5

This ends the story of disentail under Carlos IV. It was undertaken to save the credit of the monarchy and pay off the royal debts. The most tragic aspect of the undertaking, from the point of view of the king and his advisers at least, is that it did not achieve either aim. The vales, as was seen, dropped again on the market after the renewal of the war between Britain and France in 1803 and oscillated below one-half their face value most of the time after 1804. The king was powerless to infuse faith in them by cédulas, decrees, and pragmatic sanctions, for the public discounted official measures to guarantee them. The record of their exchange rate (Figure 6.1) shows that these measures hardly affected their discount. What did affect it was the international situation. Declarations of war and naval defeats produced serious declines; with rumors and treaties of peace their quotation rose sharply. The public reacted as if it trusted the good faith of the king's government but believed it powerless to resist international developments.

More serious for the future was the fact that the government was unable to take advantage of the massive sale of ecclesiastical properties to replace the debt in vales reales with one paying lower interest, as it had intended. Of the 2,315 million vales placed in circulation after 1780, 121 million were redeemed before 1800 and 300 million from 1800 to 1804.^[75] Of these redemptions, 340 million were all that came from the proceeds of the disentail. The remainder of the 1,653 million deposited in the Amortization and Consolidation Funds from sales and redeemed censos constituted a new debt. In the words of the Spanish officials who replied to Napoleon's questions: "This [Consolidation] Fund has come to the aid of the state in its difficulties with the capital produced by the various

[74] Campoy, Pólitica fiscal, 228–43, finds 204 sales of property of capellanías under the breve of 1806 in a portion of the province of Toledo between June 1807 and November 1808 for a total of 1.6 million reales. He does not date them more precisely, but most would have been made too late to appear in the deeds of deposit I reviewed. This discovery suggests that my estimate of 13 million sold under the breve before April 1808 may be low, but the order of magnitude should be correct.

[75] The total for vales reales issued includes 99 million for the Canals of Aragon and Tauste. See Appendix C.

Figure 6.1
Exchange Rate of Vales Reales Against Hard Currency
SOURCE : Appendix D.
NOTE : From July 1799 until April 1800, the discount of
vales reales was illegal. The loss of nearly three-fourths
of face value during this period ( x  on the graph) is reported
in Pragmática sanción, 30 Aug. 1800, AHN, CCR, no. 1322.

sales of properties that have been carried out, and for this reason it has not been able to redeem the corresponding number of vales."^[76]

This was not all the fiscal tragedy. When the books were closed on the reign of Carlos IV, there was another debt that was not formally recognized, the arrears in the current accounts. After 1806 the interest on the vales was not paid on time. In 1808 the crown owed 60 million, almost a whole year's interest.^[77] The fund had also fallen behind on the interest of the deeds of deposit in favor of the obras pías and other religious institutions. The king had sold their properties, and now he was not paying the corresponding subsidy, despite his solemn pledges and his words about "the advantages . . . for the obras pías themselves, which, freed from the uncertainty, delays, and risks in the administration [of their properties] have obtained a more expedient fulfillment of their objectives."^[78]

No one should have been surprised. The crown was in arrears in all its accounts. The amount varied from one to another, but in all it approached a year. Perhaps the most bitter was the situation of the royal officials, who received their salaries months behind schedule. The servants of the royal household earned 15 million a year, in April 1808 they were owed almost 7 million; the employees of hacienda earned 47 million and were owed 22 million, and so on for the other branches. The treasury paid 5.9 million a year in retirement income and widows' pensions; the arrears were 5.8 million.^[79] The archives have by chance preserved an anguished note that reflects the personal suffering of the public servants. It was written by a secretary of the royal palace, José Pizarro, to the first secretary of state on 3 July 1808, when Spain was already torn by the rising against Napoleon. The author points out that the treasury owes him sums going back five or six years, that his salary is more in arrears than that of the other functionaries, and that the accounts of the office of the secretary of the Council of State for the last six months of 1807 are still not liquidated. To pay the bills of the office, he has had to borrow from the doorman, although the latter has "only a pittance of a salary"!^[80]

The financial plight of the crown reflected all the myriad disasters of the reign of Carlos IV: the wars with France and Britain, the earth-

[76] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 41, f. 19v.

[77] Ibid., pièce 9, f. 2r.

[78] In the decree on desamortización in America, 28 Nov. 1804, AHN, Hac., libro 6012.

[79] ANP, AF IV, 1603 , 2 : 119.

[80] Letter in AHN, Estado, legajo 882.

quakes, epidemics, and famines. These dire events had worked steadily to awaken the political awareness of Spaniards. Many aristocrats had been upset by the favors and titles bestowed on the royal protégé, Manuel Godoy, who since 1795 was known grandiloquently as the Prince of the Peace. They had encouraged rumors that Godoy owed his place to an adulterous relationship with the queen, María Luisa. As years went by, more and more people were prepared to blame Godoy for the disasters of the country and to believe that he was plotting with the queen to place himself on the throne with her at his side. Carlos IV was in poor health, demoralized by the constant blows to his monarchy, and people feared that Godoy and María Luisa would connive to set aside Fernando, heir to the throne, after his father's death. Godoy, to his misfortune, encouraged resentment by his displays of wealth and grants of favors to his friends and relatives. The public, powerless to understand why the Spanish state was beset by continual and frightening torments, came to see in him not just a vain and avaricious man but almost a hellish monster, prime cause of their miseries.^[81]

The disentail had angered many clerics, and they had worked on the religious feelings of their flocks. Godoy offered them a convincing villain to blame for it. Not the disasters of the state but his insatiable greed explained the desire to despoil the church.^[82] Godoy attributed his own unpopularity largely to the machinations of the mass of clerics, who proclaimed that Fernando, upon his accession, would put an immediate end to the sale of ecclesiastical properties. "What could be my fate, when I had against me, with very few exceptions, the majority, the vast numbers of priests and monks, in so many ways lords of consciences and of opinion, so powerful among the common people, where so many lived happily on their meager crumbs."^[83]

The arrival of French troops in the winter of 1807–8 further increased tensions and suspicion. Officially they came as friends to help defend Spain in its war against Britain and to support a Spanish army drawn up to attack Portugal. The French and Spanish forces invaded Portugal, whose rulers hastily fled to Brazil, ending the war. During the winter the forces of France and Spain occupied that country without op-

[81] The full story of the myth of the diabolical Godoy is told in Herr, "Good, Evil, and Spain's Rising."

[82] Reguera Valdelomar, Peticiones, 80. Written to seek restoration of the properties to their former owners, this work specifically states that the disentail was not used for the urgent needs of the crown but to sustain "the unbridled whims of one [of Spain's 'two tyrants,' that is, the queen] and the insatiable greed of the other [Godoy]."

[83] Godoy, Memorias 2 : 234.

position, yet French armies inexplicably continued to cross the Pyrenees and took possession of various cities in northern Spain. When French units advanced on Madrid in March, Godoy, increasingly suspicious of Napoleon's real objectives, urged King Carlos to withdraw to a safe distance in Andalusia. The king ordered the Spanish garrison out of Madrid to his residence in Aranjuez, where the court was wintering as usual. Many people of Madrid suspected a trap and feared for the safety of Fernando. Some followed the garrison out of the city, and in the early hours of 18 March 1808 a crowd demonstrated outside the royal palace of Aranjuez and attacked the nearby residence of Godoy. After more than a day, it discovered the hapless Prince of the Peace hiding in his garret, beat him brutally, and put him under arrest. Terrified and demoralized, Carlos IV abdicated in favor of Fernando, who alone had the charisma to disband the mobs and restore royal authority.^[84]

The tumultuous accession of Fernando VII and the threatened descent of Spain into anarchy inspired Napoleon to substitute his brother Joseph on its throne. He feared the complete fiscal collapse of an ally that, he firmly believed, had vast wealth that its incompetent rulers lacked the ability to tap.^[85] It was no whim that led him at this moment to demand the detailed reports on the Spanish finances that are now housed in the National Archives in Paris and have made possible our reconstruction of the fiscal picture of the reign of Carlos IV. Napoleon's aggression began five years of violent conflict, known to Spaniards as the War of Independence. Accompanied by the meeting of the Cortes at Cádiz in 1810, which restructured Spain into a parliamentary monarchy with a written constitution, the war marked the end of the old regime in Spain.

The sale of church properties was, next to the conflicts with Great Britain, the most momentous development of the reign of Carlos IV. It was both a symptom and a cause of the decay of the absolute monarchy. The royal counselors conceived it as a way to save the credit of the crown. This it could not do, for in the era of Napoleon's wars Spain's rulers had to grasp desperately at every available resource to try to preserve its status as a great power, and with it the empire and the well-being of its people. The capital raised from church properties flowed down the maelstrom. Disentail maintained Spain's freedom of action for a while, but it served also to discredit Spain's rulers, both Godoy, abomi-

[84] The fullest account of these events is in Martí Gilabert, Motín.

[85] Napoleon's irrational belief in Spain's wealth is one of the main points of Fugier, Napoléon et l'Espagne.

nated as the scheming tyrant, and Carlos IV, contemned as his ineffectual dupe.

Perhaps more permanent in its effects was the blow desamortización dealt to the right of the entail of property, the traditional defense of the privileged orders on which the monarchy rested, the nobility and the clergy. Of course, in his decrees the king never questioned the right of entail, just as he sought to recognize the proper legal rights of the privileged orders; he proposed only to change the nature of the entailed property from real estate to interest-bearing royal obligations. But, as a violent critic of the desamortización wrote after the accession of Fernando VII, "the least cautious man would not place the capital of a thousand reales in them [royal notes] with the confident hope of recovering it, or even of collecting the interest for the first year."^[86] Religious and charitable institutions suffered the most from the failure of the crown to live up to its obligations, but so did the owners of family estates who sold their entailed properties. The precedent of the liquidation of the real property of manos muertas and mayorazgos now existed to guide future Spanish legislators, who were to be faced continuously with an unmanageable national debt.

Yet the idea of disentail anteceded the fiscal crisis imposed by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The reformers of Carlos III had conceived it as a way to regenerate the Spanish countryside, to create a flourishing class of farmers and strengthen the national economy. The sale of church properties to the highest bidder was a far cry from Olavide's call for the free distribution of vacant lands to indigent peasants and laborers, but its authors also counted on it to improve the common welfare. They were guided by the new political economy that, in the elegant language of Jovellanos, argued that free property would sooner or later end up in the form and hands that would produce the most, that is, they thought, in the hands of independent small farmers.

Despite the demands of war, reform remained an objective of the advisers of Carlos IV almost to the end. The measures adopted to raise money and to guarantee new loans and issues of vales reales regularly involved levies on the privileged orders. An obvious reason, of course, was that here was where the money was, and expediency alone can explain the resort to increased duties on imports and exports. But the royal ministers were guided by more than mere expediency. Not until 1805, after two years of disastrous harvests and famine, with America

[86] Reguera Valdelomar, Peticiones, 23.

once again cut off by British fleets and Napoleon importuning their treasure, did they abandon the policy of moving from regressive to progressive taxes with the imposts on wine and untithed harvests. Disentail was not a tax, yet it offered a way to tap the savings of all classes without hurting their income. At the same time, as its advocates regularly pointed out, alienation of ecclesiastical property would put it in the hands of taxpayers and thus immediately increase royal revenues. The disentail of Carlos IV must be understood not only as a wartime measure but as part of a broad plan for economic reform.

Whatever the ideology of the royal counselors, it was utopian to think that the national calamities would not affect peasants as well as lords. In 1803 the king permitted buyers of disentailed land to raise the rent or evict the tenants, contrary to existing laws.^[87] The measure came right out of Jovellanos, who denounced rent control as an "aberration of reason and zeal," but peasants did not read Jovellanos, and coming on top of the first disastrous harvest, the measure could deal many of them a cruel blow.

Other blows were more direct. Ever since the Middle Ages, the crown and the church had worked out a system to exploit the harvests for their own support. Unlike many of the royal taxes, which had long ago been compounded (encabezado) with the municipal governments at fixed rates that no longer reflected the current inflated price level, the tithes, first fruits, and similar charges on the agricultural producers were effectively geared to take immediate advantage of any change in output or prices. In this they partook of a major characteristic of tariffs on external trade, which made new duties such a tempting expedient to relieve fiscal needs, but an increase in tithes posed no threat to economic activity as higher duties might well do. The tercias reales and excusado had long provided the king with his share of the tithes, the machinery for collection was maintained well oiled, and his subjects were indoctrinated with the belief that the Lord above had ordained these levies.

But the system had its loopholes, and the exigencies of the treasury inspired the royal advisers to plug them. In 1796 the collection of tithes was instituted on harvests previously exempt because grown on lands belonging to privileged religious bodies, and the decree gave the king his customary two-ninths of the proceeds.^[88] The owners, presumably, would

[87] RC, 15 Sept. 1803, AHN, Hac., libro 8055, no. 6476. See above, Chapter 4, section 2.

[88] RC, 8 June 1796, AHN, Hac., libro 8048, no. 5313. See above, Chapter 3, section 1.

be the ones to suffer, since they had been taking advantage of the exemption in the level of the rent they collected, but peasants too would inevitably be hurt. The tax of 1805 on untithed harvests struck at another loophole, this time as an undisguised levy on the producers, for no new tithe was involved. The clergy could use both innovations to rouse the resentment of the peasants against Madrid, and Godoy obviously thought that many did.

The unsuccessful reforms of Louis XVI in the 1780s, Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out long ago, showed the common people of France how much the privileges of the nobility were costing them and undermined the stability of the regime, preparing the way for the French holocaust.^[89] Reform in Spain at the end of the old regime had much the same effect. How revolutionary Carlos IV's counselors were can be appreciated by comparing their achievements with the failure of Louis XVI to persuade the privileged orders of France to relieve the desperate straits of his treasury. The untoward sequel to the righteous obstinacy of the French aristocrats was not lost on the king, lords, and prelates south of the border. The affected sectors grumbled at Carlos IV's impositions and dragged their feet, but they did not resist openly. They did, however, unburden their anger in a campaign to discredit the Prince of the Peace with Spaniards of all ranks. Disaffection had become so universal that the privileged classes, "lords of consciences and opinion," as Godoy termed them, had the common people in their hands. The result was the rising at Aranjuez and the unbounded celebration that swept Spain at the news of the fall of Godoy and advent of Fernando VII, only to turn to unrestrained anger when Napoleon hoodwinked the innocent young king and foisted his own brother on Spain. Desamortización thus played a key role in the fall of the absolute monarchy.

Perhaps, however, as its authors expected, desamortización prepared a better future for the people. To begin to assess whether this was in fact the case, we must turn from the thoughts and acts of counselors and kings to the lives of the ordinary men who worked the land in the towns and villages or exploited it by the sweat of others, from Olavide and Jovellanos, Soler and Carlos IV, to the labrador Francisco González and the rentero Francisco García Serrano, the capellán don Alonso Molina de la Zerda and the three distinguished spinsters doña Margarita, doña Inés, and doña María Josefa Montilla y Zevallos.

[89] Tocqueville, Old Regime, 180–203 (book 3, chaps. 5–7).