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The ilustrados were deeply interested in economic theory and reform policies, much more so than in epistemology and abstract political philosophy. The most intelligent and practical-minded of these ilustrados was unquestionably Don Pedro Rodríguez, the conde de Campomanes (1723-1802), for whom, as he once put it, the invention of the sewing needle was more important than all the syllogisms of Aristotle.
Campomanes’ ideas were behind Carlos III’s controversial new laws favoring the dignity of work, including manual labor, and the trimming of meaningless privilege from the minor nobility. You could not call him a revolutionary, but Campomanes was very decisively a reformer, a position that sprang from his roles as economist, lawyer, and director of the Royal Academy of History. He was, with the conde de Floridablanca, the most powerful advocate of “regalist” politics, which dictated a lessening of the Church’s power in state matters and a growth in the king’s. Campomanes was particularly determined to rein in the Inquisition and to reduce the concentration of property, especially rural property, in Church hands, where it was slackly and poorly managed. For more than twenty years he was the chief economic officer of the Council of Castilla, a powerful post from which he issued a stream of writings on Spanish problems and solutions, inveighing against the institution of mortmain for giving so much power over land to the Church; drawing up programs to encourage industry among the working classes—for instance, by giving work to women in the silk-making trade; and fostering the education of common people, an idea that seemed revolutionary at the time. He advocated free education for poor girls, and even reported on the lives of quite marginal groups, like the Gypsies, and how they might become socially useful—an unrealized and probably unrealizable dream. His Discurso sobre el fomento de la industria popular (“Discourse on the Encouragement of Popular Industry,” 1771) and Discurso sobre la educación popular de los artesanos (“Discourse on Popular Education Among Artisans,” 1774-76) are basic texts in the history of Spanish social thought.
He backed, and labored to realize, Carlos III’s pet project of the colonization of the Sierra Morena, against the opposition of the Church and the Inquisition. He founded the Madrid Economic Society in 1775, and was its long-term director; this body became the model for similar societies across the peninsula, and greatly encouraged Spain’s economic growth in the embryo years of industrialization, when Castilla realized that it would have to catch up with the much more advanced industrial capitalism of Cataluña. The Society didn’t merely theorize; it was practical, spreading, for instance, the technical instruction that would teach metalworkers to become machinists and designers to create the machines and even drafting tools—hitherto a monopoly of the English—for making looms and spinning jennies.
As an ilustrado, Campomanes had a friend and ally in Jovellanos. Because of the latter’s tragic shifts of fortune, and not least because he was a gifted letter writer and, on top of that, a friend of Goya’s and the subject of one of his greatest portraits, Jovellanos has always been preferred to Campomanes by historians writing in English about the ilustrados: he has a Hamlet-like allure. Yet this is unfair to Campomanes, a less colorful man but a greater one, and the exemplar of the “enlightened” Spanish intellectual. On the whole, both men had a strength that their French brethren lacked. It was not so much a matter of intelligence as of practical government experience. It was all very well for French writers—“pointy-headed intellectuals” as they were apt to be—to have their utopian fantasies about radical and sudden transformation of the State and the nature of man, and to dream of the instant therapeutic effects of beheading kings. They could dream these dreams, and continue to believe in the rainbow beauty of their bubbles long after they had burst, because they had no experience of government or politics; they couldn’t have run a provincial restaurant, let alone a country. But the Spanish ilustrados were almost all politicians themselves, and sometimes quite senior and influential ones. They knew the levers of power and which ones to pull. They had no plans to abolish kingship and set up on its pedestal some purely hypothetical notion of the volonté générale. They knew how easily the pueblo, the people, could turn into the populacho, the mob. They sensed that education precedes freedom, and not the other way around.
Part of the tragedy of the Spanish ilustración was that the idealism of its bearers did them so little good. Against the entrenched opposition of the nobility and the Church they lacked the power to force reforms through, even as ministers. Generally, they were running on a meager diet of information. Ideas trickled slowly in, and often arrived in a distorted form. They were taken up in the gilded salons of Madrid, discussed in the tertulias over chocolate and biscuits, played with, and then left to lie inertly, amid the orts and fragments of a hundred other conversations, with little prospect of going further.
The ilustrados—at least the more influential ones—got the books they wanted to read. Despite the efforts of men like Floridablanca and Aranda to suppress public knowledge of the French Revolution in order to “save the system” for Carlos IV, the relevant texts almost always got through. Goya’s early patrons the duques de Osuna put together a large and impressive library of Enlightenment thought from France, Italy, and Germany; the Inquisition gave them leave to assemble it, but forbade the duke’s later efforts to bequeath it, as a whole, to the State. Access to “subversive” texts was largely determined by class. The poor, in any case, could not read. There was no substantial public for the dangerous stuff.
For the tiny minority of people who were literate but nowhere near the top of society, access to foreign, advanced thinking on matters of morality and human rights was impeded by the Church and obsessively opposed by the Inquisition. This body had lost some of its deadly repressive power by the 1750s. It no longer incinerated witches and heretics with the zeal it brought to the task in the Golden Century. Still, it was neither benign nor weak in matters of doctrinal conformity and the pursuit of heresy. It had not lost its paranoid suspicions, only some of its hitherto unbridled power to act on them. At one time or another the priestly terrorists of the Inquisition had pursued, interrogated, and threatened some of the finest minds and least questionable faiths in all of Spanish Catholicism: Fray Luis de León, St. Teresa of Ávila, Fray Luis de Granada, even Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, all fell under its bleary suspicion. It had done incalculable damage to the framework of Spanish intellectual and educational life, and the atmosphere of surveillance and moral repression it sustained was all-pervasive in absurdly small details as well as large—that, of course, being the essence of the totalitarian mind, in which there are no areas of exemption to ideology. It mattered almost as much that boys and girls had to be segregated in dance schools as that Jews had to be persecuted for their faith. Open political discussion in the inns and cafés of Madrid was frowned on, and apt to be reported. From 1790 through 1805, regular supplements to the Church’s index of banned books appeared, bringing up to date the latest forbidden works from the French Encyclopedists. (Voltaire, in his entirety, was banned as early as 1762, as Rousseau was by 1764. Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois made the list in 1756, and his Lettres persanes, published in France in 1721, were not translated into Spanish until 1813.) This did not mean that Spanish intellectual life in the eighteenth century was an unrelieved wasteland: it contained a few sharp and vibrant critical minds, like the Benedictine friar Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676-1764). The essays collected in his Teatro crítico universal (1726-39) and Cartas eruditas (1742-60) entitle him to be seen as Spain’s first modern essayist, discoursing skeptically and attractively on a wide range of subjects from folk superstitions to politics and natural history. He was, he said, “the common man’s disillusioner,” and his Teatro crítico was perhaps the closest thing Spain produced to Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. And despite the cold eye of the Church, it was possible for a great ilustrado like Campomanes to produce in 1780 a combined edition of Feijoo’s two vast essay collections that ran to thirty-three volumes. Manifestly,
such an imposing effort was too expensive to enjoy a wide circulation, but it went straight into many ducal libraries, and was read (or at least consulted) there. Still, there were not enough Feijoos to make a decisive difference, because in addition to the Church’s opposition to free minds, few Spaniards were in the habit of regular and serious reading. It was a culture of dreary illiteracy, of which few people, and certainly very few aristocrats, seemed ashamed. For a Spaniard to be engaged with the Enlightenment, first he must know how to read; second, he must as a rule be proficient in French. This reduced the number of potential ilustrados so sharply that they could hardly be expected to leaven the slothful mass of habit and piety.
Journalism, of a kind, helped—a little. Madrid held enough people to provide a public for satirical and dissenting journals with titles like El pensador and El censor. But their circulation was small, while the ferocity of their satire and the daring of their dissent were necessarily somewhat limited by State censorship and by the Inquisition. El censor, modeled on the English Tatler as run by Addison and Steele, was the longest-running of them: it stayed in publication for six years, from 1781 to 1787, not a bad lifespan for a little magazine with no subsidies. It carried no illustrations or political cartoons, but all the same its satire and polemic were an important part of the background to the great satire of Goya’s Caprichos, which appeared more than ten years after El censor folded. Unlike the ilustrados, who were determined to change socioeconomic habits, El censor was against State intervention and planning. Indeed, some of its utterances sound like foretastes of a Spanish anarchism that did not yet exist: “La absoluta libertad es la madre de la abundancia,” it declared (“Absolute liberty is the mother of abundance”). It did, however, side completely with Campomanes and the ilustrados on fundamental matters, such as their loathing of that fruit of privilege, ociosidad, idleness. “For me,” declared one of its essayists,
There is nothing more contemptible than an idle citizen who can combine his laziness with wealth and, consequently, with honors.… The humblest artisan … is (for me) more worthy of appreciation and, I think, of real honor than the most illustrious, the most honored, and the richest caballero if he is at the same time lazy and useless.
This, of course, was precisely the intuition behind the status laws Campomanes had encouraged his king to pass.
As a result of the malignant, unchecked influences of the Catholic Church, Enlightenment Spain—unlike Italy, France, England, and Germany—had inherited no existing tradition of innovative thought; no body of serious ideas on social issues; little debate on such matters as the relation between law and power, rights and duties. By tradition, Spain was short of intellectuals and speculative writers; over the centuries it had produced a considerable body of imaginative prose and verse, some of it very great indeed, from Cervantes to San Juan de la Cruz, but not a single philosopher of more than merely provincial note. In most matters that pertained to intelligence, an unsullied mediocrity prevailed. This was, of course, encouraged and preserved by the backwardness of the Church and the vigilance of the Inquisition. Spain lacked a strong and inventive bourgeoisie, that source and origin of all deep change; it had, on the other hand, an excess of priests and aristocrats, almost all of them with a vested interest in keeping the people illiterate, disenfranchised, stupefied with prayer and patriotism, and firmly under their authority, which bore down from the absolute monarchy and the Church hierarchy in Madrid. Parish priests, especially in outlying villages, tended to be as wretchedly poor as their flock; but for the hierarchy in the cathedrals of Sevilla, Burgos, and Barcelona and the established orders in the great monasteries, it was a different matter. The Church itself was colossally rich in land, real estate, bullion, and art, but it was fond of “holy poverty”—if there were no beggars, how could the benevolent earn grace in heaven by practicing the cardinal virtue of charity? It still cherished slavery as well—how could its colonies have shown a profit without it?—and its ideas about human rights, especially the rights of women, were larval. “Human rights,” “universal education,” and “the sovereignty of the people” were hardly more than noises and notions for 95 percent of Spaniards.
The remaining 5 percent or so, the so-called luces or liberales or ilustrados, were the tiny minority of educated, generally well-off, and invariably city-dwelling Spaniards who supplied most of the cultural patronage, including Goya’s. But the mass of the Spanish people regarded them with contempt as Frenchified asses, afrancesados, whose susceptibility to foreign ideas all but disqualified them as real Spaniards. It is impossible to exaggerate how foreign the world of political ideas, even in their crudest forms, was to the pueblo two hundred years ago. Everything that had convulsed and remade European thought in the eighteenth century stopped at the Pyrenees and was heard below them only as dulled echoes, faint chirpings, ill-understood threats to the proper order of things. Carlos III had done very little to improve Spanish education, which was, inevitably, still in the hands of the priests.
The most intelligent order of those priests, the Jesuits, was suppressed by the king in 1766 because his ministers (chiefly the conde de Aranda) convinced him—quite wrongly—that the hand of the Jesuits had guided the Esquilache revolt, though to exactly what purpose it was never clear. Other countries got rid of their Jesuits as an “enlightened” gesture toward liberty of thought, against the Counter-Reformation; not Spain. Its motive was merely a wrong-headed one of State security; the main effect was to make Spanish education even weaker than before.
The cultural area most clearly marked by Carlos III’s “enlightened” tastes and policies was that of urbanism and, in general, the visual arts. Madrid, at the outset of his reign, was a mess. Everyone agreed on that, especially visiting foreigners, who refused to walk in the city unarmed after sunset. Dark, narrow alleys, miserable street lighting, palaces and houses of little architectural merit. Windows had such small panes that they barely let in the light; iron balconies were crude; stairways and openings to the street were hardly more than dumps for other people’s garbage. The streets were so ill-paved that pedestrians were known to break their ankles, and draft animals to ruin their hooves, on the sharp, wobbling stones. Drainage was poor when it existed at all. Trash collection was done mostly by wandering herds of semi-holy pigs, the property of the Convent of St. Anthony Abbot, to whose cult these animals were emblematically dedicated. (In this, eighteenth-century Madrid had something in common with nineteenth-century downtown New York, where such trash collection as existed was done by herds of half-wild pigs.) In summer the streets of Madrid were a dust bowl; in winter, a bog. Most of the plans for cleaning up the city had failed. The capital, all diplomats agreed, was the dirtiest in Europe, and a suit of clothes that in Paris or London might get passed down from father to son was a rag before a year in Madrid was up.
Even so, eighteenth-century Madrid had seen some impulse to improvement. Since Felipe V had not been overwhelmed by the expense of foreign wars, he had been able to beautify his capital to a degree, building the Puente de Toledo, several theaters, a hospice, and some important churches and starting construction of the 1,200-room Palacio Real. But the essential builder was his Bourbon successor, Carlos III, who aspired not only to reconstruct the capital but to reform the civic habits of its occupants.
In 1787, for instance, he issued orders that the servants who worked at inns should wash themselves regularly, not wear hats indoors, “and, if possible, comb their hair.”8 His edicts on good behavior sound remarkably puritanical, though whether they were really obeyed or not is another matter. Smoking indoors in public places was rigorously forbidden, a restriction unheard of in other parts of Europe. In inns and hostels one was forbidden to smoke, read the papers, play cards, talk politics, or play billiards. Blasphemy was punished by prison. The innkeeper or bar owner was supposed to tell the local magistrate about each new guest. Carlos IV, in 1795, would add a curious rider to these: he forbade any unmarried tavern keeper to employ as a cook or a waitre
ss any woman who had not reached the age of forty, by which time—the monarch naïvely supposed—she would have lost whatever sexual attraction she might once have had.
It seems unlikely that the Bourbon kings had much effect on the morals of drinkers in Madrid, but they unquestionably bettered the look of the city. Carlos III also made strenuous efforts with security arrangements: he appointed a guard of night watchmen, charmingly known as the gusanos de luz (glowworms), and added to it a corps of “useful invalids” who (rather slowly, one presumes) patrolled the dark streets in groups of twenty or thirty.
The biggest works project espoused by Carlos III—though not, of course, open to the public—was the Royal Palace itself. Nearly thirty years in the building, it was now—except for its décor, whose schemes were left incomplete by the departure of its head muralist, Corrado Giaquinto, in 1762—essentially finished. This was by far the most imposing structure in Madrid, and it clearly needed others as a foil to it. Madrid is indebted to Carlos for his decision to construct the paseo del Prado, a key road in the city plan, which carried a number of major buildings that were directed, as ilustrado architecture should be, to the enlargement of public knowledge. The architect Juan de Villanueva designed for him a natural-history museum, started in 1785, that would become the all-important Prado Museum; a botanical-gardens complex (1775); and an observatory, completed in 1790 just after the king’s death. Another architect, Francisco Sabatini, contributed the enormous Hospital de San Carlos, only a part of which was actually finished; it is now Madrid’s chief modern art center, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. In the hope of attracting foreign artists to Madrid and concentrating Spanish ones there too, thus making the city a cultural as well as a bureaucratic capital, Carlos had Villanueva design a handsome Neoclassical home for the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando (1773). He marked the expanding city limits with triumphal arches, and provoked the sluggish public-works bureaucracy of Spain into paying attention to projects outside the capital—the atrocious state of the roads that linked city to city, for instance, and the construction of the Imperial Canal (1768–90) in Aragón, which was the special project of his chief minister, Floridablanca.