Spain: A Unique History (25 page)

Here the vexed issue of Reform and Counter-Reform in religion remains important. The Protestant revolt destroyed much of traditional religious culture in northern Europe, and intensified internal and external conflict. It also stimulated new energies of individual enterprise, political reform, and critical and scientific thinking that opened the way, for better or worse, to modern culture, politics, and capitalist prosperity. The point is not that much of this could not develop under Catholicism, for indeed the roots of all of it developed in traditional Catholic culture, and, later, Catholic Belgium would modernize and industrialize almost as rapidly as England. In the face of the Reformation, however, Catholic society and culture became increasingly reactive and defensive, and were slower to adapt and adjust, so that from the seventeenth century it was the Protestant countries who would lead the way.
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It must be recognized that the standard view of the Spanish decline — shared in varying degrees by the classic Black Legend and by many modern Spanish historians and Hispanists — is a kind of caricature that posits an ideal type and is suggestive only of fundamental tendencies. Spanish moralists themselves began to present what seemed to them negative features of the "Spanish type" even before the close of the sixteenth century. The best recent summary of this approach has been presented in Bartolomé Bennassar,
L'homme espagnol: Attitudes et mentalités du XVIe au XIXme siècle
(1975), a book about "national character."
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It revolved around such issues as the mania for conspicuous consumption (particularly on clothing and spectacle, not on food, drink, and housing), the attitudes toward work, social status, and lineage, the exaggerated stress on honor to the exclusion of morality, and less and less concern for education and intellectual activity. Such issues would be commented on ad infinitum during the three centuries that followed. These were serious problems and not merely inventions of the enemies of Spain, but they do not constitute a fully accurate picture of Spanish society in the seventeenth century.

Even at the trough of the decline, as Ruth MacKay has recently reminded us, most Spaniards continued to work normally at their professions.
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She and others have pointed out that it is a mistake to read the novel
Lazarillo de Tormes
as if it were an empirical sociological study. Amid the scramble for status and conspicuous consumption, ordinary artisans managed to preserve a different sense of honor of their own, even as it attached to humble work, and sometimes in written statements stressed the importance of their contribution to "la república," not at all in the sense of a new political system but in the original meaning of
res publica -
the common weal. Moreover, that Spanish society did not merely constitute some sort of "pathological" Counter-Reformation society compared with northwest Europe is further indicated by the recent research on crime by Tomás Mantecón, which shows that, despite the importance of crime and banditry in the images of Spain in decline, the two largest cities, Madrid and Seville, seem to have produced no more or even slightly less violence than their northwest European counterparts, while indices of violence further declined in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in a manner congruent with the data from northwestern Europe.
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Some aspects of society and culture may be described in conventional terms as "decadent" by the later seventeenth century, but if one employs such terminology it is important to stress that Spanish society never experienced the full form of decadence in which it lost faith in or subverted its own values. The basic culture, religion, and system of values persisted throughout the entire seventeenth-century decline and remained fully intact at the time of the transition to the new dynasty. The main "arbitrista" (reformist) literature covered the half-century 1590-1640, when it was assumed that the ills analyzed could be corrected. From about 1640 the critical literature began to die away, perhaps because by that time the decline was pronounced and obvious, and the main question now seemed to be self-affirmation and self-confidence. During the trough of the decline, Spanish writing about Spain remained remarkably positive. Comparisons with the decline of Rome were almost universally rejected, though on the grounds that the Spanish monarchy was more legitimate and less tyrannical than Rome, and could not be made subject to comparison, for there had been none other so thoroughly dedicated to and identified with Catholicism, so that it would never be merely abandoned by God.
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Providentialism is of course not the best basis for political and economic analysis.

Though economic conditions deteriorated greatly, at no time was there any question of a social or psychological implosion. Not even the humblest sector of society, whether those labeled as "pobres de solemnidad" or mere beggars, was cowed and cringing, or lost a sense of self-worth. Throughout the century foreign visitors continued to complain that ordinary Spaniards violated the class-based sumptuary laws more than in any other country, and continued to dress as they pleased, while the same visitors also denounced what they called the insolence and rudeness of the lower classes. Even beggars, when receiving alms, might insist that the almsgiver remove his hat, and also address them as "señor." To visitors, of course, this represented a Spanish grotesquerie, further examples of the dysfunctional. In some sense that might be the case, but it was not indicative of any decline in social norms.

Finally, Spain must be compared with Europe as a whole, not just with England and Holland. The historian finds that during the seventeenth century, eastern Europe not merely suffered a decline somewhat equivalent to that of Spain but underwent much worse social regression with the expansion of serfdom. There was not remotely any equivalent to that in Spain. Military hegemony disappeared forever, but Spanish society itself did not regress so much as did that of much of eastern Europe. If it began to lose ground decisively to the dynamic, modernizing northwest, it should be seen as part of a category of relatively stagnant southern Europe during that era, a category more of declining intermediacy than of the worst regression.

The recovery in fact began in the 1680s, in the midst of the reign of Carlos II "el Hechizado" (Charles II the Bewitched) and in Catalonia even earlier, during the 1660s. Population decline began to level off, though full demographic recovery did not occur until the 1720s and 1730s. The reformers who referred to themselves as "renovatores" were active from the beginning of the reign of Carlos II.
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The Real y General Junta de Comercio was created in 1679 to stimulate new enterprise and enjoyed at least a limited success. A small number of noblemen had never ceased to engage in a variety of practical enterprises, and a decree of 1682 specifically authorized their involvement with textile factories so long as they did not work with their hands.

The Bourbon dynasty of the eighteenth century then undertook the project of reform that its predecessor had been unable to carry out. There is no question concerning the reformist bent of the "Siglo de las Luces" (Century of the Enlightened), but it probably amounted to a difference in degree rather than a difference in principle. Reevaluation of the eighteenth century began with Richard Herr's
The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain
(1958), but what actually took place was more a positive evolution than a revolution.

With the rise of peripheral nationalism in democratic Spain, much attention has been given to the unification and centralization of law and institutions, as the separate constitutional structures of the Corona de Aragón (with the exception of certain law codes) were eliminated by the new dynasty.
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This, however, was obviously not the beginning of a broader government of Spain, although it marked a major step forward toward unification. There has been a tendency, particularly on the part of Catalan historians, to exaggerate the degree of change. At the beginning of his reign, Felipe V had ratified all the particularist institutions and fueros of the northeastern regions. The elimination of Aragonese institutions was a result of the subsequent struggle by dominant sectors of the latter against the new dynasty. Only in Valencia were all the regional structures abrogated completely, while Mallorca retained most of its institutions. Catalonia and Aragon lost their abusive criminal law but kept a portion of their legal systems. Save for the loss of criminal jurisdiction, seigneurial domain remained unaltered. Most notably, the new dynasty failed to unify the Spanish systems of taxation and military recruitment, which remained quite compartmentalized. Though tax quotas were at first raised for the former Aragonese principalities, they subsequently remained flat, and by the end of the century these regions were once more paying extremely low taxes, as did the Basques and Navarrese throughout history. Similarly, equal terms of military recruitment were never instituted, so that the Spanish army of the period was raised almost exclusively in Castile.

Bourbon reformism was always a halfway house. The various Spanish Academies were created and by 1785 there would be a common Spanish flag for the first time, while the king of Prussia gave as a gift the music for what became the "Marcha Real Granadera," later looked on as Spain's first national anthem. The social and economic effects of the legal, commercial, and fiscal reforms of the new dynasty were beneficial, for they ended certain residues of feudalism and more often than not improved the situation of the peasantry. Trade was much freer across the country, and Spanish America was later opened directly to the entire Spanish economy for the first time. Catalonia, which lost most of its separate institutions, was also the region to benefit most in economic terms.

The eighteenth century was more a time of continuity than of change, though there was more than a little change. Some transformation took place, but it was not drastic. The introduction of a new dynasty, the loss of the European dynastic empire, and the change in Spain's international relations opened the country a good deal more than before, and the new leadership introduced pronounced government reforms as well as new ideas. Spanish history had always lived under the burden of major projects: Reconquest and expansion, defense and propagation of the faith, the integrity of the dynastic empire and of Europe. The big difference in the eighteenth century, as J. Marías says, was that Spain then became "a project of herself," the beginning of what much later would be termed "España como problema."
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For the first time, the maladies of Spain — something that seventeenth-century government had never been willing fully to recognize — became a central issue, sometimes the key issue, though this approach also implied that there was something wrong about the way Spanish culture, society, and institutions had developed.

Well before the close of the seventeenth century, the primary foreign stereotype of the Black Legend — the Spaniard as violent and sadistic fiend, a creature of moral monstrosity — had given way to Stereotype 2, the Spaniard as proud, pompous, vainglorious, and invincibly indolent, incapable of working or studying. The second stereotype continued its triumphant advance through the eighteenth century, reaching its climax in the famous denunciation of Spain's total lack of modern accomplishment by Nicolas Masson de Morvillers in the
Encyclopédie méthodique
of 1782.

That raised the question of Spain's participation in the Enlightenment, answered in the affirmative by Herr and by Jean Sarrailh.
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The main foreign influences were from France and Italy (Carlos III having been king of Naples for twenty-five years before coming to the Spanish throne). Spanish writers added little to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the main Spanish thinkers dedicating themselves in pragmatic terms more to application than to doctrine. One advantage of this approach was that the Enlightenment in Spain was much less prone to radicalism and exaggeration than, for example, in France. Though, as elsewhere, it may have sometimes gone to excess in stereotyping and rejecting some aspects of traditional society, in general in Spain it made more sense and was more practical. Spain's leading philosopher of reform, the long-lived Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijóo, stood as one of the most reasonable and constructive figures of Catholic Enlightenment in Europe.
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Major aspects of the Enlightenment in Spain seemed almost closer to the "empirical" Enlightenment in England, Scotland, and the United States than to the abstract/ radical "ideological" Enlightenment in France, though from the 1790s on small sectors of the intelligentsia began to veer sharply toward the latter, leading to manifold pathologies in nineteenth and twentieth-century Spain.
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The "short eighteenth century" was, at least in relative terms, Spain's most peaceful century, if it is dated from the end of the Succession War in 1714 to the beginning of the wars of the French Revolution in 1793, which effectively put an end to its relative progress and prosperity. Peace did not arrive immediately, for the first years after 1714 were devoted to further military enterprises to regain dynastic possessions in Italy, but after that military action became infrequent, at least until the reign of Carlos III. The navy was rebuilt, becoming by the latter part of the century the third largest in the world. The army was reorganized on the French model, but by comparison never developed much strength, for much of the conflict during this era was maritime. During the greater part of the century, Spain's most consequential military action was the assistance provided to the North American colonists in the first modern "national liberation war." This support was more extensive both militarily and financially than has been appreciated, and came at a militarily and psychologically decisive moment when Great Britain could not afford to face further enemies, particularly one with a large fleet.
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The ministers of Carlos III were sufficiently astute to realize that in helping the dynamic North American colonies gain independence, they ran a major risk of creating a serious competitor for the Spanish world in the Western Hemisphere, but they could not resist the temptation to weaken a Britain that only a few years earlier had become hegemonic.
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