by Will Durant
Seville and Cadiz had long enjoyed a state-protected monopoly of commerce with Spain’s possessions in the New World; Charles III ended this privilege, and allowed various ports to trade with the colonies; and he negotiated a treaty with Turkey (1782) that opened Moslem harbors to Spanish goods. The results were beneficial to all parties. Spanish America grew rapidly in wealth; Spain’s income from America rose eight hundred per cent under Charles III; her export trade was tripled.63
The expanding activities of the government required enlarged revenues. These were raised in some measure by state monopolies in the sale of brandy, tobacco, playing cards, gunpowder, lead, mercury, sulfur, and salt. At the outset of the reign there were sales taxes of fifteen per cent in Catalonia, fourteen per cent in Castile. Jovellanos aptly described sales taxes: “They surprise their prey … at its birth, pursue and nip it as it circulates, and never lose sight of it or let it escape, until the moment of its consumption.”64 Under Charles the sales tax in Catalonia was abolished, and in Castile it was reduced to two, three, or four per cent.65 A moderate graduated tax was laid upon incomes. To secure additional funds by putting the savings of the people to work, Francisco de Cabarrús persuaded the Treasury to issue interest-bearing government bonds. When these fell to seventy-eight per cent of their par value, he founded (1782) the first national bank of Spain, the Banco de San Carlos, which redeemed the bonds at par and restored the financial credit of the state.
The result of statesmanship and enterprise was a substantial rise in the prosperity of the nation as a whole. The middle classes profited most, for it was their organizations that remade the Spanish economy. At Madrid 375 businessmen composed five great merchant guilds—the Cinco Gremios Mayores—which controlled most of the trade of the capital; we may judge their wealth from the fact that in 1776 they lent thirty million reales to the government.66
Generally the government favored this rise of the business class as indispensable to freeing Spain from economic and political dependence upon states with a more advanced economy. Here, as there, the growing proletariat had little share in the new affluence. Wages rose, especially in Catalonia, where the well-to-do complained that servants were hard to find and hard to keep;67 but, by and large, prices rose faster than wages, and the “working classes” were as poor at the end of the reign as at the beginning. An Englishman traveling in Valencia in 1787 remarked the contrast between “the opulence of … merchants, manufacturers, ecclesiastics, the military, or gentlemen of landed property,” and the “poverty, wretchedness, and rags” visible “in every street.”68 So the middle classes welcomed the Luces—the Enlightenment coming in from France and England—while their employees, crowding the churches and kissing the shrines, comforted themselves with divine grace and hopes of paradise.
The cities expanded under the new economy. The great maritime centers—Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Cadíz—had populations ranging from 80,000 to 100,000 (1800). Madrid in 1797 had 167,607, plus 30,000 foreigners. When Charles III came to the throne the city had the reputation of being the dirtiest capital in Europe. In the poorer quarters people still emptied their garbage into the streets, relying upon wind or rain to distribute it; when Charles forbade this they denounced him as a tyrant. “The Spaniards,” he said, “are children, who cry when they are washed.”69 Nevertheless his agents established a system of garbage-collection and sewage, and scavengers were organized to gather offal for fertilizer.70 An effort to suppress mendicancy failed; the people refused to let the police arrest beggars—especially the blind ones, who had formed themselves into a powerful guild.
Year by year Charles improved his capital. Water was led from the mountains into seven hundred fountains, from which 720 water carriers laboriously delivered it to the houses of the city. The streets were lighted by oil lamps from nightfall to midnight during six months of autumn and winter. Most streets were narrow and tortuous, following old and devious paths and hiding from the summer sun; but some fine avenues were laid out, and the people enjoyed spacious parks and shady promenades. Especially popular was the Paseo del Prado, or Meadow Walk, cooled with fountains and trees, and favored for amorous reconnaissance and rendezvous. There, in 1785, Juan de Villanueva began to build the Museo del Prado. And there, almost any day, four hundred carriages drove by, and, any evening, thirty thousand Madrilenos gathered. They were forbidden to sing ribald songs, or bathe nude in the fountains, or play music after midnight; but they enjoyed the melodious cries of women selling naranjas, limas, and avellanas— oranges, limes, and hazelnuts. At the end of the eighteenth century, said travelers, the spectacle visible daily on the Prado equaled that which in other cities of that period could be seen only on Sundays and holidays.71 Madrid became then, as it has again become in our time, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.
Charles III was not as successful in foreign policy as in domestic affairs. The revolt of the English colonies in America seemed to offer a chance to avenge the losses suffered by Spain in the Seven Years’ War; Aranda urged Charles to help the revolutionists; the King secretly sent the rebels a million livres (June, 1776). Attacks by English corsairs upon Spanish shipping finally led Spain to declare war (June 23, 1779). A Spanish force recaptured Minorca, but an attempt to take Gibraltar failed. An invasion of England was prepared, but was frustrated by “Protestant” storms. In the Peace of Versailles Spain (1783) withdrew its demand for Gibraltar, but regained Florida.
The failure to restore Spain’s territorial integrity saddened the King’s final years. The wars had consumed much of the wealth which the new economy had produced. His brilliant ministers had never overcome two powerful forces of conservatism—the grandees with their vast estates, and the clergy with their vested interest in the simplicity of the people. Charles himself had seldom wavered in his basic fidelity to the Church. His people never admired him so much as when, meeting a religious procession, he gave his coach to the prelate who was carrying the Host, and then joined the retinue on foot. His religious devotion won the affection which had been withheld from him, as a stranger from Italy, in the first decade of his reign. When he died (December 14, 1788), after fifty-four years of rule in Naples and Spain, there were many who reckoned him, if not the greatest, certainly the most beneficent king that Spain had ever had. His kindly nature shone out when, on his deathbed, he was asked by the attending bishop had he yet pardoned all his enemies. “How should I wait for this pass before forgiving them?” he asked. “They were all forgiven the moment after the offense.”72
VI. THE SPANISH CHARACTER
What sort of people were they, these Spaniards of the eighteenth century? By all reports their morals were good, compared with their peers in England or France. Their intense religion, their courage and sense of honor, their family coherence and discipline provided strong correctives to their sexual sensitivity and their pugnacious pride, even while sanctioning a passionate chauvinism of race and faith. Sexual selection promoted courage, for Spanish women, desiring protection, gave their most intoxicating smiles to those men who dared the bulls in the arena or the streets, or who quickly resented and avenged an insult, or who returned with glory from the wars.
Sexual morality had softened with the influx of French ideas and ways. Girls were closely guarded, and parental consent (after 1766) was a legal requisite for marriage; but after marriage the women in the larger cities indulged in flirtations. The cortejo or cicisbeo —courtier or attendant cavalier—became a necessary appendage to a woman of fashion, and adultery increased.73 One small group, the majos and majas, constituted a unique aspect of Spanish life. The majos were men of the lower class who dressed like dandies, wore long capes, long hair, and broad-rimmed hats, smoked big cigars, were always ready for a fight, and lived a Bohemian life financed as often as possible by their majas— their mistresses. Their sexual unions paid no attention to law; often the maja had a husband who supported her while she supported her majo. Half the world knows the maja, garbed or not, from Goya’s brush.
Bullfights rivaled religion, sex, honor, and the family as objects of Spanish devotion. Like the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome, they were defended on two grounds: courage had to be developed in men, and bulls had to die before being eaten. Charles III forbade these contests, but they were resumed soon after his death. Skillful and riskful toreadors were the idols of all classes. Each had his following; the Duchess of Alba favored Costillares, the Duchess of Osuna favored Romero, and these factions divided Madrid as Gluck and Piccini divided Paris. Men and women wagered their earnings on the fate of the bulls, and on almost everything else. Gambling was illegal but universal; even private homes held gambling soirees, and the hostesses pocketed the fees.
Genteel male dress gradually abandoned the somber black garb and stiff collar of an earlier generation for the French habit of colored coat, long vest of satin or silk, knee breeches, silk stockings, buckled shoes, all crowned with a wig and a three-cornered hat. Usually the Spanish woman made a sacred mystery of her charms by swathing them in lace bodices and long-sometimes hoop—skirts, and using mantilla veils to hide eyes in whose dark depths some Spaniard would gladly sink his soul. But whereas in the seventeenth century a lady rarely allowed her feet to be seen by a man, now her skirts were shortened to a few inches above the floor, and the formerly heelless slippers were displaced by sharp-pointed high-heeled shoes. Preachers warned that such indecent exposure of female feet added dangerous fuel to the already combustible male. The women smiled, adorned their shoes, flashed their skirts, and waved their fans, even on winter days. Isabella Farnese had an armory of 1,626 fans, some of them painted by artists of national renown.
Social life was restrained in everything but the dance. The evening assemblies avoided serious discussion, preferring games, the dance, and gallantry. Dancing was a major passion in Spain, and sprouted varieties that became famous in Europe. The fandango was danced to a triple measure with castanets; the seguidilla was performed by two or four couples, with castanets and usually with song; its derivative, the bolero, took form toward 1780, and soon acquired a mad popularity. In the contradanza a line of men faced a line of women in alternating approach and retreat, as if symbolizing the tactics of the eternal war between woman and man; or four couples formed and enclosed a square in the stately contradanza cuadrada —the quadrille. Masquerade balls sometimes drew 3,500 eager dancers, and in Carnival time they danced till dawn.
These dances made motion a living poetry and a sexual stimulus. “It was said that a Spanish woman dancing the seguidilla was so seductive that even a pope and the whole College of Cardinals would be swept off their dignity.”76 Casanova himself found something to learn in Spain:
About midnight the wildest and maddest of dances began.... It was the fandango, which I fondly supposed I had often seen, but which [here] was far beyond my wildest imaginings.... In Italy and France the dancers are careful not to make the gestures which render this the most voluptuous of dances. Each couple, man and woman, make only three steps, then, keeping time to the music with their castanets, they throw themselves into a variety of lascivious attitudes; the whole of love from its birth to its end, from its first sigh to its last ecstasy, is set forth. In my excitement I cried aloud.77
He marveled that the Inquisition allowed so provocative a dance; he was told that it was “absolutely forbidden, and no one would dare to dance it if the Conde de Aranda had not given permission.”
Some of the most popular forms of Spanish music were associated with the dance; so the cante flamenco, or gypsy (“Flemish”) singing, used a plaintive and sentimental tone with which all gypsy singers accompanied the seguidilla gitana. Perhaps these mournful melodies echoed old Moorish airs, or reflected the somber quality of Spanish religion and art, or the irritating inaccessibility of the female form, or the disillusionment following realization. A more joyous strain came in with Italian opera (1703) and Farinelli’s arias. The old castrato, after trilling through two reigns, lost favor under Charles III, who dethroned him with a line: “Capons are good only to eat.”78 The Italian influence continued with Scarlatti, and triumphed again with Boccherini, who arrived in 1768, dominated the music of the court under Charles III and Charles IV, and remained in Spain till his death (1805).
By a reverse movement Vicente Martín y Solar, after making a name in Spain, successfully produced Italian opera in Florence, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. Antonio Soler’s harpsichord sonatas rivaled Scarlatti’s; and Don Luis Misón developed the tonada, or vocal solo, into the tonadillo as an intermezzo of song between the acts of a play. In 1799 a royal order ended the reign of Italian music in Spain by forbidding the performance of any piece not written in Castilian language and presented by Spanish artists.79
We cannot sum up the Spanish character in one homogeneous mold. The Spanish soul varies with the scenery from state to state, and the afrancesados, or Frenchified Spaniards, who gathered in Madrid, were quite another type than those natives who had been mortised and tenoned in Spanish ways. But if we set aside exotic minorities, we may recognize in the Spanish people a character indigenous and unique. The Spaniard was proud, but with a silent force that took little from chauvinism or nationality; it was a pride of individuality, a resolute sense of solitary struggle against earthly injury, personal insult, or eternal damnation. To such a spirit the external world could seem of secondary moment, not worth bothering about or toiling for; nothing mattered but the fate of the soul in the conflict with man and in the search for God. How trivial, then, were the problems of politics, the race for money, the exaltation of fame or place! Even the triumphs of war had no glory unless they were victories over the enemies of the faith. Rooted in that faith, the Spaniard could face life with a stoic tranquillity, a fatalism that waited quietly for eventual Paradise.
VII. THE SPANISH MIND
When Louis XIV accepted the offer of the last Hapsburg King of Spain to bequeath his crown to a grandson of the Grand Monarque, a Spanish ambassador at Versailles exclaimed joyfully, “Now there are no more Pyrenees!” But those gloomy masses stood their ground as an obstinate barrier to French lumières, and as a symbol of the resistance that would meet the attempt of a dedicated few to Europeanize the Spanish mind.
Campomanes startled the old with a Discurso sobre la educación popular de los artesanos y su fomento (1774-76), which made a wider extension of popular education an indispensable base for national vitality and growth. Some high ecclesiastics and great landowners saw no sense in disturbing the people with unnecessary knowledge that might lead to religious heresy and social revolt. Undeterred, Jovellanos labored to spread faith in education. “Numerous are the streams that lead to social prosperity,” he wrote, “but all spring from the same source, and that source is public education.”80 He hoped that education would teach men to reason, that reason would free them from superstition and intolerance, and that science, developed by such men, would use the resources of nature for the conquest of disease and poverty. Some noble ladies took up the challenge, and formed a Junta de Damas to finance primary schools. Charles III spent considerable sums in establishing free elementary schools. Private individuals joined in founding academies for the study of language, literature, history, art, law, science, or medicine.
The expulsion of the Jesuits compelled and facilitated the remolding of secondary schools. Charles ordered an expansion of science
courses in these colleges, a modernization of their textbooks, and the admission of laymen to their faculties. He endowed colleges, and gave pensions to outstanding teachers.81 The universities were advised to admit Newton to their courses in physics, and Descartes and Leibniz into their courses in philosophy. The University of Salamanca rejected the advice on the ground that “the principles of Newton … and Cartesio do not resemble the revealed truth as much as do those of Aristotle”;82 but most Spanish universities accepted the royal directive. The University of Valencia, with 2,400 students, was now (1784) the largest and most progressive educational center in Spain. Several religious orders adopted filosofía moderna in their colleges. The general of the Discalced Carmelites urged Carmelite teachers to read Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Locke, Wolff, Condillac; here was no regimen for saints. One chapter of the Augustinian Friars studied Hobbes, another studied Helvétius. Such studies were always followed by refutations, but many an ardent soul has lost his faith in refuting its enemies.
One remarkable monk had “modernized” while Charles III was still a youth. Though spending the last forty-seven years (1717-64) of his life in a Benedictine monastery at Oviedo, Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro managed to study Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Pascal, Gassendi, Newton, and Leibniz; and he saw with wonder and shame how Spain, since Cervantes, had been isolated from the main currents of European thought. From his cell he sent forth, between 1726 and 1739, a series of eight volumes which he called Teatro crítico —not dramatic criticism, but a critical examination of ideas. He attacked the logic and philosophy then taught in Spain; lauded Bacon’s plea for inductive science; summarized the findings of scientists in many fields; ridiculed magic, divination, bogus miracles, medical ignorance, and popular superstitions; laid down rules of historical credibility that ruthlessly punctured fond national legends; demanded an extension of education to all classes; and advocated a freer and more public life for women in education and society.
