Nineteenth Century Spain

A New History

Mark Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351141826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Nineteenth century Spain deserves wider readership. Bedevilled by lost empires, wars, political instability and frustrated modernisation, the country appeared backward in relation to northern Europe and even in relation to much of its own geographical periphery. This new history, the first survey of its kind in English in more than a hundred years, offers a fresh perspective on this century, showing how and why elements of backwardness and modernity ran in parallel through Spain. Bounded by the military and imperial crises of 1808 and 1898, this study pays special attention to the experience of war on politics and society, and integrates the latest historical debates in its analysis.

Chapter 1

1808–14: two Spains?

This chapter explains the social, political, and imperial crisis culminating in the events of 1808 (palace coup and French invasion) and how these helped determine Spain’s military failures in the Iberian Peninsula and political failures in the Americas. In Spain the weakness of the Patriot armies was countered by the strength of Europe’s strongest guerrilla phenomenon. The peculiar military environment was matched by peculiar political and imperial ramifications. Uniquely in Napoleonic Europe, Spain underwent two processes of political reform at the same time, one under French domination and the other under the Patriots. The Napoleonic Wars also proved uniquely decisive in terminally eroding a European colonial power’s control over a vast non-European empire.

Just as in Portugal, Austria, and Naples, the second half of the century saw Spain undergo a series of Enlightenment-inspired social, political, and economic reforms, particularly during the reign of Carlos III (1759–88). Thus, deserted lands were resettled under royal jurisdiction, escaping being entailed in the complex patchwork of ecclesiastical, noble, and other corporate landownership with which Spain had been saddled as a result of the Reconquista and over which enlightened absolutism was trying to assert uniform regal control. Meanwhile, the traditional aristocracy of ‘right’ was being undermined by the creation of an elite of ‘merit’. Carlos III had no qualms about raising plebeians and minor nobles into a new aristocracy of service, thus bypassing the grandees. Nevertheless, such enlightened reforms were regularly stymied by traditionalist elites who could rely on administrative inertia and on occasion even raise a crowd when the latter was convinced that popular interests stood to lose. In 1766 riots swept the countryside in protest at Carlos III’s ‘progressive’ abolition of grain controls.¹ Therefore, social tensions simmered throughout the second half of the eighteenth century as the people of Spain were neither ruthlessly modernised so as to raise general living standards nor paternalistically protected by full-blooded feudalism. Only the ubiquitous charity relief provided by the powerful Spanish Church prevented further repeats of 1766 or, still more terrifyingly, the 1773–75 Pugachev revolt in Russia.

Even if Spain’s old order could weather the good years of peace, good harvests, and buoyant American bullion, all generally coterminous with Carlos III’s reign, the reign of Carlos IV (1788–1808) was marked by natural disasters, harvest failures, war and penury, destabilising the old regime and making it vulnerable to foreign intervention. In 1803, for example, a disastrous harvest led to robberies, assaults on bakers’ shops, and curfews. Smitten with hunger, the populace also had to contend with an epidemic of yellow fever that autumn which claimed sixty lives per day in Málaga and reached as far north as Burgos. From Burgos, the Hispanophile Whig, Lady Holland reported the poor to be ‘dropping like flies’ and abandoning the countryside in desperate search of relief in the towns.² Such was the suffering that the kind of paternalistic grain controls which had been in place before 1766 were reintroduced. The hand of God sent an earthquake to Motril, a plague of locusts to Segovia, and a flood killing thousands downstream from a dam breached at Lorca.³ Famines and disasters made unaffordable cost of war and armed neutrality which Spain had been obliged to sustain in the wake of the French Revolution. Whilst Spain was already no stranger to tithe strikes and anti-conscription riots, the 1793–95 War of the Convention added land riots to this list of manifestations of popular grievances when common lands in the Basque war provinces were sold off to sustain the war effort.

The 1793–95 war dragged Spain’s eighteenth-century army into France’s nineteenth century. Spain’s peninsular army had been neglected in favour of the navy, as the Bourbon ‘family compact’ imagined no more threat coming from across the Pyrenees but a very lively threat coming from the oceans in the form of Britain’s Royal Navy. By the end of the century, the Spanish army was therefore mediocre. It was heavily influenced by the Prussian model, even down to maintaining linear warfare and refusing to experiment with the line and column tactics being practised by the French Army. The troops consisted mainly of line infantry and a supplementary force of provincial militia raised by conscription and mobilised only in times of war. The Spanish cavalry was similarly a conventional force. Two elite guard-cavalry regiments (the Guardia Corps) and twelve line regiments (each of four squadrons) completed the force in 1793. In 1788, there were also three regiments of light infantry and two of light cavalry tasked with carrying our raiding actions against both native bandits and foreign Barbary corsairs. The Spanish Army could also count on irregular forces. The Basque provinces, Navarra and Catalonia, all had home-guard forces to be mobilised in time of war. Armed civilians were mobilised in parish companies led by local worthies against the French in 1793, and in Catalonia, local conscripts fed the somatén irregular militia and a slightly different all-volunteer force – the migueletes – called to support the regular army in wartime and in Catalonia only. Wartime also led to the local recruitment of varied units of freebooters, often former wrongdoers, in ad hoc units.

These units were led by an officer corps which was far from the old regime monochrome assumed by Marxist historians. Political favouritism could allow for remarkably rapid promotions of humble officers, the case of Godoy being the most extreme example. Non-political promotion was possible for rankers, albeit rare, and hardly ever beyond the rank of captain. In practice, high ranks were reserved for nobles who entered the military estate, often as cadets aged 14, who could end up with commands at both young and inexperienced ages and in territories where they often clashed with regional military and civil authorities.⁴ Officers from the rank of captain and above (short of major-general and captain general) had part of their salaries deducted to fund the ‘Monte Pío’ system of widows’ pensions. The female next of kin of officers killed in service received part of the deceased officer’s salary until the widow either remarried or became a nun. The children also received money until the age of 18 in the case of boys and in the case of girls until they married or became nuns. In times of relative peace, there was money in the pension fund to be particularly generous (e.g. around 1790). But from 1808, the system would begin to collapse.⁵

Recruitment was designed in two ways, the first (and crudest) being the leva. Marginalised and criminal men were forced into military service at regular intervals (the last being in 1787), and this mechanism obviously served a social function in terms of welfare and order. The second, more sophisticated recruitment system was the sorteo or quinta. The quinta raised recruits out of a ballot operating under a system of fixed exemptions which allowed the wealthy and the well-connected to obtain substitutes or more comfortable militia service. Unsurprisingly, this ballot system was deeply unpopular and often produced riots.⁶

The actual Spanish performance against the French between 1793 and 1795 was surprisingly good, leading to a victory at the Battle of Trouillas on 22 September 1793. Reverses thereafter were not catastrophic, as witnessed in the lenient peace terms France offered Spain in 1795. But the extent of war enthusiasm – what historian Richard Herr called ‘Spain’s levy en masse’ of 1793 – has almost certainly been exaggerated. Enthusiasm for war came from the usual suspects (churchmen) rather than the masses as a whole. National identity has to be manufactured over a long period in order for ‘people’s war’ to emerge, and these conditions did not yet exist in Spain.⁷ Yet the demands of blood and food certainly caused inchoately political protests. A poor harvest and war in 1793 inspired the mobilisation in La Rioja of hundreds of hungry peasants who marched from village to village offering vivas to liberty, equality, and to the French Assembly.⁸ But fifteen more years of socio-economic strains caused by either war or armed peace were necessary for the explosion to take place. In the meantime, the old regime appeared to be teetering. Inflation linked to the ‘funny money’ (vales reales) launched by the monarchy to fund the deficit caused strikes in the state-owned tobacco factory at Guadalajara where some four thousand workers had to be suppressed by three thousand troops.⁹ Meanwhile, demographic pressures combined with the harshening of Valencia’s already-dire feudal regime to cause in 1801 a full-scale peasant rising.¹⁰

The target of popular ire was Carlos IV’s pseudo-dictator, Manuel de Godoy, who, despite his obscure provincial origins, had enjoyed a meteoric rise thanks, firstly, to the Bourbon structural reforms which created a meritocratic aristocracy of ‘service’ and, secondly, to the caprice of the wilful queen. Queen María Luisa’s physical attraction towards the young Extremaduran proved to be a crowd-pleasing propaganda gift for Godoy’s enemies, whose scurrilous pamphlets and rumours suggested that he owed his position to his prowess in the queen’s bedchamber. The tourist Lady Holland remarked that the queen’s affair was the subject of conversation even amongst muleteers.¹¹ But what really rallied popular opinion against Godoy was more structural, namely, the fact that he served as the obvious scapegoat for a foreign policy which gave Spain the worst of both worlds: domination by France and the enmity of Britain. In addition to the sale of common lands during the War of the Pyrenees, subsequent penury had obliged Godoy to auction the welfare centres of the Spanish Church (hospitals, poorhouses, orphanages), as well as a portion of Spain’s extensive ecclesiastical lands. Their buyers were given carte blanche to raise rents as they wished. In 1806 Godoy alienated even more church lands, albeit this time with Papal agreement, in response to being bullied by a Napoleon flush with victory over Prussia into renewing Spain’s ‘French subsidy’ (annual neutrality payments).¹²

Godoy’s regalism should have pleased the enlightened young men soon to become known to history as liberales (during their phases in power after 1810 Liberals would place the reduction of ecclesiastical power at the heart of their reforms), all the more so because Godoy followed up this objective attack on privilege with another, namely, in the painstaking reductions he made to the overmanned and wasteful Royal Guard. Thus, the traditional aristocracy of ‘right’ saw one of its remaining outlets for patronage curtailed. But Godoy also tried to conciliate traditional clerical opinion by persecuting such prominent J...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 1808–14: two Spains?
• 2 1814–33: crisis of legitimacy
• 3 1833–44: Carlists, liberals, and caudillos
• 4 1844–68: search for security
• 5 1868–76: republicanism, Carlism, cantonalism, and Cuba
• 6 1876–98: imagining the nation
• Conclusion
• Sources and bibliography
• Index