PART I—
THE MONARCHY
On a mid-December morning in 1800, don Martín Sánchez Tomé, a notary of his majesty in the city of Salamanca, rode north out the Zamora gate, bearing a written order issued by don Manuel Ortiz Pinedo, alcalde mayor of the city. With him was a constable (alguacil ordinario ), to provide him aid if needed. The road toward Zamora took them over a slight rise, from which they could observe a gently rolling countryside dotted with small villages but otherwise virtually unobstructed as far as the eye could see. The plain of La Armuña was one of the richest grain regions of the Castilian meseta, and in spring half the land would be tilled and the wheat would grow up lush and green. But now in the wintery light the scene was not encouraging to the two men, for all the fields were lying fallow and the rich, red earth was showing through its covering of stubble and weeds. Oxen, mules, donkeys, and sheep pastured here and there, kept from wandering by their herdsmen.
After the pair had traveled some two leagues along the road, they turned off toward one of the smaller villages. It sat atop a low rise, a covey of mean houses huddled under the protective presence of their firm granite church. La Mata de Armuña, despite its small size, was a lugar, with its own officials; two of them, the "petty mayor" (alcalde pedáneo ) and the keeper of the records (fiel de fechos ), were expecting the visitors. With them was one of the leading figures of the community, a forceful man along in years named Francisco González.
Once the order of the alcalde mayor had been presented and read, the men set off into the fields, followed by a group of curious villagers of all
ages, eager to witness a scene that had been enacted several times since the previous summer but that still broke their monotony with the mystique of royal agents from the provincial capital. The group stopped beside one of the hundreds of small plots into which the open fields around the village were divided. The notary read from the order a description of the plot, two acres (huebras ) more or less, bordered on the east by the road from Salamanca to the village of Narros, on the north and west by lands of the hospital of Salamanca, and on the south by a field of the village church. The plot in question was now to change hands, and the order instructed the notary to deliver it to its new owners. The tenants, the document stated, would have to vacate it in three days or, if allowed to remain, must pay their rent to the new owners from the date of transfer.
The order was the result of an event that had taken place in Salamanca on the previous Sunday. At eleven o'clock that morning in the hall of the royal jail of Salamanca, "the usual place for such acts," the alcalde mayor don Manuel Ortiz had met with the notary don Martín Sánchez Tomé and an alguacil to complete the auction of seven plots of arable land in the towns of La Mata and Narros belonging to a confraternity in Salamanca, pursuant to recent royal orders to sell the properties of such religious foundations to the highest bidder and deposit the resulting capital in the Royal Amortization Fund. Don Manuel ordered the public crier, who acted as auctioneer, to announce the last written offer for the plots and open the final bidding. The crier did as told, in a voice that rang through the hall, saying, "The bid has been raised to eleven thousand eight hundred eight reales. Match this last bid! . . . I perceive the closing, soon! . . . Soon!" He waited a few minutes, then intoned his cry again, and once more. No one in the audience responded to his encouragement. One final time the alcalde mayor ordered the crier to announce the auction, to no avail. After a suitable delay, he instructed the crier to award the sale to the authors of the previous bid, wishing them "Good fortune!" (
Sánchez Tomé took Francisco González by the hand, "in his name and that of his partner Marcos González," and led him into the plot. Francisco walked around its boundaries, kicked a few clods, ordered everyone out of it, "and took several other actions as evidence of the ownership that he assumed . . . quietly and peacefully without opposi-
tion from anyone." The traditional Castilian rite for the transfer of real property had now been performed. The notary said that it applied "in voice and name" to the other six plots included in the sale; even had the purchasers wished, the midwinter light would not have lasted for a visit to all of them. Before leaving, Sánchez Tomé recorded the names of various witnesses, including the keeper of the village records, a local linen weaver, "and many other persons who attended this ceremony."[1]
This scene is representative of thousands of others enacted throughout Spain in the last decade of the old regime. The government of Carlos IV, crushed by the expenses of war and fearful of a catastrophic bankruptcy, in 1798 ordered the sale of the property held in entail by charitable institutions and other religious endowments in order to appropriate the proceeds for its own needs. It thereby introduced one of the most significant developments in modern Spanish history, the abolition of entail and the forced sale at auction of church properties and many public properties as well. In 1800 most Spanish real estate could not be freely transferred on the market; a hundred years later the opposite was the case. In the intervening century, thousands upon thousands of buildings and hundreds of thousands of fields changed hands. The process, known in Spanish as desamortización, affected the way in which Spanish cities developed and the structure of rural society evolved. It involved the basic relationships between church and state and became central to the conflicts between Spanish liberals and conservatives in the nineteenth century, and it has been blamed for many of the country's contemporary social and economic ills.
The first of the great waves of disentail swept over Spain between 1798 and 1808. This was the ominous final decade of the old regime, which led up to the Napoleonic invasion, and the introduction of desamortización belongs to the agony of the absolute monarchy. Its authors, however, were responding not only to the tensions that emanated from the French Revolution but to the optimistic enlightened rationalism of the reign of Carlos III in which they had been reared. They believed that freeing rural property would improve agriculture and reform society.
In this book, the disentail will appear as the culminating act of the absolute monarchy, not the introduction of an age to come. This is a study of royal domestic policy and rural society in the second half of the eighteenth century, how they evolved and how they interacted. The bu-
[1] AHPS, Sección Notarial, legajo 3844, ff. 40v–44v.
reaucracy of enlightened Spain, inspired by a dedication to improvement, left to posterity impressive sets of records that make it possible to look in depth at the rural world at the end of the old regime. They include the first full population censuses of Spain, the famous survey of real property and economic activities in Castile at midcentury known as the catastro (cadaster) of the Marqués de la Ensenada, and memoirs on conditions in the countryside and proposals for agrarian reform authored or inspired by Carlos III's ministers.
The first part of the study looks at the country as a whole, focusing on the impact of demographic expansion and the response of the royal government. Spurred on by urban riots in 1766, the king's counselors sought ways to provide more food for the cities. The information they had and their own reason told them that the solution was to multiply the small farmers and restrict the power and privileges of the large landowners. Even during the wars of the French Revolution, the royal government strove to fulfill this program. Disentail was the most dramatic measure, seeking now fiscal salvation as well as rural reform. We shall look at how it was carried out and how much property changed ownership throughout the country. We shall see, too, how all the royal efforts were no match for the forces of nature and war that beset the state. When Napoleon's armies occupied Spain in 1808, neither horses nor men could have put the absolute monarchy together again.
The second part of the book turns to the rural scene and looks in detail at the structure of seven towns in the mid-eighteenth century and their evolution up to the Napoleonic invasion. (La Mata will be one of them.) We shall observe who owned the land, who worked it and how the town income was distributed locally and to the outside world, who lived well and who scraped by and how many there were of each kind. Rural population was growing, and the towns had to cope with the threat of declining per capita income. In one way or another all seven were responding to the rising demand for agricultural products quite independently of any royal planning. Pressures for change were wearing away the prevailing structures, and Carlos IV's orders to sell ecclesiastical property opened the gates to accelerated change. The results would be molded by local conditions and forces in ways that the planners did not fully anticipate. Francisco González, who took over ownership of the plot in La Mata, was new to farming. The disentail permitted him to use his savings gained elsewhere, as a muleteer perhaps, to become one of the leading farmers in the village.
The third part looks at the provinces in which the seven towns were located, Salamanca in the northwest of the Castilian meseta and Jaén in Andalusia. By enlarging the field of vision, we can identify other features of the rural world. A comparison of geographic regions within each province gives an idea of the extent to which economic development depended on topography, communications, and royal or seigneurial jurisdiction. An analysis of the people who bought property in the disentail and the kinds of land they preferred tells much about provincial society and the changes taking place in it. We shall form an image of the provincial elites, those men and women who provided the hinge between the rural people who drew their sustenance directly from the soil and the outside world of royal government and national markets, what their objectives were and how their pursuit of them influenced the general development.
When the picture is complete, it will embrace the motives and actions of government and individuals at the national, regional, and local levels—a broad but concrete study of state, economy, and society that observes the complex ways in which royal policies were decided and carried out and how their effects were felt throughout the rural world as well as the role of impersonal forces like demographic growth and the market for agricultural products. A final chapter will attempt to interpret the findings and set them against contemporary developments abroad and the later stages of desamortización in Spain. Thus a study of court and country in the enlightened reign of Carlos III and the troubled one of his son should enlarge our understanding of what was involved in the passage from the old regime to contemporary times in Spain, and not only in Spain.
Chapter I—
Agrarian Conditions and Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth-Century Spain
Until recently agriculture has been Spain's main domestic economic activity, and agrarian policy has always been an issue of major concern to its governments. Nevertheless, they did not take up the idea of a planned redistribution of land until the second half of the eighteenth century, when changing conditions forced the royal advisers to envisage the relationship between the countryside and the country as a whole in a new way.
During the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century, their main domestic concern was to increase the king's revenue. Their attention focused on the unequal weight of taxation borne by the different regions and social classes. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the people of Castile contributed far more heavily to the revenue of the monarchy than those of Aragon or Portugal. The Conde-Duque de Olivares under Felipe IV and Josef Patiño under Felipe V sought to equalize taxes and military service among the various realms that formed peninsular Spain. Olivares's attempts led to a revolt of Catalonia and the secession of Portugal from the Spanish crown, but Felipe V succeeded after the War of the Spanish Succession in imposing direct taxes on the realms of the crown of Aragon in place of the niggardly subsidies formerly voted by their cortes. The new taxes, called equivalente in Valencia, catastro in Catalonia, and real contribución in Aragon, represented a fixed percentage of the income from land and occupations.
Land belonging to nobles as well as commoners and land acquired in the future by the church was subject to the new impositions.[1]
The new taxes on the eastern kingdoms embodied the principle that everyone should contribute equitably to the needs of the state. For half a century after the reforms in Aragon, the search for a further redistribution of levies held the attention of royal policy makers. Felipe V and Fernando VI struggled with the church to establish their right to tax ecclesiastical properties, finally obtaining papal recognition of it in the Concordat of 1753.[2] The kingdom of Castile posed a different kind of problem. Here the major royal taxes, the rentas provinciales, weighed heavily on the poor, and their complexity meant that the expenses of collection absorbed an inordinate part of the proceeds.[3] The new system in the eastern realms proved so successful, especially in Catalonia, that Felipe V's advisers recommended that Castile's system be replaced by a similar one based on a single tax. The única contribución would be divided between a "real" sector that taxed income from property and a "personal" sector that taxed income from labor, professions, and commerce. The real property tax would be proportional to the income from land and buildings and be paid equally by nobles and commoners. As in Catalonia, a prior survey, or catastro, of property and personal income would be needed.[4] The aim was to establish a less regressive tax structure as well as a more efficient one.
In 1746 Fernando VI, on the urging of his secretary of hacienda (finance), the Marqués de la Ensenada, ordered an experimental survey in the province of Guadalajara, using the Catalan catastro as a model. It showed that a 7- or 8-percent tax on income from land of commoners and nobles and on commoners' personal income would produce the same amount as current taxes at less cost to the state. If the real property of the church were included, the tax could be reduced to 5 percent.[5]
In 1749 Ensenada obtained a royal order to extend the catastral survey to the other twenty-one provinces of Castile. To carry it out, the king established the office of provincial intendant. Intendants had been created in 1718 on the model of the French officials of this name, but they had soon been discontinued. The order of 1749 was the origin of a
[1] Matilla, Única contribución, 29–41; Kamen, War of Succession, 335–37, 359–60.
[2] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 13.
[3] Ibid., 97, 110. Ozanam, "Notas," 52, says the cost of collecting all royal revenues in Spain was 11.2 percent of the gross income in 1751–60. The rate for the rentas provinciales must have been much higher. They represented 32.8 percent of net income.
[4] Matilla, Única contribución, 43–51.
[5] Ibid., 53–55.
new, permanent set of royal servants who were to become the key figures in the provincial administration of the kingdom.[6] The intendants began the survey in 1750, setting about obtaining a full list of the properties and sources of personal income in all the cities, towns, and villages of Castile. By 1756 they had completed all twenty-two provinces.[7] The result is commonly known as the catastro of the Marqués de la Ensenada.
The returns revealed how unfair the existing tax system was. The income from the property of the church represented 19 percent of the total income from real property in Castile, but the subsidio it paid annually to the crown was equal to only 3.6 percent of the rentas provinciales collected from the rest of the population.[8] According to the information collected, an equitable single tax of 4 percent on income from all sources would produce as much as all existing taxes. Such a reform would obviously benefit the poor, while the religious orders, secular clergy enjoying benefices, and wealthy nobles would lose some of their privileged status.
Although Fernando VI approved the single tax in 1757, it never went into effect. Ensenada had been dismissed in 1754, and Fernando became despondent and nearly insane after the death of his queen in 1758, succumbing himself a year later. His successor, Carlos III, and the new minister of hacienda, the Marqués de Esquilache, took up the matter, but they lost time by ordering the towns to review their original surveys and bring them up to date. Now fully aware of the significance of their returns, the petty municipal oligarchies dragged their feet, raising malicious questions and delaying their responses.[9] The reassessment took four years, and when it was done, the towns had discovered that their incomes were far lower than those stated in the original surveys. Two years later riots in Madrid and many other places drove Esquilache from power and marked a major turning point in plans for reform. Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, a fiscal, or advisory attorney, of the Council of Castile, became the most influential adviser in economic matters, and he had serious doubts about the practicality of the única contribución in regions whose agricultural economy was not mone-
[6] Ibid., 63, 87–88; Desdevises, L'Espagne 2 : 134–37.
[7] Matilla, Única contribución, 92.
[8] For value of ecclesiastical property and all property in Castile according to the catastro, see Table 5.5. The figures for the ecclesiastical subsidio and the rentas provinciales are in Matilla, Única contribución, 93.
[9] Otazu, Reforma fiscal, 145–76. Otazu provides the full story of the única contribución in Extremadura.
tized.[10] Still, a royal junta continued to discuss the single tax for another decade. In 1770 Carlos III ordered it put into effect as soon as provincial quotas could be assigned. Six years later this had still not been done, and the matter was dropped.[11]
All the work was not in vain, however. The idea of replacing the rentas provinciales by a single tax on income remained to inspire later ministers[12] and became the basis for a sweeping revision in 1845.[13] Meanwhile, the thousands of volumes of the catastro of Ensenada containing detailed information on the ownership of property throughout Castile were stored in the offices of the intendants, ready at a moment's notice to reveal the entailed estates of the church and the nobility. They are today one of the most remarkable sources anywhere of information on the society and economy of a preindustrial state.
2
In the 1760s a new worry drew attention away from the need for tax reform: the apparent disparity between the increasing food requirements of the country and the harvests from its soil. In recent decades historical scholarship has devoted much attention to the relation between the supply of food and population levels in early modern European countries. As a general rule, the prices of basic foodstuffs like wheat or other grains were far more elastic than those of nonagricultural goods. Europe as a whole in the early modern period followed a short fallow system, the two- or three-field rotation of grains, pulses, and fallow familiar to historians. Ester Boserup has shown that this system of cultivation is particularly susceptible to bad harvests.[14] The resulting impact of famines on real incomes directly affected demographic trends. In the extreme situation a bad harvest would cause the price of bread to rise precipitously, and many people would be unable to buy the food they needed to survive.
Two common demographic responses to declining per capita food supplies can be related to Malthus's identification of "preventive" and "positive" checks to the growth of population. In the "preventive" case, a rise in food prices resulting in lower real incomes discourages mar-
[10] Llombart, "A propósito."
[11] Matilla, Única contribución, 96–100, 107, 123–24.
[12] See Cabarrús, Cartas, 349.
[13] See Estapé, Reforma tributaria.
[14] Boserup, Conditions, 48–49.
riage and thus induces a decline in fertility. Although the resulting demographic response is sluggish, it nevertheless preserves a relatively high standard of living for a preindustrial society. A "positive" check, on the other hand, exists among populations that live close to the margin of subsistence, whose lower classes suffer a constant condition of malnutrition. Here a disastrous grain harvest or, worse, a series of bad harvests will cause the weakest members of the society to die off, victims of starvation or diseases that attack the debilitated society. In their impressive history of English population, E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield have labeled these two demographic responses respectively a "low-pressure system" and a "high-pressure system." As per capita food supplies decline in a high-pressure system, increased mortality lowers the level of population, while in a low-pressure system reduced fertility keeps the population from straining the subsistence resources except in unusual circumstances.[15]
According to these two authors, England enjoyed a low-pressure system from the early seventeenth century to the industrial revolution, with the consequence that it was socially and economically better prepared than continental Europe to take advantage of technological innovations. From the evidence that has been produced by historical demographers who have looked at France, Wrigley and Schofield conclude that during most of the old regime this country approached a high-pressure system. Present information indicates that France suffered severe crises of mortality in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, usually associated with poor harvests, although a recurrence of the plague and the ravages of war also played important parts in these catastrophes.[16] We still do not know if the severity of these crises reflected a society that was less prudent than England's in making decisions to marry, or if the famines were extraordinary events that resulted from a monoculture of wheat, more susceptible to meteorological vagaries than the English mix of winter and spring grains, or from a poorer communications network that caused French regions with harvest failures to suffer with little outside help.[17] Recent work has brought into question whether France or any other early modern European society let its population
[15] Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, chaps. 10, 11.
[16] See Le Roy Ladurie, "Motionless History," 129–31.
[17] See Weir, "Life Under Pressure." Weir rejects the view that France had a higher "pressure system" than England. Andrew B. Appleby, "Grain Prices," argues that after the seventeenth century England suffered less severe famines than France because it did not follow the monoculture of wheat to the same extent, harvesting major quantities of other grains that were hurt less sharply by the same climatic acts of God.
rise to levels that would entail near starvation when crops were normal.[18] Nevertheless, France was more liable than England to suffer from bad harvests, and this may be our best definition of the difference between a high- and a low-pressure demographic system. Historical demography is in a period of rapid advance, and future research should clarify our understanding of the situation in early modern countries.
Less historical work has been done on the demography of Spain than on that of England or France, but the knowledge we have at present indicates that in the seventeenth century the interior of Spain, like France, labored under a high-pressure system. It suffered three major crises of mortality in 1630–32, 1647–52, and 1684, all three following immediately upon famines. The "little ice age" of the seventeenth century, known to have affected agriculture adversely in northern Europe, appears also to have reached Spain, accentuating the irregularity of harvests.[19] Outbreaks of the plague affected the Mediterranean coast, but no evidence has been uncovered that it ever became virulent in the interior, where the major killer has been identified as typhus. In central Castile high grain prices and increased mortality went hand in hand, although the population decline experienced by various regions of the interior may also have been the result of a flight of people from a countryside overburdened by royal taxes.[20] During the War of the Spanish Succession, a series of bad harvests between 1704 and 1709 led to famine prices for grain, which reached their apex in 1710. Death rates were also high during these years, especially near the Portuguese frontier where the demands of rival armies intensified the suffering of the countryside.[21] It is worth noting that the four major Spanish demographic crises of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were experienced in France as well, evidence that we are observing a condition that was common to western continental Europe.
With the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, the close association between harvests and mortality disappeared in Spain, as it did in France. No serious famines occurred between 1711 and midcentury, and local mortality crises appear to have been caused by influenza or typhus, not associated with food supplies.[22] No simple explanation has been found for this change, but it is one feature of a general European eco-
[18] Jones, European Miracle, 14–16.
[19] Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 404–5.
[20] Pérez Moreda, Crisis de mortalidad, 294–326.
[21] Ibid., 329–34, 360–62.
[22] Ibid., 334–36, 362–63.
nomic growth that began about the turn of the eighteenth century. In France more effective royal authority put an end to much of the civil turmoil that marked the seventeenth century. Production of grain for export increased in England, Prussia, and other regions, and European cities that could be fed by sea trade grew in size. Inland regions were more susceptible to shortages, but central and local governments improved roads and built canals and thereby facilitated the shipment of food into areas whose normal supplies had failed. Even a high-pressure demographic system like the French became insulated from the worst effects of crop failures. Agricultural catastrophes recurred in the eighteenth century without the earlier, devastating mortality. Poor harvests in 1788 and 1789 were instrumental in inducing popular violence in the early French Revolution, but they did not produce excessive deaths.[23]
Spain was a somewhat different case. The periphery of the peninsula—the provinces of the northern coast, Catalonia, and Valencia—followed the developments of the European maritime community. The economies of these regions began to recover from the national crisis of the seventeenth century around 1680, and after 1700 they experienced a fairly steady growth.[24] The periphery imported grain by sea from France, Sicily, North Africa, and other sources of supply. Animals for slaughter crossed the Pyrenees to Catalonia and the Basque provinces, while north European maritime nations provided salt cod.[25] The prices of wheat and other basic foodstuffs followed the same curve in these areas as in the rest of maritime Europe, convincing evidence of their integration into the Atlantic economic world.[26]
Because of the rugged geography of Spain, communications remained difficult and expensive in the central meseta and Andalusia, and these regions did not experience a comparable increase in traffic or a similar economic takeoff until the second half of the eighteenth century, and then only in some areas. After 1750 grain prices in Old Castile rose more rapidly than those in Galicia and Catalonia, evidence of the isolation of the meseta from the Atlantic economy.[27] The failure of central Spain to share in the general western economic growth meant that the country now belonged to two different economic worlds. The northern and eastern periphery formed part of the Atlantic maritime community,
[23] Meuvret, "Demographic Crises."
[24] Ringrose, "Perspectives."
[25] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 138–39, Map 4.
[26] See Ringrose, "Perspectives," 63–65; Hamilton, War and Prices, 182–83.
[27] García-Lombardero, "Aportación," 58, Cuadro 4.
while the meseta and, to a lesser extent, Andalusia preserved an older, more isolated, and locally oriented economy, which received effective outside stimuli only toward the end of the eighteenth century.[28] Not that central Spain lacked internal trade or consisted only of subsistence economies. The presence of cities, especially Madrid, with their needs for foodstuffs and fuel from their hinterlands, the dedication of some rural areas to products intended for distant consumers—olive oil, wines, wool—and the manufacture of certain—Castilian specialties—woolens, linens, knives, and others—meant that goods moved around and agricultural products reached urban markets, sent there directly by peasants or by people who received the rent, tithes, and other payments of peasants. These were, however, economic patterns that came down from the past and owed little to contemporary outside developments, although demographic growth in the interior did stimulate their expansion.
While the entire peninsula did not participate in the Atlantic economic expansion, it shared in the general western population growth. Spain was blessed with rulers who counted their subjects on a national scale earlier than those of most other European countries did. In 1712 Felipe V ordered a count of all households, which was made everywhere but the Basque provinces, and formal censuses of all individuals were taken in 1768–69, 1786–87, and 1797. A careful analysis of these documents reveals that on average over most of the century, the population of Spain was increasing at the rate of 0.46 percent per year. This is very close to the best estimate of the rate of growth for England (0.44 percent), slightly above that attributed to Italy (0.38 percent), and well above the accepted figure for France (0.27 percent).[29]
A comparison of the population figures for the different regions of the peninsula reveals that the periphery of the north and east was growing at a somewhat faster rate than the center.[30] This is the situation that one would expect if one believes that economic prosperity is a cause for demographic expansion. The detailed study of Catalonia made by Pierre Vilar supports this explanation, for its coastal areas, open to commerce with the Atlantic world, were growing much more rapidly than most parts of the interior. Part of the reason was a difference in birth rates, but migration also played a major role in the population shifts.[31] Valencia also grew rapidly in the century, at a rate that can only be explained
[28] These are the conclusions of Ringrose, "Perspectives."
[29] See Appendix A for details on eighteenth-century censuses and population.
[30] See Appendix A.
[31] Vilar, Catalogne 2 : 42–94 and 3 : Map 56.
by massive immigration. Galicia probably had the fastest demographic expansion of the peninsula, but at the same time, as the region of densest population, it sent forth a large number of emigrants, especially single men, to the rest of Spain and America.[32] The proximity of the sea, both for the export of local products and for the import of food, is a critical factor in explaining the greater rate of growth of the coastal over the interior population.
Nevertheless, the interior was also growing, some regions faster than others. In the crises of the seventeenth century, the Castilian meseta had experienced an absolute population decline, and its growth in the eighteenth century could represent a recovery toward some kind of Malthusian limit (as indeed the growth of Catalonia did at first), according to the familiar demographic pattern described above. One can well suppose that this is what occurred during the first half of the century, but the evidence suggests that by 1750 the meseta was again approaching this limit, for food prices were becoming unstable.
After the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, central Spain produced enough grain to feed itself except for years of bad harvests. This is the conclusion to be drawn from the figures collected painstakingly by Earl Hamilton, which show that the level of agricultural prices was relatively low at this time. About 1734 Spanish prices, like those in France and England, began a long-term rise that was to continue until the Restoration in 1814, slow at first but accelerating in the fourth quarter of the century. Agricultural products led other goods, with wheat going up the fastest.[33] Within these long-term trends, brief oscillations appeared as responses to the quality of the harvests. Poor harvests in 1721 and the late 1730s pushed up agricultural prices temporarily, oscillating, as one would expect, more sharply in the meseta and Andalusia than in Valencia and Catalonia.[34] These data indicate furthermore that after midcentury central Spain experienced a growing shortage of foodstuffs. A crop failure made prices soar in 1750, and a further bad harvest in 1753 pushed them even higher. By 1754 the agricultural price level in New Castile, according to Hamilton, was 68 percent above that of 1746; the rise in the level for nonagricultural goods was only 24 percent.[35] Although harvests improved in the next years, the crown had to
[32] Anes, Antiguo Régimen, 35–42, largely based on the unpublished work of Francisco Bustelo.
[33] Hamilton, War and Prices, 173, Chart 5. See also Anes, Crisis, 220.
[34] Hamilton, War and Prices, 143, 148–49, 184, Chart 7; for Catalonia, Vilar, Catalogne 2 : 338–40, 3 : Atlas et graphiques, no. 69.
[35] These are the ratios that result from Hamilton, War and Prices, 172–73, Table 2.
send grain to Andalusia in 1757–58 to meet a shortage there.[36] The royal ministers were beginning to find the threat of famine a matter of concern. The evolving relation between food production and population growth in the interior must be considered a major factor in understanding the history of Spain at this time.
The demographic expansion of Spain does not suffice to explain the increasing sensitivity of the agricultural price level. The Polish historian Witold Kula has argued that in a mixed subsistence and market economy based on peasant farming, the amount of the grain harvest that reaches the market fluctuates more sharply than the total harvest. Peasants try to keep a constant amount of grain for themselves before selling any, while landowners (which in Spain included religious institutions) take care of their needs before disposing of their surplus.[37] This would explain sharp price fluctuations, which primarily affected urban dwellers because the peasantry as a whole relied only marginally on the market for their food.
The long-term imbalance came about because of rural and urban demographic expansion that caused suffering to both sectors. As the number of peasants grew, so did their propensity to consume the food they produced, but they were not in a position to withdraw much grain or other staples from the market. Landowners, seigneurial lords, the church, and the king drew payments from the farmers for rent, feudal dues, tithes, and taxes, and peasants made most of these payments in kind. Such obligations remained in force, whatever the size and number of peasant families. The grain and other products collected in this way provided most of the foodstuffs that reached the urban markets.[38] Peasants sold their surplus in the market, and they could reduce this amount as their needs rose, but they could not suppress the trade entirely. They had to obtain some cash to pay rents due in coin and to buy the limited outside products that they needed. Part 2 of this study will uncover some of the ways in which peasants of Castile and Andalusia struggled to maintain their real income. Their plight had little effect, however, on the long-term trend of prices.
Urban dwellers would also suffer if they had to rely on domestic food supplies. Most of the large cities in Spain, as elsewhere, were near the sea and could be fed from abroad: Barcelona, Valencia, Málaga, and Cádiz. In the heart of the meseta, however, lay Madrid, the largest city
[36] Ibid., 157.
[37] Kula, Economic Theory, 66–67.
[38] See Anes, Crisis, 338–39.
in the country. No other European metropolis of its size was like it, for it relied exclusively on land transport for its supplies. Since its establishment as the capital of Spain in the sixteenth century, its demands had strained the transportation capacity of the meseta, forced provincial capitals to compete with it for supplies, and caused the royal government continual concern. Between 1685 and 1800, it expanded from about 125,000 to nearly 200,000 people, a rate of approximately 0.41 percent per year, faster than the rest of central Spain, evidence that it was the recipient of considerable inmigration. After midcentury the city imported annually more than half a million fanegas of grain and legumes, half a million arrobas of wine, one hundred thousand arrobas of olive oil, three hundred thousand of meat, fifteen thousand hogs, and proportional quantities of fuel and other rural products. In the 1780s an average of seven hundred carts and five thousand pack animals arrived every day in good weather with cargoes to supply the city.[39] The market for farm products in Castile meant primarily the demand of Madrid, which dominated the entire region and provided incentives to expand commercial agriculture. By comparison, Valladolid, with 20,000 people, and Salamanca, with 16,000, were small provincial centers, but they too drew on the agricultural market. Zaragoza, whose population rose from some 30,000 in midcentury to 45,000 in 1800, dominated the region of Aragon much as Madrid did that of Castile.[40] Andalusia was more highly urbanized. The largest cities, Seville and Granada, had populations of 85,000 and 50,000, although Seville could also receive supplies by sea up the Gaudalquivir River. The relative prosperity of the region attracted immigrants from northern Spain, strengthening its urban centers.[41] Except for Madrid, the cities of Castile and Andalusia may not have been growing at a faster rate than the country as a whole, but any growth resulted in increased demand, to which agricultural price curves responded.[42]
[39] Ringrose, Transportation, 39–40 for products except wheat. For wheat, Ringrose, Madrid and the Spanish Economy, 110, 350 (Madrid needed about 1,500 fanegas of wheat per day in 1767, or 550,000 per year). The fanega was 55.2 liters, the arroba, 11.5 kg. The relationship between the Madrid market for foodstuffs and the countryside is discussed, ibid., 174–90. On the population, ibid., 26–29, and Ringrose, "Perspectives," 75–79.
[40] Valladolid, Zaragoza: Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 187, 243–44; Salamanca: Real Academia de la Historia, Censo de España (1787), legajo 9-30-3, 6259.
[41] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 87; Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 225–33.
[42] Ringrose deals with both the urban market for agricultural products, especially Madrid, and the rural incentives to withdraw production from the market in Madrid and the Spanish Economy, 174–90.
3
With an increasing rural population and a growing demand for food, the value of land could be expected to rise vis-à-vis labor, the other major factor of agricultural production. There is in fact evidence that rents were going up while wages remained stagnant.[43] These circumstances produced a strong incentive to change land uses from extensive to more profitable intensive types of agriculture, and land was becoming an attractive investment opportunity. In a region like Catalonia, which had water available and could sell on the international market, capital was put into new irrigation works and market-oriented plantings like nut trees, olive groves, and vineyards.[44] Similarly, Andalusia, able to import grain by sea as far as Seville and to ship out more specialized produce, exploited the comparative advantage of its climate and soil to extend olive groves and vineyards, in some places at the expense of land sown in wheat.[45] Part 2 of this book will observe this development in detail in the towns of Jaén province. Farther in the interior, the obvious response was to bring pastures and wastelands under the plow, and this study will show that such a response was indeed occurring.[46] Parts of the meseta had long produced wine and some olive oil for local consumption, and some of this production also expanded, especially in the second half of the century.[47] Throughout the peninsula, economic incentives were bringing about changes in the uses of the land.[48]
There were, however, obstacles to the transfer of land to more profitable uses, particularly in Castile. The most important were legal restrictions on the exchange of ownership or use of land. They applied to church and public properties and to lay estates that had been established as entails, while the crown had guaranteed the Mesta, the guild of sheep owners, and the Real Cabaña de Carreteros, the teamsters' guild, the continued enjoyment at fixed rents of the pastures grazed on by their animals. The public properties went back farthest in time. During the early reconquest of Castile and León from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, when the Christians were moving into the northern meseta, they
[43] On the rise in price of land: Anes, Crisis, 274–91; Defourneaux, Olavide, 131; on the stagnation in price of agricultural labor, Anes, "Informe, " 100.
[44] Vilar, Catalogne 2 : 219–21, 242–91, 321–31; Giralt, "Técnicas."
[45] Anes, Antiguo Régimen, 189–90.
[46] See also Mem. ajust. (1784), §249, 173.
[47] Anes, Antiguo Régimen, 171–77. See Huetz de Lemps, Vignobles 1 : 306, 309, and 318, on the extension of vineyards in Salamanca province.
[48] See also Anes, Antiguo Régimen, 167–69 on Aragon, 191–95 on the northern coast.
took over many territories that were empty of people or thinly occupied. The written sources that have been preserved permit only a shaky reconstruction of the process of settlement, but it would appear that as a general rule, all the land was assumed to belong to the crown or, by tacit or express cession of the crown, to the military leaders who recaptured it or in common to the settlers who came in and established new villages and towns. Private property developed through occupation and cultivation by the settlers, a process known in Castile as presura and escalio, which resembled squatting on the American frontier. As the Reconquista advanced beyond the central sierras after the eleventh century, the Christians captured regions already well populated, where most residents remained under the new rulers. Here too there was much vacant land, and it too belonged now to the crown, unless a king granted it to another person or body.
Lands that were not established as private property or ceded expressly to a town or an individual and remained as wastes and common pastures were known as tierras baldías or simply baldíos. They included the mountains, barren wastes, woods, and rough hills of scrub growth, to which the term monte applied, all of them uncultivated and many of them of no use. Those parts of the baldíos on which local livestock grazed or which provided firewood—known in Spanish as tierras de aprovechamiento común (lands of common use)—were vital to the economy of the peasant villages. By early modern times it would appear that all the surface of the peninsula, except possibly some remote mountain wildernesses, had been allocated to one town or another or to several towns jointly.[49] It was a moot point, however, whether the unused land within the limits of a town, the baldíos, belonged to the crown or the municipality. In practice it made little difference, because the kings protected the use in common of these lands, but it did mean that once the Mesta had acquired their use as pasture, it could henceforth insist on the right to their use.[50]
During the population expansion of the sixteenth century, new squatters settled in the baldíos, and Felipe II, in need of money, sold private title to these lands to the squatters or to their towns. The king also sold off other baldíos that were still unbroken. Sales of baldíos became one
[49] Such was the case of the Montes Universales of eastern Aragon, common property of twenty-three villages (Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 245).
[50] This discussion is based primarily on Nieto, Bienes comunales, 54–65, 101–132. Vassberg, "Sale," 631–34, also has a valuable discussion of the nature and legal position of the baldíos.
of his largest sources of royal income. Faced with strong protests of the towns and cities of Castile that the loss of these pastures was harmful to their agriculture, in 1586 the king ordered a halt to sales of baldíos that were being used by local farmers and demanded in return the approval of a new tax known as the millones .[51] A century and a half later, in 1737, when the demand for land was again rising, Felipe V, in need of funds to construct the royal palace of Madrid, reopened the sale of baldíos, only to face the strong protest of city and town governments. Fernando VI in 1747 halted the sale of lands that were being used by local residents and the restoration of those that had been sold, but he maintained the right to sell baldíos that were not being used. The legislation of Felipe II and Fernando VI implies that the king had the ultimate title to the baldíos, while recognizing the claim of the towns to lands of aprovechamiento común.[52] Nevertheless, the catastro of the Marqués de la Ensenada attributed the title of land not held by specific owners to the municipal councils, so that the question of ownership of the baldíos remained open.[53]
Except in the north and on the Mediterranean coast, most settlements were closely nucleated. Cultivated lands and improved pastures and meadows surrounded the village or town, and the baldíos lay beyond this ring. In central and northern Castile, where most towns were small and close together, baldíos might hardly exist, but in Andalusia, La Mancha, and Extremadura, where settlements were larger and frequently far apart, the wastelands were very extensive. Spurred on by the profit in land, private individuals, noble lords (señores ), and religious orders were surreptitiously taking over large tracts of the baldíos for plowing or private pasture, while city councils appropriated them to rent for municipal income, allowing the tenants to cultivate them.[54] What to do about the baldíos was a question that would concern royal advisers for the rest of the century, for in them they saw an immense resource and, whoever had rightful title, they believed the king had full authority to dispose of them.
Not all public lands belonged to the crown. The municipalities had open pastures and monte, lands of common usage that had been specifi-
[51] Nieto, Bienes comunales, 161–62; Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 91.
[52] Nieto, Bienes comunales, 135–68, esp. 164–67; Rodríguez Silva, "Venta de baldíos."
[53] None of the lists of property of the catastros of the seven towns studied in Part 2 show any royal property. Monte and pastures are assigned to the municipal council, even the vast stretches of the Sierra Morena belonging to Baños, much of which was later used to found the colonies of Sierra Morena.
[54] Rodríguez Silva, "Venta de baldíos," 8–12.
cally deeded to them, and they also had fields, meadows, and buildings that they rented to their residents or even to outsiders. These properties were known as the bienes de propios or simply as the propios, and their rent was one of the main sources for municipal budgets.
Properties that belonged to churches and cathedrals, religious orders, charitable institutions, and ecclesiastical funds were said to belong to manos muertas, mortmain in English, and were also normally barred from sale. They included the places of worship and monastic houses, the rural and urban properties that churches and religious orders had at some time purchased, and the properties that pious individuals, out of generosity or seeking to offset their sins in the eyes of the Lord, had bequeathed to ecclesiastical institutions and foundations to provide income for their activities. The building and maintenance funds of churches (fábricas ); the emoluments (capellanías ) of certain priests; the funds for the upkeep of chapels and shrines and the performance of services at them, for the recital of masses in memory of deceased persons (memorias ), and for charitable activities such as providing dowries for orphaned girls; the income of confraternities and the funds to run hospitals, orphanages, old-age asylums, and like institutions; as well as much of the regular income of parish churches, cathedrals, and religious orders came largely from property owned in mortmain. Because the purpose of these properties was to provide income, they tended to be of above-average quality and could easily become the object of desire of individuals looking for ways to profit from the rising demand for agricultural products. They will play a central role in this story.
The third kind of entail applied to the estates of individual families. By legally enforceable acts, the owners of these estates at some time in the past had established them as inalienable and indivisible units that were passed on from generation to generation by primogeniture. They were known as vínculos legos or, more commonly, mayorazgos.[ 55] Not only real estate but all forms of property could be included, such as royal bonds or juros, the ownership of local public offices, seigneurial jurisdictions, and other privileges. The usual justification for the mayorazgo was that it protected the nobility as a class necessary to the monarchy by preserving its patrimony from being squandered by prodigal heirs, although the law of 1505 that governed the creation of mayorazgos did not restrict them to members of the nobility.[56] Some mayorazgos
[55] Clavero, Mayorazgo.
[56] In the Leyes de Toro (1505), Nov. rec., X, xvii, 2.
were vast estates belonging to titled aristocrats, but others were modest holdings of provincial hidalgos and commoners.
As direct lines died out or as mayorazgos went to female heirs for want of males, two or more mayorazgos could become the property of the same family. Although they legally remained distinct entities, in effect they became a single entailed estate, for they would normally follow the same line of inheritance. This was one way in which an estate could assemble widely scattered properties, as many great artistocratic holdings did.
Vinculación operated in various ways to check the economic forces that pushed for changes in agriculture. Most obviously it prevented the sale of land by inefficient, bankrupt owners to persons with capital who could farm it better. There was no reason why the legally prescribed heir should be the best administrator among the siblings, but even if he was, he could run into difficulty in seeking to make improvements. He could not assume a mortgage for this purpose, because at his death all liens would be nullified so that his heir would receive an unencumbered estate. With royal authorization the rule on borrowing could be relaxed, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a number of aristocrats had received permission to borrow against their mayorazgos, but the purpose had seldom been agricultural improvement. Paying off debts incurred in the service of the king or the maintenance of conspicuous consumption were more common purposes.[57] Legally an owner could mortgage or sell parts of his estate that were not entailed or use other unrestricted funds to improve a mayorazgo, but the interests of his family would discourage him from doing so. Improvements in the mayorazgo would be transferred with it, and his other heirs would lose part of their anticipated inheritance. Finally, by prohibiting long-term leases, vinculación also discouraged enterprising tenants from improving the properties.
Despite all of these forms of entail, much property, both in land and buildings, was owned outright by laymen and could be freely exchanged. It is tempting to contrast favorably these properties with those that were inalienable, but in practice the difference was only relative. The laws of inheritance provided strict limitations on the disposition of estates. Most was destined to the direct heirs (the portion known as la legítima de los descendientes ), with each entitled to a specified minimum share; and no more than a fifth could be given outside the family to, for ex-
[57] Jago, "Influence of Debt."
ample, a religious fund. Because of these rules, an estate was seen more as a family holding than as the individual property of the current owner, and there was reluctance to sell any part of it. Thus law and custom worked to keep off the market even land that was legally free to be exchanged.[58]
Except for an estimate of the extent of ecclesiastical property, based on the catastro of the Marqués de la Ensenada, it is impossible to state what proportion of Spanish soil fell into each of these different types of ownership. There seems no question that the Baldíos were very extensive, possibly covering more territory than all the other lands together. An eighteenth-century writer estimated that of 136 million fanegas (a measure roughly equal to an acre) in Spain, 89 million were Baldíos,[59] while Olavide, intendant of Seville under Carlos III, asserted that two-thirds of Andalusia was uncultivated and deserted.[60] Although hardly exact, these estimates are a good expression of the magnitude of the wastelands. Of the remaining land in Castile, which includes all entailed and free private holdings, ecclesiastical estates, and municipal property, both of aprovechamiento común and propios, the catastro indicates that about 15 percent of the land belonged to the church if the area is taken as the basis and 20 percent if the annual return is the basis. The provincial summaries of the catastro listed ecclesiastical property under a separate heading, making possible this calculation, but the different types of secular property were recorded only in the individual town surveys and the enormous task of assembling this information for the entire kingdom probably never will be undertaken. Although statements have been made about the extent of mayorazgos, no reliable figure can be advanced.[61]
Beyond the various forms of legal ownership, a different kind of institution prevented the free employment of the land. This was the Mesta, the guild of owners of migrant sheep, which dated from the thirteenth century. Because of the climate and geography of the country, the flocks of merino sheep, noted for the fineness of their wool, spent the summer in pastures in the central and northern sierras and were driven south before the snowfall to distant fields in Valencia, Murcia, Extremadura, La Mancha, and Andalusia, to return north in the following spring before the summer heat burned up the southern grasslands. In their semi-
[58] Cardenas, Ensayo.
[59] Nieto, Bienes comunales, 140–41.
[60] Olavide, in Mem. ajust. (1784), §921, 281.
[61] See Appendix B.
annual migrations, tens of thousands of sheep followed long-established walks, or cañadas.
For centuries merino wool had been one of Spain's leading exports. The crown, eager to encourage a trade that brought it much revenue, had granted the Mesta extensive privileges and its own courts to ensure their observance. Among these privileges, the right of posesión ensured the members of the Mesta the continued use of any pastures they had ever occupied without an increase in rent. Extensive baldíos in Extremadura, La Mancha, and Andalusia as well as communal lands and baldíos in the northern and central sierras and private pastures were used by the Mesta, while pastures near the cañadas were also subject to the periodic invasion of the flocks. The right of posesión was a disguised form of entail, which restricted the land to its present use. By midcentury, farmers had begun to invade and plow up pastures reserved to the transhumant sheep, leading to lengthy lawsuits brought by the Mesta to preserve its rights.[62] Before towns could break new ground in the baldíos used by the migrant sheep or owners of rented pastures could recover them for their own use, they had to overcome the opposition of the Mesta. As the century progressed, the royal government received many complaints and petitions over this issue.[63]
4
Spanish agriculture followed myriad practices in the eighteenth century, only a few of which have been studied. No generalized pattern can reflect them all faithfully, yet some broad strokes are needed for orientation before proceeding with the account of individual and official responses to the new demand for foodstuffs after midcentury. One may turn first to the division between center and periphery that marked economic and demographic developments.[64] Although proximity to the sea seemed to offer all the coastal areas the possibility of participating in the maritime economy, the agriculture of only certain districts was able to take advantage of it. The Mediterranean lands of Catalonia and Valen-
[62] Mem. ajust. (1784), §249, 173.
[63] The Mesta in the eighteenth century and the royal efforts to reform it are the subject of Mickun, La Mesta. The older work Klein, Mesta, is still valuable.
[64] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, chap. 4, gives an extensive description of the landowning patterns of this period, and I shall not repeat it here. To bring the picture up to date, there is the authoritative survey of Anes, Antiguo Régimen, 163–95, and the relevant sections of the marvelous survey of the economy and administration of the different regions of Spain in Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado. Also relevant, although concerned with a later period, is Malefakis, Agrarian Reform, chap. 2.
cia flourished under the impact of domestic population growth and foreign trade.[65] Catalan farmers were especially prosperous. Few owned the land outright, but the tenants enjoyed long-term leases, censos emfiteúticos, which ran indefinitely or, in the case of vineyards, for the life of the vines. They guaranteed the lessee the use of the land, the dominio útil, leaving to the owner only the dominio directo. As a rule, farms were consolidated single-family holdings called masías, and Catalan customary law provided that the farm be inherited as a unit so that subdivision did not occur. This typical property was thus bound by a form of entail, but it did not produce pernicious economic effects because there was no restriction on the use of the land. Pierre Vilar has shown how Catalan agriculture progressed under these conditions. Landowners and tenants cooperated to extend irrigation and introduce new crops that could be sold on the international market, such as wine, nuts, and dried fruits. The profit from these products provided the capital for agricultural improvement and foreign exchange to pay for imported grain and meat. Indirectly, the savings accumulated from farming contributed to the remarkable expansion of Catalan trade and manufacture in the second half of the century.
Along the coast south of Catalonia, the terrain was divided between rough, arid uplands, about which we know little other than the fact that much was devoted to the pasturage of sheep, and the coastal plains, which included rich irrigated valleys known as huertas or vegas. These latter enjoyed a great expansion of agriculture and an accompanying growth of population. In Valencia the cultivation of rice spread rapidly in newly developed fields along the coast, providing food for a growing population, while plantations of mulberry trees supported the worms that spun the raw material for Valencia's fast-growing silk industry. Local lords received heavy seigneurial dues, up to a quarter or a third of the harvest of certain crops, but the fact that farmers were guaranteed the dominio útil encouraged them to break new ground and invest capital in their exploitations. Here too agriculture provided the basis for a flourishing economy. The huerta of Alicante and the southern coast of Granada enjoyed similar prosperity. Products included dried fruits, nuts, and select wines, such as that of Málaga, much in demand in foreign and domestic markets.[66] The agricultural products of the Mediter-
[65] Vilar, Catalogne, vol. 2, part 2, provides a brilliant study of the evolution of Catalan agriculture in the eighteenth century.
[66] On Valencia, see Anes, Antiguo Régimen, 167–69; for Alicante and Granada, Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 102.
ranean coast, along with the fine sherry shipped out of Cádiz, went to the American colonies and penetrated the markets of the advancing countries of northern Europe.
The northern Atlantic coastal fringe from Galicia in the west to the Basque provinces by the Pyrenees told a different story. Mountainous terrain and difficult communications combined with the unrestricted subdivision of properties to discourage the development of commercial agriculture. Here the most notable development was the introduction of maize in place of grains from Galicia to the Basque provinces. A study of Guipúzcoa at the eastern end of the coast indicates that the switch began there in the seventeenth century and was accompanied by marling the soil with lime, which permitted the elimination of most fallow. In addition, much pasture and wasteland was broken to provide harvests for an expanding human and animal population.[67] Basque law maintained the farms as single, hereditary units called caseríos, exploited individually to the benefit of the farmer, but local custom did not prevent them from being subdivided among tenants. A recent study of Vizcaya indicates that during the course of the century as the population grew, the number of tenant farmers rose sharply, while that of farmer owners declined slightly. By 1800 there were almost twice as many tenant farmers as owners in the region studied.[68]
In the western half of the northern fringe, the unitary family farm gave way to nucleated towns and exploitations that grouped a number of parcels. With demographic expansion, this pattern encouraged the multiplication of tiny units. Western Asturias and Galicia became plagued by the problem of minifundia, small uneconomical exploitations worked by poor tenants. In Galicia most of the land belonged to religious institutions. At some time in the past, the owners had accepted permanent leases called foros with rents that by the eighteenth century represented a very low return on the value of the land. The tenant holders of the foros took advantage of the situation to sublease their lands in smaller units to men who actually worked the soil, while they, now middlemen called señores medianeros, came to enjoy the status and leisure of hidalgos. Because the foros usually stipulated what crops were to
[67] Fernández Albaladejo, Crisis, 85–91, 181–228; Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 132–33, 151, 163–64.
[68] The unpublished thesis of Emiliano Fernández de Pinedo, "Crecimiento de Vascongadas," reports that in eighty-four sample towns of Vizcaya there were 829 owners and only 526 tenants about 1700, but 791 owners and 1387 tenants in 1800 (cited in García-Lombardero, Agricultura y estancamiento, 151). See also Fernández de Pinedo, "Entrada de la tierra," 100–101.
be raised, they hindered agricultural changes in response to market demands.[69]
Except for concern about the plague of Galician minifundia, developments in the periphery gave the royal policymakers little cause to worry. On the contrary, they found in the family farms, long-term leases, and emphyteusis of these regions models to be recommended elsewhere. The problem lay in the interior. The predominant pattern of landholding divided the central Castilian meseta into two distinct parts, one with small farms and villages, the other dominated by large properties and large towns. The obvious division of the meseta into Old and New Castile by the rugged central mountain range offers the temptation to draw the border between these two parts along this range, but this would be a mistake. Rather, the frontier is an irregular line running from northwest to southeast, approximately from Salamanca to Albacete, passing west of Madrid (Map 1.1). Western Salamanca province lies in the territory of large farms, while the hilly region of New Castile known as the Alcarria, comprising the provinces of Guadalajara and Cuenca as well as Madrid province, is characterized by small towns and properties. One could extend the small-farm region north and east of Castile to include southern Navarre and Aragon, although less than half of Aragon was cultivated. The rest, dry and of poor soil, was given over to sheep.[70]
While it is dangerous to generalize on the basis of current knowledge, it does appear that the region of small villages and small farms was dedicated to arable and livestock, the balance between the two and the nature of the harvests or livestock depending largely on the terrain and climate. Many residents (vecinos ) of the villages and towns owned some property. According to the census of 1797, the percentage of men engaged in agriculture who were landowners in this region went from a low of 11 percent in Ávila and 13 percent in Valladolid and Guadalajara to 46 percent in Navarre and 48 percent in Aragon. Except in Palencia, less than half the men engaged in agriculture were hired laborers, a strong sign that most of the exploitations were small, family-run affairs.[71] The distribution of individual exploitations into parcels of arable scattered within the limits of a village and sometimes beyond it permit-
[69] García-Lombardero, Agricultura y estancamiento, 90–110, esp. 94–95.
[70] Compare Map 3 of Malefakis, Agrarian Reform, 31, "Area held by large (over 250 hectare) owners." Although the data for it are of the twentieth century, the general pattern would apply also to the eighteenth century. On Aragon, see Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 240–45.
[71] See Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 92–94, Map 1 and accompanying table.
Map 1.1.
Old Regime Spain, Provinces of Salamanca and Jaén
ted each farmer to harvest crops during all the years of the local rotation and to share in the other agricultural activities of the village. The farmers had the use of the common pastures and the fields in fallow for the support of their animals, and certain individuals could rent grain fields and meadows owned by the village councils, the propios described earlier. A number of districts in the northern part of this region were noted for their highly developed patterns of periodic redistribution among the vecinos of the communal pastures and grain fields.[72] Nevertheless, the migrant sheep of the Mesta spent the summer in many uplands of this region, and the right of the Mesta to preserve its pastures could pose an obstacle to their exploitation by the villagers.
The number of landowning farmers should not, however, be confused with the distribution of the ownership of the land. To judge from the reports of royal intendants and the results of Part 2 of the present study, few peasants owned enough land to satisfy their needs. In most cases those classified as landowners must have possessed one or a few
[72] See Costa, Colectivismo, part 2.
small parcels and had to rent the rest of their exploitation on short-term leases, three to nine years being their common duration. Those who farmed for their own account were known as labradores, but their characteristic feature was to own a plow team, not an exploitation. In most areas the bulk of the land belonged to the village councils or the local parish church and religious funds, a situation that favored the vecinos, or to nobles and other laymen and religious institutions and foundations residing or located elsewhere, such as the provincial capital or district seat (cabeza de partido ), in which case the vecinos were at a disadvantage. We shall see in Part 2 that the share belonging to these various categories of owners varied widely, depending in part on the nature of the local terrain and the distance from active urban centers. As noted earlier, the major share of the products of this region to reach the market left the villages in the form of rents, tithes, and similar obligations. Where land was owned locally, markets were usually distant; and elsewhere the conditions of farming were largely determined by short leases, which called for payment in specified quantities of certain crops. Here the peasant was not in a good position to respond to market forces; yet when his interest and that of the absentee owner coincided, there could be an effective response, as we shall see.[73]
South and west of the Salamanca-Albacete line, the average size of towns and agricultural exploitations was considerably larger. Towns here too were nucleated, surrounded by intensively cultivated land known as the ruedo and beyond it the more open, cultivated region called the campiña. The land would be divided into plots, some for grain, many for olives or vines, and there would also be irrigated huertas for vegetables or fruit trees, broken up into small, individual exploitations. Some of these units were owned by local small farmers, but many formed part of larger estates, including those of religious bodies. The percentage of men engaged in agriculture who were listed as landowners in 1797 was between 13 and 20 in the provinces of Toledo, La Mancha, and Extremadura, but 5 or less in the Guadalquivir valley: Jaén, Córdoba, Seville. Granada was 16 percent.[74]
The valley of the Guadalquivir was the archetypical region of large farms and towns. Although most of its farming was undoubtedly done on parcels in the ruedo and campiña, its characteristic exploitation was
[73] Many of the features of the region of small farms can be observed in the fine study of García Sanz, Desarrollo y crisis. The present province of Ávila, which includes part of the eighteenth-century province of Salamanca, is analyzed by Gil Crespo, "Estructura agraria."
[74] See Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, Map 1.
not the collection of parcels but the cortijo, a large, compact property devoted primarily to raising wheat. Cortijos tended to be distant from the town centers, in the campiña or beyond it, perhaps carved out of the baldíos. According to contemporary accounts, cortijos ran from a few hundred to two or three thousand fanegas.[75] Besides a house for the administrator or tenant, cortijos had buildings for the livestock, granaries, offices, and perhaps a bakery. They could be farmed by the owner or, as was frequent, leased to a tenant who had the necessary capital, draft animals, and implements. In Andalusia these large tenant farmers were called labradores, and their working capital might include a hundred or more yokes of oxen with their plows and other equipment, enough to take on more than one cortijo.[76]
Cortijos depended on a plentiful supply of cheap labor to be called on during certain brief periods of the year for planting and harvesting. One of the striking features of this region was the large number of day laborers. It ran from 54 to 76 percent of the men engaged in agriculture in New Castile but was 80 percent or more in the Guadalquivir valley. The laborers, jornaleros or braceros, lived in the large towns with their families, in a state of poverty that with luck was alleviated by the help of religious charities. The extensive baldíos, which theoretically should have provided a resource for the landless jornaleros, were in fact of little use to them. Without tools, animals, or capital, they could not have exploited more than a small plot, even if they had been given a chance. Every indication is that the men who controlled the town councils made no effort to give them a chance or even resisted such an eventuality, preferring to appropriate the municipal properties for their own use or that of other influential persons, and of course the baldíos were distant from the town nucleus and much of them was occupied by the sheep of the Mesta during the growing season.[77]
If social divisions were greater, absentee ownership was apparently less prevalent here than in the region of small farms. To judge from the examples studied in Part 2, the larger towns of the south tended to maintain local ownership because strong ecclesiastical institutions and funds existed within the towns and most of the important lay owners
[75] For the size of a fanega, see Appendix N.
[76] Mem. ajust. (1784), §659–62, 219–21; §663, 221–22; §678, 227–28.
[77] Anes, Crisis, 180, citing Campomanes (1771); Defourneaux, Olavide, 137–38; Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 109–10. Rodríguez Silva, "Venta de baldíos," tells of a tierra baldía in Andújar (Jaén) on the banks of the Guadalquivir where the poor of the town planted melons and other crops until in the mid-eighteenth century the nearby landowners took over these fields for their own use and drove out the poor.
were members of the local elite. The major exception to this generalization were towns under the jurisdiction (señorío ) of a noble in which an absentee señor had acquired extensive properties. We shall see one such case in the town of Navas in the province of Jaén.[78]
The cortijos, olive groves, and vineyards of Andalusia specialized in production for sale. Part of the market was located in nearby cities, part in Madrid, the American colonies, and northern Europe. The owners and tenants of these properties, exploiting labor that the population expansion was making relatively cheap, were in a good position to take advantage of changing market conditions. They faced the obstacles described above to borrowing money to finance improvements, but the improvements they were likely to undertake required little capital. They might involve replanting grain fields with olive groves or vineyards or breaking new land for this purpose. Olive trees and vines required a number of years before they produced fruit—around ten for olives and four for vines as a minimum—but with a sufficiently large estate the owner could make the transition in gradual stages.
The agricultural pattern of the south and west created a highly stratified society. The large towns and cities of Andalusia and La Mancha, dominated by aristocratic residences and teeming with landless workers and their families, approached an ideal type of early modern hierarchical society. In the north and east of the interior, the region of small exploitations, village society was more egalitarian. The difference was only relative, however. A landowning class also existed here, whose holdings consisted of numerous small fields, and it was less visible because it resided away from the villages in the district and provincial capitals. A word frequently on the tongue of contemporaries revealed the oligarchic nature of rural society throughout the interior of Spain: poderosos, the powerful ones. In Andalusia the poderosos were the men whose control of the land permitted them to exploit the braceros, appropriate the common lands for their own use, and tyrannize their districts. They included the señores and other major landowners, but the term was applied with even greater opprobrium to the large tenant labradores.[79] Poderosos also existed in the region of small farms. In Soria the name applied to large owners living in the provincial capital who
[78] See the study of Andalusia in Artola, Contreras, and Bernal, Latifundio. An excellent study of the agriculture of the province of Seville in the nineteenth century is Bernal and Drain, Campagnes sevillanes.
[79] For the use of the term poderoso in Andalusia, Mem. ajust. (1784), §294, 185; §332, 195; §661–62, 220–21; §667, 223.
rented fields to the peasants or offered loans to peasants with land and foreclosed when harvests were bad.[80] In Salamanca it was used to describe the large sheep owners who controlled the Mesta and through it obtained the best pastures for their immense herds.[81] One would certainly include in their number the wealthy churches and religious orders and the clergymen who enjoyed opulent benefices. The meaning of poderosos varied according to the local economy, but all parts of the interior had oligarchs that the term fitted. Their interest lay in marketing agricultural products, and it was largely through them that the impact of rising demand would be transmitted to the men who worked the soil.
The rising population and the increasing value of land provided the conditions for a clash of interests between the crown and the poderosos. Economic self-interest would encourage the powerful owners to circumvent any restrictions that hindered them from exploiting the rising agricultural prices and the increasing supply of labor. They could be expected to seek to control as much land as possible, whether their own or the public's, and use it as they wanted, renting it at high rates or producing directly for the market with hired hands. The crown, for its part, wanted to ensure a supply of food for the cities at reasonable prices while keeping imports at a minimum. Both the crown and poderosos sought to increase production, but beyond this common aim, their objectives were bound to conflict.
5
The first response of the crown to the growing threat of grain shortages was to expand an institution long familiar in Spain. Beginning in the Middle Ages, Spanish authorities had established public granaries (pósitos ) as a defense against bad harvests. Some pósitos were creations of the crown, others were founded privately as acts of charity. According to an eighteenth-century writer, every farmer within the district of a pósito was required to deposit with it each year a portion of his harvest; he received back his deposit or its value in money after the following harvest, when he brought in his next quota.[82] Besides keeping on hand a supply of grain to feed the people in time of scarcity, the pósitos lent
[80] Ibid., §133, 157–58.
[81] Ibid., §248, 172–73. Mickun discusses the use of the term "poderoso" and the activities of some poderosos, La Mesta, 82–98, 288–91.
[82] William Coxe, L'Espagne sous les Bourbons, cited by Desdevises, L'Espagne 2 : 198.
grain to hard-pressed farmers for seed in return for a slightly larger repayment and used their profits to finance local public works.[83]
In 1751 there were 3,371 public and 2,865 charitable pósitos, most of them located in the two Castiles, León, and Andalusia. Coastal regions, able to import grain in bad years, had few. After the famine of 1750, the crown had sought to render them more effective by centralizing their administration and establishing new ones. By 1773, when their condition was reviewed, 1,854 had been added, over half of these in Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, where there had been relatively few before. In that year the pósitos had on hand a supply of wheat and flour sufficient to feed at a normal level the whole population of Spain for over two months.[84]
After Carlos III succeeded to the throne in 1759, the question of subsistence rapidly became his leading domestic concern. A prolonged drought affected Spain in the 1760s. The entire meseta and Andalusia had a poor wheat crop in 1763. The next year was no better in parts of Andalusia and Extremadura, and the entire region again suffered in 1765. Aragon's harvests also declined from the levels of the 1750s. None of these years was as bad as some in the early 1750s, but the accumulated effect produced growing shortages and rising prices.[85]
Carlos III, for twenty-five years king of Naples before moving to Spain, was familiar with the art of governing. He introduced a new generation of ministers, who were ready to try radical measures. Among them were his Italian adviser the Marqués de Esquilache and the young Asturian lawyer Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes. Esquilache became secretary of state for war and finance, while Campomanes, who had entered the government in 1755 in the postal service, was promoted in 1762 to be a fiscal, or advisory attorney, of the Council of Castile.[86] One of the tasks of a fiscal was to draft recommendations (consultas ) of the council on issues referred to it by the king. Since the consultas of the Council of Castile frequently became the texts of royal decrees, its fiscales were central to the legislative process of the monarchy. Campomanes became the council's specialist on economic questions. He followed the
[83] Anes, "Pósitos."
[84] Ibid. The pósitos had 7,261,000 fanegas of wheat and flour plus 351,000 fanegas of lesser grains; I assume 4 fanegas per person per year and 10 million population (see below, Chapter 7).
[85] Hamilton's agricultural price index for New Castile rises steadily from 103 in 1761 to 150 in 1765, as high as in 1754 (1725–50 = 100); War and Prices, 172–73, Table 11; Vilar, "Mótin," 205–6; Anes, Crisis, Gráficos 9–36, esp. 24–33.
[86] Laura Rodríguez, Reforma, 85, 90.
price of grain carefully, studying its fluctuations since the beginning of the century and noting the years of scarcity.[87]
The traditional Spanish practice was for towns and cities to fix the price of bread and take charge of supplying grain to the bakers, calling on the pósitos in time of need. Since 1699 the crown had controlled the price of wheat, and it regulated shipment of cereals both internally and abroad. As prices rose in the eighteenth century, these restrictions on trade could not be enforced. Dealers ignored the price ceilings and the regulations on the movement of grain. In 1756–57, Fernando VI removed the restrictions on the shipment of grain and wine within the country.[88] In 1764 France established a free market in grain.[89] Esquilache and Campomanes, encouraged by the French measure and aware of recent theories voiced abroad that recommended economic freedom, urged the abolition of price controls on grain. Their hope was that such freedom would lead to the expansion of the domestic commerce in cereals and that, as markets opened up, farmers would respond with greater production, removing the threat of famine. On 11 July 1765 they obtained a royal pragmática that abolished controls on grain prices and confirmed the freedom to ship grain within the country.[90]
For centuries the Spanish people had been accustomed to seeing the public authorities respond to the threat of famine with decisive acts, fixing prices and allocating resources. The new approach clashed with their accepted beliefs. It seemed an invitation for persons and bodies who had amassed grain for sale—especially large landowners and religious institutions—to force up prices by hoarding their grain and then to sell it at the peak of the curve. Intendants and other local officials began at once to decry the pragmática.[91] When the harvest then in progress proved bad and prices continued to spiral, popular fears appeared confirmed.
Throughout the cities of central Spain, resentment smoldered among the poor. Esquilache, an Italian and a reformer, was an easy target to blame. Trouble began in Madrid on Palm Sunday, 23 March 1766, when the common people rioted, ostensibly protesting a decree that Esquilache had authored banning the popular broad-brimmed hat and
[87] Laura Rodríguez, "Spanish Riots," 128 and n. 47.
[88] Anes, Crisis, 336–44.
[89] See Dakin, Turgot, 94–96; and Kaplan, Bread 1 : 137–43.
[90] Vicens Vives, Manual, 469–70; Vilar, "Motín," 210–11; Laura Rodríguez, "Spanish Riots," 118–19; Anes, Crisis, 336–47; Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 419–21.
[91] Anes, Crisis, 337–38, 344–46.
long cape. The demands of the spokesmen of the people soon extended to the provision of cheaper bread. Carlos III fled the city, dismissed Esquilache, and ordered a lower price for bread. The populace of numerous other towns and cities of central Spain soon joined the rioting, demanding that authorities enforce a reasonable price for bread. In most places officials restored peace by heeding this demand, and in some towns they forestalled trouble by bringing the price down before they were forced to.[92] In the midst of the commotion, Carlos III turned the government over to a prominent grande and experienced military leader, the Conde de Aranda, making him president of the Council of Castile. Aranda and the king acted decisively to restore royal authority. After quelling the riots, they punished ringleaders with imprisonment or death and rescinded all concessions made to the rioters. The freedom of the grain trade remained in effect. They did not want Spaniards to think that a recourse to violence could change royal policy.[93]
The Motín (riot) de Esquilache, as the event became known, caused a profound impression on the king and his counselors. Although bread riots were relatively common in France and England—in the same year an exceptional number occurred in England because the grain harvest in that country too had been disastrous[94] —they were little known in Spain. Royal authority had not been so threatened in Castile since the revolt of the Comuneros in 1520. Publicly the king's counselors blamed the rising on provocation by aristocrats and clergymen, and they justified the expulsion of the Jesuits from all Spanish dominions in 1767 in part by accusing them of complicity in the motín. But the royal counselors were well aware that high food prices had been instrumental in causing the discontent. For the next years the problem of increasing the food supply became the overriding concern of the government, pushing into the background the long-standing search for a less regressive and fairer tax structure.
Since the days when royal agents were compiling the catastro, local officials in various quarters had directed petitions to the Council of Castile asking it to correct abuses that they said hurt farming. They complained especially of the excessive privileges of the Mesta and the rising
[92] Vilar, "Motín," 233–44; Laura Rodríguez, "Spanish Riots," 132–33. Rodríguez has mapped sixty-nine riots, forty-three in central Spain and twenty-three around the periphery, eleven of the latter in the Basque provinces.
[93] Vilar "Motín," 233–44; Laura Rodríguez, "Spanish Riots," 139–43.
[94] Thomas, "Feedings England," 333–34; Tilly, "Proletarianization," 23–24; Cornelius P. Forster, Uncontrolled Chancellor, 101–2.
rent for land.[95] While the rioting was still in progress, the secretary of hacienda (finance) ordered the intendants of Old Castile and León to give their views on the best means to improve farming, stock raising, and industry.[96] As complaints from southern Spain continued to pour in, at the behest of Campomanes the survey was extended to Andalusia, La Mancha, and Extremadura. It asked for opinions on the advisability of restricting the subleasing of farm lands, placing a ceiling on agricultural rents, limiting the extent of land a single individual could exploit, and establishing villages on the cortijos.[97] The whole survey had as its objective the formulation of a legal code for agriculture or, in the words of the inquiry, an "agrarian law."
The crown also took a more direct step to improve conditions. Suspecting the complicity of local elites in the riots, Campomanes spurred on the Council of Castile to establish "representatives of the people" whose purpose would be "to stop the wrongdoing of municipal officials, who usually hold hereditary offices."[98] On 5 May 1766, a bare month after the riots, the king created two new officials to represent the public interest in the municipal councils. In all towns of two thousand or more vecinos, the taxpayers would elect by two-stage voting four "deputies of the commons" (diputados del común ) to sit with the permanent city councilors (regidores ). Smaller towns would elect two such deputies. In addition, towns large enough to have a procurador síndico, who was in theory a spokesman for the public interest but had in practice in most places become an hereditary officer allied with the ruling group, would add another new official, a procurador síndico personero del público, similarly elected, to be a kind of public tribune. Relatives of regidores were declared ineligible for the new positions. These elected officials were to take charge of feeding the cities, and they were to enforce the freedom of the grain trade.[99]
Another, more delicate task fell into the lap of the diputados del común. The Council of Castile had directed some towns of Extremadura to distribute common lands as farms to their vecinos, beginning
[95] Mem. ajust. (1784), §15–29, 143–47 (Zamora); §35–55, 148–56 (Salamanca); §133–56, 157–64 (Soria); Anes, "Informe ," 103; Defourneaux, Olavide, 133 (Extremadura).
[96] Mem. ajust. (1784), §1, 139; Anes, "Informe, " 104.
[97] Mem. ajust. (1784), §635–36, 211; §658, 219; §694, §716, 234; Anes, "Informe, " 105; Defourneaux, Olavide, 144 (on Campomanes's role).
[98] Quoted in Laura Rodríguez, "Spanish Riots," 142. She cites attempts of oligarchies of southern cities to foil inquiries into the causes of the riots, 140–41.
[99] Nov. rec., VII, xviii, 1, 2; Defourneaux, Olavide, 94–95.
with the day laborers (jornaleros ) and marginal farmers (senareros ). In the month of the motín, the local intendant informed the council that its orders were being subverted, for the "vecinos poderosos," working through the town councils, were allocating the best part of the commons to themselves and their friends. At his suggestion, the provisions of the reform were extended to all Extremadura to obtain better enforcement.[100] Both municipal lands normally rented (propios) and common pastures suitable for cultivation were to be divided into lots and distributed among the vecinos for a reasonable rent, to be held as long as they were properly cultivated and the rent paid, and not to be subleased. Jornaleros and senareros would have priority, and after them farmers with one yoke of draft animals, then those with two, and so on. In 1767 the king extended the provision to La Mancha and Andalusia, and in 1768 to the rest of the kingdom. He assigned the distribution of the lands to the Juntas de Propios y Arbitrios, municipal finance committees made up of the regidores and new diputados del común.[101]
Again the council received complaints, this time from Andalusia, that the municipalities were not carrying out the order, or that where they were, the choice lots were going to the poderosos, with little or none left for the poor.[102] The council struggled to find a way to enforce the royal will against the local oligarchs. In 1770 the government decided to modify its approach by giving priority not to jornaleros but to farmers who possessed draft animals and tools but no land. The municipal electors chosen to select the diputados del común were to name arbiters and assessors (repartidores y tasadores ) to oversee the process.[103]
A study of the documents that have survived indicates that the Council of Castile was frustrated in its good intentions. Most municipal governments chose to ignore the orders, and those that responded twisted the instructions to give the vacant lands to the poderosos and their clients, ignoring the just claims of the lower classes. An occasional town did distribute plots to small farmers and day laborers, but few beneficiaries succeeded against the odds posed by lack of capital and the denial of a moratorium on rent while they got the unbroken land under production.[104] The story of the vecino of Talavera de la Reina, whom the
[100] Real provisión, 2 May 1766, in Costa, Colectivismo , 93–97.
[101] Ibid., 242; Nov. rec., VII, xxv, n. 11.
[102] Costa, Colectivismo, 97–102, quoting real provisión of 12 June 1767 and Cicilia Coello.
[103] Real provisión, 26 May 1770, Nov. rec., VII, xxv, 17.
[104] Sánchez Salazar, "Repartos."
poderosos ordered beaten and arrested for claiming his proper share, reflects the prevailing response.[105] In local affairs, the municipal elites proved themselves stronger than the crown.
6
Like social planners before and after them, the royal reformers found it more attractive to create a new society than to remake the existing one. In 1761 the crown had decided to improve the artery that connected the capital with Andalusia and the American colonies. To make the highway from Madrid to Seville and Cádiz safe, settlements were needed in the lonely stretches frequented by bandits. The long road through the Sierra Morena, broken only by a few solitary inns, especially worried the planners. Inspired by the desire to reform the countryside, in 1766 Campomanes took charge of creating new model colonies in the region and selected Pablo de Olavide as local administrator. Olavide was a native of Peru who had become known for his enlightened ideas, gained in part from a number of visits to Paris. In the 1760s his home in Madrid, which boasted an excellent library of French works, became a meeting place for social leaders of advanced ideas and royal servants of the highest level, including Campomanes. When Carlos III called on the Conde de Aranda to resolve the crisis of 1766, the latter obtained the election of Olavide as the new procurador síndico personero del público of Madrid. Here Olavide had to defend the freedom of the grain trade against the stubborn resistance of the city council. In 1767 the Council of Castile nominated Olavide to be "assistant" of Seville, that is, intendant of western Andalusia, and gave him authority over the proposed colonies.[106]
Together Campomanes and Olavide drew up the plans. They were free to embody their ideal of the rural society, since the regions selected had virtually no inhabitants. They chose to bring in foreigners, who would be innocent of the customs and prejudices of Spaniards, and the Council of Castile accepted a proposal of a former agent of the king of Prussia to provide German immigrants. Each colonist would receive a fifty-fanega lot on a permanent (emphyteutic) lease from the crown and after ten years would pay rent in kind. He would be given a house, an irrigated huerta, space for an orchard, tools, two cows, five sheep, five
[105] Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 425, gives this story and other evidence of inequity in the process.
[106] Defourneaux, Olavide, 52–61, 73–74, 96–104, 179.
kids, five chickens and a rooster, a sow, and enough supplies for two years. The lots were to be hereditary, and they could not be divided or accumulated. Each town would have its parish church, but houses of religious orders were not allowed in the colonies, and the flocks of the Mesta were banned from the territory. Public officials were to be elective and could never become hereditary. Plans called for compulsory elementary education, but no institutions of secondary or higher education were permitted in the vicinity. The reformers were taking all possible precautions to create an egalitarian society of farmers and prevent the rise of poderosos of any kind.[107]
They selected two areas. The more challenging was in the rolling hills of Sierra Morena, between Las Navas de Tolosa, scene of the great Christian victory of 1212, and Bailén, where in 1808 the Spanish armies would capture the troops of Napoleon advancing on Seville. The second, known as the colonies of Andalusia, was in the middle of the broad Guadalquivir valley between Córdoba and Seville.
Drawing up plans was one thing, putting them into practice proved less easy. The first German colonists, attracted by exorbitant descriptions of the fertility of the Spanish soil and gentleness of its climate, arrived before the year 1767 was out. They were soon dismayed by the harsh realities of the sites and the lack of preparations, and many succumbed to epidemics in the next summer. Yet by the end of 1768 five new towns existed in Sierra Morena, and the colonies of Andalusia had received their first settlers. Nevertheless, the German clergymen who accompanied the immigrants, angered by the anticlerical tone of the arrangements, complained repeatedly to Madrid of the sad state of their charges, accusing Olavide of cruelty and mismanagement. Harkening to them, Aranda in 1769 deprived Campomanes and Olavide of authority over the project, to their anger and dismay. Within three months Aranda returned them to power, but Campomanes never forgot the affront.[108]
Olavide took up residence in the capital of the settlements of Sierra Morena, which received the royal name of La Carolina—that of the Andalusian settlements was La Carlota—and remained there for four years.[109] With his presence, the colonies grew and flourished. Gradually, their composition changed. Foreigners had caused many problems, and after 1770 Spaniards were brought in, especially Catalans, considered the most advanced farmers of the realm. By 1776 two-thirds of the colo-
[107] RC, 5 July 1767, Nov. rec., VII, xxii, 3; Defourneaux, Olavide, 180–81.
[108] Defourneaux, Olavide, 202–11.
[109] Ibid., 220–21.
nists were Spaniards, and their proportion continued to increase. Campomanes and Olavide guided their charges toward the agrarian economy they believed best for Spain. It consisted, as Campomanes wrote in 1774, of a combination of farming, livestock raising, and small industry.[110] With the riots of 1766 fresh in their memory, the planners emphasized the cultivation of grains, especially wheat. Olavide regularly vaunted the abundance of the harvests of the Sierra Morena colonies. By 1775 he claimed an average of five hundred thousand fanegas of grains and legumes per year, almost enough to feed Madrid.[111] Every colonist had cattle, and Olavide struggled to introduce artificial meadows and sainfoin for fodder. He also encouraged the planting of crops that could be the basis for local industries: flax, hemp, and silk. In 1775 the colonies had one hundred looms for wool in private homes and a linen factory with ninety-one looms. The Sierra Morena project now had nine towns and thirteen thousand people. Spanish and foreign travelers did not tire of extolling their beauty, cleanliness, and prosperity. The Englishman Henry Swinburne summed up their reaction: "I never saw a scene more pleasing to the eye, or more satisfactory to the mind of every person that feels himself interested in the welfare of his fellow creatures."[112]
Olavide never bestowed on the colonies near Córdoba the same devotion as on those of Sierra Morena. Yet in a different way they too embodied the ideals of the reformers, for they incorporated the concept of the best kind of settlement for a region dominated by cortijos. The population was not gathered in towns—there were only four of these—but scattered in homesteads located on individual farms. Clusters of live oaks were left standing in the fields of grain, giving the region a natural beauty and sense of prosperity out of tune with the rest of Andalusia, as Swinburne remarked.[113]
Despite its inauspicious start, the great experiment succeeded, and it made the name of Olavide known throughout Europe. Although the local industries founded by Olavide did not survive the Napoleonic war, the towns of Sierra Morena and Córdoba remain today, with their regular streets and modest churches, a tribute to Carlos III and his servants. The scattered farms of the colonies of Andalusia lasted until
[110] Rodríguez de Campomanes, Industria popular.
[111] Defourneaux, Olavide, 222, 233. See n. 39 above.
[112] Swinburne, Travels 2 : 105; on the colonies, Defourneaux, Olavide, 190–239.
[113] Ibid., 235 and n. 4. Vázquez Lesmes, Ilustración y proceso colonizador, studies the colonies of Andalusia, with special attention to San Sebastián de los Ballesteros, the only one whose archives have been preserved.
recently, but the small, egalitarian exploitations of Sierra Morena disappeared after the restrictions on their sale or accumulation were abolished in 1835, and gradually olives and cattle replaced wheat as the major products.[114]
7
The rural revolution from above lasted seven years. In 1773 Olavide left La Carolina for Seville, and more significantly, Carlos III named Aranda ambassador to Versailles, removing him from authority over the Spanish government. According to contemporaries, Campomanes contributed to his dismissal; how is not clear.[115] Campomanes, the self-made son of a modest Asturian hidalgo, compulsive, self-confident, increasingly domineering, and Aranda, a grande, vain in his social superiority, convinced of his leadership in Spain's Enlightenment, jealous perhaps of the other's intellectual superiority, were not made to work well together. Loyalty to the king and common hatred of the Jesuits had united them, but Aranda's brief removal of Campomanes from the colonial project produced lasting bitterness.
The departure of Aranda provided the occasion for a counterattack by those who resented the reforms. Landowners were only one group; more active were conservative clergymen who chafed at recent reforms in the universities, the religious orders, and the Inquisition and feared further changes. Their triumph came when the Inquisition arrested Olavide in 1776, charging him with unorthodox statements and correspondence with known heretics like Voltaire and Rousseau. He was convicted in 1778, deprived of his property, and sentenced to eight years' confinement. Although he escaped to France two years later, his fate was a warning to all who wanted to move rapidly against existing institutions.[116]
Campomanes remained alone to continue the struggle for agrarian reform. Fortunately for his efforts, in 1776 Carlos III appointed as first secretary of state Campomanes's partner in reform and colleague as fiscal of the Council of Castile, Joseph Moñino, recently named Conde de Floridablanca. In 1780 the king rewarded Campomanes with the title of Conde de Campomanes and in 1783 made him interim governor of the Council of Castile. Carlos IV raised him to permanent governor in
[114] Defourneaux, Olavide, 492–95.
[115] See ibid., 310–11.
[116] For the full story, ibid., 309–95.
1789. Although he lacked the title of president of Castile that Aranda had enjoyed, he now occupied the latter's onetime position. Under Floridablanca and Campomanes, the government moved at a more moderate pace, but its direction remained unchanged.
The idea of settling Spain's open stretches persisted. Various señores and landowners of Andalusia had proposed to Olavide the colonization of their lands, but after his arrest nothing was done.[117] In 1769 the royal governor (corregidor ) of Salamanca recommended the settlement of its depopulated places (despoblados ), which he said could become prosperous villages if properly colonized. These were private or ecclesiastical estates, and peopling them entailed different issues from the colonizing of unclaimed baldíos. Later on, in Chapter 19, we shall observe the modest but positive results of this proposal. The idea of establishing small farmers on the vacant pastures of Extremadura did not perish either. In 1783 Carlos III created a committee of members of the Council of Castile to review the situation. Ten years later Carlos IV, following its advice, revived the plan of 1770 and ordered the baldíos of Extremadura distributed to vecinos, this time with the size of the farms to be proportional to the number of yokes of oxen owned by the settler.[118] I have seen no evidence that this edict was any more successful than earlier ones.
The attack on the poderosos wavered, but the last decade of Carlos III saw a victory for reform over the Mesta. The Council of Castile had received many complaints about it, especially from the cities of Extremadura.[119] In 1779 the king named Campomanes its president, and the latter used his position to enforce his views. He ordered the judges of the Mesta to favor local interests over the sheep owners. In 1786 he obtained the abolition of the privilege of posesión, the right to the permanent enjoyment of their pastures. Two years later landowners were authorized to enclose their properties and plant them as they wished.[120]
We lack studies of the results of these decrees, but they were a departure in the policies of Carlos III's government. Instead of attempting to reform by edict, Campomanes had adopted the smoother path of eliminating outmoded controls over the use of the land. This policy meant that economic forces were allowed to determine the outcome; it stood to benefit the large owners of southern Spain as much as the villages of
[117] Ibid., 238 n. 5.
[118] RC, 28 Apr. 1793, AHN, Hac., libro 8101, no. 4913.
[119] Documents in the case between the cities of Extremadura and the Mesta were published in Memorial ajustado (1771).
[120] Klein, Mesta, 345–46; cédula del Consejo, 15 June 1788, Nov. rec., VII, xxiv, 19.
Castile and León that recovered rights over their common lands. In 1791, during the height of the reaction inspired by the French Revolution, Carlos IV dismissed Campomanes from the governorship of the Council of Castile. In the following years the owners of migrant sheep recovered major features of the right of posesión. Nevertheless, the wheel of history could not be turned back. The Cortes of Cádiz legislated against the Mesta, and after a long agony, it was finally abolished in 1836.[121]
On a different level, the attack on the Mesta was consistent with the agrarian policy of Carlos III. After the revolts of 1766, the royal counselors were concerned with feeding the growing population of Madrid and other Castilian cities. Although the reforms of the countryside were worded to apply to all Spain, they were conceived to improve conditions in the center and south, the breadbasket of these cities. This was the area where the poderosos were most influential, and royal interference led to battle lines being drawn between opposing camps. The reforms dealt with three types of holding: the pastures of the Mesta, the common lands of the municipalities, and baldíos currently not exploited. Except for the decision to repopulate despoblados of Salamanca province that were in private hands, the crown did not interfere with private or church properties. Yet it had unequal success in the three main areas of its activity because the reforms affected the local elites in different ways.
In two areas the crown was relatively successful: in colonizing the wastes of Sierra Morena and Andalusia and in restricting the privileges of the Mesta. The former did not conflict with the interests of local landowners, for virtually all the land employed was outside their field of operation and the settlers came from other parts of Spain and Europe, causing few ripples in local society. In the case of the Mesta, the large owners of the south and southwest stood to gain from authorization to plow up private and common pastures.
The third area of reform, however, the attempt to turn municipal common lands into small farms, brought the king into direct conflict with the poderosos of the region of large towns and large properties. Through the municipal councils they controlled these lands, and rising agricultural prices meant that they had here a potential source of personal gain. They had no interest in cooperating with the king to create a class of small farmers that would both deprive them of control of the municipal lands and threaten their cheap supply of labor.
The history of Carlos III's rural reforms reveals the Achilles' heel of
[121] Klein, Mesta, 347–48.
Spanish enlightened despotism, the lack of effective linkage between the royal government in Madrid and its subjects throughout the country. By appointing enlightened reformers to the critical spots in the highest advisory body of the kingdom, the Council of Castile—Aranda as its president and Campomanes and Moñino as its fiscales—the king could legislate a comprehensive reform program, but he lacked an effective local administration to carry it out. The creation of intendants at midcentury was a first step in providing the missing linkage, and the rapid completion under their direction of the vast task of drawing up the catastro of the Marqués de la Ensenada shows that there were plenty of competent hands available in the provinces to serve the royal administration. But when it came to introducing new policies, the king had few means to force compliance on municipal governments. For all the centuries of expanding royal authority, Spain remained in many ways a federation of self-governing municipalities, at least in those areas where the municipalities were large towns. Self-governing in a relative sense only, of course, for those who governed were the oligarchs, the poderosos, not the vecinos as a whole. Their resistance was central to the failure to introduce the single tax of the Marqués de la Ensenada, as it was to the failure to distribute baldíos to peasants. The royal counselors sought to overcome the lack of effective linkage by placing elected defenders of the public interest in the municipal councils, who, they took for granted, would see the wisdom of the reforms and defend them. The creation of the diputados del común and the procuradores síndicos personeros del público was conceived with the region of large towns in mind—the decree divided places into those with more or less than two thousand vecinos—that is, southwest of the Salamanca-Albacete line. As a measure to wrest control from local elites, it was a failure, and with it went any hope of legislating against their pleasure.
Besides these three areas of reform, the aftermath of the revolts of 1766 involved Campomanes and Moñino in a different undertaking with implications more pregnant for the future than they could have imagined. The expulsion of the Jesuits raised the issue of what to do with their properties, which included not only the buildings occupied by their schools, hospitals, and other activities—these went to bodies that would continue their functions—but numerous urban and rural properties that had produced income for the order. The two fiscales did not hesitate to argue that these estates reverted to "the Nation," from whose members they had originally come, and specifically to the king, as "Head,
Administrator, and Sovereign of the Society."[122] The king approved the recommendation in August 1768 and a subsequent one in March 1769 that put up for sale at auction properties in a state of deterioration or neglect or whose condition was harmful to society. Again it became apparent that when a royal order met with the support of the influential public, it could be carried out expeditiously. Even more than the legislation on the Mesta, the disentail of ecclesiastical properties brought the king into direct cooperation with the landowning classes, who stood to gain through the purchase of the lands. Half the Jesuit estates that were judged fit for sale—and this seems to have meant everything not used in their religious, charitable, and educational activities—were disposed of before the end of 1771. To judge from the example of the province of Valladolid, which has been studied, rural properties were most in demand, being gobbled up by persons of local social and economic prominence.[123]
These sales involved the transfer of property from ecclesiastical mortmain to free hands—only laymen were allowed to buy—but they were not conceived as an attack on entail as such. A major Jesuit cortijo in the province of Córdoba was turned into one of the towns of the new colonies of Andalusia.[124] Another indication of official intentions involved the fate of extensive pastures of the military Order of Calatrava in the valley of Alcudia (La Mancha), which the king had put up for sale in 1766. Troubled by second thoughts on the wisdom of this decision, in 1770 Campomanes and Moñino used the first returns of the sales of Jesuit properties to buy up for the crown those pastures that had not yet been alienated (and thus placed in royal hands the estate that would provide the title and wealth of the favorite of the next king).[125] Other proceeds of the sale of Jesuit holdings went to the support of hospitals, the city of Madrid, and various aristocratic houses in the form of loans at low rates of interest. None of these uses of the fortune that had befallen the king from the departure of the Jesuits reveal an ideological commitment to the superiority of free property over entail.
The sale of Jesuit properties appeared almost as a side effect of the
[122] RC, 14 Aug. 1768, quoted in Yun Casalilla, "Venta de los bienes," n. 17.
[123] Ibid., 20–22. According to Yun Casalilla's Appendix 1, Jesuit properties worth 112.9 million reales were sold by 1808. Since less than 100,000 of this total came in the last three years, little could have remained. Of the total, properties worth 55.9 million were sold in the first three years, 30.5 million in 1770 alone.
[124] San Sebastián de los Ballesteros, see Vázquez Lesmes, Ilustración y proceso colonizador, 64–70.
[125] Corchado Soriano, "Desamortización."
decision to expel the order. It was not presented as setting a precedent, although some individuals might have had their own thoughts on such a matter. Nevertheless, it foreshadowed the decision of Carlos IV in 1798 to begin a general disentail of properties under ecclesiastical control. Before ecclesiastical disentail could become a consciously announced policy, two developments occurred. One was in the realm of ideas, the other in the realm of royal finances. On the whole they ran their course independently of each other, and they can be observed separately.
Chapter II—
The Philosophy of Agrarian Reform
In 1777, at Campomanes's instigation, the Council of Castile sent the files it had collected on agricultural conditions in Spain to the Royal Economic Society of Madrid, with a request to study them and propose a plan for agrarian reform.[1] Campomanes had been the person most responsible for the founding of the Economic Society two years previously, a semiofficial body of leading citizens dedicated to the improvement of the national economy, and he was now its director.[2] He had been inspired by the example of the successful Royal Basque Society of Friends of the Country (Amigos del País), established in 1765, and the Economic Society of Madrid in turn became a model for over fifty societies founded in other Spanish cities in the next decade. Campomanes's initiative in referring the question of agrarian reform to it appears to have been aimed at gaining support from a prestigious and progressive group of Spaniards in the dark years after the fall of Aranda and the arrest of Olavide.
The council had to wait almost twenty years to receive the study it requested. In August 1777 the Economic Society instructed its Agricultural Section to review the materials and render a report. Despite many meetings over the next six years, the section did not produce a recommendation, and in 1783 the society established a smaller Junta Particular de Ley Agraria, an ad hoc committee of twelve members, to take
[1] Anes, "Informe, " 109.
[2] Defourneaux, Olavide, 165 n. 1 and 169.
over the task.[3] Its most prominent member was Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, who had recently become known as one of the king's most promising servants. The following year Campomanes resigned as director of the society in order to devote himself fully to his new position as acting governor of the Council of Castile, and Jovellanos was elected to succeed him.[4] Campomanes and Olavide had been the driving force behind the agrarian program in the 1760s and 1770s. Now Jovellanos, twenty-five years their junior, was to assume that role.
Like Campomanes, Jovellanos was a native of Asturias. After studying for the priesthood at the Universities of Ávila and Alcalá de Henares, he changed his career and entered public service as a magistrate in Seville in 1768. He frequented the salon (tertulia ) of Olavide at the height of the reform period and gained a reputation as a gifted young poet and playwright. In this company he read French and English works on political philosophy and economy. He was transferred to Madrid in 1778, where he became a protégé of Campomanes and a well-known figure in official circles. Thirty-four years old at his arrival in Madrid, he was still single, a condition he never abandoned. He already revealed the serious, generous, incorruptible character that was to mark him the rest of his life, very different from the garrulous self-assertion of Campomanes or the erratic enthusiasm of Olavide. As he grew older, he gave up writing poetry and became dedicated to two causes, the return of the Spanish church to the simple practices of the early fathers and the welfare of his countrymen. In these causes he was a priest in secular garb and would eventually become their martyr.[5]
Although Jovellanos was president of the Economic Society for only one year, he remained a member of its Junta on the Agrarian Law and from this vantage point gradually assumed responsibility for the report to the Council of Castile. The junta promptly discovered that it could not deal effectively with the mass of manuscript documents provided by the council, and it requested the council to publish the full record. This appeared in 1784 in a large folio volume with the title Memorial ajustado hecho de órden del Consejo, del expediente consultivo que pende en él, . . . sobre los daños y decadencia que padece la agricultura, sus motivos, y medios para su restablecimiento y fomento.[6] It contained the complaints of local officials against existing practices, the reports of in-
[3] Anes, "Informe, " 111–14.
[4] Domergue, "Real Sociedad," 25.
[5] A brief biography of Jovellanos is contained in Polt, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, chap. 1.
[6] See Bibliography for the original edition and 1967 republication, and for my form of citation.
tendants, and the opinions of royal servants and councils. Its most impressive section was the lengthy report, actually an essay, by Olavide in his position as intendant of Seville.[7] To read the volume is to get a sense of the tensions in the countryside among the different groups that drew their income from the land, for the aim of most of the documents was to urge change, not to defend the status quo. It did not circulate in large numbers, but it helped to arouse interest in an "agrarian law" among policymakers and other educated persons who could influence wider sectors of public opinion.
Although the junta now had its main source of information readily available, it did not begin deliberations in earnest until 1787. After the first discussion led to a unanimous agreement that Spanish agriculture was decadent, the members decided to prepare individual written opinions on the causes of this decadence. Gathered together to listen to several responses, they heard Jovellanos deliver a brilliant discourse. His ideas represented an evolution in his own mind that reflected changes occurring in the thought of his listeners. He had once joined Campomanes and Olavide in admiring earlier Spanish proponents of reform, the arbitristas of the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth-century European mercantilists and Physiocrats. About 1784 he had read Adam Smith and was thrilled by his power of reasoning and analysis. He had lost his faith in earlier writers, Spanish and foreign, and become an enthusiastic advocate of economic liberalism.[8] This was the ideology that he now propounded to the junta, as he argued that all the causes for Spanish decadence could be traced back to the effects of bad laws. Convinced by his presentation, the members charged him with the task of drafting their report.[9]
Whatever ideas Jovellanos may have expressed to the junta, he was not ready to present a text at this stage. For several years his duties as a royal servant gave him little leisure for the monumental task involved. An indirect consequence of the French Revolution was to provide him with the time he needed. The Conde de Floridablanca, whom Carlos IV kept on as first secretary, frightened by the events north of the Pyrenees, in 1790 acted to separate the most prominent reformers from sensitive positions. Campomanes was dropped as governor of the Council of Castile, and Jovellanos received the charge to investigate the coal mines of Asturias, a task that exiled him to his native province.[10]
[7] This section has been republished separately: Olavide, "Informe."
[8] Polt, "Jovellanos," 8–9.
[9] Anes, "Informe, " 109–21; Robert Vergnes, "Dirigisme," 323–25.
[10] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 261.
In his home in Gijón, Jovellanos was free to take up the materials on agrarian reform. He corresponded with the itinerant cleric and art critic Antonio Ponz, author of a series of volumes that in part described the landscape and towns of Spain. He reread Adam Smith. Much of his spare time for three years went into preparing his recommendations for the improvement of agriculture.[11] Finally in 1794 he sent the completed text to the Economic Society. The members of the Junta on the Agrarian Law met in a number of sessions to hear it read—it is a lengthy document—and they listened "electrified," as one member related. The society then adopted it as its official report to the Council of Castile. Floridablanca had fallen in 1792, and the leading figure in the government was the young royal favorite Manuel Godoy, recently made Duque de la Alcudia, who was more friendly to reform than the aged statesman. With his support the society published the report as the Informe de la Sociedad Economica . . . en el expediente de ley agraria.[12]
The Informe de ley agraria was to have a profound effect on Spanish policy. Some readers believed that it threatened the religious and social structure of Spain and attempted, without success, to have the Inquisition ban it.[13] Instead it became widely known and was reprinted a number of times in the next half century. Written in a facile yet elegant style, clear in its argument, graphic in its illustrations, and biting in its conclusions, the Informe is the culmination of Spain's intellectual flowering in the second half of the eighteenth century and ranks among the great works of the Enlightenment in any language. It is the product of deep immersion in Spanish history and law and in contemporary European thought and also of Jovellanos's sensitive observations during his wide travels in the service of his king.
2
A century after the Informe appeared, Joaquín Costa, outspoken critic of the political and social structure of the Spain of his day and one of the fathers of the Generation of 1898, published a book entitled Colectivismo agrario en España. It described at length the practices of communal farming found in many towns of Spain, such as the sharing of pastures, the sowing and harvesting of crops collectively, and the peri-
[11] Polt, "Jovellanos," 9; Anes, "Informe, " 122–24.
[12] Jovellanos, Informe.
[13] Helman, "Some Consequences," 256–57; Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 379–80.
odic redistribution of common lands by lot. Costa lamented the disappearance of these practices because he found in them the best guarantee of the welfare of the peasantry. Looking for the origin of the decadence of agrarian collectivism, he focused on the change in doctrines between those of the reformers of the 1760s and those found in Jovellanos's Informe de ley agraria. The proposals of Campomanes for the distribution of public lands to small farmers in Extremadura, he declared, contained "the fundamentals of a manifestly collective system." He judged Aranda, Olavide, and the other advisers of Carlos III equally favorably. "[Their] official proposals establish a complete system of agrarian socialism of inestimable value, . . . which could have been the point of departure for a vast and productive system of social legislation," he wrote. In contrast, he considered Jovellanos the founder of the "individualist school," which he blamed for the destruction wrought in the Spanish countryside by the nineteenth-century policy of desamortización.[14]
Costa's judgment on the men of the eighteenth century is still widely accepted. Had the plans of the earlier reformers been carried out, we are told, they would have produced social justice and well-being instead of the poverty and tensions that have characterized large parts of the Spanish countryside in the last century and a half.[15] A careful review of the writings of Jovellanos and his predecessors leads to the conclusion, however, that the change in ideas was not so simple or so abrupt as Costa held. The objectives of all the reformers were strikingly similar; what varied was their view of how to achieve these objectives. Indeed, they all worked within a conceptual framework that formed part of the general climate of opinion of the West in the eighteenth century. Two preconceptions were fundamental to this thinking, one a central belief of mercantilist thought of recent centuries, the other a social ideal that went back to the ancients.
The only productive discussion of the Economic Society's Junta on the Agrarian Law, in 1787, led to the unanimous adoption of the following statement: "In Spain not all the land that can be farmed is farmed, the types of cultivation are not suited to the terrain, and the methods of farming are not the best."[16] The statement spelled out the conviction underlying the reports in the recently published Memorial ajustado:
[14] Costa, Colectivismo, quotations from 115 and 122 (chap. 12, sec. d, and chap. 13, sec. b).
[15] See Defourneaux, "Problème de la terre"; Tomás y Valiente, Marco político, 12–37. Tomás y Valiente does note that the aim of Olavide was not so much social justice as increased food production.
[16] Anes, "Informe, " 118–19.
Spanish agriculture was in decline, and the course of its evolution must be reversed. When one seeks the reason why the reformers were convinced of this decline, however, one does not find it in a review of farming practices or of the harvests produced and the livestock being raised. The reason they cited was much more simple: Spain's agriculture was obviously decadent because Spain was depopulated.
Campomanes summed up the mercantilist assumption underlying this thinking: "The greatest civil happiness of a republic consists in its being heavily populated, for a large population is the greatest wealth that a kingdom can have."[17] Eighteenth-century Spaniards generally attributed their seventeenth-century military defeats to a demographic decline.[18] Convinced of the need to repopulate the country, in 1768 Carlos III's government took the first census of Spain. It showed that the country had 9.3 million people. Thirty years earlier Gerónimo de Uztáriz had estimated the population in the second decade of the century at 7.5 million.[19]
The best information available thus showed that there had been a demographic growth of almost 25 percent in the last fifty years. Yet the reformers were certain that the country's major problem was a lack of people. "Many persons have recognized that the decadence of the kingdom is the result of its depopulation," wrote the intendant of Córdoba.[20] The reformers did not need statistics, for they had only to look around them. "[Spain's depopulation] is manifest when one observes the ruins of deserted villages [lugares despoblados ], which one finds at every step, and those that have declined visibly or entirely vanished in our time," explained the intendant.[21] Vast stretches of the south and west were empty. Olavide wrote, "Those four realms [of Andalusia] are largely untilled and deserted, for according to the reports [I] have received, one can calculate that barely a third is cultivated."[22] His contemporaries were convinced that this had not always been the case: "If once 1,600,000 fanegas of the archbishopric of Seville were farmed, now scarcely 800,000 are," said the síndico personero of that city.[23] Nor was this true only of the south. The representatives (sexmeros ) of the partido
[17] Rodríguez de Campomanes, Regalía, prólogo, ii. For the mercantilist population theory, see Heckscher, Mercantilism 2 : 44–46, 158–63.
[18] See Jordi Nadal i Oiler, "Proleg," in Maluquer i Sostres, Población, 9–10.
[19] See Appendix A.
[20] Mem. ajust. (1784), §733, 238–39.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., §779, 247.
[23] Ibid., §310, 188.
of Salamanca city complained, "In the [partido] there are 170 despoblados. . . . Many of them show that they once had a church, and in some of them it still stands, and all once had inhabitants, even if only a few, as have most villages of that region." Large estates had replaced the lost villages.[24]
The solution for the depopulation was to revive agriculture. The intendant of Córdoba replied to the royal inquiry, "The main objective of this undertaking is to improve farming and stimulate the population of the kingdom."[25] "In the measure that farming is expanded, the population of Spain will increase, and with it her power and true interests," the síndico personero of Seville added.[26] Jovellanos agreed: a nation is richer that is abundant in men and crops than one that is abundant in livestock.[27] These Spaniards did not invent the idea that if a country lacked people its agriculture was at fault. To back up their statements, they frequently cited "el amigo de los hombres." By this they meant L'ami des hommes, a work published anonymously by the founder of the French physiocratic school of economics, the Marquis de Mirabeau. He began his analysis of agricultural policy with the statement, "The greatest good is to have men, and the second is to have land. The multiplication of men is called population. The increase in the product of the land is called agriculture. The two principles of wealth are intimately tied to each other."[28]
The reformers had an image of an ideal countryside that contrasted sharply with the reality they found in Spain. It was a classical image, popular in Greece and Rome, which the thinkers of the Enlightenment had adopted as a fundamental feature of their social philosophy. It held that the most productive farmer, as well as the most virtuous husband and father and the most patriotic citizen, was the small private freeholder. In romanticized verses, Horace had compared the early republic to the Augustinian society of his day:
Thus ere the seeds of vice were sown
Liv'd men in better ages born
Who plow'd, with oxen of their own
Their small paternal field of corn.[29]
[24] Ibid., §53, 154.
[25] Ibid., §662, 220–21.
[26] Ibid., §315, 190.
[27] Jovellanos, Informe, 84.
[28] Mirabeau, L'ami des hommes 1 : 18.
[29] Horace, Second Epode, trans. John Dryden, quoted by Paul H. Johnstone, "In Praise of Husbandry," 82.
The Renaissance revived this mythical view of the good farmer, and in the sixteenth century it became again almost a convention. Machiavelli recalled nostalgically how Cincinnatus, after saving his country as Roman dictator, returned to his plow and four-acre farm, his hands empty of any spoils of war.[30] The Spanish theater of the Siglo de Oro held up the image of the virtuous labrador to its urban audiences.[31] In the seventeenth century, the mercantilists' interests in trade and manufacture cast the good husbandman into the background, but the eighteenth century brought a reawakening of the belief in the importance of agriculture. The new enthusiasm spread from England to France, and the patriotic yeoman farmer became a stock figure of the philosophes.[32] Under the heading "Patrie" in his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire denied that financiers or rich Parisians could honestly love their country. "What then is a patrie? Is it not really a good field, whose owner, comfortably lodged in a well-kept house, can say: 'This field that I till, this house that I have built, are mine. I live here protected by laws that no tyrant can infringe. When those who, like myself, own fields and houses assemble in their common interest, I have my voice in the meeting; I am a part of the whole, a part of the community, a part of the sovereign—there is my patrie .' "[33] For economic progress too, the independent owner was best, Adam Smith asserted across the Channel: "A small proprietor, however, who knows every part of his little territory, who views it with all the affection which property, especially small property, naturally inspires, and who upon that account takes pleasure not only in cultivating but in adorning it, is generally of all improvers, the most industrious, the most intelligent, and the most successful."[34] Beneath this chorus, the voices of Mirabeau and the Physiocrats, who discovered advantages in large exploitations, did not carry across the Pyrenees.
Spanish planners accepted the classical ideal of rural society. The aim of reform, Olavide said, should be to create "useful small landowners" (útiles pequeños propietarios ).[35] "If the farmer [labrador] is restricted to a small lot and sure of his permanence, he will till the land better and improve it and gather larger harvests."[36] The síndico personero of Seville recalled that the Roman Republic had limited the size of individual
[30] Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses, 487–88 (The Discourses, chap. 25).
[31] See Salomon, Recherches, esp. chap. 6.
[32] See Johnstone, "In Praise of Husbandry."
[33] Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, 593.
[34] Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations 1 : 423 (III.iv.19).
[35] Mem. ajust. (1784), §920; §943, 280, 285.
[36] Ibid., §831, 263.
properties,[37] and Jovellanos quoted approvingly the verdict of Pliny: "Latifudia perdidere Italiam, jam vero et provincias."[38] The prize-winning memoir in response to the question "What is the best means to encourage agriculture?" in a contest sponsored by the Economic Society of Madrid in 1776 explained, "When the farmer is assured of the possession of a small portion of land or of an extended lease to it, he will double the harvest";[39] and Campomanes argued similarly that it was impossible for a province to flourish and support a large population if every family did not have a share of the land that permitted it to live adequately, be useful to society, and contribute to the public treasury.[40] For not only agriculture benefited from direct ownership but the entire commonwealth. El censor, the trenchant periodical of the 1780s, created the character of an English traveler in Spain. This man noted that where the land was divided in small lots it produced more, even if it was of poorer quality than that of large properties. "You know that the prosperity of the state is based on the rights that the farmers have in the property and that this prosperity rises or declines in proportion to how close to, or how far from, full ownership the tenant is."[41]
No one voiced the agrarian ideal more eloquently than Jovellanos:
Yes, sire, an immense rustic population spread over the countryside promises the state a people not only industrious and rich but also simple and virtuous. The farmer, dwelling on his plot and free of the passions that agitate men who are gathered into towns, will be spared the festering corruption that luxury spawns. Living with his family at the site of his labor, he can devote himself without distraction to his livelihood, inspired by the feelings of love and tenderness which naturally imbue a man in domestic society. Then husbandmen [labradores] may exhibit dedication and thrift and produce the abundance that these qualities generate; then conjugal, paternal, filial, and fraternal love will reign in their families; peace, charity, and hospitality will prevail; and our farmers [colonos] will possess the social and domestic virtues that constitute the happiness of families and the true glory of states.[42]
Because these men wanted a countryside of small farms with homes that breathed comfort and well-being, they found in the broad stretches of the arid Spanish landscape convincing proof that their country lacked
[37] Ibid., §336, 196–97.
[38] Jovellanos, Informe, 80.
[39] Cicilia Coello, "Medios para que florezca la agricultura," quotation from 319.
[40] In Memorial ajustado (1771), §48, §646–47, cited by Costa, Colectivismo, 111 (chap. 3, sec. 12d).
[41] El censor, quotation on 364.
[42] Jovellanos, Informe, 90.
people. They judged Galicia with its dense population and tiny farms superior to the vast empty valleys of Andalusia.[43] The explanation lay not in the terrain, for they accepted that Andalusia was far richer.
Besides the ancient yeoman ideal, the reformers also preserved the old belief in the fertility of southern Spain. In Augustus's day Strabo had sung the glories of the Beatis valley, but he found the rest of Iberia either poor in soil and water or too cold to be fertile.[44] The reformers now repeated his judgment: Andalusia, the ancient Baetica, was favored by nature over all provinces. Richer than Galicia or Catalonia, Campomanes called it;[45] the most fertile region of the peninsula, the dean of the Audiencia (high court) of Seville opined, "doubtless one of the most abundant in Europe."[46] The iconoclastic Censor quoted its imaginary Englishmen on the superiority of Mediterranean lands in general: "It suffices to compare Andalusia and Galicia. What rich plains the former has! How fertile in past times! While the latter is generally hilly and used to be considered sterile. We should hardly err if we were to say that there is as much difference between these provinces as between Italy and England."[47]
Why then was Andalusia so empty? Why was it that, in Olavide's words, "one does not see more land tilled than one or two leagues around the towns, and all the rest is barren, and one goes for six or seven leagues at a stretch without a sign of human industry"?[48] "If [Andalusia] cannot free itself from want," the dean of the Audiencia of Seville responded, "it can only be because of the bad use that is made of its gifts."[49] The fault was not of nature but of man. Campomanes put the matter succinctly: "The pitiful scarcity [of Andalusia] is not compatible with the fecundity of its soil and surely is not the effect of the laziness of its people, but of the political constitution." By "political constitution" he meant the structure of landowning. Property was in the hands of a few people, while the bulk of the inhabitants were "mere day laborers."[50] Jovellanos was to turn this observation into a fixed law of history—the structure of agriculture was the product of the political structure. "All studies conclude that the nature of farming [in Spain] has
[43] El censor, 386; Rodríguez de Campomanes, Industria popular, 76–77.
[44] Strabo, Geography III, 2, 1–4 and III, 4, 16 (Baetica); III, 1, 1, and III, 4, 13 and 16 (rest of Iberia).
[45] Rodríguez de Campomanes, Industria popular, 76–77.
[46] Mem. ajust. (1784), §677, 227.
[47] El censor, 368.
[48] Mem. ajust. (1784), §921, 281.
[49] Ibid., §677, 227.
[50] Rodríguez de Campomanes, Industria popular, 76–77.
always reflected the existing political situation in the nation. This influence has been so strong that neither its temperate and benign climate nor its ability to produce the most varied and rich harvests nor its ideal location for maritime trade nor all the other many gifts that nature has lavished upon it could outweigh the obstacles that the political situation has placed in the way of its progress."[51] We recall that in 1787 Jovellanos had convinced the Economic Society's Junta on the Agrarian Law that bad laws were the cause of the decadence of Spanish agriculture. Doubtless the junta was easy to convince, for the reformers as a body were prepared to blame their institutions for the nation's plight. In this they again were children of the Enlightenment, ever ready to attribute human ills to irrational practices inherited from past ages, when force and craft had ruled rather than reason and natural law. To the Spanish reformers, the inherited obstacles were those institutions that obstructed the classic ideal of the independent farmer.
They pointed accusingly at two bodies of laws: the privileges of the Mesta and the various forms of entail. The corregidor of Cáceres (Extremadura) pointed out that a thousand fanegas of pasture were needed for a thousand sheep, which occupied 4 shepherds. The same land, put to the plow, would support 150 people.[52] Two-thirds of Andalusia was barren, Olavide explained, only because it was used for pasture. "If our legislation had done half as much for farming as it has conceded to the raising [of sheep], Spain would be today one of the most powerful empires on earth."[53] Jovellanos cried, "Can anyone defend the monstrous privileges of transhumant livestock?"[54]
Similarly they blamed the practice of entail for preserving vast estates, barren of people. In their eyes lay mayorazgos and ecclesiastical manos muertas were but two varieties of the same phenomenon, a practice that accumulated land in a few hands. "Our temper seems to have been constantly to tie property to families and religious communities. We have been the destroyers of the realm," Olavide said.[55] In Spain, El censor' s English traveler observed, "I have gone into towns with six hundred, a thousand, or more households . . . and in each place there were only two or three owners; all the rest lived without land or any skill or craft. . . . If in other countries the farmer works with zeal to make the land produce, here the only concern of the day laborer is how
[51] Jovellanos, Informe, 81.
[52] Memorial ajustado (1771), cited in Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 211–12.
[53] Mem. ajust. (1784), §782–83, 248–49.
[54] Jovellanos, Informe, 95.
[55] Mem. ajust. (1784), §817, 260.
to earn his wage with little effort."[56] This was true not only in the south. The intendant of Burgos expressed pity for the farmers of his province "because they do not have lands of their own and are tenants and miserable slaves of the churches and mayorazgos."[57]
Entail was even harmful to the owners. The sixteenth-century law on mayorazgos permitted the establishment of small entailed estates, adequate to support an hidalgo at a modest level. One could conceive the result to be a class of small gentry that would be a pillar of the monarchy. Not so, according to the royal agents. "The small vínculos, of which there are an infinite number in Andalusia, with from two hundred to five hundred ducats of annual income, are prejudicial to the state, because these mayorazgos are the ruin of the head of a family and even his entire household. From the time he has the use of his reason he knows that he is the owner of an entailed property, he receives a bad education, he applies himself to no career, and in time he turns into one of the worst citizens of the republic, with no more estate than his vanity. Every day such men are seen begging for charity with their patents of nobility in their pockets," the dean of the Audiencia of Seville complained.[58]
He was obviously exaggerating. As we shall see when we look at the economies of individual towns, an income of two hundred ducats, although modest, permitted a comfortable life. The real objection to small entails was that they tied up the land just as much as the big ones, and these writers were convinced that a man who could not lose his land would not care for it. Olavide put the matter neatly: "The name of the owner is a matter of indifference to the state, but it is very harmful that properties remain always in one family. What is needed is that many people sell their possessions and many buy them. The reason is as simple as it is obvious. Everyone who buys improves. Everyone who sells his land does not have the means to work it or does not want to."[59] Campomanes added criticism of ecclesiastical manos muertas: "It is a timeless maxim that population is greater and more permanent where real property circulates with more ease among the secular subjects, without being withdrawn from them, because it is the indispensable basis for their general prosperity."[60] Jovellanos foretold the consequences in his usual pithy phrases: "[The laws of entail] chain landed property in the perpetual possession of certain institutions and families,
[56] El censor, 365.
[57] Mem. ajust. (1784), §166, 165.
[58] Ibid., §1026, 299.
[59] Ibid., §812, 259.
[60] Rodríguez de Campomanes, Regalía, Prólogo, ii–iii.
deny forever all other individuals the right of aspiring to it, and combine the unlimited right to add to one's property with the absolute prohibition of disposing of it. They make possible endless accumulation and open up a terrifying abyss that can with time swallow up the entire landed wealth of the state."[61]
3
Thus in many ways entail and the Mesta worked inexorably to eliminate the virtuous farmer. There was virtual unanimity among the reformers, both those of the 1760s and Jovellanos, about the causes of Spain's ills and about the ideal society. Although they spoke of Spain, they had in mind Castile and Andalusia, not the periphery of the north and east. Disagreement arose, however, when they proposed solutions. It is the differences in their practical recommendations that provide the basis for the interpretations of Costa and later critics. Here again, however, the conflict between Campomanes, Olavide, and their colleagues on the one hand and Jovellanos on the other is more subtle that Costa would have us believe. Jovellanos's Informe de ley agraria was, in fact, the logical outcome of the discussions of Carlos III's servants.
Three lines of thought emerged in response to the royal inquiries of the 1760s. One frankly called for state regulation based on replacing existing restrictive laws with others equally restrictive that would respond to the new situation. This line represented the persistence of an older mentality. A second urged freedom from restrictive laws but nevertheless conceived of state intervention to ensure that freedom would produce the desired effect. This was the position of the leaders of the reform movement. In part they were influenced by the French Physiocrats, especially by Mirabeau's L'ami des hommes. Finally a third approach was a fully fledged advocacy of economic freedom. Although not widely held, it was found in Spain before Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. Even though Smith made the classical doctrine of economic freedom popular, he did not invent it; in fact the doctrine already had wide support in England in the seventeenth century, and one should not be surprised at finding it voiced in Spain a century later.[62]
To see how these lines of thought differed, one can look at the opinions on what to do about cortijos, those large properties devoted primarily to raising grain that characterized the Andalusian scene. Two
[61] Jovellanos, Informe, 98.
[62] See Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought, 255.
questions in the inquest ordered by the Council of Castile in 1768 were directed at learning what bad effects, if any, the cortijos had and how they could be remedied. One asked if a formula could be found for rents paid in kind that would be fair to both the owner and the tenant. The other asked whether a limit should be placed on the extent of land farmed by a single individual or on the number of teams of oxen that he could employ. It raised the issue of whether cortijos should be broken up into smaller exploitations.[63]
The interest of the council in these issues had been inspired by a petition from the city council of Seville asking it to find ways to reduce the price of grain.[64] The petition blamed the situation on a recent rise in the rent of land and proposed that the king impose a new set of regulations. "To reduce the high price of grain the rent for farms should be rolled back to the level of 1750. . . . No farmer should be allowed to farm more than one thousand fanegas of land, including fallow and pasture, so that in this way all may benefit and more land may be put under the plow, . . . because this [abuse] is the origin of the high price of land and indirectly of grain and meat. . . . Tenants of cortijos of over one thousand fanegas should be required to release the excess so that the owners may dispose of it as they wish, at the same price as the rest, and the part released is not to be of the best or worst quality, but average."[65] The officials of the city of Jerez also denounced the exorbitant rise in rents. According to their reasoning, the rent for land could be expected to rise, but only in proportion to the increase in the amount of money in circulation and the corresponding rise in the price of agricultural products. But rents had gone up faster, and the farmer, to avoid ruin, had to raise the price of grain an excessive amount. The high price of food then increased the cost of labor, with the result that industry also suffered. "And thus it is indispensable that the government take measures to subject rents to just limits."[66] The two city councils thus voiced explicitly the first line of thought, a traditional demand for active state regulation of the economy to solve a problem of subsistence.
In their responses most administrators of southern Spain tended to agree with the city officials. They believed that the lack of regulation was leading to a dangerous situation where the rich and powerful, the poderosos, were taking over all the land. "The poor man is deprived of
[63] Mem. ajust. (1784), §716–31, 234–38; §658–93, 219–33.
[64] Ibid., §4, 139–40.
[65] Ibid., §279–92, 183–84.
[66] Ibid., §767, 243–44.
his natural patrimony, and farming is restricted to the poderosos and men of money," the intendant of Córdoba said, and that of Granada, "In small towns one can easily see the harm done when most or all the best lands are taken up by the poderosos."[67] The síndico personero of Seville painted a graphic picture of the evil as he saw it:
The excessive wealth of individuals is opposed to the happiness of the state for the reason that, as the poderosos amass for themselves the sustenance of their fellow townsmen, they turn the latter into day laborers and reduce them to begging and other extremities. These then do not marry, and the state suffers as a result. A town that falls under the grip of a rich religious community or one of these caciques is in a few short years reduced to the greatest distress. His power is greater than that of all the other townsmen and today he buys up their lands, tomorrow their vineyards, another day their houses, and finally all their properties, until he reduces once useful and industrious subjects to the miserable condition of beggars.
The síndico personero went on to describe how the economic power of the strong man bent the local council, notaries, and judges to his will, so that he could exploit all the municipal lands and pastures and even invade private properties without anyone daring to stop him.[68] The intendant of Ciudad Real described a similar process at work in La Mancha, with the refinement that here large farmers stored up grain for sale in bad years, when they were able to buy up cheaply the lands of their less affluent neighbors. They thereby "gather in one hand land that is sufficient to support many families, so that to produce one large holding forty to fifty townsmen are impoverished and reduced to misery. No town exists that does not reveal such cases."[69] The result was the opposite of the small-farmer ideal. But they saw it as a problem with a different cause from what the reformers pointed to, not ancient legislation and outdated privileges but current economic forces. It posed a challenge to their conceptual powers.
Their answer, like that of the city councils, was to ask for government regulation. They agreed that a limit should be established to the amount of land that a single man could farm,[70] and they recommended that cortijos be broken up and settled with independent farmers. The intendant of Córdoba urged that owners be required to rent lots of six to eight fanegas to any poor man who promised to build a house on the
[67] Ibid., §661, 220; §667, 223–24.
[68] Ibid., §332, 195.
[69] Ibid., §665, 223.
[70] Córdoba's intendant said 300 fanegas, Jaén's, 1,000 (ibid., §662, §663, 221–22).
lot; the intendant of Jaén would require the owners to put up houses at their expense.[71] In sum, these royal agents believed that the solution to the problem of the cortijos was to legislate in opposition to economic forces, for doing nothing meant that the mass of the population and the state would continue to suffer.
These officials showed a limited perception of the working of the economy, as can be seen in their responses to the council's question whether the subleasing of farm land (subarriendo ) should be prohibited.[72] It referred to a practice followed widely in New Castile and Andalusia whereby an individual rented the lands of a large owner and sublet them in small lots to many farmers. The intendants opposed the practice wholeheartedly because it permitted the powerful to exploit the poor mercilessly, and they called for its legal prohibition.[73] Their responses showed no sense of the economic utility of middlemen or the existence of transaction costs. "It seems to this intendant [Córdoba] that the subleasing should be universally prohibited because the sublease is normally for a higher price than the original lease. One cannot conceive by what right the lessee can profit from something that is not his and which he only has the right to use."[74] The intendant of Jaén pointed out a disguised form of subleasing that he asked also be prohibited. This was the case of an agent who took over the administration of a property for a fixed sum and then leased out the lands for as much as he could get. "These leases are in effect subleases. . . . He seeks to satiate his ambition . . . by raising the rents to the highest possible price."[75] In the minds of these men, the cause of economic problems was at bottom unbounded human greed, and the solution was government intervention to frustrate it. This was exactly the attitude of the city councillors of Seville and Jerez, who believed that the avarice of landowners lay behind the rise of rents and indirectly of foodstuffs.
It was in opposition to this spirit that the advisers of Carlos III introduced the freedom of grain trade. They took the advanced position that freedom would provide incentives to increase production and thus reduce prices in the long run. Olavide was a supporter of the new policy. One of his first official tasks was to defend it before the hostile city council of Madrid. Against the argument of the councillors that grain merchants were avaricious exploiters of the public need, Olavide justi-
[71] Ibid., §737–38 (Córdoba), §747–48 (Jaén), §750 (Granada), 239–43.
[72] Ibid., §636, 211.
[73] See intendant of Ciudad Real, ibid., §643, 213.
[74] Ibid., §638, 211.
[75] Ibid., §640–41, 212.
fied their economic usefulness. When freed from price restrictions, their activities would help the growth of agriculture, he maintained. In plentiful years they would cushion prices against collapse by putting aside stocks to sell in years of poor harvests.[76] As intendant of Seville, he applied the same reasoning to the question of fixing rents. The cities call for rent control, he said, as they call for fixing the price of grain. But a legal limit on rents "opens the door to fraud" and would only favor the poderosos, who have the power to corrupt inspectors and judges. The poor farmer would be the victim.[77] Olavide sensed that the forces of the market determined the price of land. "Rentable lands are few, compared with the population, and the number of renters is large." This scarcity permitted the owners to raise the rents to an exorbitant level and also gave an advantage to the large tenants who rented entire cortijos and sublet the worst parts at excessive prices.[78] But land was not really scarce; it was made so by the privileges of the Mesta and the accumulation of it in entails. The solution was to increase its availability.[79]
For Olavide the answer was the same as in the matter of the grain trade: harmful restrictions must be removed. Specifically, one must eliminate controls on rents and grant freedom for farmers to enclose their properties against sheep and other animals. He quoted El amigo de los hombres at length in favor of the right to enclosure: enclosed fields are notoriously better tended than open ones because this protection doubles the love of the owner for his property.[80]
Olavide could not, however, follow the doctrine of economic freedom to its logical conclusion. He wanted the cortijos to be rented perpetually in small lots at reasonable prices. To achieve this end he recommended that the government give the owners a limited number of alternatives formulated in such a way that their self-interest would lead them to select the one most beneficial to the common good. He believed that the way to assure a just share of the product to both owner and tenant was to require that all rents be paid in kind as a fixed proportion of the harvest.[81] He calculated from available information that the owner's just share was about one-ninth of the gross harvest. Given this fact, the government should establish three forms of lease and require all owners to choose one. If land were leased for less than one hundred
[76] Defourneaux, Olavide, 96–102.
[77] Mem. ajust. (1784), §768–69, 244.
[78] Ibid., §796–98, 255.
[79] Ibid., §774, 245–46.
[80] Ibid., §777; §791–95, 246–47, 252–54.
[81] Ibid., §800, 256.
years, the owner's share would be one-tenth of the crops. On land leased for over one hundred years, it would be one-ninth. But on land subdivided and leased in lots of less than one hundred fanegas for over one hundred years with the requirement that the tenant build a house and live on the land, the owner's share would be one-eighth of the harvest. "These laws alone, gentle as they are, for they do violence to no one, will produce the desired effect, whether the property be in vínculos or manos muertas, or free of entail."[82]
Thus Olavide's concept of economic freedom. And not his alone. The síndico personero of Seville (a position created, one recalls, to see that the freedom of the grain trade was enforced) attacked strongly the city's call for rent control on farm land. He explained that the working of the market forces, that is, the level of demand and the amount of money in circulation, determine the price. The solution he proposed was not to roll rents back to the level of an earlier date, as the city wanted, but, like Olavide, for the crown to establish a fair share of the harvest for the owner. He further urged a legal limit to the amount of land farmed by a single individual.[83] Campomanes also stated: "An agrarian law should place a limit on the number of fanegas of land that can be rented to each farmer, because in this way farming will be divided among a larger number of households"; and he favored calculating rents as a proportion of the harvest.[84] The line of thought represented by these men arose from a certain awareness of the working of economic forces and involved a conditional acceptance of economic freedom. Deep inside them, however, they did not really trust the effects of the market and wanted government intervention to assure that freedom produced the right results. They could not yet shake off the belief that it was the responsibility of public officials from the king on down to protect society from the working of human depravity.
In contrast, the third line of thought put its faith fully in economic freedom. It was voiced in the opinion submitted to the crown by Francisco Bruna, dean of the Audiencia of Seville. The Council of Castile asked him to review and comment on the original petitions from Seville and Jerez and the responses of the intendants of southern Spain to the questionnaire of the council.[85] Bruna revealed a keen sense of the role of the market. The price of wheat determines the state of agriculture, he
[82] Ibid., §861–76, 268–71, quotation in §876.
[83] Ibid., §303; §307; §318–19; §330; §332, 186–96.
[84] Rodríguez de Campomanes, "Discurso preliminar," xxviii–xxix. The author is identified in Sempere y Guarinos, Ensayo 5 : 188.
[85] Mem. ajust. (1784), §11–12, 142.
said. When wheat was worth twelve to fifteen reales a fanega (as it was at the time of the catastro), rents were low, cortijos were empty, and the farmers sold off their equipment at the fairs. Others kept their oxen only to be able to till the olive orchards. But recently conditions had changed. "Agriculture is so prosperous that land is lacking and there is an excess of farmers [labradores]. One needs no more proof of this truth than to hear the high rents of cortijos. Some have gone up by half and others even more." Bruna called it an error to blame this rise on the large tenants, for the same men were around when rents were low. He credited the improvement partly on the recently introduced freedom of grain trade and partly on a depression in colonial trade. "Everyone has come to realize that the true gold of the earth is the grain in the fields. So we see the greatest merchants of Seville engaged in this trade. The only business they think about is farming and producing olive oil." All classes benefited, he said, as one could see in any town in Andalusia. "One finds whole streets of new houses where there used to be hovels of straw. Even the unhappy braceros have shared the new wealth, for their wages have gone up more than a third, and they see their children clothed who used to pester them naked in the fields." Bruna was convinced that economic freedom inspired men to take advantage of their possibilities. Few Andalusians had the drive to save, he admitted—"what the majority earn in a week, they spend on the day of rest"—but those few who did "begin with a small plot [as peujaleros ], with good luck they set up a farm with a house on it [become rancheros ], and soon achieve the position of large farmers [buenos labradores ]." If a man were denied the prospect of enlarging his farm, he would work only enough to fill his daily needs.[86]
Opposing the recommendations of the intendants, Bruna favored allowing economic forces to determine the size of exploitations. To break up cortijos and limit the amount one person could till was to court disaster, in his view. Cortijos were the result of the geography of Andalusia, marked by large towns distant from each other. Unlike the peasants of the small villages of the meseta, farmers could not go out daily with oxen to till these distant fields, and only occasionally were workers needed in large numbers. Not enough men owned yokes of oxen to make it practical to divide cortijos into small farms, nor could one imagine that large farmers would turn over their oxen and seed to landless laborers. "No one will abandon the administration of his farm and
[86] Ibid., §677–84, 227–30, quotations from §681, §682, §677.
his resources to unfortunate and unreliable men so that they may waste them. If he were forced to do so, with one blow the sinews of the main form of agriculture of these provinces would be destroyed." Large owners were best for Andalusia; they produced the best grain, raised the best horses, and could store up harvests for bad years, which were frequent.[87]
Bruna was equally adamant in opposing rent control. "Nothing is more important to all business, whose leading branch is agriculture, than the freedom to make contracts." To prohibit money rents and specify the share of the harvest that owners were to receive, as Olavide urged, would not be appropriate to all cortijos. Some required more input of labor by the tenant than others because of the nature of the land, some had pastures that could be paid for only in money, and some contracts called for the tenant to clear new land. "Even the tenants would object to such a regulation, because they do not want others informed of the extent of their wealth or checking on their harvests. Everyone wants to be free to strike a bargain and get the benefit he can from his industry and diligence." If owners and tenants were allowed to reach their own terms, they would cooperate to extend the amount of land farmed, and rents would eventually go down on their own.[88]
The dean had read Mirabeau, and he reflected the physiocratic doctrine that agriculture should be freed from legal controls and that large properties were the most progressive. Yet his conclusions were based firmly on a close observation of conditions in Andalusia. Olavide, who also referred to Mirabeau, could not bring himself to let individuals make their own decisions, because he sensed, although less clearly than Bruna, that the result would be the preservation of the cortijos. The myth of the good farmer had him in its spell. The dean, like the Physiocrats, did not hold the myth, and he let freedom lead to its logical conclusion.
The difference between their mentalities is brought out by a revolutionary proposal of Olavide's. He recommended that the king settle small owners on the lands that he had authority over. These included municipal lands, those of charitable foundations, of the military orders, and of the Jesuits.[89] Most especially, however, he had in mind the baldíos, the public wastelands. Sell them off, he advised, or lease them. Let every man with two pairs of oxen who does not own twenty fanegas get a lot of fifty fanegas in return for one-eighth of the harvest and the obligation to erect a house and farm buildings. Let every man with money
[87] Ibid., quotation from §683.
[88] Ibid., §725–28, 236–37, quotations from §725, §727.
[89] Ibid., §810, 258.
buy outright a lot of fifty to two hundred fanegas to farm himself or have someone farm for him. He pointed out that there was much loose capital in Andalusia, some of it in the hands of foreign merchants, who would repatriate it if not offered an investment in Spain. Tap this capital, he urged, and at the same time turn laborers into useful farmers by letting men of wealth buy sections of baldíos of up to two thousand fanegas each, provided they lease it to poor braceros in fifty-fanega lots with a house and a yoke of oxen.[90] By such a variety of measures he saw the baldíos transformed into small fertile farms. To keep them such he proposed laws as strict as the ones of entail that he condemned. No one was to be allowed to subdivide his fifty-fanega lot or accumulate more than one or sell it for profit or mortgage it or transfer it to manos muertas.[91] Although he did not say so, what he was proposing was an amalgamation of the instructions of the Council of Castile to Extremadura to divide common lands among their peasants and the regulations for the colonies of Sierra Morena, whose founding he was supervising.
If there seemed a contradiction between the ideal society of farmers and his proposal that men with money could buy public properties four or even forty times as big as those given to the owner of two yokes of oxen, Olavide was prepared to justify it by borrowing from the doctrine popularized by Montesquieu that monarchies rest not on egalitarian societies but on ones with legal ranks. "The inequality of fortunes is necessary and proper in monarchic states," he explained. But there must be a gradual scale, and Spain needed to create intermediary ranks between "today's owners and those whom we are going to make with fifty-fanega lots."[92]
His mind swam with the giddy image of his new society:
How many useful small owners can be produced by this means? I dare to predict that soon the population will grow so much that a man will call himself lucky to acquire a lot in the baldíos. Today these are despised as useless, but they will flourish with an infusion of manure and sweat. And this is not all. These lands are worth a vast treasure. Those that are sold will produce liquid cash, those that are leased, an annual sum so immense that it will provide a monstrous income. . . .
What shall we do with these immense funds? What? Why the general good of Spain, the improvement of agriculture itself. . . . Let them be applied to building roads, to irrigating the land that can be irrigated, to making rivers navigable, to digging the canals that are feasible, to establishing acade-
[90] Ibid., §931–37, 283–85.
[91] Ibid., §940–41; §1009–10, 285, 295.
[92] Ibid., §932, 283.
mies of practical agriculture and endowing them suitably, to carrying out experiments that will introduce in each province the new and profitable methods that the agricultural nations have discovered. And if some money remains, after these immense tasks, let it be used for the relief and succor of those in want. . . .
Where will the money be found for such vast and important expenditures? In the baldíos. Providence has set them aside for these magnificent endeavors, for the resurrection of Spain, for our century, in which a wise government will use them with insight and fairness. This fund suffices for everything.[93]
In other words, people the barren wastes of Spain with homesteaders by a wave of the royal scepter, and their industry will produce the wherewithal to modernize the nation. Never did Spain's enlightened reformers voice their dream more graphically and eloquently. This was the dream that Joaquín Costa later described as a "collective system . . . of agrarian socialism of inestimable value." Costa's emotional commitment to the "agrarian collectivism" that he saw under attack in his own day must explain his strange enthusiasm for Olavide, Campomanes, and Aranda and his condemnation of Jovellanos. For the reformers of the 1760s were as individualistic as Jovellanos was to be. Their ideal was the small property owner, able to enclose his lands against the herds of his neighbors and the Mesta, living with his family in his house on the homestead. More individualistic a picture one can hardly imagine. In practice they even hesitated to invade the rights of large landlords. Olavide urged the king to sell off lands under his authority or to lease them permanently, but in the case of private properties, he and Campomanes were prepared only to regulate the terms of the leases in the public interest. Costa's perception of these reformers as collectivists was inspired not by their view of the ideal society but by the fact that they fell back on government regulation to achieve their ends.
They were not even in agreement on this point, however. Those who truly favored government regulation adhered to the first line of thought described above and called for legal limits on rents and the size of exploitations. Campomanes and Olavide were advanced mercantilists who believed that free enterprise, properly regulated, would create a more productive economy than strict controls. Theirs was a position with which one can sympathize today, but logically it had less to recommend it than either the fully interventionist doctrine of the city councils and intendants or the laissez-faire argument of Francisco Bruna.
[93] Ibid., §943–44; §954; §960, 285–89.
From this review of the Memorial ajustado, one must conclude that it offered no clear answer to the problem of how to establish an "agrarian law," but a motley of conflicting philosophies. When the Council of Castile gave the Economic Society of Madrid the task of drawing up such a law, it gave them the challenge of formulating a single rational and acceptable policy.
4
It was a remarkable accomplishment that the society met the challenge, although it took eighteen years. The final result was Jovellanos's convincing defense of economic freedom as the answer to the agrarian law. His posthumous reward, since Costa, has been to carry the blame for turning Spanish planning away from its proper course by popularizing laissez-faire doctrines in Spain. The records of the Economic Society show, however, that his work cannot claim this honor. Jovellanos was but the most brilliant of his colleagues in the society, who as a group were already becoming converts to economic liberalism in the 1780s.[94]
In the late 1770s the society, headed by Campomanes, accepted the views of the reformers of the 1760s. A case in point is the award it made in its essay contest on the question "What are the best means to encourage agriculture?" First prize went to José Cicilia Coello, former síndico personero of Ecija, a town near Seville. He had evidently seen Olavide's memoir to the Council of Castile, for many passages drew directly from it. In selecting it, the Economic Society both honored Olavide, who was hidden away in the prison of the Inquisition, and indicated its approval of the recent reforms.[95]
By the 1780s interested Spaniards were becoming familiar with contemporary European economic thought. They read not only Mirabeau but other French, Italian, and English writers who favored economic freedom. Some Spaniards began to call for absolute economic liberty and "the sacred right of property."[96] These men saw in political economy the new science of man, which could find solutions to society's ills. "The science of the citizen and the patriot," Jovellanos called it.[97] A few read Adam Smith, probably in French translation, and appreciated his
[94] See Vergnes, "Dirigisme," and Anes, "Informe. "
[95] Defourneaux, Olavide, 166 and n. 3; Anes, "Informe, " 128–29; Vergnes, "Dirigisme," 305–6. Cicilia Coello, "Medios para que florezca la agricultura."
[96] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 52–57.
[97] Robert S. Smith, "English Economic Thought," 312–14; Elorza, Ideología liberal, chap. 8.
logical arguments opposed to state intervention in the economy. Smith maintained that the wealth of nations depended on specialization, the division of labor among men and nations, and the pursuit by each individual of his own interests as he saw best.[98] Most members of the Junta on the Agrarian Law of the Economic Society had learned of the new ideology and were prepared in advance to applaud Jovellanos's discourse of 1787, in which he argued that the decadence of Spanish agriculture could be traced back to the working of bad laws.[99]
The persuasive language of Jovellanos, himself a recent convert, helped win the day for laissez-faire, but the trend of thought was moving in this direction in any case, in Spain and elsewhere. The new economic philosophy offered a simple and clear road out of the confusion of the Memorial ajustado. The junta gladly charged Jovellanos with drafting its report and listened "electrified" when it finally reached them.
The Informe de ley agraria spelled out immediately the principles on which its author based his recommendations. The "eternal laws of nature" imposed on man by the Creator when He gave him dominion over the soil established self-interest as the guiding light of each individual, ran the argument, a familiar one for men of the Enlightenment. Following their interest, men created property in land and property in the product of their labor. As a result, both owner and tenant should share the product of the soil. The sole purpose of legislation should be to protect property in land and labor and to enable each individual to pursue his self-interest, so long as it were maintained "within the bounds set by justice."[100] The sight of men bent on irrational courses had misled legislators into believing that laws conceived by persons devoted to the public interest would guide men better than their own selfish ends, he said. "Everyone asks you [the Council of Castile] to provide new laws to improve agriculture, without reflecting that the causes for its backwardness are primarily the laws themselves. Consequently one should not seek to multiply laws but to reduce their number, not so much to establish new ones as to abolish old ones."[101] Jovellanos was following the path marked out by John Locke a century earlier. It had led the more advanced eighteenth-century economists to the conclusion that the best government was the one that governed least. The reformers of the 1760s had advanced the same doctrine, but they had shied away from its consequences. Jovellanos had no such qualms.
[98] Quoted in Polt, "Jovellanos," 16.
[99] Anes, "Informe, " 109–21; Vergnes, "Dirigisme," 323–25.
[100] Jovellanos, Informe, 82.
[101] Ibid., 81.
He specified three classes of obstacles to the free working of individual self-interest: physical, political, and moral. The physical obstacles, what we would call today the influence of the environment, had been passed over by the earlier reformers. Olavide argued that if England, France, and the Basque provinces did not have commons or wastelands—hardly an accurate statement but one inspired by Mirabeau's reference to the English enclosure movement—then they were inappropriate in Andalusia.[102] Jovellanos had traveled around Spain with a sensitive eye and appreciated the problems posed by its geography. He condemned the abuses of the Mesta, but he would not prohibit transhumance of sheep because Spain's climate required it. "Make a single one of these flocks spend an entire summer in Extremadura or an entire winter in the mountains of Babia [León], and it would inevitably perish."[103] Physical necessities are not privileges, he implied. Jovellanos realized that different climates and soils favored different types of exploitation, and he counted on the self-interest of farmers to discover what the best type was for each region. The intensity of cultivation permitted by local soil and climate also determined the size of farms: small in irrigated regions like Murcia and Valencia or rainy ones like Asturias and Galicia; large in the arid south, where fields could be sown only every other year and pastures must be extensive.[104]
For this reason any attempt to legislate the size of exploitations was senseless. The role of the state should be to overcome the physical obstacles. The country needed irrigation canals and roads, not just highways to the capital but byways to open up the hinterland and ports to market the products of the soil.[105] To pay for these works, Jovellanos revived the plans of the earlier reformers. Set up a "public improvement fund" based on a tax on all persons without exception, proportional to their means (one recalls Ensenada's single tax) and on the sale or rent of the baldíos and municipal common lands (the dream of Olavide).[106]
He devoted more attention to the second type of obstacle to progress, the political, for it was the laws whose effects he condemned. "If private interest is the main lever to achieve prosperity in agriculture, without question there are no laws more in conflict with the principles held by the [Economic] Society than those that, instead of exciting this interest, discourage it by reducing the quantity of private property and the num-
[102] Mem. ajust. (1784), §925–27, 282.
[103] Jovellanos, Informe, 97.
[104] Ibid., 89.
[105] Ibid., 129–31.
[106] Ibid., 133–34.
ber of individual owners." Such were the laws of entail. Religious endowments were but "the deathbed consolations of the wealthy" and served only to corrupt the clergy, while the mayorazgo deprived virtuous second sons of their just reward and cheapened nobility by making it commonplace. The privileges of the Mesta, which were not to be confused with the requirements of transhumance, were equally "monstrous." "A barbarous custom, born in barbarous times and worthy only of them, has introduced the barbarous and shameful prohibition to enclose lands."[107]
The evils were the same as before, what was new was the spirit in which Jovellanos attacked them. He applied a far keener appreciation of the working of the marketplace than his predecessors. Campomanes and Olavide had championed freedom of trade in grain, because they believed that the open market would induce farmers to increase production, but when they turned from the commodity market in grain to the factor market in land, they found the cause of existing evils in human depravity, and they looked to the wisdom of legislators to guide economic growth. Jovellanos had full confidence in economic freedom in both markets. He did not claim that men were all good; on the contrary, he found them acting selfishly and harmfully, as when the clergy sought to increase their holdings or when men of wealth created mayorazgos or sheep owners monopolized pastures. The evils arose from the lack of insight of past governments, which catered to these men's avarice by granting it legal sanction. In the process they prevented the free play of the avarice of other men, by denying the majority access to private ownership.
He scathingly referred to the reports in the Memorial ajustado as "so many aberrations of reason and zeal."[108] "They pretend that the rise in price of land is caused by the greed of the owners, but is it not also caused by the greed of the tenants?" No price can be unjust that is the result of a free agreement between the parties. "It is natural, where rural population is excessive and there are more renters than rentable lands, that the owner lay down the law to the tenant, as it is that he must accept it where there is an excess of rentable land and few farmers for many fields." Rents have gone up in southern Spain, where they are paid in money, but not in the north, where they are paid in kind. "What better evidence that the cause is in the rise in the price of foodstuffs or in an increase of population or both?" No rule for fair rent can apply to all Spain. To attempt to enforce one would require "constant vigilance,
[107] Ibid., 83, 100, 103–5, 86.
[108] Ibid., 79.
many agents, long and complicated investigations and accounts. . . . It is therefore proper to allow the parties freedom in the choice of rents. Only thus can the interest of owners and tenants be reconciled."[109]
When Jovellanos argued that geography determined the size of exploitations, he had in mind only those worked by their owners or tenants. He condemned the latifundia of Andalusia that were tilled by jornaleros because they were never tilled well.[110] How to get rid of them? Free them from entail, and the laws of the market would soon reduce them to the most efficient size. The right to acquire property would produce holdings of unequal size, but large properties would not be tied to specific families. "The natural vicissitudes of fortune will make them pass rapidly from one owner to another."[111]
He kept hammering home that the backwardness of the Spanish countryside was principally the effect of bad and ancient laws. Like Olavide, he believed the baldíos represented a waste of natural resources. He said that they appeared under the Visigoths as a response to the depopulation of those troubled times.[112] They survived the Reconquista because the insecurity of those centuries gave an advantage to mobile wealth in livestock. But when the last Muslims were subdued, the baldíos should have been put under the plow. They were not, because "public policy, finding the legislation on grazing disastrously entrenched, continued to lavish favors on livestock until the baldíos became its exclusive property." Thus, under the pretense of furthering the common good, the land that could provide the well-being of many families fell under the control of the rich.[113]
In this and other ways, past history, strong interests, and misguided governments had brought Spain to its present pass. Human intelligence could open the way to progress, once it was freed from "barbarous" customs born in "barbarous" times. (The adjective used by classical authors to indicate the absence of reason was Jovellanos's favorite term of abuse. Adam Smith had applied the very same word to the practice of entailing vast estates.)[114] Indeed the "enlightened legislation" of Carlos III had already raised Spanish farming to the most flourishing state it had ever known, Jovellanos insisted.[115]
[109] Ibid., 94.
[110] Ibid., 89.
[111] Ibid., 98.
[112] Nieto, Bienes comunales, 139, takes pains to reject this "traditional" view of the origin of the baldíos, which he believes was first advanced in Jovellanos's Informe.
[113] Jovellanos, Informe, 83–84.
[114] Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations 1 : 385 (III.ii.7).
[115] Jovellanos, Informe, 81.
His reasoning led him to dismiss as relatively unimportant how the state put wasteland into private hands. An equal distribution, as called for by Olavide, would favor the common people; sales would put land in the hands of the rich. But if land could henceforth be bought and sold—a condition Olavide precluded—how it was now disposed of was immaterial. "The self-interest of the new owners in the long run will determine the size of the exploitation and fix on the crops that are most suitable to their resources and abilities and to the conditions of the soil and climate. If the laws but leave the owners alone, do not be concerned that the owners may follow the less profitable course."[116]
His solution then was this: regardless of how it was done, turn public property into private property and allow full freedom in its sale and rental. Sell the baldíos, sell the municipal lands (propios), sell the national forests, or at least lease them permanently. The grazing interests claimed a threat to the meat supply if public pastures were not protected. No worry. If the price of meat were to rise, stockmen would find pastures for their herds, "in grassy meadows where the climate permits and in prairies where it does not."[117] The crown had long regulated the use of forests (montes), fearful of a shortage of wood. "Allow the owners free and absolute exploitation of their timber and the nation will acquire many fine forests. The natural effect of this freedom will be to awaken the interest of the owners and inspire their devotion and activity, which regulations have dulled."[118]
Similarly, free the land in entail, and it will begin to circulate and its price will drop. High costs had driven capital out of agriculture into livestock, industry, or other more gainful fields,[119] while owners had become neglectful absentees and tenants penniless rustics. Look at Andalusia, for two centuries the center of commerce with America. "Can it show a single rural enterprise that gives evidence of the transfer of wealth into agriculture? Has it seen a single clearing or an irrigation canal, a drainage ditch, a machine, an improvement, any sign at all of efforts to apply its resources to the improvement of cultivation? Such works are carried out only where properties circulate, where they provide profit, where they pass continuously from poor and idle hands to rich and enterprising ones."[120] Jovellanos had the innate sense of a development economist, anxious to attract capital where it would be invested most
[116] Ibid., 84.
[117] Ibid., 86.
[118] Ibid., 91.
[119] Ibid., 99.
[120] Ibid., 100–101.
gainfully. He saw that the way to do so was to free the factors of production from legal restrictions on their transfer and employment. He was further convinced that, far from hurting the little man, this freedom would so increase the total output that everyone would benefit, except those whom the laws now protected from the consequences of their own inefficiency.
Finally, beyond geographic difficulties and irrational laws, Jovellanos saw a third set of obstacles, which he called moral and today one might call cultural. Spain's prejudices blinded its leaders to its real needs. Statesmen had for centuries held to the belief that industry and commerce should be defended and encouraged, while agriculture could be sacrificed. Yet, said Jovellanos, showing again how much he was a man of his age, agriculture is the fountain of a nation's wealth, the source of population growth, "the mother of innocence and honest labor and, as Columella said, the ally and kin of wisdom."[121] Spain's schools and universities "produce a surplus of priests, friars, doctors, lawyers, notaries, and sacristans, while we lack muleteers, sailors, artisans, and husbandmen [labradores]." Farmers need primary education and landowners training in agronorny.[122]
Like Olavide, Jovellanos dreamed of a new Spain, with waving fields of grain, traveled highways, and busy ports. Beyond the prosperity of his countrymen, however, he also wanted their happiness. He denounced the practice in small towns of mimicking the severe policing found in cities.
Not an alcalde exists who does not establish a curfew, does not ban singing and charivaris [cencerradas ], does not patrol and spy, and, besides pursuing those who rob and swear, is not constantly after those who merely sing and play. The poor lad who has sweated all week and comes home exhausted on Saturday night to change his shirt, cannot join his friends to shout freely and sing a ballad. . . . The forces of law and order confront him in his festivals and dances, in his gatherings and feasts. No matter where he goes he sighs in vain for that honest liberty that is the soul of innocent pleasure. What other cause can there be for the despondency, the slovenliness, the fierce and unsociable character that mark the rustics of some of our provinces?[123]
Within the mature statesman and enlightened reformer, busy writing his prescriptions in his paternal home in Gijón, burned still the poetic passion of his youth. His agrarian law would fill the countryside not only with roads, canals, and fruited plains but with joyful families.
[121] Ibid., 120.
[122] Ibid., 124–25, quotation on 124.
[123] Ibid., 134.
Who does not see the tenants coming to settle in the fields, drawn by their own interest? Who does not see the small owners following behind them, inspired to till and improve their lands? And who does not see that when the fields are peopled and plowed and made beautiful, then the great and rich will arrive too, at least in those seasons when nature calls aloud to them, offering its many attractions and its many consolations?[124]
5
The argument of Jovellanos's Informe de ley agraria was as clear and simple as it was moving. Free the economy, and the agrarian reform would take care of itself! The Memorial ajustado had provided only confusion and lack of direction, out of which Jovellanos had selected the one message that foreshadowed the evolution of European economic thought. This was the memoir of Francisco Bruna, dean of the Audiencia of Seville. But whereas Bruna could prescribe economic freedom because he accepted large estates, Jovellanos urged it because he believed it would produce a society of virtuous farmers everywhere that Spain's geography would permit. He held to the same enlightened ideal as the reformers of the 1760s, and his faith in it helped sell his argument to his contemporaries.
The reason for his success has been frequently attributed to his conscious defense of the interests of the rising new class of the bourgeoisie.[125] Freedom to invest capital in land, freedom to create large exploitations where these were most productive, and freedom to contract between owner and tenant are seen as so many measures to assure the bourgeois takeover of the face of Spain. If Jovellanos did not directly attack the noble mayorazgos, this interpretation holds, he was bowing to his awareness of how far the Economic Society was prepared to go. Not the literary or philosophical qualities of the Ley agraria but its usefulness to a social class explains its success.
The course of Spanish ideas on agrarian reform traced here provides a different explanation. That something needed to be done about agricultural production became evident when rising population began to press against the available sources of food, especially in the interior, a development that was common to most of western Europe in the eighteenth century. Responsible Spaniards struggled to find solutions. Those they came up with owed much to their preconceived views of the ideal
[124] Ibid.
[125] This is the burden of Vergnes, "Dirigisme."
society, most notably their concept of the virtues, both economic and moral, of the independent farmer. They could not agree on how to achieve this ideal because they were thinking in a period of transition between the mercantilist doctrines that relied on public intervention to correct social evils—doctrines that reflected the Christian view of human nature—and the emerging faith in freedom to follow individual self-interest.
In an age when people sought clearly logical solutions to human problems, economic freedom made more sense than a modified program of state intervention. On reading Adam Smith, Jovellanos noted approvingly in his diary, "How admirable when he analyzes!"[126] The example of Francisco Bruna shows that reason and logic were directing other men independently to the same conclusions as Smith.
The rise of new ideas in the Enlightenment has no measurable relationship to the rise of a new class. In France the call for limits on the role of the state was largely an act of the nobility; indeed Montesquieu, who spoke consciously for this class, was one of the most famous champions of the doctrine. In Spain the men who debated the issue were first and foremost royal servants, devoted to the cause of the monarchy and the commonwealth. Many of them, like Jovellanos, were hidalgos by origin. He did not speak for a new class any more than his predecessors did. Political writers are, of course, influenced by the world in which they live and respond to the problems presented by it, but beyond this obvious fact, for the purposes of analyzing history, ideas can be ascribed as much an existence and evolution of their own as the other major forces that we perceive to affect human evolution.
Like his predecessors, Jovellanos denounced civil and ecclesiastical entail, but like Olavide he recommended the outright alienation only of public lands and those under royal authority. Both men urged the sale of the baldíos and the use of the income for public works. Four years after Jovellanos finished his report, Carlos IV began to put his ideas into practice. He began, however, not with the baldíos but with the properties of religious foundations. He sold them at auction and he used the income not for public works but to shore up the royal credit. His act responded not only to the rise of economic liberalism traced here but to the effect of foreign wars and revolution.
[126] Jovellanos, Diarios, 304–5 (1 June 1796).
Chapter III—
The Decision to Disentail
Within a few months of the death of Carlos III in 1788, a tempest arose in France whose blasts would convulse the reign of his successor. In 1793 the government of the new French Republic declared war on Spain, and except for two brief respites, Spain would be at war for the next two decades. One of the grave decisions that hostilities forced on Carlos IV was to raise money by the sale of religious properties.
Wars have always placed a strain on the credit of European states, but throughout most of the eighteenth century Spain faced the strain with remarkable success. In part it benefited from dropping its commitments to defend an empire in central Europe after the War of the Spanish Succession, and in part from the growing economy of its empire in America. After 1770 its domestic economy was also growing rapidly, expanding the tax base of the crown, one of whose major sources of revenue was duties on exported and imported goods.[1]
The Spanish treasury suffered from the cost of Spain's participation in the War of American Independence on the side of France and the new American nation. Because of the effectiveness of the British navy, trade between Spain and its American colonies declined, entailing a sharp loss
[1] Stein and Stein question the growth of the Spanish economy in this period in "Concepts and Realities." They rely on reports of royal ministers. What their sources show is that the ministers were not aware of where growth was taking place. Evidence of growth beyond that offered in Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, can be found in Canga Argüelles, Diccionario de hacienda, s.v. "Libre comercio."
of royal revenues that domestic sources could not make up. To meet the deficit, the government of Carlos III created a form of paper money known as vales reales. They were interest-bearing bonds that were declared to be legal tender for private and public debts. The first issue in 1780 was for 16,500 vales, each of 600 pesos face value, equivalent to approximately 9,000 reales de vellón, the standard unit of currency in late eighteenth-century Spain, for a total issue of about 149 million reales. Each vale earned interest of 1 real per day for the first 361 days each year, almost exactly 4 percent per year. The government paid the interest only once a year, but when the vales were used as currency, it was easy to calculate the total value including interest to date. Legal penalties were prescribed for refusal to honor them, but since the unit value was large, they did not serve for retail purchases, salaries, or similar payments.[2]
During the war the government made two more issues of vales, for a total of approximately 303 million reales. To put these sums in perspective, one may consider that the annual royal income from ordinary taxes in Spain and America in the five years 1784–88, years of peace, was around 500 million reales.[3] For these issues, the unit value was 300 pesos each, to make their circulation easier. The effect of creating so much paper money was to depreciate its value vis-à-vis hard currency. At the end of the war the vales circulated at a loss of 13 percent, and at one point they were traded at 22 percent below face value. But the peace of 1783 restored confidence in them, and by 1784 they suffered a loss of only 1 percent. Despite further issues in 1785 and 1788 for approximately 99 million reales to subsidize the building of the canals of Aragon and Tauste, near the Rio Ebro, vales were quoted in these years at face value or even 1 to 2 percent higher. In 1785 and 1791 the crown redeemed 36 million reales' worth of vales.[4] Between 1789 and 1792 it
[2] Hamilton, War and Prices, 79. All the issues of vales reales are listed in ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 11. The peso in question was defined as 128 cuartos. One cuarto was 4 maravedís, and 34 maravedís equaled one real. The peso was thus 15.059 reales (Hamilton, War and Prices, 22 n. 69).
[3] Barbier and Klein., "Revolutionary Wars," Table 1, gives the total receipts of the royal General Treasury, 1784–1807. For the five years 1784–89, they average 636 million reales, but they include loans and other extraordinary income. Cuenca Esteban, "Ingresos del estado," Table 4, breaks down the income of the General Treasury into ordinary and extraordinary income but gives figures starting in 1788. His figures for ordinary income 1788–92 are 20 percent lower than Barbier and Klein's figures for total receipts for these years, a ratio that, when applied to Barbier and Klein's mean total for the earlier years, gives 508 million.
[4] Hamilton, War and Prices, 79–82. Hamilton also mentions an issue of 3,990,000pesos in vales in 1791 by the Compañía de Filipinas, but this never became part of the royal debt. The monthly quotations of the vales from their first issue until 1808 are contained in ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 10 (see Appendix D). Further statements in the text of their rate of exchange against specie are based on this document, unless otherwise noted.
also paid off a loan of 3 million florins (or guilders) contracted in 1782 with the Amsterdam bankers Hope and Company and Fizeaux Grand and Company, and early in 1793 it successfully negotiated a new loan with Hope for 6 million florins.[5] Spain was in a strong financial position at the opening of the last decade of the century and appeared to have inaugurated successfully the use of paper money, a transition that proved long and difficult for other countries, especially France.
Spain's entry into the war against the French Republic, following the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, initiated a new period of trial for its fiscal strength. The war was fought primarily on land, at the eastern and western ends of the Pyrenees. Very rapidly the Spanish royal finances suffered from the effects of the conflict. Although historians are developing a picture of the royal income for these years, the exact royal fiscal situation remains unclear.[6] Until full accounts are developed, the most reliable information is still found in reports left by contemporary officials of the ministry of hacienda, which if not exact, tell us the conditions as they understood them and provide the information on which they relied in making their decisions.
Two reports of 1798 and 1799 by Miguel Cayetano Soler, secretary of hacienda after August 1798, have been preserved in the Real Academia de la Historia.[7] In addition, José Canga Argüelles published in his Diccionario de hacienda a memoria he directed to the king on the state of royal finances in 1802, when he was an official of hacienda.[8] Finally, when Napoleon took over the crown of Spain in 1808, he ordered a series of reports prepared on the Spanish royal finances, which have been preserved in the French archives.[9] These provide additional details to fill in the picture of the rapidly developing crisis.
The crown found itself faced with a ballooning annual deficit. In 1793 its expenses (exclusive of the colonies) were 709 million reales, its
[5] Buist, Hope and Co., 280–81. Buist calls the Dutch monetary unit the guilder, but the Spanish documents always refer to it as the florin.
[6] Cuenca Esteban has sought in vain the full accounts of the royal finances, including expenditures ("Ingresos del estado," 184).
[7] Col. SG.
[8] Canga Argüelles, Diccionario de hacienda, s.v. "Memoria sobre nivelar en tiempo de paz los ingresos y los gastos del erario español, escrita de orden superior in 1802 por D. José Canga Argüelles. . . ."
[9] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 –2 . There are 143 documents in the collection.
income 584 million.[10] In the next three years expenses were 946, 1,029, and 1,070 million reales, while in 1796, a year of peace, income including that received from America rose to only 730 million reales.[11] The total deficit for these four years was 1,269 million reales,[12] equal to about two years' income.
The first response of the government to the urgent need for money was to revive the creation of vales reales. On 1 February 1794 it issued 16,200,000 pesos' worth of vales in units of 300 pesos. Concerned, however, that the vales would lose their gilt-edged reputation, the king signed along with this decree another, which proclaimed these and earlier vales to be a "national debt contracted in the public interest" and created an amortization fund (fondo de amortización ) to take charge of extinguishing this debt. The fund was provided with two sources of income. All municipalities were ordered to pay the fund 10 percent of their incomes from local taxes and the rent of municipal properties, the propios y arbitrios, as they were called. In addition, the national Bank of San Carlos, chartered in 1782 partly to help float the early vales, was to contribute the fees it received for the export of specie from Spain, which it alone was permitted to do. The royal advisers estimated that the combined income from these two sources would be 1 million pesos per year. Since there were now vales worth 50 million pesos in circulation, exclusive of those of the canals of Aragon, the provision was intended to maintain confidence in the vales rather than liquidate them rapidly. With this purpose in mind, the king proclaimed: "In no situation or urgency, whatever it may be, can these [funds] be seized for other purposes; concerning this I issue the strictest orders." The amortization fund was to be placed in a deposit "under three keys" to be held by the secretary of hacienda, the governor of the Council of Castile, and the Tesorero Mayor. It could not be touched without the orders of all three officials.[13]
The war with France forced the government to make two more issues of vales reales, one on 15 September 1794 for 18 million pesos and an-
[10] According to Col. SG, Soler (1799), f. 211. Canga Argüelles says 730 and 629 million respectively (Diccionario de hacienda, s.v. "Memoria sobre nivelar"). Cuenca Esteban gives 567 million receipts from ordinary sources of income ("Ingresos del estado," 197, Cuadro 4).
[11] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 25, f. 35. (Canga Argüelles, Diccionario de hacienda, s.v. "Memoria de D. Francisco Saavedra al Señor D. Carlos IV, 4 de mayo de 1798," gives the same figures.) Cuenca Esteban gives income from ordinary sources for 1794, 1795, and 1796 as 597, 489, and 790 millions.
[12] Col. SG, Soler (1799), f. 212.
[13] Both RDs, 12 Jan. 1794 and 16 Jan. 1794, in AHN, Hac., libro 8046, no. 5013.
other on 15 March 1795 for 30 million pesos. These issues included vales of 150 pesos, half the smaller previous denomination. The king was seeking to increase their usefulness and circulation, but since the smallest denomination was over 2,000 reales, they were still far from modern paper money destined for everyday transactions.[14]
Each of these issues was accompanied by the provision of new sources of income for the amortization fund. The first established a tax of 6 percent on income from the rent of agricultural land and 4 percent on rents of buildings. The 6 percent also applied to income from seigneurial jurisdictions and other royal rights that had been alienated to individuals. These taxes affected all laymen (including nobles). In addition, having obtained the approval of the pope, the king ordered the clergy to provide an annual subsidy of 7 million reales out of its income from properties.[15] For the 1795 issue the king established another levy on the church, again with papal approval, which required that income from vacant church offices and benefices be paid into the fund.[16] The royal counselors soon found it advisable to strengthen further the backing of the vales. On 21 August 1795 the king decreed a capital levy of 15 percent on all property acquired in the future by secular vínculos and mayorazgos and ecclesiastical manos muertas, to go to the fund.[17]
The decree that established the tax on income from rented property and the ecclesiastical subsidy stated that the king chose these sources of income in order to spare "the poorest classes of the nation," who already "contribute with their persons and property," and to burden instead "the property-owning subjects who live off unearned income [vasallos hacendados que viven de sus rentas ]." Earned income was exempted: "If [the owners] cultivate [the lands] themselves or for their account, they will pay nothing for the moment." The king justified the 15 percent capital levy on property transferred to ecclesiastical or lay entail as "a small compensation for the prejudices that the public suffers from the removal of these properties from the market." These statements echo the reform policies of the previous reign. The first recalled the ill-fated single tax envisaged by the Marqués de la Ensenada, while the levy on entailed properties was inspired by the repeated denunciations of en-
[14] Hamilton, War and Prices, 83. 1 use the official dates of emissions, given in RC, 8 Sept. 1794, AHN, CCR, no. 1086, and in ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 11. For contemporary Spanish thought on paper currency, see Fernández Marugán and Schwartz, "José Alonso Ortiz."
[15] AHN, CCR, no. 1086. Godoy, Memorias 1 : 168–69, furnishes details on the decree.
[16] Godoy, Memorias 1 : 170–71, quotes the decree in part.
[17] RCs, 21 Aug. 1795, AHN Hac., libro 8047, nos. 5263, 5264.
tail by the reformers. The royal counselors had found a pretext to introduce more just and beneficial tax policies—a figurative as well as literal silver lining to the clouds of war. On 20 November 1795 the hard-pressed king went even further, abolishing the servicio ordinario y extraordinario y su quince al millar, a property tax on commoners collected in Castile. He could ill afford to spare it, but the decree stated that he adopted the measure in order to encourage agriculture and reward his poorest and most numerous subjects for their loyal service in the present war.[18]
The three wartime issues of vales amounted to 964 million reales, three-quarters of the total deficit for the four years 1793–96. To make up the remainder of the deficit, the crown resorted to direct taxes and loans, but its policy remained the same—where possible spare the king's productive subjects. New regressive taxes on salt and tobacco were matched by a rise in the price of stamped paper, used for notarized documents, and the extension of its use to ecclesiastical courts, a 4-percent deduction from salaries of royal officials earning annually 8,000 or more reales, and a one-time levy of 30 million reales on the income of the church.[19]
Despite these efforts, tax revenues remained very sticky.[20] At some time in the past in many parts of Castile the rentas provinciales had been converted into fixed annual payments levied on town and city councils, and their amount, known as the encabezamiento, could not be raised easily to reflect inflation or increased economic activity.[21] Under the circumstances, the vales suffered a loss of confidence. After July 1794 they were quoted at a discount, and by the last month of the war they were 21 percent below par. Shaken, the government was forced to issue bonds for 240 million reales, similar in unit value to the largest vales but with 5-percent interest, higher than the vales. To make the offer more attractive, numbers would be drawn by lot, and the owners of the bonds bearing them would receive cash prizes totaling over 3 million reales.[22]
France and Spain signed a peace treaty at Basel in July 1795. The
[18] RD, 20 Nov. 1795, Nov. Rec., VI, xvii, 12.
[19] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 382.
[20] Cuenca Esteban shows income from rentas provinciales and ordinary taxes for 1793 to 1795 as 128, 125, and 140 million reales ("Ingresos del estado," Cuadro 4). See also Barbier and Klein, "Revolutionary Wars," which develops the inflexibility of the Spanish tax structure.
[21] The encabezamiento for Salamanca province in 1795, along with others, is in AGS, Dirección General de Rentas, Hacienda, legajo 2664.
[22] Loan of 31 July 1795, partially quoted in Godoy, Memorias 1 : 172–73, and referred to in RC, 11 July 1797, AHN, Hac., libro 8049, no. 5612.
effect on the royal credit was immediate. The discount of the vales declined from 22 percent in August to 10 percent or less in September, although it rose slightly in succeeding months. The royal counselors could congratulate themselves that they had survived the fiscal crisis, but their satisfaction rapidly vanished. The British government, still at war with France and convinced that Spain was now helping its enemy, ordered its navy to attack Spanish shipping. Faced with this threat, Carlos IV swallowed his regal pride and family loyalty and signed an alliance with the French Republic on 18 August 1796, and on 7 October 1796 he declared war on Great Britain. This proved to be the most momentous decision of the reign.
The first secretary of state, Manuel Godoy, who had flaunted the title of Prince of the Peace since the end of hostilities with France, has usually been denounced for the error of this decision. It is difficult to see, however, what other course the Spanish government could have taken, since it lacked a navy strong enough to protect its neutrality between the two powerful antagonists, France and Great Britain. The United States was to find itself caught in a similar predicament a few years later and eventually forced also to declare war on Britain. Spain, with more at stake and a tradition of alliance with France against England, opted for war with less hesitation, but the result, which its leaders could not foresee, was disaster.
On 14 February 1797 British ships under Horatio Nelson attacked a larger Spanish fleet off Cape Saint Vincent, the southwest promontory of the Iberian Peninsula, and won a major victory. Nelson then placed Cádiz under tight blockade, and the British navy intercepted shipping into other Spanish ports. The blockade at times became almost complete. Shipments of specie from America could not reach Spain, and the income from customs duties declined sharply, affecting a major source of royal income.[23] The crown's income in 1797 was 487 million reales (it had been 584 in 1793), while its expenses rose to the unheard-of figure of 1,423 million, leaving a deficit of 945 million, a sum far in excess of the total expenditures in a year of peace.[24] A sign of the seriousness of
[23] Mean annual income from customs, 1793–95, was 130 million; in 1796, when Spain was at peace, it was 211 million; for the five years 1797–1801, it averaged 78 million. (These figures may be misleading, since after 1798 the customs of Cádiz were assigned to the Caja de Amortización and may not have entered the treasury accounts.) Income from America, 1793–95, averaged 123 million; in 1796 it was 232 million; from 1797 to 1801, it averaged 17 million (Cuenca Esteban, "Ingresos del estado," Table 4).
[24] Col. CG, Soler (1799), ff. 211, 215. Cuenca Esteban, "Ingresos del estado," Cuadro 4, gives the income for 1797 as 496 million.
the situation was the decline in value of the vales. From 1796 to 1798 they were discounted between 15 and 20 percent. Besides being a threat to the public credit, this discount produced an added expense for the royal treasury. It was obligated to accept vales at face value, but when it placed them again in circulation, no doubt to avoid public anger, it did so at the current market value, despite the decree of their legal tender. Thus in 1797 it paid out 1,080 million in vales to meet expenses of 900 million.[25]
It was impossible to resort to new taxes to cover this deficit. Additional levies on the lower classes conflicted with accepted policy, and they would have been ill advised in any case. The royal counselors no doubt recalled that a new levy had brought a rising of the countryside in Galicia in 1790–91.[26] Now more troubles occurred, riots in Guadalajara and Seville in January 1797,[27] and others in Asturias and Seville in the spring of 1798.[28] Among the higher sectors of society, merchants and manufacturers, especially those of Catalonia and the Basque provinces, who depended on the colonial market, were in a state of depression that ruled out additional taxes on them. The privileged classes, clergy and property owners, had been angered by the taxes instituted during the French war and still in effect. A royal cédula of 8 June 1796 had added to the discontent of the clergy. Hitherto many ecclesiastical properties had been exempt from tithes. The cédula, for which the pope had given his approval, now required payment of tithes from harvests on all properties owned by religious orders, bishops, and archbishops. The resulting income was to go to the local priests, but the king insisted on receiving his usual two-ninths share of all tithes (the tercias reales ).[29] Godoy recalled later, "Few acts as fair as this one met greater opposition and aroused more displeasure among the upper privileged classes."[30] The measure could not solve the crisis, however, and the royal advisers found themselves forced to choose between more loans and more issues of vales.
Since no one wanted more vales—on the contrary it was urgent to shore up the credit of those in existence—they decided on new loans. On 1 July 1797 the king offered for sale 100 million reales' worth of
[25] Col. CG, Soler (1798), f. 202.
[26] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 249.
[27] Ibid., 396.
[28] Moniteur (Paris), 12 prairial VI (31 May 1798).
[29] RC, 8 June 1796, AHN, Hac., libro 8048, no. 5313; also in Nov. Rec., I, vi, 14.
[30] Godoy, Memorias 1 : 179.
5-percent bonds with a face value each of 4,000 reales. The previous loan of 1795 had been in units of 10,000 reales, but now, the decree said, the king wanted to offer "the less well-off class of the nation" the "advantages" of subscribing. The bonds could be bought for vales or specie, and they would be paid off in twelve yearly batches in the currency in which they were purchased. The practice used in 1795 of offering prizes as an inducement to prospective purchasers would be continued: a lottery to be held in March 1798 would pay out 3 million reales to the two thousand owners of the bonds with the lucky numbers, first prize being 100,000 reales.[31] The loan was rapidly subscribed, and on 29 November 1797 the king offered another 60 million to the public.[32] The second offering was less successful, and the government closed it out in April 1799 without all the bonds having been sold.[33]
At this critical moment, the ministry underwent a major transformation. Since 1792 Manuel Godoy had been its leading figure. From the start he had been unpopular. Of obscure Extremaduran origin and only twenty-five at the time of his appointment, he appeared to owe his rise to his intimate relations with the queen. Few contemporaries recognized that he was trying to revive the enlightened policies of Carlos III, after the reactionary interlude introduced by the Conde de Floridablanca in the early years of the French Revolution. Instead they blamed him for the military and naval defeats and the unpopular new taxes. The anti-revolutionary clergy found him especially dangerous, and the privileged sectors adversely affected by his fiscal policies were also ill disposed toward him. At the end of 1797, Godoy obtained from the king the appointment of a new group of ministers who enjoyed high repute and could be counted on to support reform. Jovellanos, still in banishment in Asturias, with some misgivings accepted the post of secretary of grace and justice, with responsibility for religious affairs. The secretaryship of hacienda went to Francisco de Saavedra, an equally upright royal servant with a good reputation in financial matters. A few months later, on 30 March 1798, Godoy resigned as first secretary of state. His unpopularity was certainly one reason, and the French Republican government also worked for his overthrow, probably because it believed he did not support the alliance between the two countries enthusiastically.[34] Saave-
[31] RC, 15 July 1797, AHN, Hac., libro 8049, no. 5612, quoted in part in Godoy, Memorias 1 : 177–78.
[32] RC, 29 Nov. 1797, AHN, Hac., libro 8049, no. 5668; Godoy, Memorias 1 : 178.
[33] Hamilton, "Guerra e inflación."
[34] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 398–99.
dra was given his position as first secretary of state with responsibility for foreign affairs, in addition to his direction of hacienda.
Hopes now centered on Saavedra to perform the miracle that would save the public credit and raise the income needed to pursue the war. On his recommendation, Carlos IV on 9 March 1798 formally established an Amortization Fund (Caja de Amortización) as a separate institution with its own director. To emphasize its separation from the royal treasury, its offices were located in the Bank of San Carlos, and it was to use the bank's agents in the provinces to collect its moneys. The king charged it with redeeming arid paying the interest on three types of government debt: the vales reales, the loans of 1795 and 1797, and the debts contracted outside the monarchy. It was assigned the sources of income previously established to redeem the vales as well as those that guaranteed the other types of debt. These included the income from the customs house at Cádiz and part of the income from the sale of stamped paper. The king's cédula expressed the hope that the Amortization Fund would end current speculation in vales and would find ways to lower the interest rate, "in order to encourage the industry and commerce of the nation." [35]
The creation of the new fund had only a passing effect on the royal credit. The discount on the vales declined from 19 to 16 percent, but by May it was back to the earlier figure. Abroad it failed to raise confidence in the credit of the Spanish crown. When the government sought to float a loan in Holland for 3 million florins to repay a Dutch loan of 1778 for the Canal of Aragon that now fell due, its bankers in Amsterdam, the Widow E. Croese and Company, could not raise half that amount.[36]
By May the treasury had outstanding bills of 26 million reales against 10 million on hand, of which only 71,000 were in specie and the rest in vales.[37] The predicted deficit for the year was now 800 million reales. In the emergency the king appointed a special committee, or junta, of ministers and leading merchants to provide a solution to the fiscal dilemma. The Conde de Cabarrús headed it. He had been a leading financial adviser of Carlos III, but Floridablanca had obtained his imprisonment in 1790 as a dangerous subject, and he had since been out of favor.[38] The
[35] RC, 3 March 1798, AHN, Hac., libro 8050, no. 5707, quoted in Godoy, Memorias 1 : 182–86. Godoy claims credit for helping develop this cédula, along with Saavedra and Jovellanos.
[36] Col. CG, Soler (1799), f. 214. The Moniteur of Paris reported that the bankers refused to float the loan (22, 28 prairial VI [10, 16 June 1798]). See Buist, Hope and Co., 280, 283. On the loans taken out from Dutch bankers by Carlos III and Carlos IV, see also Riley, International Government Finance, esp. 165–74.
[37] Col. CG, Soler (1799), f. 214.
[38] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 261, 393.
junta studied various options but its only immediate achievement was an appeal to the patriotism of the king's subjects in Spain and America. A decree of Carlos IV of 27 May 1798 admitted "an enormous gap" in available funds and urged his subjects to contribute to a voluntary public donation or else to a patriotic loan without interest, to be repaid after the war was over.[39] As one might expect during a war that failed to arouse enthusiasm and that many blamed on Godoy, the results were disappointing. Where the junta hoped for a public donation of 200 million, it received only 23 million, and the patriotic loan produced only 1.5 million.[40] The government also pressed for a loan from the church, to be paid off by one of the royal incomes from tithes (the excusado ) and got 36 million this way, a mere drop in the "enormous gap."[41]
Saavedra did not survive the crisis in office. On 18 May Carlos IV placed the ministry of hacienda in the hands of Miguel Cayetano Soler. Formally Soler was still under the orders of Saavedra, who remained first secretary of state, but two months later the latter fell seriously ill and had to retire from the ministry. Soler became secretary of hacienda in his own right.[42] Mariano Luis de Urquijo, known as an enemy of the conservative clergy, became acting first secretary. Jovellanos also retired at this time for reasons of health.[43] It was Urquijo and above all Soler who had to face the crisis and save the nation. Urquijo was in office only until December 1800, when Godoy returned to favor, but Soler remained secretary of hacienda until the end of the reign.
2
At the end of August 1798, Soler prepared a report for the king that summed up the gravity of the situation: "Everything therefore calls inexorably for extraordinary measures to produce massive funds, without which the public credit will be ruined. If Your Majesty should fail to pay punctually the royal servants and the creditors of the state, the stability and very existence of the government will be jeopardized."[44] Soler indeed had in mind "extraordinary measures" to save the crown, but he
[39] RD, 27 May 1798, AHN, Hac., libro 8050, no. 5754.
[40] The exact figures are 23,048,281, given in Col. CG, Soler (1799), f. 214, and 1,541,000 in ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 14. Soler says only 693,750 for the patriotic loan, but more must have come in later.
[41] Col. CG, Soler (1799), f. 14. The exact figure is 35,781,530. For the excusado, see Appendix G.
[42] Matilla, Catálogo 1 : 533, Orden general no. 5750.
[43] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 421.
[44] Col. CG, Soler (1798), f. 204.
dressed them up in attractive colors. He had discussed his proposal fully with Saavedra, he said. "The best statesmen have much desired it and public opinion has accepted it." It was "to sell the real property of brotherhoods, charitable foundations, hospitals, and ecclesiastical benefices (patronatos y capellanías ), and also the estates belonging to the encomiendas of the military orders, and deposit the product in the Amortization Fund at 3-percent interest, to be used to extinguish the vales reales and royal bonds."
The idea of a direct attack on the wealth of the church was nothing new, he added.
I have read a memoir written in August 1794 and another in October 1796 when the present war was declared, which show with perfect clarity not only the great public benefits that would accrue to the state, as anyone can perceive, from the sale and subsequent circulation of those properties and the increase they would bring to the income of the crown, but also the private gains that those foundations would obtain by receiving punctually the interest on their capital. . . . The bad administration of those properties is so notorious that no one fails to lament the harm that their neglect and decay cause the public. Their yields, which could be a great source of national wealth, are reduced, and the pious intentions of the founders are betrayed. For these reasons alone, therefore, the transfer of these properties into active and taxpaying hands would be seen as very important and much applauded.[45]
Soler knew well how to sweeten the pill!
He was correct in saying that statesmen had long discussed the problem of the extensive properties that belonged to ecclesiastical manos muertas, but on the whole they had muted any suggestions for their alienation. As we have seen, they fixed their eyes rather on the baldíos. Yet they never forgot that the manos muertas were a major form of entailed property and stood in the way of economic freedom. Campomanes first became famous as author of the Tratado de la regalía de amortización, which appeared in 1765. It was intended as a defense of a proposal under review by the Council of Castile that would require royal approval before a religious institution could acquire further property. Campomanes argued, as others had before him, that since canon law prevented the clergy from selling properties of religious bodies, eventually all property would belong to the church unless a restraint
[45] Ibid., ff. 205–6. The memoir of 1794 that Soler refers to is found in part in Sempere y Guarinos, Historia de los vínculos, 417–25. I do not know the one of 1796, but it may be the memoir of Juan Sempere y Guarinos given to Godoy in Nov. 1797, ibid., 431–32.
were placed on its acquisition. He went on to say, "If already at the beginning of the last century it was believed advisable (conveniente ), as we have seen, to dismember the superfluous property that the church already then had in excess, . . . how much more true this is today, given the unchecked expansion of acquisitions in the century and a half that has elapsed since then."[46]
The Council of Castile failed to recommend the law, convinced by opposing arguments that the manos muertas were not yet so vast as to pose a serious threat.[47] The reformers turned their attention elsewhere, as the need for food became the most urgent item on their agenda. When they looked again at land belonging to the church, it was with the idea of settling farmers on it. Then they discovered that there were two types of religious properties, those that belonged to recognized ecclesiastical entities like parish churches, cathedral chapters, and religious orders, and those that could be considered part of the public domain. The latter were properties that had been donated as endowments to pay for the performance of religious services and processions in memory of defunct donors (aniversarios and memorias ), to maintain shrines and altars devoted to the worship of saints, to contribute toward the activities of religious confraternities, and to support charitable establishments such as orphanages, asylums, and hospitals.[48] These endowments were all known familiarly as obras pías. Another type of fund, more ambiguous in its nature, were the patronatos and capellanías, funds to provide income for members of the clergy. Many were sinecures, in the proper sense of the term, posts without souls to care for, and can be loosely translated as benefices. Nomination to patronatos de legos were made by laymen, presumably descendants of the founder, and thus were a kind of family property; nomination to capellanías came from ecclesiastical authorities such as bishops.[49]
As a rule the properties of all these foundations and funds belonged to manos muertas. The catastro of the Marqués de la Ensenada listed them under "ecclesiastical property," and they were administered by the secular or regular clergy or by organizations like confraternities that were tied to the churches. Royal officials nevertheless distinguished be-
[46] Chap. 20, quoted in Justo Fernández, "'Regalía,'" 74.
[47] Ibid., 78–79.
[48] For examples of such bequests in sixteenth-century Seville, see Pike, Aristocrats, 117.
[49] Patronatos de legos were also known as capellanías laicales (see circular, 3 Mar. 1807, AHN, Hac., libro 8058, no. 6871). I am indebted to M. Christian Hermann for helping to clarify this point.
tween their properties and those belonging outright to churches and religious orders, as is evident in the recommendation of Olavide that "the government make many small owners with the lands that it has in its possession, such as those belonging to the towns [los propios y arbitrios], those of the military orders, those that belonged to the Company [of Jesus] and those belonging to capellanías and obras pías."[50]
The reformers were very critical of the state of the lands belonging to obras pías and capellanías. Francisco Bruna observed, "There is nothing more common in Andalusia than the untilled scrubby lands and unkept vineyards of abandoned capellanías. When one sees a field in this condition in the countryside, one naturally remarks that it must belong to a capellanía."[51] Jovellanos was even more severe. Medieval monarchs, he said, quite properly granted lands and other sources of income to the clergy to reward them for their services in war. Later, however, unrestricted gifts inspired by the piety of the faithful turned this practice into an abuse. "How many capellanías, patronatos, aniversarios, memorias, and obras pías have been established since the laws of Toro [of 1505] . . . allowed the makers of wills to give property to the church as a sacrifice of atonement!" The result, he complained, was a large number of clergymen with no useful function and great harm to agriculture. The church should be endowed with royal bonds and similar holdings rather than land.[52] His reasoning seemed to rest on the difference between land, a limited good, and credit, of which there could be no finite amount.
Both Jovellanos and Olavide looked rather to the baldíos to solve the agrarian problem. Just as the Ley agraria was published, however, the troubles of the royal exchequer became acute, inclining the royal advisers to rethink the needs of the nation. In 1794 they received a memoria (the author is not identified) that echoed the ideas of the reformers—Spain is by nature a rich country made poor by its institutions, which prevent the multiplication of small farms—but stressed the possibilities inherent in a sale of religious properties. The estates of capellanías, hermandades, and obras pías, it said, must be worth 200 million pesos, and those of the churches and religious orders another 300. If this enormous sum were to be deposited in the royal treasury at 3-percent interest, "with the proper solemnities of papal bulls and the rest that is called for," the government would be able to attack Spain's enemies with such vigor that they would be "confounded and filled with terror by the mere
[50] Mem. ajust. (1784), §810, 258. See also §831, 263.
[51] Ibid., §1025, 299.
[52] Jovellanos, Informe, 102.
news of such a measure."[53] The crown would gain funds, the nation farmers, the church a steady income, and the poor clergymen an honest salary. "The obras pías, freed from the corruption of their administrators, will produce more income and it will be spent for the holy ends intended by their founders."[54]
Set aside in 1794, this proposal received new attention after the outbreak of the war with Britain. The Dirección de Fomento General (Office of Development) brought the idea to the attention of Godoy in September 1797. "There are," it said, "according to the census of 1787, 773 hospitals, 88 hospices, 26 houses for retirement, 51 foundling homes, a total of 938 establishments. . . . The obras pías are much more numerous, and all together account for an extraordinary mass of properties withdrawn from circulation, whose administration and cultivation are generally in the worst neglect . . . producing only 1- or 2-percent income for their owners."[55] Their sale by the crown in return for a fixed interest on the capital would benefit their owners, provide the crown with "great assistance . . . in the present circumstances," and, if the measure were extended to other similar properties, "the national debt would be extinguished in a brief time."[56] Juan Sempere y Guarinos, a former member of the Junta on the Agrarian Law of the Economic Society of Madrid, sent Godoy a similar memoir two months later. In May 1798 Saavedra, the secretary of hacienda, now fully convinced of the urgency of the matter, wrote the king a report on the critical financial situation that said, "What is most important is to decide once and for all on the sale of the properties of hospitals, brotherhoods, benefices, and obras pías." The extraordinary ministerial junta of May 1798 reviewed the proposals and gave them its blessing.[57]
In February 1798, after Saavedra became secretary of hacienda and before Godoy's resignation, the king decreed a measure that offered the junta a precedent. Using the arguments of a generation of reformers in favor of the disentail of municipal properties, the king, on the advice of his ministers, ordered the sale at auction of buildings belonging to municipal propios that were rented out as private residences. The resulting
[53] Memoria in Sempere y Guarinos, Historia de los vínculos, 417–25 (quotation on 421).
[54] Ibid., 423.
[55] The text of the project in ibid., 425–30 (quotation on 426–27).
[56] Ibid., 430.
[57] Ibid., 431–32; Canga Argüelles, Diccionario de hacienda, s.v. "Memoria de D. Francisco Saavedra al Señor D. Carlos IV, 4 de mayo de 1798." On this subject see also Merino, "Hacienda."
capital was to be deposited with the royal tobacco administration, which would pay the municipal governments 3 percent on their deposits. The explanation offered for the measure was that private owners would take better care of the houses, the towns would receive a surer form of income, and the nation would gain from the free circulation of property, arguments drawn straight out of Jovellanos and his predecessors.
The act seems almost a trial balloon for ecclesiastical desamortización, and Godoy presents it in his memoirs as the first step in this direction, for which he takes credit.[58] We now have a study of the effects of this decree in the city of Salamanca. While local officials began within a month of the order to prepare for its execution, the first sales were not completed until November 1799. By 1804 eighty-two separate sales had disposed of 90 percent of the houses belonging to the city.[59] In advising the king to sell off religious properties in August 1798, however, Soler could have been encouraged by the reception given to this order, but he could not yet know how it would work out. A more positive precedent was the rapid disposal of Jesuit properties after 1769.[60]
One can appreciate the dilemma faced by the king and his counselors. On the one hand, the accursed French revolutionaries had confiscated the properties of the church to pay off their national debt. On the other, the Spanish crown faced a bankruptcy like the one that forced Louis XVI to call the Estates General and thus begin the process that ended with the fall of the monarchy and his own execution. Soler's warning that "the stability and very existence of the government" were in danger voiced the crown's fear of fiscal insolvency inspired by the Gallic experience. But could Spain not avoid the catastrophe by adopting the French policy as a preventive measure? It would save the crown while doing no harm to the church, because the king would acknowledge the full value of its confiscated properties. How could the measure be criticized if the institutions affected were guaranteed a larger income than they now received in rents? Such was Soler's word to the king at the end of August. Carlos IV, sadly missing the moral support of Godoy and doubtless tormented by the perils of bankruptcy, approved Soler's proposal almost at once.
On 19 September 1798 Carlos signed four decrees that incorporated the recommendation of his secretary of hacienda. The most important read in part as follows:
[58] Godoy, Memorias 1 : 179–80, which quotes part of RC, 21 Feb. 1798.
[59] Infante Miguel-Motta, "Desamortización."
[60] See above, Chapter 1, section 7.
In order to continue procuring the welfare of my beloved subjects by all possible means amid the present urgent needs of the crown, I have believed it necessary to dispose of a massive fund that can serve two objectives. One is to substitute for the vales reales another debt with lower interest and fewer problems. The other is to give relief to industry and commerce by extinguishing the vales reales through more effective measures than those already adopted. Since my sovereign authority to make use of public establishments for these and other ends of the state is undisputed, I have resolved after mature consideration to alienate all the real property belonging to hospitals, hospices, houses of charity, homes for the aged, foundling homes, confraternities, memorias, obras pías, and lay patronatos. The product of these sales will be deposited in my Royal Amortization Fund at 3-percent interest per annum, as will the capital of any censos [obligations] owed to these establishments and foundations that are redeemed.[61]
The decree furthermore "invited" the archbishops, bishops, and other prelates to alienate "properties belonging to capellanías colativas [benefices whose holders were appointed by prelates of the church] or other ecclesiastical foundations, depositing the product in the Amortization Fund at 3-percent annual interest." The logic of the decree is evident. It interpreted the possessions of charitable institutions and other obras pías and endowments for religious services to be public property, under the sovereign authority of the crown, and so too benefices whose holders were nominated by laymen (patronatos de legos). The king could dispose of such properties at will. Endowments for benefices under the full control of ecclesiastical prelates escaped the king's authority, but he could appeal to the prelates to help meet the national crisis.
Two other decrees ordered the sale of two other types of real property and the use of the product to redeem the vales. One were the possessions of the Company of Jesus that had not yet been sold.[62] The other affected the properties of the Colegios Mayores, six residential colleges located at the Universities of Salamanca, Valladolid, and Alcalá de Henares. Carlos III had tried to reform them to eliminate the influence of the partisans of the Jesuits, but instead they had fallen into decline. The king now ordered their income from rents and tithes paid into the Amortization Fund and their properties sold, except those used for educational purposes, which went to the universities.[63] The income from specific Jesuit properties had been assigned to certain obras pías; the decrees left in the air who, if anyone, was to receive the 3-percent interest
[61] RC, 19 Sept. 1798, AHN, CCR, no. 1221.
[62] RC, 19 Sept. 1798, ibid., no. 1217.
[63] RC, 19 Sept. 1798, ibid., no. 1222.
payable on the capital realized by the sales of the remaining properties of these two sets of institutions.
The fourth decree was distinct in nature. It gave permission to owners of mayorazgos and vínculos and other titles "that are inherited according to the rules observed in the mayorazgos of Spain" to sell their real properties at public auction provided they deposited the net proceeds in the Amortization Fund, "not withstanding whatever clauses [in their acts of foundation] may prohibit [their] alienation." [64] The king explained ingenuously that the purpose of the decree was to allow holders of entailed estates to contribute to the patriotic loan without interest that he had opened the previous May, but he guaranteed 3-percent interest to future owners of the mayorazgo, so that the heirs of the contributor should not be defrauded. The entailed estates would still exist, but in the form of royal obligations. Indeed, the king offered to pay the present owner the interest at once if his needs prevented him from subscribing to the patriotic loan. Royal permission to sell entailed family estates was nothing new, but before it had usually been given to individuals in financial need.[65] The decree extended the authorization to all owners of entailed estates, thereby establishing a pregnant precedent that national urgencies could override private articles of vinculación.
3
The four royal decrees of 19 September 1798 initiated the long process of desamortización in nineteenth-century Spain. A number of developments contributed to the final decision. Most obvious was the urgency of the fiscal crisis. The decrees promised a sure way to shore up the faltering credit of the monarchy and solve the current fiscal dilemma. The owners of vales reales could use them at full face value to buy properties put up for sale, and the crown would be able to retire the vales from circulation as it received them in payment for properties. Henceforth the creditors of the crown would be the privileged, unproductive sectors whose properties were sold, the religious foundations and the individual clergymen who profited from them, and the landed owners of vinculos, to the extent that they chose to collaborate, rather than the merchants and other members of the productive classes who had been saddled with the burden of the vales that circulated at ever-declining market value.
[64] RC, 19 Sept. 1798, ibid., no. 1216.
[65] Jago, "Influence of Debt."
Although the measures avoided new taxes on all levels of society, they fitted in with the policy of tapping the resources of the idle rich rather than the industrious poor to pay the expenses of the state. The royal debt would remain, but consolidated at an interest of 3 percent rather than the 4 percent paid on vales or the 5-percent interest on the recent loans. At one blow the annual cost of servicing the debt would be reduced by at least a quarter. At the same time, the income of the crown would increase because the properties of the obras pías would lose their tax-exempt status as they came into the hands of laymen. Their harvests would be subject to alcabalas and similar imposts. Such was Soler's plan. It had one weakness: its success depended on the crown's not putting back into circulation the vales received—that is, on the product of the sales actually going to the Amortization Fund. This in turn depended on balancing the budget, an achievement hardly possible as long as the war with Britain continued. For the moment, however, the properties allocated for sale seemed so vast that even the expenses of the war were not a cause for worry.
Even though the decision to disentail was directed primarily at finding fiscal resources that would solve the current crisis, it was also inspired by the long consideration of the need for agrarian reform. The demands of war had, however, produced a major change in the plans of the agrarian reformers. The king would not, as they had urged, distribute the baldíos to impoverished farmers and laborers at modest cost in a kind of Old World Homestead Act or sell them to men of wealth to raise money for an economic infrastructure. The urgent need for liquid funds meant that the king must put properties up for sale at a good price, and this meant offering buyers not barren wastes but lands and buildings that would provide an immediate income. Those belonging to or controlled by the church fitted the need. For centuries ecclesiastical institutions had been buying up valuable estates or receiving them from the faithful as endowments for their many activities. For centuries, too, the crown had turned to the wealth of the church in its time of need. In the thirteenth century, Fernando III had obtained two-ninths of the tithes of Castile to support his war of reconquest,[66] a tribute the kings still collected, now from all Spain. Fernando and Isabel had obtained the sale of indulgences, known as the bula de la cruzada, to support the conquest of Granada, a practice also still being followed. Felipe II had established the excusado, the right to the tithes of the most productive
[66] Nov. Rec., I, vii, n. 1.
household in each parish, to support his war against the Turks.[67] In Part 2 of this study, we shall run into it still in operation at the end of the eighteenth century. Carlos IV was following an old-regime tradition when he selected the estates of obras pías to help him now. But to take over property rather than income was new, a product of changed circumstances and philosophies.
The beginning of desamortización reflected the evolution of eighteenth-century society. The expanding population inside and outside Spain increased the demand for food in the markets and transformed the relations among the factors of production. Labor became cheaper and land dearer. Those who controlled or used land were encouraged to apply more capital and labor to its exploitation. It was no accident that the king's counselors selected land as the resource that would attract available private capital and strengthen the royal credit. The reformers, from those of the 1760s through Jovellanos, had remarked on the high price of land—"scandalous," Jovellanos called it—and the exorbitant rents that owners were asking. Land was a factor of production in high demand. The fiscal exigencies of the war simply decided the crown to free some of it from artificial restrictions on its transfer. In this way desamortización was a belated response to the demographic revolution of the century, as the reforms of Carlos III had been an earlier one.
The invitations extended by the king to church prelates and owners of mayorazgos to sell estates under their control and place the proceeds in the Amortization Fund at 3 percent were thus more than desperate and artless appeals to their patriotism. Quite conceivably, their properties could command a high enough price on the market for the interest on the capital received to produce more income than the properties did. This was especially so if the properties were inefficiently tilled or managed by corrupt administrators, as the reformers kept repeating.
The king ordered the sale of properties of obras pías and similar ecclesiastical foundations, but he left the decision on the alienation of properties of capellanías up to the bishops and of mayorazgos up to their owners. One might conclude that the king was merely recognizing the difference between public property, which was under his authority, and private property, which was protected from expropriation. That something else was involved, however, is suggested by the king's response to Soler's recommendation to include the estates of the encomiendas of the military orders among those to be forcibly sold. The
[67] Ibid., II, xii, n. 1. See Appendix G.
military orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara had been founded in the Middle Ages as brotherhoods of knights who took religious vows and fought against the Muslims. Since 1523 the king of Spain was their hereditary grand master, and their properties, which were extensive in Extremadura and Andalusia, could be considered part of the royal domain. Nevertheless the income from their encomiendas, or fiefs, went to their caballeros (knights), who since the end of the reconquest were honorary appointees, most of them titled aristocrats or wealthy hidalgos. Despite Soler's urging, the royal decrees did not provide for the sale of these properties. Although one suspects that at a practical level the royal counselors did not believe it advisable to stir up this influential group, the decision fits a more general pattern. The king could order the sale of the estates of obras pías because, as his decree said, "my sovereign authority to make use of public establishments . . . is undisputed." The throne might tremble beneath him but the king did not hesitate to proclaim an unabashed assertion of his absolute authority. Yet royal absolutism had its limits, and the rights of the church and the nobility presented one such limit. Desamortización as conceived by Carlos IV and his advisers had as its objective to shore up the monarchy, and for this purpose the privileges of the legal orders (estamentos ) were an integral part of the monarchy. The French revolutionary government confiscated all the estates of the church and those of émigré nobles. No such act emanated from the king of Spain, however dire the situation, for he was holding the dike against revolution, social and political.
Desamortización offered a way to cut the Gordian knot of reform, creating new landowners without destroying the economic basis of a society divided into legal orders. By transforming the capital of mayorazgos and manos muertas from real property to royal obligations that were expected to produce their owners a greater net income, the king would actually benefit the aristocracy and clergy. Thus in the decree on the sale of mayorazgo properties, the king congratulated himself for achieving simultaneously "the two important objectives of preserving intact the entailed estates, and with them the splendor of the families to which they belong, and of restoring the lands to the husbandry of active and industrious owners, with transcendental influence on the progress of the wealth and happiness of the nation."[68]
Agrarian reform was still definitely part of the agenda. To assure that active owners acquire the land, the decrees specified that the sales should
[68] RC, 19 Sept. 1798, AHN, CCR, no. 1216.
be by public auction, "with prior assessment of the properties and the posting of thirty days' notice in the district capitals (cabezas de partido ) and the towns in the vicinity of the one in which the properties are located," "dividing the estates as much as possible in order to attract many buyers and multiply the number of owners."[69] The decrees ignored the question of where industrious farmers were to find the capital to bid for the properties, but Jovellanos's Ley agraria offered reassurance: in the long run it made no difference how lands were transferred from entail to the free market. The working of economic laws would inexorably lead to their being farmed in the most efficient way, which in his mind meant in most places by small private owners. The long-term effect would be the highest possible output and hence the greatest welfare for the nation as a whole.
Nevertheless the war with Britain marked a major turning point in Spanish domestic policy. The food riots of 1766 brought to an end a long period during which the crown had sought to impose a less regressive and more efficient tax structure. For the next thirty years the government struggled to find an "agrarian law" that would produce more food. After 1796 the search for money to pay for wars and keep the monarchy afloat took over first priority. Except during the war against Napoleon, when the fight for survival as an independent people dwarfed all other considerations, the fiscal problem imposed by wars was to remain for half a century the primary consideration in the formation of royal economic policies. Agrarian reform remained on the agenda, but plans for it had to respond to the more imperative need for money. The critics of desamortización since Joaquín Costa have credited the generosity of the reforms planned by Carlos III to the capacity of his counselors—Aranda, Campomanes, and Olavide—to perceive the true needs of the rural society. One might better explain them as the product of a brief, fortunate period in Spanish history when royal deficits were not the dominant concern of the rulers.
[69] RCs, 19 Sept. 1798, ibid., nos. 1216, 1221.
Chapter IV—
The Struggle to Save the Royal Credit
Unfortunately for the crown the announcement of the sale of entailed properties did not restore its credit. The war with Britain continued to hurt Spain's economy and kept the royal budget out of balance. British squadrons effectively blockaded Cádiz and Barcelona, and another fleet cruised along the northern coast, preventing all trade except risky blockade running.[1] Carlos IV was forced to resort to borrowing to meet the crown's obligations. On 15 October 1798, one month after the decrees on desamortización, the government floated a new domestic loan of 400 million reales,[2] and on 8 April 1799 it announced a new issue of vales for almost 800 million reales, the largest ever.[3] After this, it was able to avoid further borrowing in Spain, but it had to pay off loans in Holland that it had taken out in 1778 and subsequent years. In October 1799 it negotiated a new loan of 3 million florins (24 million reales) with the house of the Widow E. Croese, half to cover matured obligations of 1778–80 and 1792 and the other half for current needs.[4] This contract was extended in September 1800 to increase the amount by another 2.5 million florins (20 million reales).[5] In June 1801 the Spanish government resorted once more to this tactic, again in part to cover former obligations to Dutch banks, and took out a loan of 4.5 million florins (36 mil-
[1] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 388–90.
[2] RC, 17 Oct. 1798, AHN, Hac., libro 8050, no. 5797.
[3] Carta, 15 Apr. 1799, ibid., libro 8051, no. 5880. See Appendix C.
[4] RC, 6 Oct. 1799, AHN, CCR, no. 1280.
[5] RC, 1 Sept. 1800, ibid., no. 1323 (MS).
lion reales) with the house of Croese.[6] These were not large sums, but they represented hard foreign exchange. In order to cover them, the king delivered drafts on the royal funds in Mexico, which the Dutch bankers no doubt hoped to collect through neutral countries if the war still continued when they matured.
For larger sums that could be used within the monarchy, the king resorted to tapping the income of the Amortization Fund, which he had created in March 1798 on the recommendation of Saavedra. According to the decree establishing it, the fund was an independent entity whose purpose was to pay interest on and eventually redeem the royal debts, for which purpose the king assigned it income from various taxes and other sources, including the proceeds of the disentail.[7] To keep it above the fiscal demands of the moment proved to be a vain hope, however. Between February 1798 and June 1799 it gave the royal treasury for current expenses 271 million reales, while it retired only 40 million reales of vales. In June 1799 it lost even its pretense of independence and was placed under the treasury. In the next fourteen months, until it was abolished in August 1800, it provided another 298 million for expenses while extinguishing only 217,000 reales of vales.[8] A major part of these funds came from the payments it received in these years from the purchasers of disentailed properties. The declared purpose of the disentail, one recalls, was to pay off the vales and replace them with a debt at lower interest. From the start, the high hopes of Soler to restore the royal credit with disentail were being frustrated.
The shakiness of the crown's fiscal position inevitably undermined the market value of the vales. They had been quoted between 15 and 20 percent below par in 1798, but they fell to between 30 and 45 percent below par in the first half of 1799.[9] In 1800 the crown suspended the scheduled annual repayment of the 100-million-real domestic loan that it had floated with such fanfare in 1797,[10] and when the Amortization Fund was closed in August 1800, the crown owed 62 million reales interest on the vales reales.[11] In that year the discount on the vales ranged between 62 and 72 percent.
[6] RC, 12 June 1801, ibid., no. 1373 (MS). See Buist, Hope and Co., 283.
[7] RC, 3 Mar. 1798, AHN, Hac., libro 8050 no. 5707.
[8] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 96, ff. 4v–5r. The exact figures are 270,882,473; 39,533,929; 297,670,106; 216,898.
[9] For monthly quotations of the vales reales, see Appendix D.
[10] The records of the repayment of this loan are in AHN, Hac., legajo 4095. They show regular amortization in 1797, 1798, and 1799 and then no further repayments until 1816–18, when a few bonds were redeemed.
[11] ANP, AF 1608 , 2 : 96, ff. 4v–5r.
In 1801 Spain waged a brief and victorious war on land against Britain's ally Portugal. The vales began a slow recovery, and by September of that year they were being discounted only between 59 and 61 percent. In October the Spanish public learned that preliminaries to a peace treaty had been signed in London between Spain, France, and Britain. By November the vales were quoted at only 30 percent below par. On 27 March 1802 the three countries signed the Treaty of Amiens, restoring peace to Europe for the first time since 1792. The promise of better times led to the vales being exchanged at less than 10 percent off par value in May and June 1802. The euphoria did not last, however, and by the end of the year they were again off more than 20 percent. Nevertheless, during the reign of Carlos IV, the royal credit never again was so shaken as it was between 1799 and 1801, the most frightening years for the monarchy in living memory.
2
Soler fought desperately to avoid a fiscal collapse, and the disentail rapidly became his major resource. The royal decrees of 19 September 1798 ordering the desamortización of vast quantities of property were not precise as to how such an undertaking was to be carried out. The decree covering the properties of obras pías said simply that the matter should be referred to the ministry of hacienda, "so that it may make the arrangements that are simplest, least expensive, and most conducive to the execution of what has been ordered."[12] Thus the king left it up to Soler to figure out how to execute the measures he had conceived.
Sales began before the end of the year under the authority of the provincial intendants and their subdelegates. In January 1799 the king issued detailed instructions for the auction of the properties.[13] The administrators of ecclesiastic holdings and the town justicias (justices) were ordered to collaborate in determining what properties were covered by the decree of 1798. Two assessors (peritos ), one named by the ecclesiastical owner and the other by the Amortization Fund, would assess the properties, and then agents of the fund would post announce-
[12] AHN, CCR, no. 1221.
[13] RC, 29 Jan. 1799, AHN, CCR, no. 1240. The legislation on disentail in these years can be followed in the cédulas, decrees, and circulars found in the AHN, CCR, and AHN, Hac., "Ordenes Generales de Rentas." Indispensable is Matilla, Catálogo. Thanks to Matilla, I was also able to consult the unpublished manuscript of volume 2, Siglo XIX. The reference numbers in my citations to this collection are those assigned by him.
ments of the auctions. The town justicias were to carry out the auctions, under the review of the intendants. "The justicias will take care that each property is auctioned off separately so that there may be as many buyers as possible, thus increasing the number of owners in the kingdom, subdividing the large properties where possible without prejudicing their present owners."[14] At the same time the king established an order of priorities. As a general rule, he said, the first properties to be put on sale were to be those belonging to confraternities, memorias, obras pías, and lay patronatos. Only when these were liquidated were those of hospitals, asylums, and other charitable institutions to be touched. The final words of these instructions reiterated the now-familiar phrases about "the common benefit that will accrue to the kingdom from placing these entailed properties in circulation" and the foreseeable advantages to the pious establishments through saving the salaries of administrators and avoiding their "collusion with the tenants and subordinates."[15] Funny that the counselors chose to save the charitable institutions until last if they had such confidence in the benefits to the bodies whose properties were sold!
These instructions gave evidence of a certain impatience, inspired by the need for money. They established, for instance, that bids would be accepted for two-thirds of the assessed value, payable either in vales or hard currency, and buyers would be allowed up to two years to pay if they put down a quarter of the price on signing the contract. And to attract the loose capital in the country, besides the sales being announced where the properties were located, they were to be advertised in surrounding towns, "especially where there are believed to be wealthy persons."[16]
In the next years the king signed additional decrees specifying in minute detail the procedures to be followed and modifying them as the circumstances changed. They reveal the effects of fiscal pressure. Thus an "addition" of December 1799 to the original instructions virtually abandoned the rule of selling the properties one at a time. "The judges will take care to sell the properties precisely as required by the Instruction [of 29 January 1799] unless the representative of the obra pía accepts or requests that they be alienated as a unit because they are more attractive in this form or because it is evident that this procedure will lead to the more rapid sale of all of them, without foreseeable harm to
[14] RC, 29 Jan. 1799, AHN, CCR, no. 1240, art. 17.
[15] Ibid., art. 44.
[16] Ibid., art. 7.
the foundations [the present owners]."[17] The foreseeable decline in the number of possible buyers seemed to be forgotten. Three months later the royal agents received a circular charging them "to activate and promote the alienation of the properties of obras pías. The serious public emergency demands these sales and can no longer brook procrastination, delays, or pretexts that obstruct them."[18]
The most significant instruction came in 1803. The Memorial ajustado published in 1784 had recorded complaints from various parts of the monarchy that rents for land were being raised to the detriment of the tenants and the public. In November 1785 Carlos III, concerned lest landowners attempt to pass on to their tenants a recent tax on income from their properties, had frozen rents for land unless the local justicias and intendants approved the increase. He also prohibited owners from evicting tenants in order to cultivate land themselves unless the owners were resident farmers in the towns where the lands were located.[19] As with so many of Carlos III's praiseworthy orders, not all poderosos chose to obey;[20] nevertheless it remained on the books, and in 1794 Carlos IV reaffirmed it.[21] In September 1803, however, the king decided to exempt from its application the lands being disentailed:
Having learned from experience that these regulations, which were intended to prevent owners from evading, by indirect means, moderation and just measure in the use of their fortunes . . . , hinder the alienation of properties belonging to pious foundations, because they discourage many [potential] buyers, who judge that they will not be able to employ the properties as they wish or that they will have to undergo costly lawsuits with the tenants, . . . I have ordered that the buyers of properties of the pious foundations be perfectly free to do with them as they see fit, whether by cultivating the properties and lands that they have bought or by concluding new and more advantageous leases, so long as they execute evictions with sufficient time for the former tenants to find other leases or make other suitable arrangements.[22]
With this cédula royal policy turned its back on the reforms of Carlos III that were aimed at protecting the small farmers and laborers from the poderosos. Henceforth tenants would see their farms pass from an owner who was subject, in theory at least, to rent control to another who was free to squeeze as much as he could out of his new properties.
[17] Adición, 27 Dec. 1799, AHN, Hac., libro 8052, no. 5992 art. 18.
[18] Circular, 26 Mar. 1800, ibid., libro 6012.
[19] RC, 6 Dec. 1785 AHN, CCR, no. 740. On his measure, see Jovellanos, Informe, 94.
[20] Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 422–23.
[21] RC, 8 Sept. 1794, AHN, CCR, no. 1086, capítulo 2.
[22] RC, 15 Sept. 1803, AHN, Hac., libro 8055 no. 6476.
The financial plight of the crown was shattering the dream of a land of independent small farmers. Even Jovellanos's prophecy that disentail would work toward a redistribution of land in small units was belied by the tone of this order. Its effect would be to place the burden of guaranteeing the vales reales on the small tenant farmer, who was threatened with a rent increase, along with the former ecclesiastical owner, who was forced to accept royal obligations in place of real property.
Besides affecting the properties of religious foundations, the decrees of September 1798 gave permission to owners of mayorazgos and lay vínculos to sell their estates and deposit the proceeds in the Amortization Fund. Inducing lay owners to part with their holdings was a different kettle of fish from executing the forced sale of church properties, and the royal counselors groped for means to this end. The original decree indicated that the properties were to be assessed and auctioned in the same manner as the church properties. In January 1799 the king published another cédula aimed at encouraging owners of mayorazgos to sell their real estate. Noting that some individuals had offered to dispose of their entails and deposit the capital received in the Amortization Fund but were unable to do so because of their debts,[23] the king allowed them to keep an eighth of the proceeds from their sales "as a reward." Although the fund would receive only seven-eighths of the total sale price, it would recognize the entire amount as a debt of the crown to the mayorazgo and would pay 3-percent interest on it.[24] By this measure, the owners were allowed to spend part of their inheritance as they wished, not just to pay off debts, and still keep the full amount in royal obligations. The net effect for the moment was to increase the interest on the money received by the Amortization Fund from 3 to 3.4 percent. According to the memoirs of Godoy, who was out of favor at this time, "this concession was considered on all sides an unbecoming measure, as much to the government that proposed it as to those persons who were moved by it to sell their properties."[25]
Less unbecoming was the next measure, which revealed a perception of the issues of economic development. In February 1803, acting on the advice of the Council of Castile, the king gave permission to the owners of entailed estates to sell properties of their entails that were located far from their homes and use the proceeds to buy others of obras pías.
[23] Godoy, Memorias 1 : 271, confirms that some mayorazgo owners had made such offers.
[24] RC, 11 Jan. 1799, AHN, CCR, no. 1238.
[25] Godoy, Memorias 1 : 273.
Thereby the owners could consolidate their estates, reduce the cost of administration, and dedicate themselves to improving their properties, to "the progress and general development of agriculture." For sales of this kind, the king withdrew the "reward" of one-eighth of the sale price.[26]
Another cédula of 1805 exuded further economic philosophy. It enabled owners of mayorazgos and vínculos to free portions of their estates from entail. They would "buy" the properties from the mayorazgo at a price established by an independent assessor by depositing the price in cash in the royal fund, to be credited to the mayorazgo. Because the one-eighth "reward" was maintained, owners could free properties from entail for seven-eighths of the assessed value. The mayorazgo would possess royal obligations paying 3 percent instead of the real property, which the owner would now be free to bequeath to the heirs he chose instead of the liquid capital used for its purchase.[27]
The text of the decree suggests that the initiative came from Soler, whom, it said, the king had charged to advise the Council of Castile on the merits of the proposal. It thus represents official thought on private property. Land, the cédula said, was preferable to liquid capital as a family holding not because it produced a higher return but because it was safer. Dishonest guardians could not squander a ward's inheritance or husbands dissipate their wives' dowries if these consisted of real property. What father who lacks sons would want his entailed lands to go to a distant and perhaps unknown relative while being forced to leave his daughters only cash? Why should he improve his lands if his widow and daughters could not benefit from his efforts?
This measure can even be of fundamental importance in improving private and public customs. Firstborn sons, who today have nothing to fear from the owners of the mayorazgos that they will receive, and secondborn sons, who expect nothing from them, will now vie for the affection of their father by their deference and good behavior. Now the father who has accumulated savings will have the power to settle on his more virtuous children the very estates whose value they have all come to appreciate because they have had their fruits before their eyes since childhood.[28]
The decree contains a curious mixture of the new faith in competition and the virtues of the nuclear family with a traditional acceptance of the superiority of land over other forms of capital. Gone is the older belief in the need for the monarchy to guarantee a noble class by entail-
[26] RC, 3 Feb. 1803, AHN, Hac., libro 8055, no. 6375.
[27] RC, 10 June 1805, AHN, CCR, no. 1624 (also AHN, Hac., libro 8057 no. 6677).
[28] Ibid.
ing its estates. The decree would preserve landholdings in the immediate family while freeing them from entail. Except for the stimulus to a father to increase his savings, all these advantages could have been achieved more directly by abolishing the mayorazgo outright. The king and his advisers were not ready, however, to attack private entail. Fifteen years later, after the turmoil of the Napoleonic invasion, the revolutionary leaders of 1820 did abolish the mayorazgo. Rescinded in the restoration of 1823, the abolition was reenacted permanently in 1836. By then the owners of entailed properties had had time to discover the advantages to them of disentailing their own estates, a lesson that Carlos IV first taught them.
In other ways the royal ministers struggled to turn adversity to profit. Censos, or permanent liens on real property, had plagued the owners of estates, both entailed and free, since the sixteenth century, but the terms of many of them, those called censos perpetuos, made their redemption virtually impossible. Most commonly, censos were established on the estate of a debtor in favor of the estate of the creditor in return for a monetary loan, but also frequent was the establishment of a censo perpetuo on a specific property in favor of a religious foundation or obra pía as a permanent endowment for a specific purpose without any loan being involved. The persons who founded such a censo did not deprive his heirs of part of the family estate, but he did alienate a portion of the income from it permanently in favor of a religious fund. The decree of 1798 ordering the sale of properties of obras pías permitted persons whose properties were encumbered by censos in favor of these institutions to redeem them by depositing their capital value in the Amortization Fund in the name of the institution.[29] A year later, when the market value of the vales was falling rapidly and disentail was barely getting under way, the king authorized every person who was subject to perpetual or redeemable censos in favor of anyone or any institution to pay them off with vales. Perpetual leases or quitrents (cánones emfiteúticos ) could also be redeemed with vales. The vales would be marked out of circulation and be kept by the former owner of the censo or canon, who would receive the 4-percent interest they bore, more, the cédula pointed out, than the 3 percent the law allowed on censos. Redemption payments of censos belonging to obras pías would, as before, be deposited with the Amortization Fund and bear 3-percent interest. The act was a boon to debtors, for they could pay off their obligations with depreci-
[29] RC, 19 Sept. 1798, AHN, CCR, no. 1221.
ated vales, while creditors, who had lost the power to foreclose on the real property of their debtors, in the future had to rely on the crown for interest on their capital.[30]
In April 1801 the king extended his authorization to redeem fixed charges with vales to include all forms of permanent payments to ecclesiastical institutions for festivals, masses, dowries, and the like and such payments to the crown as the ones made annually by property owners in Madrid for street cleaning and street lighting. Even more significant, owners of mayorazgos were allowed to sell part of their entails in order to pay off liens on the remainder. Where the principal was not specified in the original contracts, the cédula assigned to it an amount 33 1/3 times the annual payment due if it was a redeemable censo and 66 2/3 times if it was a permanent obligation. That is, the obligations were capitalized at 3.0 and 1.5 percent, respectively. This time the king decided that capital of censos perpetuos would be deposited with the royal fund at 3 percent, while owners of redeemable censos could do what they wanted with the vales they received in payment for them.[31]
Specifically under attack was the concept of permanent unredeemable obligations. A cédula of 1804 clarified that recent legislation did not preclude the establishment of new censos, provided they were redeemable and were not to be owed to ecclesiastical funds whose properties were being disentailed. The cédula recognized that borrowing played a legitimate role in the expansion of industry and agriculture. It maintained, however, the legal limit on interest of censos at 3 percent.[32]
The royal counselors were using the crisis of the monarchy to end all permanent, quasi-feudal obligations. The consequences could be profound. No doubt the prospect was threatening, especially to landowners long separated from the direct use of their lands by emphyteutic contract, of whom there were many in Catalonia. They could now lose any rights to the land and be henceforth at the mercy of the state for their income. There was evidently strong resistance to the measure. In a cédula of 1805, the king spelled out again the rules for redemption. The detail was greater, but the tenor was the same as in 1801. The new cédula described legal procedures for forcing a reluctant owner to accept repayment of the obligations due him. However, the king excluded specifically from redemption the foros of Galicia and Asturias and annual payments in kind of part of the harvests, such as many lay and ec-
[30] RC, 10 Nov. 1799, AHN, Hac., libro 8052, no. 5975.
[31] RC, 17 Apr. 1801, AHN, Hac., libro 8053 no. 6168.
[32] RC, 15 Sept. 1804, AHN, Hac., libro 8056, no. 6598.
clesiastical señores collected in their señoríos. Despite the king's need for money, he thought it the better part of valor, or even wise policy, not to attack foristas and señores.
Measures that brought in vales could not serve the crown for all its needs, however. The government was committed to paying in hard currency the interest on the vales and on the obligations to pious foundations for the properties that had been sold.[33] Despite repeated assurances that vales were as good as bullion, the crown had to distinguish between the two in practice. The instructions of January 1799 gave preference to bidders for disentailed lands who made offers in hard currency. If a sale was concluded in vales, another bidder could obtain the property at the same price by paying half in hard currency and half in vales.[34] The additional instruction of December 1799 modified the original rule that permitted bids for two-thirds of the assessed value. Henceforth bids made in vales had to be for the full value.[35] The administrators of the obras pías then pointed out that sales concluded in hard currency for less than the assessed value defrauded them of part of their capital and the interest due on it. For this reason on 16 August 1801 the king declared that on sales made for less than the assessed value payable in hard currency the fund would recognize a debt to the former owners for the entire assessed value and pay the interest on it. The obvious effect of this decision was to raise the interest rate on the sums actually received by the crown. If the Amortization Fund received two-thirds of the value in hard currency and paid 3 percent on the full value, it paid 4.5 percent on the amount received, higher than the interest rate on the vales. The king further announced that for sales for more than the assessed value that were paid in hard currency, the fund would recognize a debt to the former owner 25 percent above the sale price. In this case the effective interest was 3.75 percent.[36] In November 1802 it suspended the 25-percent premium on sales for more than the assessed value in hard currency, but it continued to accept bids in hard currency for two-thirds of the value and recognize its debt to the former owner for the full amount.[37] The desperate need for bullion had forced the government to abandon part of the advantage of consolidating the national debt at a lower rate of interest.
[33] Instrucción, 29 Jan. 1799, AHN, CCR, no. 1240, art. 27; and the repetition of this article in Circular, 12 May 1800, AHN, Hac., libro 6012.
[34] Instrucción, 29 Jan. 1799, AHN, CCR, no. 1240, art. 16.
[35] Instrucción, 27 Dec. 1799, AHN, Hac., libro 8052, no. 5992 art. 21.
[36] RC, 16 Aug. 1801, AHN, Hac., libro 8053 no. 6226.
[37] Orden of the Council, 8 Nov. 1802, AHN, Hac., libro 8101, no. 6346.
How much the crown lost in this way is difficult to estimate. On the basis of the analysis of sales in the provinces of Salamanca and Jaén that forms Part 3 of this work, one can suggest that the fund may have received 10 percent less in currency and vales than it recognized as debt to former owners; in other words, it was committed to pay 3.3-percent interest on the total amount received rather than the 3 percent stated.[38] On the other hand, so long as the vales were depreciated by more than one-third their face value, it was in the crown's interest to receive two-thirds of the assessed value in hard currency rather than the full value in vales. This was the case from March 1799 to November 1801 and again after May 1803.
3
While Soler and the fiscales of the Council of Castile worked out ways to accelerate the disentail, the royal advisers also struggled to create an effective administration for the undertaking. In January 1799 the king established a Junta Suprema independent of all royal councils, audiencias, and other tribunals to expedite the sales and resolve any difficulties. To head it, he appointed the archbishop of Seville, Antonio Despuig, and among its members was Manuel Sixto Espinosa, director of the Amortization Fund.[39] The junta did not produce the desired results, however, and in June 1799 the king abolished it and placed the Amortization Fund under the authority of the royal treasury, as it had been from 1794 to February 1798.[40]
With the vales being discounted between 30 and 40 percent, the specter of a royal bankruptcy again haunted Soler. Publicly, at least, he blamed the trouble on a few avaricious speculators, men "without honor or virtue," who were giving less than face value in hard currency for vales, destroying confidence in them.[41] When a cédula of April 1799 failed to put a stop to their activities,[42] he conceived a plan to combat their machinations, which the king published in July. It reminded the public that vales were legal tender while admitting that up to now the crown had not enforced this rule, even in its own dealings. Henceforth
[38] In Jaén the crown received in hard currency and vales reales about 88 percent of the amount it recognized as debt to former owners, and in Salamanca about 95 percent.
[39] RC, 12 Jan. 1799, AHN, CCR, no. 1237. See also RC, 18 Feb. 1799, AHN, Hac., libro 6012.
[40] RC, 29 June 1799, AHN, Hac., libro 8051, no. 5922.
[41] RC, 8 Apr. 1799, ibid., libro 6012.
[42] Ibid.
the vales were to be treated strictly as legal tender, but the king would permit them to be discounted 6 percent in settling contracts calling for payment in silver or gold. The king threatened prosecution of anyone who refused to accept them at this rate. Since the smallest vale was too large for most everyday transactions, he established Cajas de Reducción (change offices) in the thirteen leading commercial centers of Spain to exchange vales for hard currency (efectivo ) for those who needed it for small transactions or payments abroad. The offices were to be provided with 165 million reales in hard currency and twice that amount in "cédulas de caja," circulating paper notes in denominations ranging from 100 to 1,500 reales, to be issued in exchange for vales. To obtain the necessary hard currency, the king offered the public stock certificates (acciones ) in the Cajas de Reducción, on which dividends would be paid out of the interest on the vales acquired by the cajas. If an appeal to the clergy did not produce this amount, the king would resort to a forced distribution of stock among the "personas pudientes" (wealthy persons) in the region of each office. The king himself would purchase 10 percent of the stock.[43] Soler sent the intendants instructions to use "all the energy of their zeal and the force of their persuasion and lights" to convince the "pudientes" to "contribute voluntarily" to the subscription.[44]
The measure did not succeed. The personas pudientes evaded both voluntary and forced contributions, and the vales remained unredeemable except for paper cédulas de caja. Threats of prosecution could not revoke Gresham's Law,[45] but Soler did not easily admit defeat. In November 1799 the king signed three decrees that struck at the privileged and wealthy. The first required all holders of royal offices that the crown had sold some time in the past (oficios enajenados ), to contribute one-third of their value to the Cajas de Reducción.[46] The second decree ordered all sources of income previously committed to the redemption of vales transferred to the cajas and established three new taxes to support them. These were a tax on domestic servants that rose progressively with the number of servants (for the first male servant the employer was to pay 40 reales per year, for the twentieth and all additional servants, 303 reales each; female servants cost half as much), a similar progressive tax on horses, mules, and carriages used for pleasure, and a
[43] RC, 17 July 1799, ibid., libro 8051, no. 5931. On the interpretation of this cédula, see circular, 20 Aug. 1799, ibid., no 5947.
[44] Circular, 23 July 1799, ibid., libro 6012. See also three circulars of 19 July 1799 in slightly different terms evidently prepared for different distribution (ibid.).
[45] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 395.
[46] RD, 6 Nov. 1799, AHN, Hac., libro 8101, ff. 93–96.
tax on retail stores, inns, and taverns, which varied with the type of business (but not with profit or turnover).[47] The third cédula was much more direct. The king informed his subjects that the deficit for the following year would be only 300 million reales, far less than in recent years, despite the massive expenses of the war and the loss of income that it occasioned. To cover the deficit, he ordered a subsidy for this amount to be allocated among all cities and towns in proportion to their wealth and instructed each municipality to collect its share as it best saw fit, hitting all classes, "as should be when the public good is involved," but without being burdensome on the poor.[48] The measure revived an old practice: in 1590 when Felipe II inaugurated the millones tax in Castile, also calculated in round numbers, he had assigned a specific amount to each municipality and let it decide how to raise the sum. Times had changed, though, for Felipe II had been forced to obtain approval of the Cortes of Castile.[49]
Soler was trying desperately to shift the royal finances from dependence on devalued vales to metal currency, but the objective proved ever more elusive. In March 1800 he informed the farmers of royal revenues that henceforth they could not use vales to pay their contracts with the crown.[50] This order was followed in the next months by others specifying various royal taxes that could be paid only in coin. The most important were import and export duties, including those on trade with the American colonies.[51] When these measures also failed to provide the needed cash, the king ordered specie belonging to the crown to be shipped from America, but as he soon admitted publicly, "although one or another of [the shipments] reached our ports successfully, the remainder fell into the hands of the enemy despite the precautions taken."[52]
By now the government no longer tried to blame speculators for the decline of the vales but realized that it was a question of public confidence, shaken by the effects of the war. In 1800 vales were being exchanged for little more than one-quarter of their face value, and in
[47] RD, 6 Nov. 1799, in RC, 10 Nov. 1799, ibid., libro 8052, no. 5975.
[48] RD, 6 Nov. 1799, in RC, 12 Nov. 1799, ibid., libro 8052, no. 5976.
[49] Jago, "Habsburg Absolutism," 312–13.
[50] MS letter of Soler to Antonio Alarcón Lozana, 14 May 1800, AHN, Hac., libro 8052, no. 6010.
[51] MS letters of Soler to Alarcón Lozana, 1 Apr. 1800, ibid., no. 6018 (applies to especies estancadas ); 18 Apr., no. 6026 (derechos de aduanas ); 31 May, no. 6048 (sal ); 18 July, no. 6061 (el 10% de alcabalas y cientos de los generos extranjeros ); 5 Sept., no. 6078 (4% de alcabalas y cientos sobre venta de ganado mular en La Mancha ); 28 Feb. 1801, ibid., libro 8053, no. 6149 (derechos de introducción de frutos . . . de Américas y los de extracción para ellas ).
[52] Preamble to Pragmática sanción, 30 Aug. 1800, AHN, CCR, no. 1322.
making its payments, the royal treasury itself could receive only this much for them.[53] Upon the recommendation of Soler, in March 1800 Carlos IV established a committee of four ministers and a fiscal of the Council of Castile to find a remedy. They studied various suggestions but finally accepted a proposal of Soler based on the belief that confidence in the vales could be restored by convincing the public that they had the most solid backing of any paper money in existence. After the council reviewed his proposal, Carlos IV published it on 30 August 1800. His decree declared that all seven issues of vales made since 1780 were a legitimate debt of the monarchy and listed the royal revenues assigned to back them. The decree directed more revenues to guarantee the vales, some of them already in existence, some new. The principal ones were a tax on the pósitos (public granaries); a larger share of certain minor tithes; the first year's income from each appointee to many ecclesiastical and royal offices; taxes on brandy and liqueurs; export duties on wool, silk, and olive oil; and heavier import duties on many luxury products, including those from the colonies. One of the new taxes was a revised tariff on patents issued by the Council of Castile known as gracias al sacar —these included the recording of new incumbents to noble titles, of university and lower degrees, professional licenses, hunting licenses, and many other authorizations.[54]
The major innovation of the decree, however, was to create a new institution to collect and manage all the income assigned for the guarantee and amortization of the vales, entirely separate from the royal treasury. It was given the title Comisión Gubernativa de Consolidación de Vales and was placed directly under the Council of Castile, with its president being the governor of the council. The hope was to restore the credit of the vales by establishing an independent authority to pay interest on them and redeem them that was not subject to the daily demands of the monarchy. To emphasize the importance of the measure it was published as a pragmatic sanction, equal in force to a law approved by the Cortes. The public crier of Madrid proclaimed it before the royal palace and at the Gate of Alcalá to the sound of trumpets and drums.[55] Indeed the measure was to have lasting effect, for the commission, soon
[53] Ibid.
[54] A later cédula spelled out the new charges for gracias al sacar: RC, 19 May 1801, AHN, Hac., libro 8053 no. 6184. It also ordered an increase of one-fifth in the bula de la cruzada, a donation collected each year from all communicants. A subsequent instruction ordered this increase to take effect in 1802 (Circular, 16 Sept. 1801, ibid., no. 6232).
[55] Pragmática sanción, 30 Aug. 1800, AHN, CCR, no. 1322; also in AHN, Hac., libro 8052, no. 6072.
known as the Caja de Consolidación (Consolidation Fund), became a separate state treasury with its own income and capital and played a major role in the remainder of Carlos IV's reign.[56] Among its tasks was to administer the desamortización of ecclesiastical and mayorazgo properties and collect the resulting capital.
Despite the public solemnities, the discount on the vales did not budge. In desperation the king once again victimized the church. On 3 October 1800 Pius VII granted Carlos IV one-ninth of all the tithes collected in Spain, over and above the tercias reales (two-ninths of the tithes) that the king had received since the thirteenth century. In return Carlos IV graciously agreed to give up the 7-million-real annual subsidy that he had collected from the church since 1794.[57] And still the royal maw pursued the clergy. On 10 February 1801 the pope signed another breve approving more impositions on the church of Spain to apply to the redemption of the vales. Giving his approval, in effect, to measures already outlined in the pragmatic sanction of 1800, the pope ceded to the king the first year's income from all benefices, except those that involved the cure of souls, and from episcopal pensions. In return, the king gave up income from vacant benefices that Pius VI had authorized for the amortization of vales in 1795.[ 58] The arrangement, which ended the temptation to keep benefices vacant, may have been a fair quid pro quo, but the pope also gave the king for ten years the excess income from tithes not payable to parish priests and churches or needed to support the other clergy at a decent level, although the breve did not specify how this amount was to be determined. Finally, the breve also applied to the first year's income from encomiendas of the military orders, whose beneficiaries were not the clergy but the nobility.[59]
4
The fiscal history of these years shows that Soler's campaign to disentail ecclesiastical and family properties was only part of a broadly conceived program to save the royal credit. Threatened with bankruptcy, the gov-
[56] Because the Consolidation Fund collected its own revenues, the records of the royal treasury given in Barbier and Klein, "Revolutionary Wars," and in Cuenca Esteban, "Ingresos del estado," do not tell the full story after 1800.
[57] Papal breve, 3 Oct. 1800, published in RC, 26 Jan. 1801, AHN, Hac., libro 8052 no. 6094.
[58] See above, Chapter 3, section 1.
[59] Papal breve, 10 Feb. 1801, published in RC, 24 Apr. 1801, AHN, Hac., libro 8053 no. 6140.
ernment gave the appearance of grabbing at straws. Yet even in the midst of the worst crisis in a century, it sought to maintain the spirit of tax reform followed since the days of the Marqués de la Ensenada, placing the new burdens not on the poor, who bore the brunt of the rentas provinciales, but on the wealthy and the clergy. The instructions on how to impose the forced subsidy of 300 million reales for 1800 ordered the towns to avoid burdening the poor; the levy on carriages and servants introduced the concept of a tax rising progressively with the wealth of the subject. Similarly, the instructions to disentail obras pías spared until further notice the properties belonging to hospitals, asylums, and other institutions dedicated to the care of the poor. No doubt, the motives were practical as well as altruistic, for the rich had more wealth to tap, but the aim of a more just society was as present in the tax measures as in the decrees on disentail. And the better society that the royal advisers conceived needed an end to restrictions on the free use of the means of production—land and capital—with rewards for the enterprising person, whether he was a farmer with savings or a second son who was kind to his parents. Permanent debts, including emphyteutic quitrents, would vanish, along with selected permanent entails, but fixed-term borrowing for economic development would not be affected.
Many of the clergy resented being the prime targets of the king's decrees. Although the king maintained that the endowments of obras pías and other ecclesiastical foundations covered by the disentail were public property and thus subject to his sovereign authority, the common opinion of both clergy and laity, revealed for example in the catastro of mid-century, held that they belonged to the church. For all the king's confident assertion, the royal act flew in the face of clerical privilege, and many clerics responded with stubborn resistance. The royal cédulas and instructions referred frequently to inexcusable delays of ecclesiastical administrators.[60] In October 1800 a cédula repeated to the ecclesiastical authorities that they were obligated to report all properties subject to sale and gave them a limit of thirty days, after which the royal judges were to intercede. The cédula reminded the ecclesiastics that exact information on the properties was available in the massive surveys carried out for the tax reforms in the realms of Aragon early in the century and for the catastro of the Marqués de la Ensenada in Castile.[61] It warned
[60] For example, Circulares, Apr. 1799 and 13 Apr. 1802, ibid., libro 6012.
[61] RC, 21 Oct. 1800, AHN, CCR, no. 1334. The catastro of La Ensenada is referred to as the "papeles de la Única Contribución." I have seen no records of sales of crown property.
against "confabulations" between owners or administrators of pious foundations and the justicias of the pueblos to delay the sales. To show his good faith, the king ordered the alienation at auction of all property of the crown, except the buildings used by the royal family and two monuments of Muslim architecture, the Alhambra of Granada and the Alcazar of Seville. Two years later, in April 1802, a circular responded to complaints registered by some buyers that those responsible for obras pías were failing to cooperate in registering the deeds of sale. The circular threatened the institutions with loss of interest on their capital until they delivered the titles to the property.[62]
Behind these warnings one senses the sullen foot-dragging of bitter clergymen. They did not stop at noncompliance. In April 1801 the king directed a circular to the church prelates describing the case of "a certain parish priest" who had denounced the sales as a spoliation of the church that violated papal encyclicals. The king explained the error of the priest's argument, and he urged the bishops to silence such rumors, whose purpose was to deter prospective buyers.[63] The priest in question had directed a letter to the governing commission of the Consolidation Fund justifying his resistance to the sale of the properties of an obra pía under his administration. The commission could have chosen to deal with him quietly—in fact it did order his bishop to discipline him—but it preferred to make an example of him because he was obviously not one of a kind.[64]
Warnings did not stop those clerics who felt right was on their side, but they turned to subtler stratagems. By 1805 the royal agents had discovered that some religious institutions had resorted to selling the properties of obras pías that they controlled and had astutely contravened the royal orders by using the proceeds to buy other properties, not liable to disentail, under their own name.[65] Other administrators of obras pías mortgaged their properties before sale, knowing that the debts would be paid off out of the sale price, leaving them free to enjoy the money they had borrowed. The king declared all such contracts null and void.[66]
The wealthy were equally reticent in their response to the demands of the crown. It proved impossible to collect all the subsidy of 300 million reales that was assigned to the municipalities in 1800. Many sectors of
[62] Circular, Apr. 1802, AHN, Hac., libro 8101, f. 143, no. 6284.
[63] Carta circular, 27 April 1801, ibid., libro 6012.
[64] The case is described in Reguera Valdelomar, Peticiones, 120–22.
[65] Orden of the Council, 21 Dec. 1805, AHN, Hac., libro 8057, no. 6740.
[66] Circular, 12 Nov. 1803, ibid., libro 6012; Circular, 12 May 1804, ibid., libro 8056, no. 6546.
the economy were deeply depressed because of the British blockade. The quota assigned to Barcelona was 15 million reales, but despite threats of a royal embargo on their goods, the merchants produced only 3.5 million by 1801.[67] The government had difficulty with other new taxes. A cédula of December 1802 detailed how to collect the tax on servants, horses, mules, carriages, and commercial establishments enacted in November 1799. The preamble admitted that most towns had not yet instituted the tax, and the cédula abandoned the idea of a progressive levy. Henceforth all servants and specified luxury items were to be taxed at the same rate.[68]
Carlos IV was suffering from the same structural weakness of the monarchy that had foiled the reforms of Carlos III, the lack of effective linkage between the king and his subjects. The execution of royal decrees affecting the wealthy was in the hands of the justicias of the pueblos, as those affecting the clergy were in the hands of ecclesiastical justices. In both cases the officials' primary loyalty lay elsewhere, with their señor or the local elites, and the king did not have an independent bureaucracy at this level to carry out his orders.
Desamortización was a unique project, however, for it split the opposition. Although it aroused many clergymen, it tempted laymen with accumulated capital, whatever the size of their peculium. Even wealthy clerics could be susceptible to its lures. To win over the justicias, the king instructed the intendants to give them 0.5 percent of the value of the sales they concluded for payment in hard currency, and 0.25 percent of sales paid for in vales. The intendants were to distribute a similar amount to those persons who most helped in achieving each sale.[69] A few months later bishops received instructions to give similar rewards to those who helped sell properties that required the bishops' approval, such as those of capellanías.[70]
The appeal to greed succeeded where the imposition of new levies failed. Following the pragmatic sanction of August 1800, the Consolidation Fund began slowly to redeem the vales reales. According to Godoy's memoirs, which appear to be based on accurate information, between November 1800 and December 1801 the fund made thirty-one redemptions totaling over 136 million reales.[71] In 1802, the year of peace, seventeen more redemptions raised the total to over 200 million. At the same
[67] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 393.
[68] RC, 17 Dec. 1802, AHN, Hac., libro 8054, no. 6356.
[69] Circular, 23 Mar. 1801, ibid., libro 6012.
[70] Circular, 10 Sept. 1801, ibid.
[71] Godoy, Memorias 1 : 350–51. He gives the figure 136,344,837 reales.
time, the crown closed the Cajas de Reducción, which had been opened with much fanfare in 1799 and had proved a disaster. The fund redeemed stock certificates from the wealthy persons who had been forced or cajoled into buying them.[72] By the end of 1803, the fund had made a total of sixty-one redemptions and eliminated 253 million reales' worth of vales.[73] According to figures provided Napoleon in 1808, the Consolidation Fund eventually redeemed vales totaling 300 million.[74] This was almost 14 percent of the 2,193,423,811 reales of vales in existence at the time of the pragmatic sanction. Royal officials burned in public the vales taken out of circulation, and the press gave publicity to these occasions.[75] Since the crown made no further issues of vales, Spaniards were provided with reasons to mitigate their suspicions of these pieces of paper. In mid-1801 the discount on the vales was over 50 percent; in May 1802, it was below 10 percent. If the peace of 27 March 1802 had not been accompanied by this evidence of fiscal responsibility, it is unlikely that the vales would have recovered their credit so rapidly.
Disentail was the one feature of Soler's campaign that made possible this accomplishment. Once the machinery had been set up to carry out the sales at public auction, the marketing of church properties justified the hopes that Soler had placed in it when he proposed the measure to Carlos IV in August 1798.
[72] Ibid., 369–70.
[73] Ibid., 401. 253,028, 894 reales.
[74] ANP, AF 1608 , 2 : 11. 300,001,129 reales.
[75] Godoy, Memorias 1 : 369.
Chapter V—
The Extent of Disentail
It is relatively easy to follow the legislation on disentail in these years. The decrees, cédulas, and circulars can be found in various collections in the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid. It proved much more difficult to study the sales themselves and the other transactions that resulted from the legislation. I was unable to locate the records of the Amortization Fund and Consolidation Fund (Caja de Amortización and Caja de Consolidación).[1] At the local level, the provincial historical archives are assembling the past records of the notaries. The volumes from these years contain copies of the original notarized deeds of sale of the disentailed properties. Here one can find samples of the sales, like the one described in the first pages of this book, but it is impossible to study the process throughout the monarchy, because many volumes of notarial records have been lost. Even if they had not been, the task would be forbidding. The deeds of sale are bound along with the other notarized documents of the time and can be located only by a search through the entire notarial collections for these years. Each deed of sale is lengthy, at times having as many as fifty folios. Anyone who has worked with notarial archives is aware of how long it takes to review them for one province, let alone fifty. Another possible source is the records of the former
[1] Some of the records of the Caja de Consolidación are in the archive of the Dirección General del Tesoro, Deuda Pública y Clases Pasivas, in Alcalá de Henares (see Cuartas Rivero, "Documentos"). When I checked with this archive in the 1960s, its catalogue did not yet list these records (except for a volume of 1824), and I have not used them.
contadurías de hipotecas (property record offices), which are also being collected in the provincial historical archives. Carlos III founded these offices in 1768 in the cabezas de partido to record liens and exchanges of property.[2] The instructions on desamortización of January 1799 ordered the contadurías de hipotecas to record the sales.[3] It is easier to follow the transactions here than in the notarial documents, because the offices recorded the essential details in brief, and they contain very few other entries in these years. They are, in fact, one of the basic sources for the study of disentail in individual towns in Part 2 of this book. Nevertheless, in the provincial historical archives of Jaén and Salamanca, which I used, a number of registers of the contadurías de hipotecas are missing, and one suspects that the same is the case in other provinces.
Fortunately, I located a source that is relatively complete for the entire monarchy. From the outset the Amortization Fund and later the Consolidation Fund issued notarized acknowledgments or deeds of deposit (escrituras de imposición ) that recognized the royal debt to the former owners of the properties or redeemed censos (the obras pías and other ecclesiastical institutions and the entailed family estates). These deeds of deposit tell us the amount of the royal debt resulting from each transaction as well as other pertinent information and calculate how much the fund would pay the former owner annually in interest. According to the accepted practice, the notary kept a copy of each deed. At first, the deeds of deposit were delivered by provincial notaries, but the funds rapidly centralized the activity in Madrid, using the notary Juan Manuel López Fando and after 1807 Feliciano del Corral. Their records (protocolos ) are now in the Archivo Histórico de Protocolos of Madrid, a total of 147 bound volumes and 17 unbound bundles with 78,428 deeds of deposit dated from 1798 to 1808.[4]
The number of deeds is enough in itself to suggest that Soler's appeal to the avarice of the king's subjects was indeed successful. The deeds consist of printed forms of three pages, recognizing the royal debt to the former owner, with blanks in which to record by hand the details of each deposit. With time, in order to reduce the paper work, the notary's office adopted the practice of including in one deed the proceeds of the sales of various properties when they had belonged to the same institution or estate. Thus there were more sales made than the number of deeds.
[2] Pragmática sanción, 21 Jan. 1768, AHN Hac., libro 8025, no. 2167.
[3] RC, 29 Jan. 1799, AHN, CCR, no. 1240, art. 26.
[4] See Appendix F.
| ||||||||||||||
The amount of the royal debt is recorded prominently at the head of each deed and listed in the index of the volume. It is not usually the same as the sale price. After 16 August 1801, we may recall, when a purchase was paid for in hard currency at less than the assessed value, the crown recognized a debt equal to the assessed value, and for fifteen months it recognized a debt 25 percent above the price received for sales made above the assessed value in hard currency.[5] On the other hand, the legislation required that all censos and other liens on the properties be paid off out of the sale price before the proceeds were deposited in the funds. In these cases, the deeds of deposit represent lower amounts than the sale price. (In this way, we saw, the disentail served to liquidate a larger number of ancient forms of indebtedness and leave the new owners with properties free of encumbrances.) Since some deeds were for more than was paid and others for less, on balance they furnish a first approximation of the value of disentail under Carlos IV. It would require a careful reading of all the deeds to determine the sale price and type of currency used in each case.
Several collaborators carefully totaled the amounts of royal debt listed in the indexes to the volumes, with the results shown in Table 5.1. The difficulty of the task and the state of some of the records means that these totals are not absolutely accurate.[6] Fortunately, there is available a global statement of the deposits in the two funds. When Napoleon forced Fernando VII to renounce the crown of Spain in his favor at Bayonne in May 1808, he commissioned Spanish officials to furnish him
[5] See above, Chapter 4, section 2.
[6] See Appendix F for the method used.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
with detailed information on the finances of Spain. These reports, made from the best information available in Madrid, are now in the Archives Nationales in Paris. Among them are reports on the receipts of the Amortization and Consolidation Funds. They record total deposits, shown in Table 5.2, but do not specify the sources of the deposits.
The total reported to Napoleon for the two funds is 1,653 million, well above the 1,238 million covered by the Madrid deeds studied. To proceed with an analysis of the extent of the disentail of Carlos IV, it is important to know if the difference between the two figures represents missing deeds of deposit or if other moneys are also involved in the figures given Napoleon, such as proceeds from the different taxes assigned to the funds. A detailed analysis of the question, which I have described elsewhere, concludes that the deposits at 3 percent in the Amortization Fund and all those in the Consolidation Fund reported to Napoleon were obligations incurred for sales of disentailed properties and redemptions of censos carried out under various decrees of Carlos IV.[7]
[7] Herr, "Hacia el derrumbe del Antiguo Régimen," 59–65. On the basis of Yun Casalilla, "Venta de los bienes," Appendix 1, which appeared after my article, the table on p. 65 of my article of the amounts of desamortización carried out under the Consolidation Fund should include an additional 4.6 million reales for sales of former Jesuit properties, ordered by one of the decrees of September 1798. No one has yet studied the disposition of the properties of the colegios mayores, which should also appear in this table.
The total of the two is 1,632.8 million reales. The difference between this figure and the total of the Madrid deeds studied is made up by deeds issued in the early years by provincial notaries and late sales for which the Madrid notaries, who fell months behind in their task, had not issued deeds before the end of 1807, the cutoff date of my investigation.
2
Knowing the correct amount collected from the sales tells us nothing about their location. To determine this essential piece of information, we resorted to the deeds of deposit recorded by López Fando and Corral that we have studied. In most instances my collaborators and I were able to establish the location of the properties covered by them. They represent about 80 percent of all the sales, and the total deposits for each province can be projected from them. These provincial totals can then be broken down into the part owed to ecclesiastical foundations and the part owed to lay entails. Table 5.3, Columns A and C, shows the results.[8]
These sums include both money received by the crown for the sale of real properties and money received as redemption of censos. The indexes of the notarial volumes of López Fando and Corral do not distinguish between the two, and it was impractical to review all the deeds to identify the redeemed censos. From a detailed review of the deeds of Salamanca and Jaén provinces, which forms the basis of Part 3 of this study, I estimate that 4.5 percent of the total ecclesiastical deposits came from redeemed censos. By deducting this proportion from the total of each province, Column B of the table gives the estimated provincial totals of deposits resulting from the sale of ecclesiastical properties.
This correction is not applied to Catalonia, however, because a tally of more than half the deeds of this province showed that 61.5 percent of them represented redeemed censos. One can suggest that the reason why there were more redeemed censos in Catalonia than sales of ecclesiastical property is that the redeemed censos included emphyteutic quitrents (cánones emnfitéuticos), which existed widely in that province.[9] If this is the case, the disentail of Carlos IV enabled a number of permanent tenants in Catalonia to establish full ownership of their properties by paying off the capitalized value of their emphyteutic leases with de-
[8] A number of unknowns are involved in calculating this table. The method is described in detail in Herr, "Hacia el derrumbe del Antiguo Régimen," 66–71. The figures in Table 5.3 differ slightly from those in Table 1 of this article due to later corrections.
[9] See above, Chapter 4, section 2.
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preciated vales reales. More research is needed, however, to clarify the effect of this disentail on Catalonia.
A review of the deposits credited to family entails showed that they too include a large number of redeemed censos. The owners of mayorazgos and other secular entails were not required to sell their lands, but they did have to accept the capital of a censo in vales and, after April 1801, to deposit the capital received in the redemption of censos with the Consolidation Fund.[10] This rule may explain the high proportion of redeemed censos among the deeds of deposit in favor of secular entails. A sample of the deeds, drawn from all years and all provinces except Zamora, shows that roughly one-third of the amount deposited in favor of secular entails came from redeemed censos. After making this deduction from the total deposits, Column D of the table gives the estimated provincial totals for deposits from disentailed secular properties.
3
The estimated provincial totals for deposits resulting from the disentail of real property shown in Table 5.3, Columns B and D, have little significance as they stand. They must be transformed into some economically meaningful statistic before one can assess the extent of Carlos IV's desamortización. One would like to know what portion of the property of the church was sold and what portion of all the cultivated land in Spain changed hands. One might base such a proportion on various measures: the area the assessed value, or the value of the annual production. Given the information available, the only practical proportion is the last, because this corresponds to the information provided by the catastro of the Marqués de la Ensenada. The makers of the catastro calculated the value of rural properties according to the average annual sale price of their harvests or their product as pastures. Thanks to the work of Antonio Matilla Tascón, we have available the totals of the catastro for property in the twenty-two provinces of Castile.[11] We lack such information for other parts of the monarchy, which are not covered by the catastro.
Even with the information on Castile it is not possible to compare directly the provincial totals of the catastro with the provincial totals of the deeds of deposit. One must first know the relation between the cadastral value of an average property and the amount of the deed of de-
[10] RC, 17 Apr. 1801, AHN, Hac., libro 8053, no. 6168.
[11] Matilla, Única contribución, Appendixes 10 to 30 and 39b.
posit given for it. Such a relationship can be calculated in some cases. Using the notarized deeds of sale, the registers of the property record offices (contadurías de hipotecas), and the individual town surveys of the catastro (libros maestros de eclesiásticos ) for the seven towns studied for Part 2, I found 139 sales in which I could match the properties sold with properties described in the catastro. I could then calculate the relation between the sale price and the cadastral value of these properties.
It became apparent that different types of property (arable, pastures, olive groves, etc.) produced different ratios of sale price to cadastral value. Arable showed the least markup, with olive groves, urban properties, and meadows each higher in that order. The markup also varied with the different ways in which payment was made. Sales paid for in hard currency had a lower ratio of sale price to cadastral value than those paid for in depreciated vales reales. Similarly, there was a different ratio in cases where a purchase was paid for in hard currency but the royal fund raised the amount of the deed of deposit, according to the cédula of 16 August 1801, to compensate the former owner for not receiving as many reales as he would have if the buyer had bid in vales.[12]
The detailed procedure for these calculations is described in Appendix E. The results show that the real estate of the church brought a good price. Buyers were prepared to pay in hard currency 19 times the cadastral value for arable fields and 34 times for olive groves (for payments in vales reales the ratios were 24 : 1 and 44 : 1). According to the tables of Earl Hamilton, the grain prices in Old and New Castile and Andalusia for 1791–95 averaged 1.78 times those for 1746–55, and for 1796–1800 2.05 times the price of the earlier period, during which the catastro was drawn up. Olive oil prices in New Castile (the only region for which he provides these data) were up 2.06 times by 1791–95 and 2.53 times by 1796–1800.[13] On the assumption that grain and olive production had not risen on individual properties, we can conclude that buyers were willing to pay for grain fields roughly 9.3 times the value of their annual harvests after the beginning of the war with Britain in 1796, and for olive groves 13.4 times, all calculated in hard currency. One can imagine that contemporaries considered the wartime inflation a temporary phenomenon and, if so, based their bids on their recollection of prewar prices in the years 1791–95. In this case they were paying 10.7 times the value of harvests for grain fields and 16.5 times for olive groves. (When bidding in vales, they of course paid more on average.)
[12] RC, 16 Aug. 1801, AHN, Hac., libro 8053, no. 6226.
[13] Grain prices, Hamilton, War and Prices, 183, Table 12; oil prices, ibid; Appendix 1 (prices for 1747 and 1751 missing).
In other words, the buyers were expecting arable fields to produce annual grain harvests worth about 9 to 11 percent of their purchase price, and olive harvests about 6 to 7.5 percent. When we study various towns in Part 2, we shall see that rents for grain fields in Salamanca were between 20 and 31 percent of the harvest, in Jaén about 25 percent on both grain fields and olive groves. Buyers of arable fields who planned to rent them to peasants thus expected a net return of about 2.5 percent on their capital, those of olive groves about 1.5 to 2 percent. These rates were well below what they could get for royal notes, which were shaky, and also below the standard 3 percent for censos, which were guaranteed by the possibility of foreclosure. Since the expectation of continued inflation with which we live in the second half of the twentieth century was not yet present in 1800, the buyers did not discount it. The properties of obras pías clearly brought good prices, despite the haste with which the crown placed them on the market. Jovellanos and the other royal advisers had been correct in assessing a great thirst for land among the holders of free capital in Spain.
4
It is now possible to estimate the extent of the disentail in the provinces of Castile. We know from the catastro of la Ensenada the value of properties belonging to ecclesiastical institutions in each province of Castile. This figure appears in Table 5.4, Column A. Table 5.3, Column B, gives us an approximate total amount of the deeds of deposit for ecclesiastical disentail in each province, but for our purpose it must be converted to an equivalent figure in cadastral value. From Appendix E, we have an estimate of the ratio of the face value of the deeds of deposit to cadastral value for the different forms of payment and the different types of property. We must first establish the proportion of the sales paid for under each form of payment (hard currency, vales reales, etc.). For this purpose, the data on the provinces of Jaén and Salamanca is used as representative of all Spain, admittedly a limited and selective sample but the only one available to me.
Next, we must establish the proportion of the sales made up by each of the different types of property, since the ratio of sale price to cadastral value differed among them. Again we start with the information from Salamanca and Jaén, but it would be unreasonable to expect these two provinces to be representative of the distribution of different cultivations throughout Spain. If we assume that the disentailed properties were a cross section of all agricultural property in each province, we can make
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the necessary adjustment for each province by using a contemporary source, the Censo de frutos y manufacturas de España é Islas Adyacentes, prepared in 1799 by the royal government.[14] Its information has been shown to be wrong in specific respects,[15] but it can serve to establish a rough concept of the provincial structures of agrarian property, for it gives the value of the different agricultural products in each province.
From Appendix E we learn that in most provinces one can estimate that the mean face value of a deed of deposit was approximately thirty times the cadastral value of the same piece of property (a ratio of 30 : 1). In provinces where the proportion of improved land was high, the ratio would have been higher than 30 : 1 because we found that buyers in the disentail offered a higher markup over the cadastral value for improved land than for arable. These provinces, according to the Censo de frutos, were Córdoba, Galicia, Granada, Murcia, and Seville. The proper ratio appears to be 36 : 1 for Granada and 34 : 1 for the other four. Madrid also needs a special ratio because a large amount of urban property was sold here, at a high markup. A ratio of 43 : 1 is applied. We can now divide the total amount of the deeds of deposit for ecclesiastical disentail in each province (Table 5.3, Column B) by 30 (or the larger number for the six provinces noted) to obtain the approximate cadastral value of the property disentailed (Table 5.4, Column B). With this information, we can calculate a preliminary estimate of the percentage disentailed in each province (Table 5.4, Column C).
Except for Madrid, the percentages in Column C vary between 5 and 28. The figure 50 percent for Madrid is not correct. If the buyer of a property did not live in the province where it was located, he could opt to make his payment to the commissioner in his province. The records show that many residents of Madrid adopted this option, buying properties of considerable value in other provinces and having the sales recorded in Madrid. As a result the Madrid total represents more than the amount sold in its province. Let us suppose that 25 percent of the ecclesiastical properties of Madrid were sold, a credible figure since there were many sales. We must distribute the remainder of the amount deposited in Madrid among the other provinces.[16] The distribution can be made proportional to the amount sold in each province, but the three bordering provinces, Guadalajara, Toledo, and Segovia, deserve more. I
[14] Censo de frutos y manufacturas.
[15] Fontana Lázaro, " 'Censo de frutos y manufacturas.' "
[16] We must use the ratio 30 : 1, not 43 : 1 of Madrid. The provinces of Castile represent 79 percent of all the sales outside Madrid; we must distribute only this much of the remainder among them.
Map 5.1.
Castile, Proportion of Ecclesiastical Property Disentailed, 1798–1808
have assigned them a proportion double that of the other provinces. The result is that one must increase the amount of sales in provinces outside Madrid by 8.06 percent and in Guadalajara, Toledo, and Segovia by 16.12 percent. Raising Table 5.4, Column B, by these percentages, one obtains the results in Column D. The corrected percentages of ecclesiastical property disentailed are in Column E. They run from 6 to 30 percent.[17]
The significance of this table can be better understood by looking at the results in Map 5.1. It becomes clear that the disentail had more effect in the south than elsewhere. There is an impressive block of provinces from Seville to Murcia where 19 percent or more of the properties owned or controlled by the church were sold, and in Jaén the propor-
[17] There have been some recent studies of the desamortización of Carlos IV, but they do not provide provincial totals that can be checked against Tables 5.3 and 5.4: Campoy, Política fiscal; Marcos Martín, "Desamortización"; and Pardo Tomás, "Desamortización."
tion was 16 percent. Other areas of high sales were Salamanca (20 percent) and Madrid (25 percent, although the figure for Madrid is arbitrary, as we saw). At the other extreme are two blocks of provinces where 10 percent or less was sold: the northwest sector of the kingdoms of León and Old Castile, including Galicia, and all New Castile except Madrid and Extremadura, together with Soria, which borders on this block to the north. Between these two blocks runs a belt of provinces from Burgos to Extremadura, including Segovia and Ávila, where between 14 and 17 percent was sold. Because of the number of unknowns in our calculations, one cannot expect the percentages to be exact, but the pattern revealed by the map is hardly likely to be the result of a coincidence of errors.
Probably the most important factor in accounting for the pattern is the proportion of ecclesiastical property that belonged to obras pías, memorias, and other foundations subject to the decree of 1798. It was very likely greater in the areas of higher disentail, but there is no easy way to check this assumption. Human factors also played a part, for much depended on the dedication and efficiency of the royal commissioners in charge of the operation. On the other hand, factors such as regional types of agriculture or local weather did not have much effect. An analysis of the total value of sales in each province in each year produces no regional patterns, as one would expect if the kind or size of harvests had played a role. A large proportion of sales in one province might occur in a year during which there was little activity in neighboring provinces. (There was, however, a decline in sales in most provinces in 1803, 1804, and 1805, years of bad harvests and rural crisis.)[18]
The dedication of the local commissioners was critical, as the royal advisers were aware. Repeatedly in the early years, the king issued circulars to the intendants urging them to put pressure on their subordinates and local justicias to hasten the sales.[19] The archives of the ministry of hacienda include a copy of an order dated November 1799 from the intendant of Seville to the justicias of the province to push the disentail, threatening, if they did not, to send a royal agent at their expense to act for them.[20] In 1804, when sales were notably slow, the king through the president of the Consolidation Fund once more pressed the intendants to use all their energies to hasten the affair. Again the intendant of Seville passed the word on to the justicias of his province, with the warn-
[18] For the annual sales for all Spain, see Appendix F.
[19] Circulares, 18 Nov. 1799, 26 Mar. 1800, 7 May 1800, AHN, Hac., libro 6012.
[20] Circular, 15 Nov. 1799, ibid.
ing, "If as a result of your inactive disposition I do not see all the good effects that ought to be forthcoming, I shall take against you the most serious measure that corresponds to your indolence in a matter so stringently urged by higher authority."[21] Seville was one of the regions where a high percentage of ecclesiastical property was sold, but it is impossible to tell from the evidence here if the intendant's threats overcame the perennial problem of administrative linkage with local officials whose loyalties lay elsewhere or if the province had a greater than average number of eager potential buyers with disposable capital.
A judge of the Cancillería of Granada, who bitterly opposed the disentail, later described in scathing terms the attempts of the government to force its officials to carry out its instructions. All to little avail, the judge recalled: "But despite such efforts the truth triumphed, de jure and de facto, and in accord with it they [the agents of the crown and the prelates of the church] remained remiss in the consummation of the sales, presenting a tacit resistance in this prudent way, in default of open resistance, which they could not and should not oppose to an irresistible force."[22]
As the judge pointed out, the attitude of the church authorities was also a factor. Capellanías and charitable foundations whose properties had been donated by religious institutions could not be sold without their permission.[23] It is easy to imagine that few prelates accepted with alacrity the royal invitation of 1798 to proceed with disentail. One who did was the Jansenist bishop of Salamanca, Antonio Tavira y Almanzán, a friend of Jovellanos,[24] who favored the undertaking. Many properties of capellanías were sold in Salamanca, but few in Jaén.[25] Besides Madrid, Salamanca was the only province outside Andalusia that had more than 19 percent of its church properties sold, Jaén the only province in Andalusia below that figure. The attitude of servants of church and state may explain these peculiarities in provincial responses; nevertheless, the overall pattern observed in Map 5.1 must reflect major regional differences in the nature of ecclesiastical property, that is, conditions produced by previous history.
According to these calculations, 15 percent of all ecclesiastical property in Castile was disentailed. It is true that this proportion is based on
[21] Circular, 5 Nov. 1804, and letter of intendant, 14 Nov. 1804, ibid.
[22] Reguera Valdelomar, Peticiones, 125.
[23] Circular, 18 Nov. 1799, AHN, Hac., libro 6012.
[24] Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 415–16; Saugnieux, Prélat éclairé, 269–70.
[25] As determined by the study of the towns in Part 2.
the only total figure available for ecclesiastical property derived from the catastro made under Fernando VI, but the holdings of the church would not have increased much by the reign of Carlos IV. This was no longer a time of large grants for religious ends, and the government frowned on any increase in manos muertas. In making these calculations I have been careful not to overestimate the proportion sold, leaning rather in the other direction. Fortunately, there is independent confirmation of its extent. Among the questions that Napoleon posed the Spanish bureaucrats in 1808 were the following: "What is the amount of capital that is the product of the sales of the properties of charitable foundations [obras pías]? Of the clergy? What is the estimate of how much remains to be sold of the properties of charitable foundations and of the clergy, in comparison with the quantity of both kinds of property whose sale has already been ordered?" The Spanish officials did not give an exact answer to the first question because no one had kept a separate tally of disentail of "obras pías" and "clergy." They replied that the sales of obras pías might be 950 million and of the clergy (that is, capellanías) 237 million, a total of 1,187 million. (We know that this figure is low.) To the second question they replied that there remained to be sold 250 million worth of obras pías and 650 million of capellanías. Furthermore, a papal breve of 1806 had approved the sale of one-seventh of all other ecclesiastical property.[26] The officials calculated this seventh to be worth 500 million; that is, they believed the total to be 3,500 million.[27] These figures produce an estimate of the total value of all ecclesiastical property in Spain before the disentail of 1798 of 5,587 million reales. What the Spanish officials estimated had been sold, 1,187 million, was 21 percent of the total.
Thus the financial advisers of Fernando VII believed that a greater proportion of property of the church had been sold than we estimate. They were referring to all Spain, not just Castile; nevertheless, I believe our figure to be closer to the truth, although 15 percent may be too low. One can be reasonably sure that a sixth of all ecclesiastical property was disentailed. In most provinces of Andalusia it was a fifth or more, and, if the figures of the catastro are correct, it was almost a third in Murcia. One must conclude that the disentail of Carlos IV was an event of major significance in the history of the Spanish church and church-state relations.
[26] See below, Chapter 6, section 4.
[27] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 20 : 26.
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Map 5.2.
Castile, Proportion of All Property Disentailed, 1798–1808
5
Thanks to the catastro it is also possible to calculate the approximate proportion of all the properties in Castile that changed owners in these years as a result of desamortización. The procedure is identical: obtain the total value of the property in each province according to the catastro and compare it with the total of the deeds of deposits (in this case using both ecclesiastical and family entails). To make the comparison, we use the same ratios of deeds of deposit to cadastral value as in Table 5.4. The results are given in Table 5.5 and Map 5.2.
The proportion of all real property that was disentailed in Castile then is estimated to be 3 percent. The highest percentage of land that changed hands was in Andalusia, Salamanca, and Madrid, 4 percent or more. In second rank were Zamora and the belt from Burgos to Extremadura, including this time Toledo, where 3 percent was sold. In other
regions, the northwest of Old Castile and León and the south and east of New Castile, with Soria and Murcia, the figure was below 3 percent.[28] But in Salamanca it reached 7 percent, and in Seville, 6 percent. In the first, approximately one property out of every fourteen—in the towns and the countryside—changed hands, and in the second one out of seventeen, and in the rest of Andalusia one out of twenty or twenty-five. Since these are only provincial averages, there were towns and cities where the transfer was greater, as appears to have been the case in Madrid.
Andalusia and most of the province of Salamanca lay southwest of the Salamanca-Albacete line. The disentail of Carlos IV hit hardest in the region of large properties, the areas that the counselors of Carlos III had singled out as in most need of agricultural reform and that have been marked by great estates to the present day. In due course we shall have to consider whether the desamortización served to improve conditions, as its proponents hoped, or exacerbated an already bad situation, as the critics of desamortización hold.
[28] Although according to our calculations Murcia had the highest proportion of ecclesiastical disentail, the proportion of all property disentailed was low because the province had relatively little ecclesiastical property, according to the catastro. One may question the accuracy of the catastro for Murcia, but there is no easy way to check it.
Chapter VI—
The Collapse of the Monarchy
To contemporaries this massive transfer of land and buildings appeared to be only a beginning. Even before the properties of obras pías were all disposed of, the government of Carlos IV undertook a further disentail of church properties, as great as the first. The monarchy found itself ever more deeply embroiled in a quagmire from which the only hope of escape seemed to lie in the disposal of the wealth of the church.
The clear skies that blessed Spain after the Peace of Amiens in 1802 soon clouded over. In May 1803 Britain and France renewed their war. Spain's rulers sought to remain neutral, but Bonaparte would not allow his ally such a luxury. Under pressure from him, in October 1803 Carlos IV agreed to pay France a "neutrality subsidy," 6 million francs (24 million reales) a month, retroactive to the outbreak of the new war.[1] The British government, not unreasonably, refused to consider Spain henceforth neutral, and its navy began to attack Spanish convoys returning from the Indies. Carlos IV responded to these hostilities by declaring war on the king of Great Britain on 12 December 1804.[2]
The new war proved to be as disastrous as the last for Spain's economy. Traffic with the Indies, which flourished for three years after the peace of March 1802, collapsed after December 1804. Figures collected by officials in Barcelona reveal the effect. Almost complete for all ports of Catalonia, they show a precipitous drop in ships leaving for America.
[1] Lafuente, Historia de España, 16 : 34–36; Fugier, Napoléon et l'Espagne 1 : 238–45.
[2] Lafuente, Historia de España, 16 : 42–44.
There had been 68 in 1803 and 105 in 1804, but in 1805 there were 20, in 1806, 6, and in 1807, only one.[3] The story was the same elsewhere. At Cádiz the total value of exports to the Indies, which has been estimated to average 204 million reales in the three years of peace (1802–4), averaged only 23 million in the next three years; imports from the Indies fell from 183 to 6 million for the same periods, all figures calculated in constant prices of 1778. For the peninsula as a whole the drop was equally spectacular, from an estimated 312 million to 45 million for exports and from 293 to 38 million for imports.[4] Royal income from the Indies suffered the obvious consequences: it fell from a mean of 193 million reales for 1802–4 to 28 million for 1805–7.[5] Trade with other countries, which could be carried in neutral bottoms or go overland to France, was less affected, but the blow was still serious. Mean income from customs, including but not limited to trade with the Indies, was halved, from 187 to 85 million.[6] The records of the Consolidation Fund, which drew part of its income from customs duties assigned to it, show the same trend (Table 6.1). The American colonies, moreover, provided the largest market for Spanish manufactures and the main source of cotton. For Catalan industry, the new war meant loss of profits, high unemployment, and burdens on the public and private charities.[7]
To add to the concerns of the royal ministers, these years brought the worst series of natural disasters in over a century. From 1800 to 1803 Andalusia, along with other warm or tropical regions on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, suffered serious epidemics of yellow fever. The royal government attempted to isolate Andalusia, reducing to a minimum movement of people and goods between it and the rest of the country, while France and other nations banned trade with southern Spanish ports as a safety measure. Normal relations with affected areas were not renewed until 1805.[8] On 30 April 1802 an irrigation dam built by Carlos III in the Segura River above Lorca burst, drowning a large number of people and destroying houses, crops, and orchards. The crown sent
[3] Fontana Lázaro, "Formación del mercado," 44.
[4] Cuenca Esteban, "Statistics," Table 3.
[5] Cuenca Esteban, "Ingresos del estado," Table 4.
[6] Ibid.
[7] See Fontana Lázaro, "Formación del mercado," 45 n. 72.
[8] Peset and Peset, Muerte en España, 101–8; Herr, "Good, Evil, and Spain's Rising," 160. Besides the references cited here, see U.S. minister to Pedro Cevallos, 3 Aug. 1801, AHN, Estado, legajo 5537, no. 2; U.S. chargé d'affaires to Pedro Cevallos, 10 Jan. 1803, ibid.; arrêté of Préfet des Basses Pyrenées, 26 vendémiaire XIII, and letters of Conde de Santa Clara to Pedro Cevallos, Barcelona, 2 Nov. 1804 through 1 Mar. 1805, AHN, Estado, legajo 5212.
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emergency relief to the disaster area and opened a national subscription to aid the victims.[9] In January and February 1804 a series of earthquakes desolated many cities and towns of Andalusia and also struck an extensive region from New Castile to Navarre. Again the crown was called on to feed and shelter the homeless.[10]
Worst of all in terms of economic loss was the failure of grain harvests throughout much of the country in 1803 and 1804, caused by excessive rainfall.[11] A famine followed in the interior of Spain, much worse than the one that preceded the urban riots of 1766. In the meseta the price of grain doubled from 1801–2, a fairly normal year, to 1804–5, and in Extremadura and Andalusia it rose to two and a half times its former level.[12] The royal government was faced with demands from
[9] Godoy, Memorias 1 : 370–71. On this disaster Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 263, cites J. Musso y Fontes, Historia de los riegos de Lorca (Murcia, 1847).
[10] Gazeta de Madrid, 27 Jan., 3, 21, 28 Feb., 2, 9, 20 Mar. 1804.
[11] On rain as the cause of failures, see Circulares, 10 and 24 Feb. 1804, AHN, Hac., libro 8056.
[12] Anes, Crisis, 495, Graph 58.
town officials throughout the country for price fixing and was forced to give up temporarily the freedom of grain trade. In September 1803 in Madrid province and in May 1804 elsewhere, it fixed maximum prices for grains.[13] In July 1803 it forbade exports of pulses to Portugal, and in August it suspended import duties on foreign grain, flour, and vegetables until 30 June 1804.[14] When crops also failed in 1804, this exemption was extended through June 1805.[15] Carlos IV appealed to Bonaparte for help and received permission to import grain from western France;[16] as his contribution Carlos suspended the collection of the alcabalas and other taxes on the sale of this grain.[17] Special transport had to be arranged to bring these supplies to Madrid and other cities and defend them from marauding bands of peasants.[18] In rural areas, abandoned by the government, undernourishment brought disease and death.[19]
The war, the crop failures, and the other disasters meant that the crown received less as its share of the tithes and tariffs while it had to pay for supplies at famine prices to alleviate hunger in the cities, feed its armed forces, and give relief to afflicted regions. According to accounts prepared for Napoleon in 1808, the royal treasury received from 1803 through 1807 the following amounts (in millions of reales de vellón), exclusive of the income due from the American colonies:[20]
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I have not found comparable records of the crown's income for the years 1798–1802.
[13] Ibid., 412 and n. 13.
[14] Circulares, 11 July 1803 and 18 Aug. 1803, AHN, Hac., libro 8055. nos. 6446, 6459.
[15] Circular, 17 Apr. 1804, ibid., libro 8056, no. 6538.
[16] RC, 7 Feb. 1804, ibid., no. 6522.
[17] RC, 26 Oct. 1804, ibid., no. 6615.
[18] RC, 16 Nov. 1804, ibid., no. 6622, and Fugier, Napoleón et l'Espagne 1 : 320.
[19] Pérez Moreda, Crisis de mortalidad, 377–79; Peset and Carvalho, "Hambre y enfermedad." See also the case of La Mata (below, Chapter 7, esp. Table 7.23).
[20] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 25, p. 35. Cuenca Esteban, "Ingresos del estado," now has provided much more detailed figures of the income of the Royal Treasury, including the years for which I have no data. They show the same pattern as the reports to Napoleon, but the totals are considerably higher. I have been unable to determine which parts of the income of the royal treasury that Cuenca Esteban identifies entered into the accounts rendered Napoleon.
In 1796, which like 1803 was a year of peace, the income of the crown was 730 million reales, including the funds from America.[21] Out of its reduced income after 1803, the treasury had to pay the ordinary state budget and the interest on the debts that had not been assigned to the Consolidation Fund. In 1807, the only year for which I have found an account of expenditures, it paid out 637 million, leaving a deficit for that year of 132 million.[22] It was not possible for the treasury to take charge of the extraordinary expenditures as well, and the king found himself forced to appeal more and more to the Consolidation Fund, although the pragmatic sanction that established it specified that its income was to be used only to amortize the vales reales and pay interest on the royal debt.[23] During the famine of 1803–4, he instructed the fund to support the pósito (public granary) of Madrid, which had exhausted its funds and its credit, and to pay for the purchases of food both in Spain and abroad.[24] When Bonaparte forced Carlos IV to contribute a neutrality subsidy of 24 million reales per month, it fell to the Consolidation Fund to pay the bill,[25] and after Spain entered the war, it had to bear other burdens as well. In August 1805 it was assigned the cost of provisions for the army and navy, 9.25 million per month, and in October of that year, the month in which Admiral Nelson destroyed the French and Spanish navies off Cape Trafalgar, it was ordered to provide 10 million more per month to the navy.[26]
When Carlos IV established the Consolidation Fund, he assigned it revenues to cover the interest on the vales, but these provided little excess for additional expenses. According to the accounts furnished Napoleon, in the five years 1801–5 these revenues averaged 89.5 million per year. The Spanish informants said that the fund could count on 95 million in time of peace and 75 million in time of war.[27] Since, how-
[21] See above, Chapter 3, section 1.
[22] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 119. Ibid., 2 : 20, gives "Les diverses dépenses de l'Espagne en 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, 1807," but only as the average of these five years, which is 800 million per year. Ibid., pièce 25, gives "Dépense en temps de paix," that is, in 1793: 560 million; plus the interest on the debt, 210 million; total, 770 million per year. It is clear that the Spanish authorities knew more about the income than the expenditures of the state.
[23] Pragmática sanción, 30 Aug. 1800, AHN, CCR, no. 1322, art. 2.
[24] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 96 f. 9v.
[25] Fugier, Napoléon el l'Espagne 1 : 269–72, 283.
[26] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 96, ff. 9r, 10r. Before 1799 the provision of the army and navy was farmed as an asiento to the Cinco Gremios Mayores of Madrid. In that year the ministry of hacienda took it over (Canga Argüelles, Diccionario de hacienda, s.v. "Provisiones," and Col. CG, Soler [1799], f. 221). In 1808 the royal treasury still owed the Cinco Gremios Mayores 129 million reales (at 5 percent) in arrears for this contract (ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 41, ff. 16v–17r).
[27] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 96, ff. 10v–11r.
ever, the interest on the vales was 75 million per year and the fund had to pay also the interest on the loans negotiated with Dutch banks[28] and on the capital from disentailed properties, which increased regularly as the sales proceeded, it had no income to cover new obligations.
The credit of the vales reales inevitably reflected the condition of the economy and the strength of the Consolidation Fund. Their value had risen with the announcement of peace in 1802, but it declined again when France and England renewed hostilities and fell sharply after Spain entered the conflict at end of 1804. In 1802 they oscillated between 9 and 26 percent below face value. They were off 47 percent in 1803 and 57 percent in December 1804. After this date they never rose above a loss of 40 percent; they were down 64 percent in July 1806 and 63 percent in March 1808.[29] It is true that they never dropped over 70 percent as they had in 1800 during the disastrous experiment with the Cajas de Reducción. Nevertheless, the credit of the crown once again was a constant worry of the royal ministers.
2
Since 1801 the crown had not resorted to new taxes or loans. After the declaration of war on Britain in December 1804, it had no choice but to find additional resources. In the middle of 1805 the king announced five new taxes. Three followed the pattern of earlier impositions assigned to the fund by affecting income of the church and raising tariffs on foreign trade: (1) An increase of 10 percent on import duties and 15 percent on export duties and an additional 1/2 percent on bullion coming from America (of which very little could arrive); (2) A 3 1/3-percent tax on income from royal donations to ecclesiastical foundations (Godoy says it was later reduced to 2 percent); (3) A half year's income from every new appointee to "lay benefices" (capellanías laicales, loss of a year's income had been imposed on ecclesiastical benefices in 1800).[30]
Two of the new taxes, however, represented a distinct break with the policies followed by Carlos IV and Godoy, for they fell on the agricultural producing class. In June 1805 the king decreed a 3 1/3-percent direct tax payable to the Consolidation Fund on all agricultural products and newborn domestic animals on which tithes were not collected. These
[28] Ibid., pièce 90, ff. 10–11.
[29] See Appendix D.
[30] (1) RC, 22 June 1805, AHN, Hac., libro 8101, no. 6685; Circular, 20 July 1805, ibid., libro 8057, no. 6694; (2) ibid., no. 6704, noted in Matilla, Catalogo, vol. 2; (3) Godoy, Memorias 2 : 62.
were mainly fruits and vegetables, honey, and pastures, plus some animals. The tax could be paid in kind or in cash. Since it would be difficult to calculate, experts (peritos) were to determine the amount each producer should pay.[31] The tax was obviously cumbersome and could not fail to be unpopular. Its collection was beyond the capacities of the fund's personnel, already burdened with the administration of the disentail, and in March 1806 its directors ordered its commissioners to farm out the new tax at auction to private individuals.[32] The tax, not surprisingly, was very slow in producing new income.[33]
The other new levy was little more successful. A royal cédula of July 1805 established a tax on all wine produced and sold in Spain, with the exception of wine produced by religious institutions for their own consumption. It would be collected by the Consolidation Fund specifically to support the expenses of war, and the king declared that it would end six months after the publication of peace in Madrid. The amount was not great, four maravedís per quartillo of wine, and to make the tax more palatable, the Council of Castile was instructed to suppress municipal taxes on wine.[34]
In announcing these two taxes, Carlos IV appealed to his subjects' patriotism to bear the new burden. In his memoirs Godoy states that the wine tax was adopted despite his opposition. He disliked it because it would hit the small producer, not the consumer. "This tax, furthermore, had something niggardly about it, its collection was difficult, subject to fraud on one hand and to vexations and abuses on the other."[35] Whether or not Godoy actually took the position his memoirs claim, his desire to dissociate himself from the tax when writing the story of his life in the 1830s is evidence of its widespread unpopularity.
Both of theses taxes probably did more harm than good. They produced little income,[36] and instead they helped discredit the government of Carlos IV, and Godoy in particular. Godoy tells his readers that the government had under study a new general tax plan, evidently similar to the single tax of la Ensenada, which would have benefited the productive classes at the expense of the passive ones. The war and the resistance of the privileged groups, especially the clergy, prevented its enact-
[31] RC, 26 June 1805, AHN, Hac., libro 8057, no. 6686.
[32] Circular, 12 Mar. 1806, ibid., libro 8058, no. 6766.
[33] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 96, f. 12r.
[34] RC, 2 July 1805, AHN, Hac., libro 8057, no. 6687. There were 34 maravedís to the real, and 32 cuartillos to the arroba. The cuartillo was thus about one pint.
[35] Godoy, Memorias 2 : 62.
[36] The Spanish officials informed Napoleon that the wine tax produced only 88 million in three years (ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 96, f. 10v).
ment, he claims.[37] The earlier tax policies of Carlos IV, which had been maintained through the first war with Britain, indicate that his government did indeed have some such underlying philosophy, shared no doubt by Godoy and Soler. The second war, coming on the heels of the first and accompanied by natural disasters, drove the royal advisers from this path.
Godoy's successors learned the lesson. When Napoleon placed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne in 1808, one of Joseph's first acts on reaching Madrid was to abolish both taxes, "so as to give agriculture the development it needs for the prosperity of the kingdom and so that my beloved subjects will begin to feel the effects of my desires for their happiness."[38] A few months later the Supreme Central Junta, which had been established to head the forces in revolt against the Bonapartes, although desperately in need of money, also abolished both taxes.[39]
3
The second war with Britain also forced Carlos IV to resort to new loans. To get more money out of the Spanish public, now thoroughly suspicious of the crown's solvency, the government sought backing from the most respected commercial bodies of the country. In June 1805 the king floated a domestic loan of 100 million reales at 5.5 percent, to be paid off in eight years. To encourage purchase of the bonds, these were issued in relatively small units of 2,000 reales, and, as in earlier domestic issues, prizes were to be awarded to the holders of lucky numbers among the bonds selected by lot to be paid off each year. The Consulado (chamber of commerce) of Cádiz was assigned to administer the loan, which was to be guaranteed by the increase in import and export duties described above.[40] In 1805 and 1806 the Consolidation Fund requested a voluntary loan (so it was called, at least) at 6 percent from the merchants of Madrid and the provinces. It produced 64 million reales.[41] At the same time, to be able to meet its domestic bills, the government marked 197 million reales' worth of vales reales with a special stamp that converted them into vales dinero, that is, true paper money exchangeable for specie upon presentation to the Consolidation Fund.[42]
[37] Godoy, Memorias 2 : 127–28.
[38] RD, 26 June 1808, AHN, Hac., libro 8059, no. 6961.
[39] RD, 22 Nov. 1808 (Aranjuez), ibid., no. 6966 (tax on products not tithed), and RD, 9 Feb. 1809 (Seville), ibid., no. 6974.
[40] RC, 22 June 1805, AHN, Hac., libro 8101, no. 6685.
[41] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 96, f. 13r.
[42] Ibid., f. 12. The date is not specified, evidently 1805.
Despite this guarantee, the vales dinero rapidly were discounted. In 1806, to save them, the government convened with the merchants of Madrid to accept vales dinero from the public in exchange for promissory notes of the merchants payable over the next two years. In return the fund agreed to pay the merchants a quarter of all capital received from the sale of ecclesiastical properties. By 1808 the amount of vales dinero still in circulation had been reduced to 22 million reales.[43]
In April 1806 the king issued two urgent orders aimed at raising further cash for the Consolidation Fund. One instructed the pósitos of the kingdom to lend the fund 36 million reales in hard currency. The accountant general (contador general) of the pósitos was to assign quotas to the individual granaries, for prompt delivery.[44] The other order instructed all municipal councils to provide the fund with 24 million reales out of their normal sources of income, the propios y arbitrios (hard currency was not specified). "Each town will contribute immediately with the first moneys on which it can lay hands, without waiting for an impracticable assignment of proper quotas."[45] Both loans were to receive 4-percent interest, and the royal government promised to pay them back within three years of the signing of peace. Like so many of the king's appeals, these produced less than called for, but they came closer than most, 34 and 19 million respectively.[46]
Carlos IV was forced to seek new loans abroad as well, in order to meet his obligations to France. The Consolidation Fund never managed to keep abreast of the monthly neutrality subsidy of 24 million. In March 1804 it had delivered only 74 million of the 240 million owed by then, and Bonaparte accepted an arrangement whereby a French banker, Gabriel Julien Ouvrard, paid the French government what Spain owed and took over the notes of the king of Spain.[47] When Spain entered the war in December 1804, Ouvrard, a skillful but reckless man of affairs, obtained the contract to provide the supplies of the Spanish army and navy. He did so during the first months of 1805, but Spain did not pay him for this service, or the outstanding balance on the neutrality subsidy. He did, however, recover an advance of 60 million reales made to the Spanish government in December 1804, and toward the remainder he was given drafts on Spanish America for 9.8 million pesos (196 mil-
[43] Ibid. and Godoy, Memorias 2 : 129 n. 122.
[44] Order of 24 Apr. 1806, AHN, Hac., libro 8058, no. 6775.
[45] Miguel Cayetano Soler to Acting Governor of Council of Castile, 24 Apr. 1806, ibid., no. 6773.
[46] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 96, f. 13. The exact amounts were 33,712,238 and 19,134,450.
[47] Fugier, Napoléon et l'Espagne 1 : 283–84; Buist, Hope and Co., 384–85.
lion reales), which he could collect only with much difficulty. To meet the rest of his obligations to Ouvrard, Carlos IV signed a contract in September 1805 with the house of Hope and Company of Amsterdam for 10 million florins (80 million reales) at 5.5-percent interest. The amount of the loan was to be delivered by Hope to Ouvrard and was to be repaid in the capitals of the colonies in America in ten annual installments of 1 million each, plus a 5-percent premium, beginning the following year.[48]
At the beginning of 1806, the French government calculated that Spain still owed Ouvrard 60.5 million francs (242 million reales). Napoleon exploded in anger: "It is we who have paid Spain a subsidy, rather than getting from her what she owes us!"[49] Finally, by a settlement of 10 May 1806, the Consolidation Fund agreed to liquidate the account with France for 24 million francs, to be paid by the fund, plus the outstanding drafts on America, which totaled 9.6 million pesos. Altogether this was almost 300 million reales. Desperate for money, the French government managed through Dutch and English bankers (despite the war!) to collect the drafts on Spain's treasuries in its American colonies, at a considerable discount.[50]
It was at this point that the king called on the pósitos and municipal budgets for support.[51] This was not the end of the story, however, for the Spanish government continued to negotiate loans with Dutch banks, in part because it had to cover repayments of the loans taken out earlier in the reign. In April 1806 Carlos IV signed a contract with the house of De Smeth for 30 million florins (the enormous sum for a foreign loan of 240 million reales),[52] but the archives of the Dutch banks indicate that the arrangement never became final.[53] In October of that year Spanish agents finally succeeded in obtaining a loan for this amount from Hope and Company. Dutch lenders were more sanguine about the credit of the king of Spain than his own subjects, but their confidence rested on the expectation of getting at the Spanish silver bottled up in the ports of the Indies through neutral intermediaries. With 5.5-percent interest and other premiums to pay (including an ample fee to the French for-
[48] RC, 26 Sept. 1805 (MS), AHN, CCR, no. 1641; Fugier, Napoléon et l'Espagne 2 : 19; Buist, Hope and Co., 298. See Buist, 298–304, for the full story of this complex settlement.
[49] Fugier, Napoléon et l'Espagne 2 : 21 and 57.
[50] Ibid., 2 : 57–59, 183–84. A fuller account in Buist, 304–31, giving slightly different amounts.
[51] Godoy, Memorias 2 : 78.
[52] RC, 29 Apr. 1806 (MS), AHN, CCR, no. 1661.
[53] Buist, Hope and Co., 308, 333.
eign minister, Prince Talleyrand), Carlos IV agreed to repay Hope 28 million pesos in Mexico between 1807 and 1820, that is to say, 70 million florins.[54] Even so, the Consolidation Fund received only 23 million of the 30 million florins, and these went to repay former loans and to fulfill its obligations to France.[55] To pay for the supplies of the armed forces, Spanish officials informed Napoleon, the fund had been giving "drafts on the royal treasuries in America with a discount of 16 percent to cover costs, commission, freight, and other expenses that may arise in collecting them."[56] With deals like this, it is not surprising that the Consolidation Fund was behind in its obligations. In 1808 it still owed the French treasury 7.9 million francs (31.6 million reales) of the 24 million francs it had promised in May 1806,[57] and it had a debt of 318 million reales to the Dutch bankers.[58] On the other hand, the fund claimed Ouvrard still owed it 26.5 million francs plus other lesser sums.[59]
4
In this way the Spanish rulers were able to turn aside the thunderbolts of the French emperor, but these loans did not satisfy domestic needs. Disentail was the only sure resource. Since it had proved so successful in Spain, the king and his counselors decided to extend it to the Indies. In November 1804 Carlos IV issued a decree that expressed his satisfaction at the advantages that desamortización had brought to the obras pías of Spain. "I have decided for all these reasons and because of the special care and esteem that my [subjects] of America deserve, to allow them to partake of equal benefits." He ordered the sale of the properties of their obras pías "and that the product and [the capital] of the censos and existing funds that belong to them be placed in my Royal Amortization Fund" (so it said, but it meant the Consolidation Fund). The decree, very lengthy, provided necessary details on the manner to vend the prop-
[54] RC, 15 Oct. 1806, AHN, CCR, no. 1689; Fugier, Napoléon et l'Espagne 2 : 77; Buist, Hope and Co., 335.
[55] Godoy, Memorias 2 : 130–31, gives this figure and is supported by ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 96, f. 13v. Buist, Hope and Co., 336, says Spain got only 10 million florins net.
[56] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 41, f. 20r.
[57] Ibid., f. 19v., and 2 : 96, ff. 12–13.
[58] Ibid., 2 : 66, states that in 1808 the Consolidation Fund recognized as its debt to Holland: loan of 1805, 85 million reales; loan of 1807 [sic ], 233 million reales. In 1821 the Spanish government and the Dutch bankers reached an agreement to recognize the debt as 31,135,000 florins (249 million reales) (Dirección General de la Deuda Pública, Colección legislativa 7 : 286–92).
[59] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 96, ff. 12–13.
erties.[60] In Spain the desamortización declared the redemption of censos to be voluntary on the part of the debtor. In America the redemption of censos and deposit of the capital in the Consolidation Fund was to be obligatory. For debtors, the difference was profound. The decree caused considerable alarm in the Indies, especially among the clergy and upper classes of Mexico, and produced some income, but the money could not be shipped to Spain and served only to meet the notes that the king gave to his foreign bankers drawn on his treasuries in the Indies.[61] In the end it was highly counterproductive, because it added to the growing estrangement of the king's American subjects without bringing the king much financial return.
The possibilities were more favorable at home. The instruction of January 1799 on disentail had ordered the king's officials not to proceed with the sale of the properties of hospitals, poorhouses, old-age asylums, orphanages, and similar charitable institutions, until those of obras pías, memorias, confraternities, lay patronatos, and others of this type were liquidated. A circular of September 1805 now explained that the sale of the latter properties had produced "its effect" and that "the urgent needs of the kingdom, arising as an inevitable consequence of the unfortunate events that have afflicted it in recent years and of the present war" required the disposal of all the properties included in the decree of September 1798.[62]
The disentail had slowed down since the bad harvest of 1803 and 1804 and the accompanying famine, and this decision gave it new impetus. In 1803, 1804, and 1805 López Fando recorded deeds amounting to 84, 123, and 106 million, respectively. In 1806 the figure rose to 136 million, and in 1807, 208 million.[63] The last figure represented sales concluded approximately through May 1807, because of López Fando's slowness in delivering the deeds of deposit. We have estimated that another 169 million's worth was sold in the remainder of 1807, and 80 million in the first months of 1808.[64] In other words almost 600 million's worth was auctioned off after the order of September 1805, 36 percent of all the sales. Much of this represented properties of hospitals and other charitable foundations.[65]
[60] RD, 28 Nov. 1804, AHN, Hac., libro 6012.
[61] See Flores Caballero, Contrarevolución, 28–65; and Hamnett, "Appropriation."
[62] Circular, 30 Sept. 1805, AHN, Hac., libro 8057, no. 6716.
[63] See Appendix F.
[64] See Herr, "Hacia el derrumbe del Antiguo Régimen," 63–65.
[65] For example, the properties of the Madrid poorhouse (Callahan, Santa y Real Hermandad, 151–56).
Even this did not satisfy the desperate rulers. They began to cast their eyes on the other wealth of the church, hitherto not affected by the disentail.[66] This time they decided to take more precautions. Carlos IV had issued the decrees of 1798 motu propio, without admitting any other competence, and as has been seen, his act aroused resentment and opposition among many clergymen. With the conscious intent of avoiding a similar backlash, while recognizing the accepted privileges of the church, this time he appealed to the pope.[67] Pius VII responded sympathetically to the misfortunes of the Spanish monarchy with a breve of June 1805 that proclaimed, "With the fullness of apostolic authority we grant the Catholic king the faculty to alienate in his dominions as much ecclesiastical property as produces an annual net income of two hundred thousand gold ducats, and no more." The resulting capital would be used to retire the vales but also, this time, more realistically, "to alleviate the most serious and urgent needs of the kingdom itself." The pope declared such sales licit and ordered the clergy not to molest the buyers.[68] The arrangements were not so advantageous to the crown as the disentail of 1798, because they did not specify which properties were to be sold to make up the stipulated amount and because the king had to take possession of them and begin paying interest to their former owners before announcing them for auction.
The king published this breve in October 1805, together with instructions on its execution. Experience soon showed that the procedure was not efficient, and the king obtained a second breve in December 1806 replacing the previous one. This time the pope gave the king the right to sell one-seventh of all the real properties belonging to the church, including the religious and military orders, with the single exception of the endowments of parish churches destined for the maintenance of the curates (the congrua ). Following the procedure agreed on in the breve of 1805, the Consolidation Fund would assume ownership of all these properties prior to disposing of them and would pay the former owners the equivalent of the income from them, averaged over the previous five-year period. The proceeds of their eventual sale were earmarked for ex-
[66] On 25 Feb. 1805, Carlos IV abolished ecclesiastical señoríos and compensated their former holders with deposits on the Consolidation Fund equivalent in annual return at 3 percent to the amounts they received from their señoríos (Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado, 450–53). Moxó, Disolución, 12, states that the measure did not apply to all ecclesiastical señoríos and as a consequence had a very limited impact.
[67] ANP, AF IV, 1608 , 2 : 30.
[68] Papal breve of 14 June 1805, quoted in RC, 15 Oct. 1805, AHN, CCR, no. 1644.
tinguishing the vales and for the other needs of the crown, with special mention made of supplies for the navy.[69]
The procedure remained cumbersome, for the seventh part of the properties of an ecclesiastical institution could obviously not be sold until there had been a review of its property and an agreement reached on what represented the seventh to be sold. However, the breve also conceded the king a measure of immediate importance. It authorized the sale of all real properties of capellanías colativas, that is, benefices whose holders were appointed by prelates of the church. These were juicy plums, which the decree of 1798 had invited the bishops to put up for sale, without great success. Henceforth no episcopal approval was needed, and as in the decree of 1798, sales could proceed at once, with the deed of deposit that assigned 3-percent return on the sale price to the benefice coming only later, vastly hastening the process. In February 1807 the king published the breve with accompanying instructions.[70] A circular letter to the commissioners of the Consolidation Fund in March 1807 ordered them to proceed at once to the sale of the properties of benefices, while awaiting determination of the seventh of the properties of the various ecclesiastical units.[71]
On the whole, the government was unable to profit from the apostolic breves. Among the deeds of deposit through 1807, there are only sixty-two in 1806 and thirty-five in 1807 resulting from the breve of 1805. Their total amount was 476,983 reales and produced an annual interest of 14,309 reales, less than 1 percent of the amount authorized by the breve.[72] Since the deeds of deposit had to be granted before the properties were sold, we do not know how many of these properties were disposed of at this time. The deeds of deposit made as a result of the breve of 1806 are all in one volume of the records of Feliciano del Corral.[73] It has 291 documents, dated from 30 June 1807 to 7 November 1808. Only the first 12 are dated 1807, and they were written out in longhand until number 21, of 11 March 1808. These 291 deeds of deposit refer to sales concluded before the end of November 1807 and all involve the properties of capellanías colativas, although the printed form was worded to cover also the seventh part of other ecclesiastical properties. They represent approximately 6.5 million reales. I estimate that an
[69] Papal breve of 12 Dec. 1806, quoted in RC, 21 Feb. 1807, ibid., no. 1702.
[70] Ibid.
[71] Circular, 3 Mar. 1807, AHN, Hac., libro 8058, no. 6871.
[72] They are found in AHPM, López Fando, protocolos 22153–60 (June–Dec. 1806) and 22162–64 (Jan.–Mar. 1807). They can be recognized by their different format.
[73] Ibid., protocolo 23679.
equal amount was sold between November 1807 and April 1808, whose deeds of deposit were never recorded. This would be a total of 13 million, an insignificant sum in comparison with the 1,650 million deposited under the decrees of 1798.[74]
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).