Spain: A Unique History (26 page)

With the expansion into California and a few other border areas, the American empire reached its greatest extension, and by that time was being treated as a "Spanish empire" for the first time, all parts of the country enjoying equal commercial rights and a concerted effort being made, also for the first time, to exploit the broader range of the American economy for Spanish interests. Taxes were rationalized and made more efficient at home, but also extended more broadly into America, and certain aspects of administration more centralized, provoking in turn a natural reaction that stimulated growth of a kind of political consciousness in creole society.

Though the Spanish empire was not at all the kind of economic powerhouse that the British empire was becoming, the imperial reforms of the ministers of Carlos III seemed, in some respects, more effective than those of his contemporary George III. The Spanish imperial domains had never been considered "colonies" in the British sense, but neither had the American "kingdoms" ever been permitted the full constitutional systems of the peninsular principalities, and were thus easier to deal with than the thirteen British colonies, each of which possessed autonomous parliaments. Moreover, an absolute monarchy in Madrid theoretically ruling over multiple "kingdoms" possessed greater flexibility for maneuver than did a parliamentary government in London, which insisted on its own complete and undivided sovereignty but, as a result, enjoyed increasingly less room for compromise.

Since 1603 Great Britain had had a "composite monarchy" that bore comparison with the "monarquía compuesta" of Habsburg Spain (discounting the continental Habsburg dynastic domains). After the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707, the "progressive" British system moved to extend the sovereignty of a single parliament over all these territories. By contrast, in Madrid parliament had been largely reduced to a "Diputación" of the traditional Cortes, and the crown itself was politically and administratively absolute. This, however, gave it power to attempt sweeping reform and redefinition, something that by 1775 was no longer possible in British North America.

For the first time in Spanish history, by the later eighteenth century "patria" and "nación" began to be used in ways approaching their modern sense, and the Caroline imperial reforms sought to create what one minister termed "un solo cuerpo de nación," a single Spanish-speaking nation spanning the Atlantic. The largest empire in the world was to be replaced by the largest nation in the world, as for the first time a more comprehensive Spanish administrative system was directly introduced into the Americas. A basic problem that the crown could not resolve, however, was that it proposed a two-tier system, largely administered by Spaniards. Creoles received new rights and opportunities, but not fully equivalent ones. Pan-Hispanic representation was to be achieved merely through the appointment by the senior Spanish administrators of a handful of American representatives to the Diputación de las Cortes in Madrid — the standing committee, which was nearly all that was left of the traditional Cortes under eighteenth-century absolutism. This idea was carried over by Spain's first constitutional liberals in 1810-12 and 1820-23, maintaining the notion of an immense Spanish-speaking nation, but at no time would the liberals be willing to grant equal, as distinct from highly limited, representation, ultimately dooming the project. The Spanish American revolts of 1780-82 in Peru and Nueva Granada (Colombia) were suppressed, but the problem of American participation and representation would slowly, but steadily, grow more acute.

For Spanish society it was the mellow autumn of the traditional culture, a time of reform and relative enlightenment without drastic transformation. Traditional society remained largely intact, having lost some of the more pathological characteristics of the seventeenth century. This golden autumn was not a very creative time in high culture and the arts, at least until Goya appeared at the very end, but it was a period of a curious fusing of high culture with some of that of the lower classes. Popular culture reacted against foreign models, producing the first expressions of modern "casticismo" (Spanishness) in the new "majeza" (lower-class elegance) of the urban lower classes. In time "art" became more "popular," an indication of a partial change and transformation, as the aristocracy sometimes aped popular styles, a fashion unthinkable in the preceding century. The theater in Madrid and other cities was the principal medium that brought these strands together, at least by the late eighteenth century, and to some extent reflected the rejection of sophisticated "afrancesamiento" (Frenchification) by lower-class majeza.
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It was the last century of traditional Spanish culture, a time in which Spanish society was generally calm and to a considerable degree at peace with itself.

This was obviously not a drastically new, transformed, and "modern" society. There were many reform projects, and considerable growth and expansion, particularly during the reign of Carlos III, but it still remained a traditional society.
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Many things improved, commerce expanded greatly, industry increased in Catalonia and several smaller zones, and cities on the periphery became the major new centers of growth, but this was expansion with only limited transformation. As John Lynch said of Spanish agriculture during the eighteenth century, "agriculture grew but did not develop."
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Food production increased as agriculture expanded into marginal land, becoming more extensive rather than more intensive. Population growth required regular food imports, living standards for the ordinary population in Madrid began to decline once more, and infant mortality apparently increased slightly during the second half of the century, indicating that no decisive new breakthrough had been made. Similarly, "enlightened despotism" did not by any means signify the beginning of a new kind of Anglo-American-style political system. Nearly all the truly decisive reforms were resolutely rejected.
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By the 1780s, however, small educated minorities were calling for much more advanced and decisive changes.
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Popular cultural change has been much less studied than the writings of the elite. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, the rejection of traditional Castilian elite culture was accompanied by the growing acceptance of critical Enlightenment norms on the one hand, accompanied on a different level by the growing plebeanization of culture and attitudes, which among the common people was becoming xenophobic, emphatic, and shrill. Jesús Torrecilla has pointed out that traditional culture was largely Castilian and featured seriousness, sobriety, austerity, dark colors, a rather cold realism, and objectivity, emphasizing certain standards of work well done, characterized by slowness, reflection, a certain astuteness, and calculation. Hallmarks were gravity, decorum and dignity. This was increasingly replaced by a modern "Andalusian" popular culture that emphasized rhetoric, bright colors, frivolity, "la bullanga jaranera" (merry uproar), cheerful irresponsibility, and new marginal forms of behavior and indulgence, a general style trend, some aspects of which would continue for about one hundred fifty years and beyond, into the middle of the twentieth century. This would become the culture in evidence of "romantic Spain," forming the third major stereotype of Spanish culture and character. The keynote was no longer aristocracy but lower-class majeza. In its own way this would quickly assume more modern form, as the traditional "corrida de toros" (bullfighting) crystallized in its classic style, dressing its bullfighters in what would be an unvarying eighteenth-century costume (even in the twenty-first century), the first modern "plazas de toros" being constructed in Andalucía during the 1770s and quickly moving northward. Interestingly, they can be considered the first modern mass public sports facilities in any country, inaugurating for an archaic spectacle a trend that would slowly but inexorably accelerate around the world for more modern sports during the next two centuries. Other aspects of "popular style" also crystallized, the various regional traditional costumes and popular dances assuming their full form during the second half of the eighteenth century. Similarly, at the very end of the century the new Andalusian musical style known as flamenco would begin to emerge, finally assuming its modern form in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In the shadow of the rationalist Enlightenment, the ingredients of romantic Spain were already being assembled. Later, much of this would be the delight of tourist and Spaniard alike, though far from the tone and quality of the elitist culture of the Golden Age.

In Spain as in France, the Old Regime was overthrown by the great revolution of the 1790s, in France directly and in Spain by the French military invasion that subjugated much of the country and introduced a Napoleonic regime of radical reform, based on some of the more moderate aspects of the revolution. Whereas the English revolution of republicanism and Puritanism of the 1640s had few international repercussions, the French Revolution was a worldhistorical event, because France at that time was the leading continental European power and because French radical ideas led what to some extent had become an international movement.

The French Revolution had a profound effect abroad, not so much in the creation of radical regimes elsewhere (all of which were overthrown) as in stimulating nationalism and also the long-term diffusion of liberal, as distinct from radical, ideas. Nowhere, however, did the revolutionary and Napoleonic era have so great an impact as in the Iberian Peninsula. For Spain it produced the greatest upheaval of modern times prior to the Civil War of 1936-39.

The reign of Carlos IV exhibited political confusion and weak leadership, slackening the pace of the reformism notable under Carlos III, though, after an initially sharply conservative reaction to the revolution, some reformism was resumed. Spanish government steadily lost initiative, however, until the royal family allowed itself to be carried away into French captivity — the Portuguese royal family, by comparison, having the perspicacity to flee to Brazil, a far preferable option.

The result of the French takeover was the Spanish War of Independence, universally recognized as by far the broadest and most intense popular and national reaction to Napoleonic domination found anywhere in Europe. It gave rise to a great mythology both inside and outside Spain. Within the country it produced the myth of the great national resistance of patriotic self-sacrifice, the "guerrillero" as representative of the traditional and patriotic people. In western Europe it helped to establish Stereotype 3 about the Spanish — the vision of "romantic Spain," which partially reversed the preceding stereotypes. This would achieve full canonic formulation by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, holding that when Spaniards took to violence they were not sadistic monsters but unusually brave and death-defying heroes willing to sacrifice themselves to preserve their independence and way of life. Rather than being mindless religious fanatics, Spaniards preserved a spiritual approach to life and culture that defied the gross materialism of the modern world. Rather than being lazy good-for-nothings, the Spanish represented human and social values that they refused to sacrifice on the altar of industrialization and profit. Rather than being closed to science and enlightenment, the Spanish sustained a common popular culture that prized song and dance, expressing an artistic and esthetic vitality lost to bourgeois society beyond the Pyrenees. Whereas Stereotype 1 was a product of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and Stereotype 2 a product of the late seventeenth century and the Enlightenment, Stereotype 3 would dominate much of the thinking about Spain in other western countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — at least until the 1970s — though often also mixed with aspects of Stereotypes 1 and 2.

Within Spain itself the myth of the idealistic and self-sacrificing resistance of the Spanish people has generally prevailed on both the Left and the Right, although most recently aspects of it have been called into question by historians such as José Alvárez Junco.
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Scholars have usually recognized that part of the elite supported the reformism of the monarchy of Joseph Bonaparte, and that the resistance was fundamentally divided between majoritarian traditionalists and minoritarian middle and upper-class liberals, the latter better organized and politically more active, or at least geographically better situated. In general, however, the clergy were more important than political liberals in mobilizing large sectors of the population, who fought for religion and their traditional way of life more than for any modern concept of "Spain." Most had no perception of the modern idea of nation, but the liberals certainly did. Localism and regionalism were important in the resistance, as they have been throughout the history of the country. In some areas certain aspects of the guerrilla shaded off into banditry.
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The War of Independence was indeed a titanic struggle but also politically and ideologically more complicated than it has often been presented.
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It produced the two new political and military terms that Spain provided the modern world: guerrilla and liberal.

It marked the beginning of the "two Spains" of modern times: one Catholic and traditionalist, the other liberal and anticlerical (though at first also largely Catholic, in a more moderate sense), which within another century would evolve into a division between Catholic conservatives and anti-Catholic social and political radicals. It also meant the end of most of the Spanish American empire. Whereas the North American colonists won their independence in the face of the dominant new imperial power of that generation, the Spanish Americans faced the opposite — a complete breakdown of Spanish government in the face of foreign invasion and occupation. At that time the various regions of Spanish America would never have initiated a process of self-government, soon to affirm independence, had it not been for the vacuum of power in Spain. The independence of the Latin American countries would eventually have taken place, but not so soon or in the same way.