English revolution and the French, or between the two ‘monsters’ Cromwell and Robespierre, ‘equally ferocious, hypocritical and malign’.50 According to Gil Novales (1981, 73), this comparison seems to be based on Antoine Fantin-Desodoards’s Histoire Philosophique de la Revolution Française (1796).51 The gist of Reinoso’s appeal is that the lessons learnt from the violent outbreaks in both England (1649) and France (1789) should serve as a severe warning to Spain.
A month later, in September 1822, another text supposedly by Burke appeared in Reinoso’s periodical, under the title ‘Opinión de un escritor célebre acerca de Rousseau’ (A famous writer’s opinion on Rousseau).52 However, the authorship was concealed, which aroused speculations. In an attempt to justify this omission, the editor comments a few weeks later:
The illustrious Edmund Burke does not need our praise … his very name suffices and constitutes his best defence. Profound politician, renowned moralist, graced with knowledge and virtue, he is respected in England as an ornament to his fatherland, and his works go from hand to hand with uncommon applause.53
Altogether, the Spanish current against Rousseau matched Burke’s hostility towards him. Nevertheless, although Burke was welcome as an authoritative source, being an enemy of Rousseau was not enough to imply one was a genuine follower of Burke, as Gil Novales states:
The early flow of the Spanish reaction will soon incorporate many other currents together with that of Burke and Barruel, producing a wealth of information more emotional than rational. In those circumstances the very name of Burke, having become redundant as an allegation, is probably being forgotten in Spain. … However, it is also possible to relate this oblivion, this lack of interest, to the absence of a Spanish edition [of his works].54
It is indeed puzzling that such a work as Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France should not have appeared in a full Spanish translation until the middle of the twentieth century. Yet, a few decades ago it was discovered that as early as 1793 a certain Agustín de los Arcos had made the first attempt at a translation of Burke’s Reflections from French into Spanish. However, it was never printed.55 Nor have Burke’s speeches and essays been published in Spain, until recently when three of them have appeared (Adánez González 2008), as mentioned earlier. In her introduction, Noelia Adánez González suggests an explanation:
… his having been considered a tory … and a reactionary for most of the time, in continental Europe. The insistence on the latter categorization in fact reveals what is possibly the ultimate cause of this, in principle, inexplicable inhibition in the dissemination of the writings of Edmund Burke in Spanish.56
Nonetheless, several other nineteenth-century scholars and politicians had attempted translating Burke or were somehow influenced by his thoughts, aesthetic or political.57
One of these was Félix Amat de Palau y Pont (Sabadell, 1750 – Palmira, 1824), a priest and Professor of Theology in Barcelona. A co-founder of the local branch of the Sociedad Económica, one of the liberal societies which strove to enhance progress in Spain, he produced an extract of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. Intended for a specific audience, it seems to have circulated relatively freely, yet was never properly published, as mentioned in the biography his nephew wrote in 1835:
The year 1790 arrived, in which the Revolution caused great havoc in France, and threatened our kingdom. Sr. Amát, with the aid of his brother D. Antonio, who was in perfect command of the English language, produced an extract or a compendium of the work, then recently published by the judicious Edmund Burke, entitled: Reflections on the French Revolution [sic]. Further, some copies of this compendium were made in Barcelona and Tarragona; some got to Madrid, where they ended up circulating in a printed version, without giving the name of the translator or the printer, or the place or year. Sr. Amát never deemed it necessary to comply with the request of numerous friends to publish them. He used to reply that they needed much retouching.58
Amat became the Archbishop of Palmira in 1803, and in 1806 King Carlos IV’s confessor. He welcomed the arrival of Napoleon in Spain in 1808, and in 1812 was a member of the committee that presented Napoleon’s brother, the imposed King José I,59 with a Memoria, [Memorandum] concerning Spanish opinion of the Inquisition.60 Consequently, he had to abandon Madrid after the French defeat in 1814, and retired to Catalonia.
Another Spanish intellectual to bear the imprint of Burke is Graciliano Afonso y Naranjo (La Orotava, 1775 – Las Palmas, 1861), a Philosophy professor from the Canary Islands. During the 1808 riots he proved a patriot and anti-French, yet in 1815 the Inquisition accused him of encouraging his students to read the Encyclopédie, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau’s Emile and Contrat social, Montesquieu and others. Strongly committed to the liberals, he had to flee the country in 1823 when absolutist royal power was restored and was condemned to death while in exile. His American years were fruitful in terms of his production of pre-Romantic poetry, some of which had a political stance. Upon his return following Fernando VII’s death, Afonso devoted himself to translations of classical and English writers, among them Burke. Afonso’s biographer points out the influence that Burke’s aesthetic ideas had on him: ‘The names of Milton, Burke and Macpherson complete the list of the literary sources of this poet-cleric’, specifying in a footnote: ‘In 1850 Burke (Enquiries into the origin of taste) [sic], was a thinker much read by don Graciliano and the Spanish Romantics’.61 Further on, it is stated:
A philosophy – deism – incited those boisterous sentimentalists with texts by Pope, Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, advocates of the natural religion. The Spanish writers, needing this new philosophic orientation, achieved their aims thanks to French translators or interpreters; and poets capable of reading texts in their original language are very rare. Graciliano Afonso, translator of Pope and of Burke, did not need French texts to enhance his sentimentalism; the very English masters inspired him.62
The remarkable evolution of the statesman Francisco de Paula Martínez de la Rosa (Granada, 1787 – Madrid, 1862) provides a perfect example of the shift from youthful revolutionary to stern monarchist in later life, which was undoubtedly partly indebted to a reading of Edmund Burke. From a liberal family, he studied Law and became a professor in Moral Philosophy. Fond of Condillac, he began by writing verse, and founded the newspaper Diario de Granada. A radical nationalist during the events of 1808, he was assigned diplomatic missions in Gibraltar and London. His patriotic poem ‘Zaragoza’ was published in London in 1811, and in 1812 he produced the essay ‘Incompatibilidad de la libertad española con el restablecimiento de la Inquisición’ (The incompatibility of Spanish freedom with the re-establishment of the Inquisition), which was prohibited by the Inquisition in 1815.
In 1813, Martínez de la Rosa was elected deputy to the constitutionalist Cortes. Upon the restoration of the absolutist monarchy he was accused of treason and sentenced to a ten-year term on the Canary Islands, where he studied the writings of Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham. In 1820, the restoration of the constitutionalist government prompted his release. Yet after years in prison, he no longer sought inspiration in the French Revolution, but in Bentham and Burke instead. He was thus held to be too moderate, and even ridiculed by public opinion.63 When indicted in 1823 for sympathizing with the French, Martínez de la Rosa opted for exile. Under the regency of Isabel II, he returned to active politics and, while keen to justify himself, he was blamed for his ‘filosofía claudicante’ (philosophy of surrender). He became a deputy and, after the Restoration, a member of the Academy of History, twice Minister of State, and ambassador in Paris and Rome. Altogether, his shift from radicalism to conservatism, influenced by Burke and his own experiences of the tumultuous times through which he lived, is noteworthy.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the realist writer Benito Pérez Galdós (Las Palmas, 1843 – Madrid, 1920) began his famous Episodios Nacionales (National episodes), a cycle of forty-six novels written between 1872 and 1912, covering most of the troubled nineteenth century, and beginning with the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. This cycle is deemed one of the most important sources for an understanding of the struggles of the nation. Burke is mentioned tangentially, as a Spanish traveller boasts:
When I was in England… – continued the old Malespina –, as you already know, the English Government called for me to improve the country’s artillery … Every day I had lunch with Pitt, with Burke, with Lord North, and with General Cornwallis and other important characters, who called me the witty Spaniard.64
The Spanish statesman and historian Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (Málaga, 1828 – Mondragón, 1897) is renowned for his conservative policies while holding a number of posts, among them Minister of State twice, and Prime Minister six times.65 In 1874, in the wake of the 1868 ‘Glorious Revolution’, he led the conservative minority in the Cortes, opposing freedom of religion and universal suffrage. After the ephemeral First Spanish Republic (1873–74), Cánovas became the key figure in the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Isabel II’s son Alfonso XII (on whose education at the Military Academy at Sandhurst he had a major influence), authoring a conservative constitution in 1876. He also brought an end to the last Carlist threat to Bourbon power by merging a group of dissident deputies with his own party.66 His repressive policies fostered nationalist movements in both the Basque provinces and Catalonia, and laid the foundation for labour unrest well into the twentieth century. Moreover, his colonial policies proved a disaster, resulting in the loss of Spain’s possessions in the Pacific (the Philippines) and eventually Cuba (1898). Cánovas would not live to witness the latter outcome since he died in 1897 at the hands of an anarchist.
Striking as it may seem that such a reactionary character should have resorted to the moderate Edmund Burke, in a famous speech on the ‘constitutions and political circumstances of four states different from our race [sic] i.e.: Switzerland, the Anglo-American United States, France and, if only tangentially, England,’67 Cánovas declared his intention to ‘attempt an inquiry into the practical modes of the monarchic-liberal sovereignties’ exertion of [power], taking as the example the Constitution of England.’68 He mentions Burke in this speech, vowing:
Those who did not read the Reflections on the Revolution in France, in the summer of 1790, written by the highly eloquent Burke, ignore the most convincing and severe words ever launched against any political system or any revolution, and this while the French one was yet in its rosiest dawn … At that point England denied, with the most obvious reason, all kind of kinship with the new Revolutionaries, and even the Whigs, in their majority breaking with Fox’s sentimental liberalism, declared in that very year 1793, through Lord Granville [sic], that ‘to defeat the French Revolutionaries at whatever cost and to the last degree is the greatest of duties’.69
In the first part of the twentieth century, a liberal thinker, José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), stands out. Strongly influenced by German philosophy, though not easily categorized, he produced his essays España invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain) and La rebelión de las masas (The revolt of the masses) in 1917, the second of which placed him on the international stage. Andrew Dobson points out similarities between Ortega and Burke:
Ortega expresses the belief that what is important to the present is the foundation provided by the past and that attempts at wholesale destruction of the past will result in distortion of the present. At one point he mentions the ‘conservative sociologist’ (generically speaking) [who] would say that even if institutions do not perform perfectly all the time, they may still have to play a part in the political system – their very existence indicates that they have a part to play. Ortega agrees: ‘It seems that nature’s plan is organised in such a way that we need a certain amount of rigidity and firmness to survive’ (OC10, 390). When contemplating reform, the foundations provided by the past should not be perfunctorily cast aside for it is they that provide the ‘rigidity and firmness’ on which to base the present. Edmund Burke, widely recognised as the ‘father of English conservatism’ provides a classic statement of the claims of the past upon the present:
The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant. All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity; and I hope, nay, I am persuaded, that all those which possibly may be made hereafter will be carefully formed upon analogical precedent, authority, and example. (Burke 1790, 117)
The fear of ‘fabrication’, the favouring of ‘inheritance’ and the organic language are all typical of anti-utopian statements and they are all to be found lurking in Ortega’s political thought. The parallels between Burke and Ortega are highly instructive in that the various aspects of Burke’s thought which find an echo in Ortega point to an enduring conservatism in the latter’s position (Dobson 1989, 73).
Years of political instability were to follow, with a second Republic proclaimed in 1931, and the struggle between the ‘two Spains’ culminating in the 1936–39 Civil War. During the four ensuing decades, General Franco’s regime cast a shadow over the country; only timid attempts at the expression of enlightened thought were made and these were generally crushed. The first full translation of Burke’s Reflections by Tierno Galván, mentioned above, took place in this period.
With the arrival of democracy and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in the figure of King Juan Carlos I, and with the turn of the twenty-first century, a certain rebirth of interest in the works of Edmund Burke can be discerned, as stated above. Furthermore, several scholarly works on him have been published in Spain and Latin America, including an extensive biography by Demetrio Castro Alfín (2006) Burke: circunstancia política y pensamiento (Burke: political circumstance and thought).
Finally, since January 2006, a Burke Foundation has been established in the country’s capital ‘with the aim of becoming an institution of reference on the Spanish cultural scene, with a mission to explore and disseminate the traditional principles of Western political thought, and thus contribute to making society freer, fairer and more virtuous’.70
Notes
1Blanco White was one of a large exodus of liberals at the beginning of the nineteenth century to various parts of Europe, especially London and Paris. A good deal of research on the Spanish exiles abroad is going forward. Their political and literary opinions were often considerably different from many of those cited in this chapter.
2‘Blanco White … un personaje muy admirado en España hoy por su supuesta valentía de espíritu al expatriarse y hacerse anglicano, como si no tuviesen los españoles cosa mejor que hacer, para su progreso político y social, que tornarse anglicanos’ (Gil Novales 1981, 63). Trans. into English of this and the other quotes in this chapter: Lioba Simon Schuhmacher.
3Sociedades de Amigos del País, similar to Political Projectors or political reform societies.
4The court painter Francisco de Goya brilliantly depicted the royals and their entourage, as well as times of turmoil such as the Madrid uprising against the French invaders. The historical novel Goya (1951) by the German-Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger provides a compelling and reliable insight into that period.
5This army was named the ‘Cent Mille Fils de Saint Louis’ (‘los cien mil hijos de San Luis’, in Spanish), and headed by the Bourbon Prince Louis (Louis-Antoine d’Artois), Duke of Angoulême, who, in 1830, became the ephemeral French King Louis XIX.
6The period between 1823 and 1833 is known as the ‘década ominosa’ in Spain.
7The three ‘Guerras carlistas’ (Carlist wars) were: 1833–40; 1846–49; 1872–76.
8Pronunciamiento is a euphemistic term for military uprising.
9A lengthy text by Noelia Adánez González introduces the translation by Mari Luz García González and Luisa Juanatey Dorado; see Adánez González (2008).
10See Burke (1807). Juan de la Dehesa (Avilés, 1779 – Madrid, 1839) studied law at the University of Oviedo and became a professor at the University of Alcalá. Dehesa also translated Jean Louis de Lolme’s work, The constitution of England; or, An account of the English government: in which it is compared, both with the republican form of government, and the other monarchies in England (Lolme 1812), from which several extracts and articles appeared in the Spanish press. Dehesa also produced a kind of handbook: Método práctico simplificado para aprender por si solo en poco tiempo el idioma inglés y traducirlo al español (An applied and simple method of learning English by oneself and translating it into Spanish) (De la Dehesa 1821). He was Minister of Grace and Justice for four months in 1835.
11Menéndez’s work consisting of five volumes appeared between 1883 and 1891. Vol. III on the eighteenth century was first printed in 1890. A much revised edition followed in 1907, and counts as the authoritative version: Madrid: Imprenta de la viuda é hijos de M. Tello, Suc. de Rivadeneyra, Impresor de Cámara de S. M. C. de San Francisco. The quotes in this chapter are drawn from: Fundación Ignacio Larramendi: Biblioteca Virtual Menéndez Pelayo: http://www.larramendi.es/menendezpelayo/i18n/micrositios/inicio.cmd [accessed 24.05.2015]. See bibliography for the digital version of the complete works of Menéndez Pelayo.
12‘trasladada del inglés con mucha fidelidad y acierto’ (Menéndez Pelayo 1907, III, 1:184).
13‘En Longino (quien quiera que él sea) la crítica parece vocación religiosa, y el entusiasmo por los antiguos modelos se convierte en una manera de inspiración poética u oratoria. Pero admirando su libro como monumento literario, hay que confesar que dejó intacta la cuestión estética de lo sublime, y que apenas llegó a vislumbrarla. Y fué [sic] lo peor que su ejemplo y autoridad, confirmada en las escuelas modernas por una traducción más elegante que fiel de Boileau, en tiempos en que el tecnicismo de los retóricos griegos era secreto de pocos, contribuyó a embrollar las ideas sobre este punto, y atrasó y extravió la ciencia, como es de ver en Burke mismo, hasta que la sutil crítica kantiana llegó a penetrar en la esencia de lo que hasta entonces se había tenido por indisoluble enigma’ (Menéndez Pelayo 1907, I, 3:109–10).
14‘Pero el libro que se levanta dominando el conjunto de todos sus trabajos [i.e. de Arteaga], y comunicándoles la unidad de una teoría fuertemente enlazada, es, sin duda, el de las Investigaciones filosóficas sobre la belleza ideal, considerada como objeto de todas las artes de imitación, impresas en Madrid, y en lengua castellana, en 1789, y que, sin contradicción, deben tenerse por el más metódico, completo y científico de los libros de estética pura del siglo XVIII, pudiendo hombrear sin desventaja con cualquier otro de su tiempo, aunque entren en cuenta Burke, Sulzer y Mendelssohn, con la excepción única del Lacconte, que es una obra de genio con todas las superioridades de tal, es decir, con horizontes y perspectivas infinitas, pero que no puede considerarse como una Estética metódica, ni el autor lo pretendía’ (Menéndez Pelayo 1907, III, 1:150–51).
15‘Antes de recorrer tales evidencias en Le Rivoluzioni, veamos la muestra más directa y explícita en La belleza ideal (cap. XI), donde encontramos una presencia testimonial clarísima de la tópica de lo sublime según el modelo burkeano, pese a que Batllori, siguiendo a Menéndez Pelayo, sostenga que ‘al irlandés Edmund Burke no creo lo conociese, pues fuera de no citarlo nunca, cuando pónese Arteaga a razonar sobre lo sublime …, lo hace con plena independencia de su Philosophical Enquiry …’’ (1999–2000, 244).
16Within his Extractos das Obras Políticas e económicas do grande Edmund Burke; see Bibliography.
17‘Nueva edición corregida y revisada con esmero’, as referred to in Gil Novales (1981, 64).
18The manuscript was acquired through Sotheby’s by the Spanish National Library in 1976. See Bibliography.
19See Aguilar Piñal (2008) for an earlier, unpublished attempt.
20Tierno Galván (Madrid, 1918 – Madrid, 1986) was a professor in Sociology and Constitutional Law, an essayist and a politician. A key member of the Spanish Socialists (PSOE), and a highly popular mayor of Madrid (1979–86), Tierno Galván began by writing his doctoral thesis under the supervision of the traditionalist scholar Francisco Elías de Tejada. Also remembered as the ‘old professor’, Tierno Galván was subject to censure under Franco’s regime and was forced into exile in the 1960s.
21As mentioned in Llorens (1967, 133).
22‘…de insertar un papel o libro noticias algunas favorables o adversas de las cosas pertenecientes al reino de Francia’. Madrid, Real Orden, 7 de junio de 1793.
23‘se presta el Burke a Caveda y Tenreiro; el Smith a Pedrayes;’ (Jovellanos 1999, VII, Diario 2º, 485).
24‘me envía la Historia de la persecución del clero de Francia, por el abate barruel [sic], que leeré,’ (Jovellanos 1999, VII, Diario 2º, 492).
25See e.g. Aguilar Piñal (2008) and Clement (1980).
26A succinct and authoritative biography is that of Caso González, written in 1980 and translated into English by M. J. Álvarez Faedo in 2011 on the bicentenary of Jovellanos’s death.
27Having boarded a vessel heading for Cádiz, Jovellanos fell ill and had to disembark in Puerto de Vega, where the vessel sought shelter in a storm. He died a few days later.
28‘Al paso que se estudia la personalidad de Burke … surge inevitablemente por si sola la figura que, hasta cierto punto, resulta su equivalente en España: esta figura es Jovellanos … simplemente señalar que, de modo general, su actitud es en muchos casos singularmente semejante, y que a lo largo de la lectura de las obras de Burke es imposible no recordar frecuentemente muchas páginas de Jovellanos. … la religiosidad de Jovellanos, su conservadurismo liberal, su actitud frente a la Revolución francesa, e incluso su tendencia literaria prerromántica, hacen de él una personalidad parecida a la de Burke. Incluso coinciden en los valores humanos de sinceridad y honradez … veremos en él un hombre cuya personalidad y actitud es en España equivalente a la de Burke en Inglaterra’ (Burke 1989, 31–32).
29See e.g. Varela (1988, 231): ‘El asturiano se opone, como lo había hecho Burke, a las tendencias democráticas que entendían la libertad como autodeterminación permanente’ [The Asturian opposes, as Burke had done, the democratic tendencies that understood liberty as a permanent self-determination].
30‘Mi deseo era preparar por medio de nuestro plan una constitución modelada por la inglesa y mejorada en cuanto se pudiese, y a esto se dirigía la forma que ideamos para la organización de la asamblea’, letter to Lord Holland dated 5 December 1810, Muros de Galicia (Jovellanos 2008, V, Correspondencia 4ª, 423).
31‘su admiración por el sistema político británico, que compartirán todos los liberales moderados, pero sus posiciones no son nunca las de un conservador’ (Carantoña Álvarez 2010, 28).
32‘En cualquier caso, el lugar ideológico más próximo a Jovellanos en principio es esa primera izquierda liberal. Y si somos estrictos con la red de conexiones de ideas efectivas, habría de afirmarse que Jovellanos es un protoliberal’ (Sánchez Corredera 2011, 775)
33‘pensamiento reaccionario’, Gil Novales (1981, 63).
34E.g. ‘Cánovas, who was an admirer of the British philosopher Edmund Burke …’ (Looks 1977, 380).
35‘Cabría por último tener en cuenta la inserción de una corriente de signo conservador, donde se encuentra, cabalmente, la novedad producida como consecuencia de la inserción, mas tardíamente, del pensamiento de Burke, del que fue decidido partidario el venezolano Andrés Bello, a partir de su instalación en Chile’ (Batllori and Hernández Sánchez-Barba 1988, 832).
36‘célebre carta del muy juicioso tanto como elocuentísimo Edmundo Burke, protestante inglés a quien no se tachará tampoco de preocupación, ni de falta de ilustración, ni política’ (Inguanzo y Rivero (1820–23), vol. I, Prólogo (prologue) p. xlvii). He is clearly referring to the Reflections.
37It seems that the source was a French translation rather than the original English. The quoting appears rather inaccurate as well; compare Inguanzo y Rivero (1820–23), vol. I, Prólogo (prologue) pp. xlvii–liv with Burke (1968, 200; 203; 216).
38Inguanzo y Rivero, vol. I, Prólogo (prologue) pp. xiv–xv.
39‘Corroboró esta verdad, tan sencilla e inconcusa si el interés y la maldad no se empeñasen en torcerla, con las elocuentes palabras del protestante Burke contra la desamortización decretada por la Asamblea francesa y, contra todo proyecto de asalariar al clero a tenor de cualquier otro cuerpo de funcionarios civiles.’/ ‘Estas maravillosas palabras de Burke son el tema que Inguanzo ha glosado en sus quince cartas’ (Menéndez Pelayo 1978, 3:474–75).
40‘Un cuerpo numeroso suele creerse impune, y no siempre ligado por la ley del honor, porque cada individuo piensa poder cargar sobre los otros lo odioso de la medida que se adoptó y evitar la pena a la sombra de la muchedumbre, de que hace parte. Esta reflexión del inglés Burk [sic] en su libro sobre la revolución francesa, reflexión que pasó por original, fue hecha dos siglos antes por uno de nuestros políticos del sigo 16. ‘La multitud’, dice Saavedra, ni disimula ni perdona, ni se compadece. Tan animosa es en las resoluciones arriscadas, como en las justas; porque repartido entre muchos el temor, o la culpa, juzga cada uno que ni le ha de tocar el peligro, ni manchar la infamia’ (Anon. 1820, 9).
41The cultural historian Vicente Llorens (1954; 1971) and the author Juan Goytisolo (2010) have done much to raise awareness of this unusual character in Spain.
42See: Eugenia Peroso Arronte, ‘Imaginative Romanticism and the Search for a Transcendental Art’, in: The Reception of S. T. Coleridge in Europe, eds Elinor Shaffer and Edoardo Zuccato (Continuum, 2007), pp. 167–96. Blanco White is discussed pp. 137–48, Coleridge’s letter of praise appears on p. 139, and the poem, ‘Night and Death’, on pp. 139–40.
43Blanco White (1825, v–vi): the work was published under the pseudonym ‘Leocadio Doblado’, although it was disclosed that ‘these letters are in effect the faithful memoirs of a Spanish clergyman … [who] left that beloved country [Spain] whose religious intolerance has embittered his life’.
44‘En 1791 publicó una respuesta a la obra famosa de Mr. Burke sobre la Revolución Francesa. Esta respuesta atrajo la atención del célebre Fox, quien lo convidó con su amistad y trato, y aún el mismo Burke, con la generosidad que se conoce sólo en los países libres, donde todo el mundo está acostumbrado a discusión, y debate de opiniones; se hizo amigo de su joven antagonista’ (Blanco White 1823, 269).
45‘Sabían estos varones venerables que si ha de haber un rey, es para que tenga en sus manos las riendas del gobierno, y como dice el elocuente Burke, “pocos títulos tendrían a su fama de sabiduría, si no hubiesen acertado a asegurar su libertad de otro modo que debilitando a su gobierno en sus operaciones, y haciéndolo precario en su posesión del mando”’ (Blanco White 1811, 34). Original English text in Burke (1968, 115).
46‘El concepto de sublime como lo terrorífico juzgado estéticamente pudo ser tomado por Blanco White tanto de Hume como de Burke o Kant, quienes lo desarrollaron a partir de las consideraciones del primero de ellos acerca del placer estético que produce el género literario tragedia’ (Calvelo 2000, 117).
47‘Llámese libertad o como quiera
Se engaña quien la elojia [sic] o vitupera
i ignora a quien se aplica y en qué caso …’
Footnote: ‘Edmundo [sic] Burke en sus célebres: ‘Reflexiones sobre la Revolución Francesa’ dice: ‘No puedo decidirme a elojiar [sic] ni censurar nada relativo a los sentimientos y negocios humanos, cuando se me presenta el asunto en toda su desnudez, despojado de toda relación, y considerado meramente como una abstracción metafísica. Las circunstancias son las que dan a todo principio político su colorido peculiar y sus efectos característicos. Cuando se me dice que un pueblo ha recobrado su libertad ¿qué motivo tengo para congratularlo? ¿Será porque la libertad, considerada de un modo abstracto, entra en el número de los beneficios que nos dispensa la Providencia? Entonces felicitaré al loco que rompe sus saludables prisiones, y al asesino que se escapa de la cárcel, ya que uno y otro no hacen más que recobrar sus derechos naturales’ (Mora 1840, 154–55; 464).
48‘la fama de Burke os es conocida, de Edmundo Burke, el más ilustre escritor del partido contrario. Cada uno de estos hombres publicó en diferentes épocas un folleto sobre hacienda, y cada uno (tal es la depravación de los poderosos) habló de aquel principio como una regla invariable. Yo por mi parte he publicado dos defensas de la economía, una contra Rose, y otra contra Burke, pero éste, añadiendo la traición y engaño al espíritu de rapiña, mucho tiempo antes que se publicase el folleto del partido contrario, se había constituido en defensor de la Economía, con el único objeto de desacreditarla’ (Bentham 1820, 19). Consejos que dirige a las Cortes y al Pueblo Español Jeremías Bentham – traducidos del inglés por José Joaquín de Mora, (1820), Madrid: por Repullés, twenty-two-page Spanish version offered to the Ateneo of Madrid, with a foreword by the translator José Joaquín de Mora, of Jeremy Bentham’s Four Letters to the Spanish People (1820). Burke is referred to on pp. 10–11.
49‘los ingleses más distinguidos, un Chatam [sic], un Burke y un Fox … tan claros varones’, ‘ardiente amor por la libertad’ (Alcalá Galiano 1820, 1–3).
50‘rasgos tan sublimes como ciertos’, ‘los funestos acontecimientos de su país en el año 1649’, ‘monstruos … Cromwell y Robespierre’, ‘igualmente feroces, hipócritas y malvados’ (Reinoso 1822a, 388–95). Reinoso either overlooked the following passage in the first part of Burke’s Reflections, or it did not figure in his translation: ‘That sermon is in a strain which I believe has not been heard in this kingdom, in any of the pulpits which are tolerated or encouraged in it, since the year 1648, – when a predecessor of Dr. Price, the Reverend Hugh Peters, made the vault of the king’s own chapel at St. James’s ring with the honour and privilege of the Saints, who, with the high praises of God in their mouths, and a two-edged sword in their hands, were to execute judgment on the heathen, and punishments upon the people; to bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron’ (see Burke 1968).
51Fantin-Desodoards draws a parallel between Cromwell on the one hand and Robespierre and Marat on the other, and firmly opposes the idea of equality or ‘levelling’.
52See Anon. (1822). It is noteworthy that Burke’s text is taken (and translated into Spanish) from the French Declaration des Droits.
53‘El célebre Edmund Burke no necesita nuestros elogios para su desagravio: bástele su nombre para su mejor apología. Político profundo, moralista insigne, adornado de conocimientos y de virtudes, es respetado en Inglaterra como ornamento de su patria, y sus obras corren en manos de todos con aplauso poco común’ (Reinoso 1822b). This is an editorial reply of 15 November 1822 to the reactions to ‘Opinión de un escritor célebre acerca de Rousseau’ (22 September 1822) in Reinoso’s Cádiz newspaper La Constitución y las Leyes (The constitution and the laws), 59 (15 November), pp. 652–53.
54‘En el tempranísimo anchuroso cauce de la reacción española, junto a Burke y Barruel se integran otras muchas corrientes, llegando a constituirse una masa de información más emotiva que racional. En estas circunstancias el nombre mismo de Burke, ya innecesario como alegato, acaso en España se va olvidando … pero también es posible pensar en ese olvido, esa falta de interés, que la ausencia de edición española vendría a confirmar’ (Gil Novales 1981, 75).
55The story, referred to by Gil Novales (1981, 75), which he learnt from Lucienne Domergue, is worth telling: there is a dossier (Leg. 3.234 de Estado) in the Spanish National Historical Archive (Archivo Histórico Nacional) containing eight documents from 1793, which include Agustín de los Arcos’s offer to undertake a translation of Burke’s Reflections from French into Spanish, even though he was aware of the order not to mention the French Revolution. Prime Minister Godoy let him proceed. Upon completing the translation in July 1793, the translator asked for a reference to obtain a canonry at the Cathedral of Zamora; he obtained it, yet the printing of the translation was left for ‘a better occasion’. A few months later, the new canon was chased out of his home by the chief magistrate who thought he was entitled to dwell there. What is more, he looked at all de los Arcos’s papers, evidently coming across the manuscript translation of the Reflections. Without delay, the magistrate reported this to the authorities, yet the canon was freed from the magistrate’s zest by an order from the Palace dated 1 January 1794.
56‘… se le haya considerado un tory … y un reaccionario, la mayor parte del tiempo, en Europa continental. La insistencia en esta última categorización revela de hecho cual puede ser la causa última de esta en principio inexplicable inhibición en la divulgación en castellano de los escritos políticos de Edmund Burke’ (Adánez González 2008, 14).
57The main source of information contained in the following passages is Gil Novales (2011), complemented by others as specified.
58‘Llegó el año 1790 en que ya la revolución hacía grandes estragos en Francia, y amenazaba á nuestro reino. El Sr. Amát, ayudado de su hermano D. Antonio que poseía con perfección la lengua inglesa, hizo un extracto ó compendio de la obra, que entonces acababa de publicar el juicioso inglés Edmundo Burke, titulada: Reflexiones sobre la revolución francesa. Sacáronse luego en Barcelona y Tarragona varias copias de dicho compendio; pasaron algunas á Madrid, en donde corrió después impreso sin nombre de traductor, ni de imprenta, lugar y año. El Sr. Amát nunca juzgó deber condescender á las instancias que le hicieron muchos amigos para que le publicase. Solía responder que necesitaba retocarse mucho’ (Torres Amat 1835, 57).
59The so-called ‘Puppet king’, also nicknamed ‘Pepe botella’ (‘the bottle-Joe’) due to his fondness for drink.
60The Memoria is most probably by Llorente (1812).
61‘Los nombres de Milton, Burke y Macpherson completan las fuentes literarias de este poeta clérigo’ (Armas Ayala 1963, 304); ‘Burke (Investigaciones filosóficas sobre el origen del gusto), en 1850, fue un preceptista muy leído por don Graciliano y por los románticos españolistas’ (n. 14).
62‘Una filosofía – el deísmo – incitaba a estos ruidosos sentimentales con textos de Pope, de Bolingbroke, de Shaftesbury, defensores de la religión natural. Los escritores españoles, necesitados de esta nueva orientación filosófica, satisfacían sus aspiraciones gracias a los traductores o a los intérpretes franceses, y son muy raros los poetas capaces de leer los textos en su lengua original. Graciliano Afonso, traductor de Pope y de Burke, no necesitó de textos franceses para fortalecer su sentimentalismo; los mismos maestros ingleses fueron sus inspiradores’ (Armas Ayala 1963, 324).
63He was nicknamed ‘Doña Rosita la pastelera’, i.e. belittled as ‘Mrs. Rosie, the pastry cook’.
64‘Cuando estuve en Inglaterra… – continuó el viejo Malespina –, ya sabe usted que el Gobierno inglés me mandó llamar para perfeccionar la Artillería de aquel país…; Todos los días comía con Pitt, con Burke, con Lord North, con el general Cornwallis y otros personajes importantes que me llamaban el chistoso español’ (Pérez Galdós 1995, 53).
65At thirty-two, he became a member of the Academy of History following the publication of his Historia de la decadencia de España desde el advenimiento de Felipe III al trono hasta la muerte de Carlos II (1854) (History of the decline of Spain).
66The third and final of the ‘Guerras carlistas’ (Carlist wars) was from 1872 to 1876.
67‘se refiera tan solo a las Constituciones y a las circunstancias políticas de cuatro Estados que no son de nuestra raza… a saber: Suiza, los Estados Unidos anglo-norteamericanos, Francia, y, aunque de paso, Inglaterra’ (Cánovas del Castillo 1889, 10–11).
68‘a ser mi intento inquirir los modos prácticos de ejercer las soberanías monárquico-liberales, tomando por dechado entonces la Constitución de Inglaterra’ (Cánovas del Castillo 1889, 12).
69‘Quien no haya leído las Consideraciones sobre la Revolución francesa, en el verano de 1790 escritas por el elocuentísimo Burke, desconoce las más convencidas y severas palabras que contra ningún sistema político ni contra revolución alguna se hayan lanzado jamás, y eso que la de Francia estaba en sus más sonrosados albores. … … Entonces Inglaterra negó con razón más clara todo género de parentesco con los revolucionarios nuevos, y rompiendo los mismos whigs, en su mayoría, con el liberalismo sentimental de Fox, declararon en el propio año de 1793, por órgano de Lord Granville, que ‘el combatir a todo trance y hasta el último extremo a la Francia revolucionaria “era el más grande de los deberes”’ (Cánovas del Castillo 1889, 42–43).
70‘La Fundación BURKE nace en enero de 2006 con el propósito de convertirse en una institución de referencia en el panorama cultural español, con la misión de profundizar y difundir los principios tradicionales del pensamiento político occidental, y de este modo contribuir a una sociedad más libre, justa y virtuosa’ (Fundación Burke, 2008).