3

The vision of desamortización as the fulfillment of the bourgeois revolution was formulated before much active research on desamortización had been carried out. In recent decades it has become the favorite topic for investigation in the history of nineteenth-century Spain, itself an area of study that has opened up only in the last generation. A careful bibliography on desamortización made in 1981 found 12 titles between 1900 and 1959, 21 in the 1960s, and 135 in the 1970s, plus another 21 theses in progress.^[42] The influential Instituto de Estudios Fiscales of the ministry of hacienda supported conferences on the theme in 1977 and in 1982; in the latter seventy-nine papers were presented.^[43]

This fascination with the subject has led to questioning of the role of the bourgeoisie as the prime mover of desamortización, although the interpretation still has its defenders.^[44] I have explored the issue before, proposing that, far from succumbing to a new bourgeois class, the Spanish landed elite in the nineteenth century maintained its economic

[41] See above, Chapter 19, section 5.

[42] Rueda Hernanz, "Bibliografía" (I do not count the entries that are tangential to desamortización).

[43] "Desamortización y hacienda pública," Madrid, March 1977, and "Jornadas de desamortización y hacienda pública," Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, Santander, 16–20 Aug. 1982. Francisco Tomás y Valiente directed both conferences.

[44] The most prominent is Tomás y Valiente. Besides his classic book, Marco político, he upholds this position in "Recientes investigaciones." He elaborated further in his concluding remarks to the 1982 Santander conference, "Reflexiones finales."

control over the countryside and political control over the central government.^[45] A summary of the arguments will place the present conclusions in better perspective.

The position in favor of desamortización as the instrument for a bourgeois revolution relies on two major arguments. The first amounts to a matter of definition. According to it, the bourgeoisie may be the same segment of society as the former "feudal" class; not its social origins or the origins of its wealth determine its identity but the way in which it exploits the economy. Antonio Miguel Bernal, who has worked extensively on conditions in the nineteenth-century Spanish countryside, explains the position in this way:

I really believe that this type of owners [the new and old Andalusian landowners of the nineteenth century who exploited the land to supply the domestic and foreign market] can be considered a "bourgeoisie" because their economic power is tied not so much to the direct ownership of the land as to the system of exploitation of the land. . . . The system of property does not matter as much as the fact that they hold economic decisions in their hands. . . . The control of production, the control of labor, political control are all in the hands of this group of exploiters of agriculture. I believe that these are three essential requirements for any bourgeois group.^[46]

Effectively, this line of reasoning maintains that the dominant class in a capitalist economic system is a bourgeoisie, whatever its other characteristics may be. If the capitalist class and the bourgeoisie are defined as synonymous,^[47] then of course one need not raise the question whether capitalism was introduced by the rise of the bourgeoisie or vice versa. It does not help our understanding of what happened in history, and yet it is amazing how commonly the argument in favor of a nineteenth-century bourgeois revolution is reduced to this tautology. In the present case it is not even correct in its premises, because nobles under the old regime, both the hidalgos of Lopera and the titled aristocrats who owned cortijos in Navas, one of whom was its señor, controlled production, labor, and the local political power. The Spanish case supports those like Marx who find the origins of capitalism in the large landowners of the old regime.

The second basis for holding that desamortización formed part of a

[45] "Significado de la desamortización"; "Spain"; and "Elite terrateniente."

[46] Remark made during a discussion published in La question de la "bourgeoisie", 77–78. The entire discussion, 77–86, is of great interest. Bernal's position did not find unanimous support.

[47] As, for instance, Wallerstein does in Modern World System, 351: "The capitalist class (the bourgeoisie ) has claimed to be the universal class."

bourgeois revolution is substantive, namely that research into specific regions has regularly found that a major portion of the rural properties were bought by residents of cities, such as provincial capitals and, above all, Madrid. Since these purchasers obviously did not till the soil themselves and furthermore did not have aristocratic titles (although many had the honorific don ), the authors class them as bourgeois. This conclusion begs the question of the provenance of the capital they used for their purchases, for if it came out of land they already owned, desamortización was not producing a new class but simply reinforcing an old one. This study has revealed how the increasing commercialization of agriculture under the old regime could produce the necessary savings.

In fact, on closer scrutiny, the mid-nineteenth-century process appears very similar to the one that had already taken place under Carlos IV. There continued to be three main types of buyers, those who bought on a national scale, among whom residents of Madrid predominated; those who lived in provincial cities and spread their purchases around local economic regions, centering on their cities; and the small rural owners and tenants, who bought in their towns and those adjoining, more numerous than the first two types although the total quantity of their purchases was less. The last group was more common in the north, where villages were small, and the share of the total sales that went to them increased in direct relation to the distance of their villages from urban centers. In general, the wider the area in which a buyer operated, the larger the properties he acquired. Although none of the studies explicitly develop this pattern, one can deduce from them that it approximates what happened at different times in Ciudad Real (New Castile),^[48] Alava (Basque Provinces),^[49] Navarre,^[50] Gerona and Barcelona (Catalonia),^[51] and Valencia.^[52]

The studies just mentioned all deal with a limited period. For the par-

[48] Simón Segura, "Desamortización en Ciudad Real."

[49] Extramiana, "Quelques aspects du désamortissement."

[50] Donézar, Desamortización en Navarra, 279–309. He divides the buyers into "the rich of Madrid" (royal counselors, bureaucrats, army officers, and bankers) and a "regional middle class," which includes both the residents of the four major cities of the province and the leading taxpayers of the rural towns.

[51] Simón Segura, Desamortización en Gerona; Simón Segura, "Desamortización en Barcelona." In Barcelona a large proportion of the property sold under Mendizábal was urban, and Barcelona merchants were conspicuous among the buyers of both urban and rural properties. The article does not distinguish these categories quantitatively.

[52] Pardo Tomás, "Desamortización." A significant number of merchant landowners of Valencia city and local titled aristocrats appear among the buyers. The studies referred to in the paragraph do not analyze the buyers in the way I do; the conclusion is my own. My reasoning is explained in part in "Significado de la desamortización," 76–79.

tido of Olmedo of Valladolid province, located to the northeast of Salamanca, Germán Rueda Hernanz has investigated the identity of the buyers of properties disentailed from 1821 to 1891, using not only the records of desamortización but lists of voters, taxpayers, and property owners.^[53] Almost all the local buyers he finds to be labradores, but they range from "potentates," relatively wealthy landowners living in the partido capital who bought hundreds of arable plots, down to tenant farmers who seized the opportunity to buy the plots they had been renting. The local buyers obtained 51 percent of the land sold (by area, not purchase price), and those of bordering rural areas another 10 percent. As one would predict from my findings for Salamanca, they bid very high for their purchases (two and three times the assessed value), especially the smaller buyers, and they took over 80 percent of the vineyards and irrigated horticultural plots, whereas they got less than their share of pastures and pine groves (a local specialty).

The rest of the buyers lived in the city of Valladolid or in Madrid. Buyers in the provincial capital were professional people, involved in law or politics, while of those in Madrid, we know only that some had moved there from Valladolid. A study of the province as a whole in the years 1836–53 shows that the more distant a region was from the city of Valladolid, the lower the share of land purchased by residents of the city. It would appear that, as in Salamanca, the urban residents, middle-range buyers, extended their purchases within an economic region that the city dominated, but little beyond it.^[54] Most of the buyers in Valladolid had disposed of their properties by 1879, and so had the buyers resident in Madrid. Rueda calls these people speculators and bourgeois, but he points out that they accounted for only 40 percent of the land and that the rest cf the beneficiaries were people directly engaged in agriculture.^[55]

The nature of the persons who bought on a national scale, that is, outside their economic region, is of interest because it reveals whether they continued to rely on wealth redistributed by the church and state, as

[53] Rueda Hernanz, "Beneficiarios del proceso desamortizador."

[54] Rueda Hernanz, Desamortización, en Valladolid, 178–79. Urban buyers predominated in all levels of purchasers in the zone around the city and in all but the lowest level of purchasers (those buying under 20 hectares) in those zones of the province south and east of it. In the distant zones of the province to the northwest and southwest, local buyers predominated at all levels. Unfortunately Rueda does not distinguish between urban buyers living in Valladolid and outside the province, but the majority lived in Valladolid. This impressive monograph has established the author as the leading historian of desamortización of his generation.

[55] Rueda Hernanz, "Beneficiarios del proceso desamortizador," 65–66.

at the end of the old regime. Some of the Madrid residents who bought in Navarre in the desamortización of Mendizábal were local people who had moved to the national capital as public servants or deputies, and others were high army officers, who may have become familiar with the region during the Carlist War. Their occupations suggest that their capital came from redistributed wealth or was of Navarrese origin.^[56] The role of Madrid residents increased as time went on and changed in nature.^[57] They were major purchasers in Ciudad Real after 1855, not only for resale but to keep and exploit, using local administrators.^[58] The most famous buyers were the Safont brothers, José and Manuel, members of a wealthy Catalan family now resident in Madrid, who acquired properties in the four Catalan provinces plus Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Salamanca, Seville, and Mallorca.^[59] Evidently merchants, their activity shows that commerce and perhaps industry were beginning to challenge the state as sources of large wealth. But their brother Jaime, who bought land in various towns of Catalonia and houses in Madrid and Seville, was an administrator of ecclesiastical properties in Barcelona.^[60] Acting as agents and brokers in the purchase of disentailed properties became a recognized occupation, and speculation, that is, buying with the intention of reselling, took an increasing share of the sales. These activities centered in Madrid, in part because bidding on all major properties could be made there as well as in the provincial capitals.^[61]

In the middle of the century enterprising Spaniards were exploiting a number of opportunities presented by the activities of the government: railroad shares, elegant suburbs called ensanches, mines, banks, and, no doubt, although we know little about it, military contracts. To make a business of buying and selling national properties, whether for oneself or for others, fitted naturally into the ethos of the period. Desamortización at its height was a different kettle of fish from what it had been at the end of the old regime, but then the Spain of Isabel II and the Moderado order, which brought together the old aristocratic landowning sector with newly enriched urban groups, was not the Spain of the en-

[56] Donézar, Desamortización en Navarra, 307–8.

[57] Simón Segura, "Desamortización en Ciudad Real," 98–102, 108.

[58] Donézar, Desamortización en Navarra, 284; Simón Segura, "Desamortización en Barcelona," 130.

[59] Simón Segura, Desamortización en Madrid, 96; Porres, Desamortización en Toledo, 416. José Safont was born in Vich in 1803 and had brothers who stayed in Catalonia (Simón Segura, Desamortización en Gerona, 24n).

[60] Simón Segura, "Desamortización en Barcelona," 127.

[61] Simón Segura notes that Madrid buyers became particularly important in the provinces after the desamortización of 1855; under that of Mendizábal, local buyers dominated in the provinces ("Desamortización en Ciudad Real," 98).

lightened Bourbons, who had tried, however unsuccessfully, to control the oligarchies in defense of the producing sectors and thus of the monarchy as a whole. And yet the original patterns of disentail held firm, with the mass of rural properties going to regional elites and village labradores, who got their wealth out of the land, directly or indirectly. If a glittering bourgeoisie was attracting the limelight at center stage, it was, at least in part, as a product of desamortización, rather than desamortización being its creation.