In plate 15, Y no hai remedio (“And there is no remedy”), the French firing squad has been displaced to the background; we don’t see the one that is about to kill the prisoner in the foreground, who is blindfolded and bound to the execution post; all we do see is the trio of barrels pointed unwaveringly at his bowed head and helpless breast, and the collapsed body of a previously shot man, his face half-obliterated by the bullets, lying on the ground in almost exactly the same posture as the dead man in the black waistcoat in the Third of May. In plate 26, No se puede mirar (“One cannot look”), Goya produced a dramatic masterstroke. The executioners have vanished altogether, but the threat of their presence just offstage is all the greater for it. All we see of them is a cluster of eight gun muzzles and their fixed bayonets poking in from the right edge of the frame, like a single pointing finger: pure, deadly tools. This has an astonishingly cinematic effect: a small, intrusive shape that, like the turning of a doorknob or the creak of a stair that announces the expected killer, creates panic among the wretched Spaniards who are huddled in the cave. Though “huddled” is perhaps the wrong word. No se puede mirar is a superb example of Goya’s ability to give formal rhythm and focus to what, in another artist’s hands, could be a chaotic, undifferentiated lump of bodies. He did this by stressing the angularity of poses, creating a bleak and powerful counterpoint of slopes and triangles within the heap. The woman in white, framed by the cave’s darkness, rocks back in despair at the same angle given by the back of the man in the traje corto, kneeling, wringing his hands in prayer or despair, his back to the rifles. The triangle of the void between his legs matches the solid triangle of leg belonging to the kneeling man in the foreground—who, though he wears a dark jacket and trousers that place him a social cut above the working class, is as plain and ordinary a member of the pueblo as one could wish to see.
Goya, Los desastres, plate 26, No se puede mirar (“One cannot look”), 1863. Etching and aquatint, 13.9 × 21.5 cm. (illustration credit 8.39)
In the etchings all individuality, all exuberance of humanity, is concentrated in the victims alone. And so it was in the Third of May. Goya did not see this happening. But he imagined it so powerfully, drawing on such a rich deposit of older imagery—the Christ figure of the worker in particular—that the content of his utterance, the perception that war is a despicable and monstrous injustice, an impartial machine that kills men like cattle and, most of the time, leaves no residue of glory behind it, is the prototype of all modern views of war. What the common people of Europe discovered in their millions in the twentieth century, that atrocious epoch of failed dreams and triumphant death, a time of ideology-driven suffering beyond the previous imagination of mankind, Goya foreshadowed in the Disasters and then gave monumental form to in the Third of May.
THE RESTORATION
THE USUAL WAY of treating Fernando VII, looking back to when el rey deseado replaced el rey intruso on the throne of Spain, is to have no sympathy for him at all. And indeed it is hard to have any, because he was such an unpleasant human being, cowardly, dim, cunning, and cruel. He was perhaps the only player in the long and sometimes comic Bourbon drama who came to be detested even more than Godoy. (Even if you believed the dubious proposition, so largely created by Fernando himself, that Godoy was vice incarnate, at least you could have some admiration for his sexual potency; the royal glands of Fernando contained nothing special.) There was a long revisionist episode during the reign of Franco, who admired Fernando for slashing out the liberal Constitution and taking the side of the Church in all things. But it did not last, and Fernando is now as despised as he ever was.
And yet one wonders just what his legion of critics would have had him do to knit his broken country and bind up its wounds. By returning to Spain, Fernando came back to impossibility. The war had exhausted Spain, eviscerated and bankrupted her. The only way she could get solvent again was by exploiting her former colonies, with a crushing victory over the South American insurgents. But she could defeat them only by spending immense sums, which Spain did not have, on an armed reconquest. This was actually tried, though not hard enough. In 1815 a force of ten thousand Spanish soldiers, commanded by Pablo Morillo, was shipped to Venezuela, then in the throes of a civil war between the conservative cattlemen of the interior and the leaders of the movement for independence from Spain. Once Morillo’s weight was thrown behind the outback faction, they won hands down. But it was an ephemeral victory: the urge to independence was too strong. The hitherto urban rebels fell back into the sierra and, just as their Castroite descendants would in Cuba a century and a half later, formed cells and groups that punitive expeditions could not reach to destroy.
An alternative for Fernando might have been to replace the aristocratic economy with a free-market one, to expropriate the Church—in short, to implant real capitalism in Spain. But such things take time, and in any case they ran counter to everything that the king and his priestly and aristocratic ear-benders believed in. Capitalism, in Fernando’s eyes, meant liberalism, an unthinkable concession.
But in any case, Spain was still at war in South America after the French had been defeated on the peninsula. Fernando stubbornly clung to the hope that he could suppress the rebellion on the other side of the Atlantic; but he was facing an aggressive and inspired foe, the Venezuelan liberator Simón Bolívar, who broke the colonial army in Colombia while his Argentinian comrade General San Martín led an army over the Andes into Chile to secure its independence. Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay already had theirs. Venezuela won its nationhood in 1821, Peru in 1824.
Nothing further could be done to restore the South American empire or to win back Spain’s revenues from it because Spain’s navy was so weak. Even if it could have spared the troops and money for a campaign on the far side of the Atlantic, it had no means of delivering the force; that could only be done by an alliance with England, the world’s greatest naval power, but England had no interest in propping up a Spanish empire in decline. Thus by the 1820s the colonial system on the mainland was in most respects over, leaving only Mexico and Spain’s island dominions, chiefly Puerto Rico and Cuba. So Fernando was restored as the head of a hollow empire that got hollower with each passing year, and every pressure group in Spain itself was on him. The nobility wanted a full restoration of its privileges. The Church wanted all its economic power handed back to it. The Inquisition wanted free rein. The Basques and Catalans wanted independence. The army wanted to be paid off. In the middle of this vortex of demands, Fernando VII, with his typical combination of haughtiness and insecurity—a bad combination at the best of times—accepted the most fulsome declarations of fealty from the worst and most opportunistic of his subjects.
This showed as soon as the French let him free from detention in Valencay in March 1814 and he returned to Spain. The liberals, his natural enemies, had extracted (extorted, he believed) a promise from him to swear a solemn oath to the Constitution. But then his generals offered him full backing in the exercise of his absolute rights, and a group of ninety-six deputies known as the Persians, the conservative serviles, sent him a manifesto condemning the 1812 Constitution as an invalid and pernicious document. This stiffened Fernando’s spine. On his triumphal progress south to Madrid, he passed through Gerona and Tarragona and was received with ecstasy in Zaragoza, where crowds of citizens turned out to draw his coach and cheer his passage while women strewed flowers in his path. It was a classic example of how easily the pueblo could become a populacho, a people turned into a rabble, when manipulated from above by the aristocrats and the Church hierarchy. They did not need to be bought. Their king had them in his pocket. On May 4, he reached Valencia, where with effortless duplicity he issued a decree: “I abhor and detest despotism … kings have never been despots in Spain; neither its good laws nor its constitution have ever authorized it.… I will deal with the deputies of Spain and the Indies, and in legally assembled parliaments.” But, he added ominously, the best thing for his realms would be to abol
ish the “so-called” Cortes and Constitution, so that everything could go back to exactly where it had been before 1808.
And it was done. Reaching Madrid on May 13, again with delirious citizens competing to draw his coach, Fernando carried out a coup d’état that almost exactly mirrored the overthrow of his father in the Mutiny of Aranjuez six years before. His agents whipped up the mob; aristocrats manipulated it by the basest means; the army imprisoned the liberal leaders; the king declared the Cortes null and void. He was not interested in negotiating over changes in the 1812 Constitution; it must be erased, and all laws and policies stemming from it must be annulled and treated “as though such measures had never taken place.” Fernando did not feel he needed an elected parliament to tell him what the pueblo was thinking and feeling. For that he had the reports of police spies, which he trusted more than the word of deputies.
The Cortes, under the new Constitution, had begun by swearing a four-part oath to maintain the Catholic religion, to sustain the integrity of the nation and the observance of its laws, and to proclaim Fernando VII king. This, one might have thought, would be enough for any reasonable monarch, but Fernando was not reasonable.
He did not want to abolish slavery, judicial torture, imprisonment without trial, and strict censorship. He loathed the idea that indianos in the colonies should have the same rights under law as Spaniards in their homelands. He did not believe in the most elementary human rights, since these conflicted with his own absolute power. He was not merely a reactionary or a conservative: he wanted to conserve nothing if it offended his rigid absolutist principles.
In fact, he wanted to take Spain further back than it had been since the time of Fernando and Isabel. The number of convents and monasteries instantly began to swell. Universities and theaters were shut, and only the government-published Gazeta oficial remained of a press that was otherwise censored out of existence. The status of ministers changed, and radically: in the blink of an eye, the portfolios of state, finance, justice, war, and navy were downgraded into mere secretaryships and—to emphasize their loss of prestige—were transferred to ground-floor offices in the Palacio Real. Their terms of service rarely lasted more than two or three months. There would now be no doubt who was in charge, and why. Fernando was, because God willed it.
The king, who had railed so bitterly against the immorality of Godoy, set out to engage in every crooked practice and sexual indulgence that had supposedly disfigured the court under the reign of his enemy, from skimming defense money from a deal over rotten ships with Russia, to filling his bed with the kind of ladies that Godoy would hardly have deigned to touch with gloves on. Fernando was, in fact, married. By his death in 1833, he had had four wives, and only the last of them, his niece María Cristina, produced issue: two daughters, the elder of whom, Isabel, reigned as Queen Isabel II (1833–1870), displacing Fernando’s younger brother, Carlos, as heir presumptive to the throne and thereby triggering the bitter conflicts of the Carlist wars.
At the time of his restoration, Fernando was in his first marriage, to the pale, sickly, plain, and intelligent princess of Naples. The liaison was a disaster for both sides. María Luisa detested her daughter-in-law, calling her “a half-dead frog” and “a bloodless little animal all venom and vinegar.” She was afraid that, being Italian (a people the Spaniards believed were always poisoning their enemies), she would do away not only with Fernando but, more to the point, herself.1 Accordingly, María Luisa had the princess spied on by her confessor, her doctor, and her friends. For her part, the princess soon realized her mistake in marrying the Desired One, but by then it was too late. She had accepted him on the basis of a portrait (not by Goya), which was ugly enough but nowhere near the unpleasant reality. “My daughter is desperate,” wrote the queen of Naples.2 “Her husband is an absolute blockhead and not even her husband in the flesh, as well as being a hulking lout who does nothing and stays all the time in his room.” It is not difficult to see Fernando’s desire to humiliate, insult, and frustrate a royal wife of royal origin as the outcome of his hatred for his royal mother. For El Deseado, the trashier the woman the better: his contempt for them worked as a revenge on his exiled (and exiling) mother.3
Fernando VII was completely a radical, though not intelligently so. And like many radicals before and since, he placed his trust in the instincts of the mob. He knew the mob could be relied on to hate liberals and afrancesados. If he could keep the mob on his side, the aristocracy could manipulate it at will against the pointy-headed elitists and he could stay in power. That had been the lesson of Aranjuez, and Fernando never forgot it.
Perhaps the most succinct emblem of the war Fernando launched against liberals happened, shortly after his return, at the University of Cervera. This school was an artificial growth. Back in 1717, Felipe V had closed all Spanish universities as being too liberal for his tastes and set up one central institution, the University of Cervera, in a paltry town on the highway from Madrid to Barcelona that lacked even a municipal library. Its curriculum was an antiquated joke, devised by the Inquisition. (The Jesuits had once helped run the university but no longer; foolishly, Carlos III had expelled them from Spain in 1767.) But when Fernando VII paid it a state visit during a royal progress early in his reign, the chancellor of the university rose, or rather sank, to the occasion and became an emblematic figure in Spanish academic history. “Lejos de nosotros,” he assured the Desired One, “la funesta manía de pensar”—“Far from us be the disastrous mania for thinking.”
Fernando could not have agreed more, and his war on the doceanistas—the “Year-Twelvers,” nickname of those who supported the 1812 Constitution—began during the night of May 10–11, 1814, when the police dragged a number of distinguished liberals from their beds to prison. Some ended up in jail in Africa, others were immured in convents and monasteries—the nuns and priests, clicking their rosary beads as they patrolled the stony corridors, made good jailers for Fernando. His hunt for suspected “traitors” soon attained manic proportions. Arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, confiscation of goods, arraignment by the newly restored Inquisition, the sundering of families, torture sometimes: these were the common fate of liberales. They were extraordinarily hated by the right and responded with a bitterness they had never felt before.
Consequently, civil life in Madrid descended into an insipid mixture of fear and boredom. Tertulias, those discussion groups so enjoyed by urban Spaniards, almost ceased to exist. So did café life, since any gathering of more than two people was viewed as potentially subversive by Fernando’s numerous police spies. Plagued by surveillance, constantly threatened by authority, floods of liberales—perhaps as many as twelve thousand families—went into exile, most in France, preferring an uncertain future in the territory of a recent enemy to the prospect of living under the heavy and arbitrary thumb of Fernando; more often than not they were welcomed (at first) as political martyrs whose presence in France was a compliment to its government. Some went to England; a few, to North America.
Fernando’s special hatred was reserved for the declared afrancesados. (Of course, the categories of “liberal” and “French sympathizer” constantly overlapped.) Most of these were timid and conformist people, of superior intelligence to the instinct-driven populacho who so desired the Desired One. They had careers to protect. Lawyers, merchants, local administrators, cultured bureaucrats, they took the French side against the confused and hectic patriot resistance because they sincerely believed two main things: first, as noted before, that the Napoleonic system of laws and rights was morally and politically better than what the Bourbons had to offer; second, that France could not possibly lose the war.
This was, technically, a defeatist attitude, and the afrancesados were certainly collaborators. But there was every reason to think that armed resistance to Napoleon would plunge Spain into a hopeless war that it was bound to lose. Once it was lost, Spain would become a colony in the bluntest terms, ruled from Paris as a huge French fief. Therefore the be
st way of preserving both the Spanish throne and at least some degree of Spanish autonomy was to negotiate with Napoleon and accept his brother, José I, as a genuine king. Not one of the afrancesados would have considered himself a traitor. They were all patriots. But the capital-P Patriots had won, thanks to Wellington. The “Frenchies” had lost. Fernando now set out to wreak his revenge on them, with a grinding and obsessive minuteness that reflected his determination to give no one who had ever opposed him a second chance. His instrument for this was the mob. In 1814, a crowd of Madrid people celebrated his return to power by rioting out of control against the Cortes and the very idea of electoral, constitutional government. They destroyed most of the Hall of Sessions in the parliament, tore out a stone plaque on which the chief articles of the Constitution were engraved, and broke it in fragments. They also defaced or destroyed a number of statues and graven symbols associated with constitutional rule, chanting imbecilic slogans in praise of Fernando and absolutism:
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