4

If desamortización was not brought on by a bourgeois revolution in Spain, how does one analyze its causation? The evolution of rural society in two provinces at the end of the old regime, which is the core of this book, provides some evidence on this score. The story told here began with the growth of population. Demographic expansion was common to eighteenth-century Europe. It probably resulted from the disappearance of the plague, increased agricultural output, more effective central governments, better communications, changes in the nature of warfare, and other developments that helped induce an economic revival of the Atlantic world. Higher birth rates and lower death rates were a natural response. Some of the demographic growth nevertheless remains unexplained by the obvious economic forces, for in Spain it took place not only in the periphery of the peninsula, already well integrated by maritime communications with the rest of the Atlantic world, but also in the central meseta, a region little affected by the developments just noted until the nineteenth century. Although historians will continue to seek explanations for the eighteenth-century beginning of the modern population explosion, for the purpose of analyzing the process that led to desamortización, demographic growth, whatever the reasons behind it, can be posited as an independent and underlying cause. This proposition should come as no surprise, for a number of historians in the past generation have singled out population as an independent or quasi-independent force in European history. The names of Walter Abel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Douglass North come to mind, among other.^[62]

[62] Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur; Le Roy Ladurie, Paysans de Languedoc; North and Thomas, Rise of the Western World. Abel and Le Roy Ladurie attribute the long agrarian cycle of early modern Europe to demographic fluctuations; North and Thomas the evolution of European economy and political structure in the Middle Ages and early modern period to them.

In the present Spanish case, demographic growth can be seen to cause at least two other kinds of developments. A first effect was to change the factor relations in agriculture, depressing the price of labor relative to land, while inducing a rise in the market prices for agricultural products. The result was to make land an attractive investment and encourage the expansion of commercially oriented agricultural production, which involved new uses of land: pasture to arable, arable to olive groves, and so on. Complaints had reached the Council of Castile from various parts of the peninsula about high rents, with accusations about the exorbitant demands of the poderosos who dominated the local economies, and we have found some support for the complaints in the accounts of religious institutions that owned land in the towns of Salamanca.

The desire for land led persons at all levels associated with agriculture to respond eagerly to disentail. The massive sale of ecclesiastical properties under Carlos IV's decrees of 1798 is proof of the widespread desire for land. By 1805 the Consolidation Fund, in charge of the sales, was running out of the properties first designated for disposal and had to turn to those of hospitals, asylums, and similar charitable foundations, originally exempted from the process. Another example of the land hunger is the success of the buyers of the lands in defending their purchases against attempts to annul the sales, finally winning their case in 1817. During the war against Napoleon, as mentioned earlier, local governments met their urgent needs by selling land of the town council, often in a shady fashion, to village potentates. Although these sales were strictly illegal, the buyers managed to resist all later attempts to return the land to the villages.^[63] After 1823 the government of Fernando VII tried to annul the desamortización of the revolution of 1820, yet the buyers established their titles under Isabel II.^[64] These are but explicit evidence of the powerful demand for land present in all levels of Spanish society.

Events in Spain were part of a general Western development at this time. Everywhere a basic change was taking place in the relation of individuals to agricultural production and the land. One feature was the abolition of serfdom and the "feudal" obligations of peasants to their lords where they still existed, notably in central and eastern Europe, although the most famous example was the night of 4 August 1789 in the

[63] See n. 10 above.

[64] See Mateos Rodríguez, "Desamortización en Sanabria."

French National Assembly.^[65] Another feature of the development was to put land into private hands, and among the private hands into those that would produce more for the market. The case of English parliamentary enclosures is best known and has long been understood as a measure to make agriculture more productive and hence more commercial. Spaniards like Jovellanos, who argued for the benefits of private property and the right to enclose plowed fields, knew something of the English case. In the 1790s a development much closer to them was the decision of the French revolutionaries to sell ecclesiastical estates to pay the royal debt. The motivation for this legislation has been usually described as anticlericalism developed during the Enlightenment, together with a belief in the advantages of private property. Historians have tended to overlook the fact that the Revolution began because of the need to bolster the royal credit. The members of the National Assembly would hardly have made the decision to sell the estates of the French church if they had not believed that there was a strong demand for land, which would produce much income for the state from this step. In France as in Spain, a pull was present to make the auctioning of church properties a promising way to resolve the royal debt, and the pull in both countries went back to a rise in population.^[66]

It has been shown that the curve of the volume of English enclosures coincided closely with the price curve for wheat,^[67] convincing evidence that the desire to profit from high agricultural prices induced English landowners to modify local property arrangements and in the process pick up a share of the village commons. In Spain, disentail also coincided with high grain prices. Earl Hamilton's figures show that in the five years 1796–1800 grain prices were the highest they had ever been, following an upward trend that went back to midcentury.^[68] This was not the first coincidence between prices and desamortización. The properties that had belonged to the Jesuits went on sale in 1769, and sales

[65] Blum, End of the Old Order, describes this development throughout Europe.

[66] Alexis de Tocqueville is one who recognized the importance of the high price of land at the time of the Revolution: "'Land is always sold above its true value,' a shrewd contemporary observer remarked, 'and this is due to the Frenchman's inveterate craving to become a landowner' " (Old Regime, 24 [book 2, chap. 1]).

[67] Chambers and Mingay, Agricultural Revolution, 82–84, and Fig. 1. Following Ashton, Economic History of England, they also acknowledge the role of fluctuations in the interest rate but assign it much less importance than Ashton does. In Spain the interest rate was fixed by law and custom except on royal loans, but these were discredited.

[68] Hamilton, War and Prices, 183, Table 12. The price indexes in Old Castile and Andalusia went over 200 for the first time in 1791–95, and in 1796–1800 were 239 in Old Castile, 251 in Andalusia (1726–50 = 100).

reached their peak in 1770–71. Agricultural prices had declined slightly since the famous peak of the mid-1760s but were still above those in any earlier period.^[69] The same epochs, 1760s–1770s and the years after 1795, were when the parliamentary enclosure movement was most active in England.^[70]

Prices fell during the Restoration—thus the decision to disentail in 1820 took place in a deflationary period and cannot be accounted for by a sudden desire for land—but it is revealing that the two major dates in the history of desamortización, 1836–37 (Mendizábal's legislation) and 1855 (the Madoz law), both followed close on high agricultural prices. The years 1830–36 were years of low grain production in Andalusia and soaring prices, with famine in 1834, which became known as "the bad year."^[71] The price level remained high until the end of the Carlist War in 1839. Similarly the period 1853–55 witnessed high grain prices in western Europe because the Crimean War cut off shipments from Russia.^[72]

Supporting evidence for the direct effect of the international grain market on land redistribution comes from across the Atlantic. In the United States the federal government was busy selling public land in the Midwest between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Civil War. Here too the curve of sales followed closely that of wheat prices. Both peaked in 1836 and 1854–55, with wheat prices almost double their usual level and land sales five to ten times as high as average.^[73] Historical writing has explained the Spanish legislation of 1836 and 1855 as the product of the current political situation, which on both occasions temporarily put the Progresista party, committed to desamortización, into power. It is hard to escape the conclusion, however, that the international grain market was partly responsible for the attractiveness

[69] Yun Casalilla, "Venta de los bienes," Appendix 1 for sales; Hamilton, War and Prices, 172–73 and 183, Tables 11 and 12, for prices.

[70] Chambers and Mingay, Agricultural Revolution, 83, Fig. 1.

[71] Ponsot, "Rendement des céréales," 479; Ponsot, "Andalousie occidentale," 105; Sánchez-Albornoz, "Integración del mercado nacional," 173 n. 20.

[72] For nineteenth-century Spanish prices, see Sardá, Política monetaria, 302–3, Table 1 (prices in Barcelona, see esp. those for wheat, barley, olive oil); and Sánchez-Albornoz, Crisis de subsistencias, Appendixes 1 and 2 (Aragon, 1780–1895; Seville, 1827–58). Artola, Contreras, and Bernal, Latifundio, 120–35 and Cuadro 22, shows that rents for cortijos in Andalusia rose after 1750, reaching their high point in 1800–1810. A period of decline followed, especially marked in the 1820s, until a sudden change in trend in 1836–37.

[73] For the sales: Cole, "Cyclical and Sectional Variations." Cole attributes the peaks to waves of speculation. The association with wheat prices is made by North, Economic Growth of the United States, 136–37 and Appendix 2, Table A-11.

of these laws at these dates. In the United States the distribution of public lands and in Spain the legislation creating them and putting them up for auction were both responding to developments affecting all the Western world.

It was not only that the desire for land was more acute when agricultural prices were high but also that potential buyers had the means. Our study of the villages of Salamanca showed that many peasants could pay for their purchases out of savings generated in a few years' time. Similarly it is probable that a large proportion of the cost of enclosures in England came out of current income.^[74] Legislators who were pressed for money to finance wars and other emergencies, like those in France after 1789 and those in Spain constantly after 1794, could appreciate this potential source of funds, and they came up with land to put on the market. This was not their only possible solution. One could issue paper money or attempt new taxes or levy forced impositions or borrow or repudiate national debts. Carlos IV tried all these expedients except the last, which his advisers feared would destroy the monarchy. The only one that succeeded was desamortización, because it was the only one that offered the holders of savings something desirable in return. Men and women eager and able to buy land in response to the expanding agricultural markets were a pull factor in the process of disentail, and moments of high agricultural prices inspired legislators to respond to the pull.

If the attraction of land because its products were in ever-increasing demand was the first way in which demographic growth sparked the process leading to desamortización, the second involved the policies of the royal government. Rising population put pressure on food supplies, especially in those areas of Spain that communicated poorly with the sea and the broader Atlantic community. The share of the harvests that peasants kept for themselves probably declined per capita and the real wages of rural workers were threatened, but the most obvious result was shortages and high prices in the commercial sector of agriculture, on which the cities relied for their supplies. In the heart of Castile, Madrid was growing, and its demands dominated the agricultural market of the meseta. Campomanes, impressed by physiocratic authors who proposed economic freedom in agriculture, convinced Carlos III to free the domestic grain trade in 1765, in the hope that the measure would induce greater production. It effected no immediate decline in prices,

[74] Chambers and Mingay, Agricultural Revolution, 82–83.

and riots broke out in Madrid and many other places in the spring of 1766, the famous Motín de Esquilache.

Although many blamed the popular risings on the new policy, the king and his ministers maintained it. In addition, the royal counselors sought more direct ways to increase food production. The king ordered municipalities to distribute commons and wasteland to active farmers in the south and west of the country, but without much success because the local notables, who sensed a threat to their hold on their inferiors, circumvented the royal orders. The king also undertook the colonizing of vacant regions in the Sierra Morena and Andalusia. The colonies took root, and their organizers claimed vast harvests of grain, yet the problem of supply continued. An attempt of the 1780s to repopulate despoblados in Salamanca province had very limited results, again because of the resistance of the large owners.

These experiences convinced the advisers of Carlos III, of whom the most important was Campomanes, to explore conditions in the countryside in the hope of discovering a new agrarian law, which would end the legal barriers to agricultural efficiency and in the process organize rural society on a more just foundation. On their advice, Carlos III issued instructions to the intendants to survey the situation in their districts and propose reforms and then requested opinions on their reports from local authorities and royal judges. The resulting opinions and recommendations were frequently at cross-purposes with each other. Various municipal authorities defended the traditional municipal and royal controls of grain markets and bread prices, and some of them urged an additional control over rents. Other informants, more modern in their outlook, like Olavide, intendant of Seville and director of the recently established colonies, recommended a measure of economic freedom for landowners but hung tenaciously to ultimate royal control of the economy through guidance of the ways that freedom would be implemented; at least one person, the dean of the Audiencia of Seville, Francisco Bruna, writing before Adam Smith had published his Wealth of Nations, proposed absolute freedom to owners in the use or renting of their lands.

The incompatibility of the various kinds of advice given to the crown goes far to explain the failure of the royal government to devise a policy out of these recommendations and its decision to turn to the Royal Economic Society of Madrid for a solution. During the decade that this body struggled with the problem, Adam Smith became known to interested Spaniards, and many of the confused minds inside the Economic

Society welcomed the logical simplicity of the tenets of laissez-faire. When Jovellanos recommended a solution to the agrarian law that rested on economic freedom, drawing on Smith but echoing the judge Bruna, his proposal won majority support of the society not only in 1787, when he first voiced it, but in 1794 when he presented it at length in his momentous Informe de ley agraria. Given wide publicity, Jovellanos's work convinced the royal advisers that the end of legal restrictions on the transfer and use of land was the most pressing need for the improvement of agriculture.

Many thinking Spaniards, like many thinkers elsewhere in the West at the time, believed that the most productive farmer as well as the most reliable citizen was the small landowner. Inspired by this belief, the Informe de ley agraria foresaw that, everywhere physical conditions permitted, the abolition of entail and the freedom to exchange private property would in the course of time produce a country of prosperous owners of family farms, since, as the most productive users of the land, they would be able to pay most for it on the open market. The redistribution of the countryside into small farms might take time, but the working of economic laws would make it inevitable. Although Jovellanos was not directly involved in the decrees of disentail of 1798, his line of thinking was instrumental in the decision of Soler and Carlos IV.

The conviction that legal restrictions on the ownership and inheritance of real property were economically deleterious molded more than the decision to disentail ecclesiastical property. The decrees also empowered owners of secular mayorazgos and vínculos to sell their lands and deposit the proceeds in the Amortization Fund. At the same time, they facilitated the liquidation of permanent and temporary liens on property (censos or cánones), by payments made in vales reales. Other legislation authorized owners of mayorazgos to sell entailed estates far from the main body of their holdings in order to buy land nearby, to simplify management and improve agriculture. Owners of mayorazgos were also permitted to "buy" properties out of entail by depositing their assessed value in the Amortization Fund. The mayorazgo, destined by its terms for the oldest son or in default of a son for a collateral heir, would henceforth take the form of deposits in the royal fund, while the current holder of the mayorazgo could leave the real property that he had bought out to one or more of his other children. Siblings would vie for parental love, customs would improve, and property would circulate. Carlos IV and Soler did not venture to attack religious or lay entails in the form of royal obligations, but their acts pointed logically in

the direction of abolition, and within three decades legislation would catch up with logic. By then, landowners had discovered the benefits of free property.

Although the train of events that led to the Informe de ley agraria and the decrees of Carlos IV began with concern over the need for more food supplies, this causative force is quite different in nature from the demand for land that motivated the purchasers. Here we have a clear example of the role of ideas in history. Nothing in the agricultural or land market or in demographic growth determined that the classical economic doctrine of laissez-faire would become popular at this time. The success of the new doctrine lay in the contemporary infatuation with rational solutions to human problems and the belief that the evils of society were mostly the effect of laws and institutions inherited from times when rulers did not listen to reason. The other solutions for an agrarian law proposed in response to the royal inquest were all more involved, less purely logical, and therefore less convincing to contemporaries who believed themselves enlightened.

Nor, as already noted, can one attribute the popularity of the new economic doctrine to the appearance of a new social class. The men who made or applauded these decisions were not typically bourgeois; most belonged to the well-established sectors of society. They were servants of the crown, joined by some aristocrats, landowners, and prelates of the church, such as the members of the Economic Society of Madrid who applauded Jovellanos's proposals. If anything marked them, it was a desire to serve their country and make the interest of the public their guiding star.

History seeks to recount and explain the sum of the activities of the individuals alive in the place and time it is dealing with, but the historian is obviously unable to discover the relations among all their experiences, their thoughts, and their actions. What the historian can hope to do is to identify the main forces affecting the lives and behavior of the people in question, analyze the apparent relationships among the forces, and assign to each its role in the events of the time. Such a historical analysis is not an abstract exercise, however, but should reflect the reality of the past age, because the evidence that the historian uses comes from the people of the time, as is the case here. On these terms, the conclusion to this story is that ideas had a life of their own, independent, at least analytically, of changes going on in society. The demographic evolution and the shortage of food decided the government to take action in the agrarian sphere, and the new economic doctrine determined the

form of the legislation. In the terms of Aristotelian philosophy, population changes were an efficient cause, and new economic theory provided the formal cause for desamortización and the other acts freeing property.

If, in time-honored historical terminology, these were underlying causes, the immediate cause for the initiation of ecclesiastical disentail in September 1798 was the crisis in royal finances brought on by the wars of the French Revolution. Following the declaration of hostilities with Britain in October 1796, traffic with the empire in America fell victim to the British navy, royal revenues declined, military expenses skyrocketed, and the resulting deficits threatened public faith in the royal credit. Offerings of loans were not fully subscribed; exactions on the clergy and wealthy landowners produced more resentment than return; and the vales reales, circulating royal bonds that served as paper money for large payments, were exchanged far below par. Soler, won over by the arguments put forward by Jovellanos, convinced the monarch that the disentail of church properties was the last resort to avoid possible threats to his throne and assured him that the measure would benefit both the state and the people.

Since the 1760s the reformers had been calling for the redistribution of the baldíos, which by common accord belonged to the king, not ecclesiastical properties, whatever their harmful effects might be. The immediate cause for the switch to the latter as the object of the first major desamortización was the imperative need for money and the fact that ecclesiastical estates, actively used and providing income to their owners, could bring in a good price, far more than baldíos, which would require inputs of labor and capital before they could be fully exploited. At first sight the crown intended no harm to the church. The measure promised the institutions that they would not lose income, since 3-percent interest on the sale price might well be more than their current net return. Until around 1806, when the Consolidation Fund fell behind in its payments, the institutions had little cause for complaint.

But many persons were aware that royal paper was more shaky than solid land and buildings. The king had to take measures against members of the clergy who denounced the disentail as an attack on the church or found more subtle ways to sabotage the process. Why was the Spanish church the first major owner to suffer from desamortización? It is not usual to think of it as weak. An obvious reason is the ideology of the Spanish enlightenment. Enlightened ministers like Campomanes and Jovellanos and publicists like Luis Cañuelo, editor of El censor,

criticized the idle and perhaps debauched life of the religious orders and the neglect of their lands, harmful to the economic welfare of the country.^[75] Jovellanos complained bitterly, "What is left of [Spain's] former glory except the skeletons of its cities, once populous and full of factories and workshops, of stores and shops, and now only peopled by churches, convents, and hospitals, which survive amid the poverty that they have caused?"^[76] Goya mocked the gluttony and hypocrisy of monks and priests in his Caprichos.

Anticlerical criticism was directed in part at the charitable institutions, precisely those that the decree of 1798 earmarked for despoiling. Beginning with Campomanes and his associate Bernardo Ward in the middle of the century, various reformers called for the care of indigents, orphans, cripples, and the aged to be transferred to the state. In their eyes, the methods of the religious asylums and hospitals only served to prolong and worsen the condition of these persons.^[77]

With this spirit present in the government, the decision to turn to the property of the church to guarantee the safety of the crown came easily. On its side, the church did not present a united front. Priests were conscious of the interests of their families as well as of their institutions. Those like the Andalusian clerics whom we found in the towns of Jaén were members of local elites, owed their positions to their social connections, and were motivated by family interests. The priests with more modest origins, common in the north, thought in terms of their heirs, nephews being the most likely, whose place in society many of them were already furthering by supporting their education.^[78] Many of the sales went to priests. In addition, a number of clergy, those labeled Jansenists, were convinced that the wealth of the church was harmful to its mission and thus could approve of desamortización on religious grounds. In these ways, the divided loyalties of members of the clergy meant that the church was not an independent force; it was more vulnerable to arguments in favor of despoiling it than its imposing position suggested.

Just as in 1798, the later applications of desamortización were all expressly directed at reducing the national debt. As a result, historians have frequently seen the guarantee of the public credit (and, not inciden-

[75] Sarrailh, Espagne éclairée, 628–61; Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 183–93.

[76] Jovellanos, Informe, 100.

[77] Sarrailh, Espagne éclairée, 526–35; for Campomanes, Laura Rodríguez, Reforma, 109–11.

[78] See Herr, "Comentario," 276.

tally, the repayment of loans owed to the bourgeoisie) as the primary motivation for it. The debt was, however, as this study should make clear, only the immediate inducement, the push that made the king jump in the river. The river was there because land was in high demand, and the road that led the king to it was the evolution of thought in the Enlightenment. Desamortización came out of a push and a pull. The immediate push was the need of the king for money, the long-term push, the belief among his leading advisers and the influential sectors of society that economic freedom and private property were the panaceas for the problems of both the state and society. The pull was the demand for land among those Spaniards who had money, because the rising price of foodstuffs made land a productive investment. We saw above that these people owed their available capital primarily either to the economic flows redistributed by the state and the church or to income from the commercialization of agriculture.