The “discovery” of the Spanish Enlightenment: Intellectual and political contexts
The interpretation of eighteenth-century Spain has been profoundly affected by the changing political, social, and intellectual context from which the country’s past has been analyzed (Enciso 1990; Fernández Sebastián 2002). Throughout the nineteenth century, it was marked by the conflict between conservative and liberal ideologies. For the most traditionalist intellectuals, the eighteenth century represented an era of regrettable foreign influence on Spain’s culture. They saw the Enlightenment as an antireligious, frivolous movement incited by Frenchified fashions, and foreign to Spain’s nature, a notion that would be developed by the most retrograde sectors of Francoist historiography. On the other hand, for nineteenth-century liberals (with significant differences between the distinct liberalisms: conservative, moderate, progressive), the Enlightenment and Bourbon reformism represented the root of the ideals of progress and reform and of the struggle against secular prejudices, the principles of which they considered themselves heirs. This perspective was transmitted to the Second Republic (1931–1939), a period during which some intellectuals became interested in investigating the roots of Spanish modernity. Such was the case, for example, with Gregorio Marañón (Las ideas biológicas del Padre Feijoo, 1934) and Pilar Oñate (El feminismo en la literatura española, 1938).
Regardless of whether the fact was celebrated or regretted, the dominant view for a long time was that there had not been a Spanish Enlightenment worth the name, as the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset roundly declared in 1930: “The great educational century passed us by” (1983, II, 600; Nos ha faltado el gran siglo educador). Thirty years later, another philosopher, the Franco regime dissident Julián Marías (1963), presented the eighteenth century as one more of the Spains that could never be (like that of the Spanish Silver Age of the 1920s and the Second Republic): an era of lost opportunities, liberalizing but suddenly broken by conservative regression, thus projecting the drama of the Civil War (1936–1939) onto the past.
Beginning in the 1960s, foreign Hispanists contributed significantly to the renewal of studies on eighteenth-century Spanish culture and society. In particular, Jean Sarrailh (1957), in a foundational work originally published in French in 1954, asserted that there had existed a movement of intellectual renewal in Spain similar to that of the Enlightenment in other countries, although he may have exaggerated French influence and excessively delayed its start. The work of other Hispanists—such as French scholars François López, Lucienne Domergue, Marcelin Defourneaux, and George and Paula Demerson, the Italian scholar Giovanni Stiffoni, the British scholar Philip Deacon, and the Americans Richard Herr and J. H. R. Polt—would continue along the same lines.
With the decades of the 1970s and 1980s there came an increase in research and a significant change in interpretive schemas tied to a historiographical revision that reappeared in Spain during the Transition that followed the hiatus created by the dictatorship. The changes were intense and fertile, particularly in the field of socioeconomic history, which revealed the reality—but also the boundaries—of the demographic and economic growth that occurred during the Enlightenment era. This growth was especially obvious on the periphery, with increases in agricultural production, crop diversification, the push to produce manufactured goods (particularly textile goods), commercial development both in domestic markets and with America, and the processes of social differentiation and polarization (Fernández Díaz 2009; Mantecón 2013). The changes took longer to be incorporated into the area of intellectual and cultural history. A notable exception to this delay can be found in the work of José Antonio Maravall, whose pioneering studies on eighteenth-century Spanish culture, published across several decades and collected posthumously (1991), dealt with such diverse topics as trends in political reform, the importance of education, and aesthetic sensibilities.
Substantial changes resulted from that interpretive transformation (Enciso 1990). As a basic premise, the existence of a Spanish Enlightenment was solidly established, not as merely a pallid, faltering, indirect reflection of the “authentic” French Enlightenment, but as a movement with its own specificity, within the general limits of European Enlightenment, its own connections to an internal dynamic of socioeconomic and political change, rather than being merely propelled by foreign influences. Furthermore, in the face of the classic idea of a very late Enlightenment that did not take off until the second half of the eighteenth century—with the exception of isolated precursors like Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (who published his works between 1726 and 1760)—the research of José María López Piñero (1979), Pedro Álvarez de Miranda (1992), Antonio Mestre (1996), and Jesús Pérez Magallón (2002), among others, situated the origins of the Enlightenment in the so-called time of the novatores (1680–1720), early innovators in philosophy, science and erudite history. This was followed by the early Enlightenment (the generation of Feijoo and Gregorio Mayans, between 1726 and 1754) and its peak towards the end of Fernando VI’s reign and during that of Carlos III (1759–1788) (Sánchez-Blanco 1999, 2002). The decade of the 1790s witnessed the terrible impact of the French Revolution, causing an intense preventive reaction by the government (increased border checks, prohibiting the publication of references to the events of the Revolution, closing all periodicals except for official ones in 1791, controlling tertulias—gatherings in private homes where topics of the day were discussed—and conversations). At the same time, it was a time of rich intellectual and literary production by a younger generation of educated men, some of whom had fairly radical ideas (Sánchez-Blanco 2007; Lorenzo Álvarez 2009).
In addition, studies of the Spanish Enlightenment in the 1980s and 1990s highlighted its dual sources: European—not only French—influence (selectively assimilated) along with Spain’s own traditions (Sánchez-Blanco 1991; Mestre 1998). Undoubtedly, many of the influences (intellectual, artistic, literary, as well as in customs and manners) came from France, reinforcing, along with the ascent of the Bourbons and the dynastic alliance, a shift already begun by the end of the seventeenth century with respect to the former outward flow of Spanish culture to other lands during the political supremacy of the Habsburg monarchy. But there were also close cultural ties with Italy, ranging from music—especially opera—theater, and art, to economic and legal ideas, which were strengthened by the expulsion and exile of the Jesuits to Italy in 1767. An English influence is also noticeable in the scientific and philosophical spheres, political economy and literature, while a German influence is evident in the fields of philosophy, law, economy (cameralism), and industrial and mining technologies. Meanwhile, certain Spanish cultural heritages were recuperated and given new value, reclaimed (also selectively) by the intellectuals of the eighteenth century as their own predecessors: while Baroque literature was rejected, Spanish texts on philological criticism and humanist religiosity from the sixteenth century, and those of the arbitristas or reformers of the seventeenth, were valued and reprinted.
The Spanish Enlightenment within the framework of studies on the Enlightenment
The historiographical appreciation of the Spanish Enlightenment has been inscribed for decades within the most general framework of an evolution from a view of the Enlightenment as an almost exclusively French, or at any rate German, phenomenon, to one that understands it as an international movement with distinct territorial variations (not only national but also regional, local, and even individual). In this way, territories whose social and political circumstances did not easily allow the emergence or public expression of radical ideas, and whose most significant contributions were produced not on an intellectual or theoretical level, but on the level of practical projects (like Portugal, Spain, and many of the Italian territories), were incorporated into the Enlightenment canon (Bolufer 2003).
That widening of the geographical boundaries of the Enlightenment has allowed for the revision of some themes that the excessive identification with the French model (and specifically with the philosophes) had distorted, such as the question of religion. Inasmuch as the irreligious nature of the Enlightenment has been questioned, pointing out the minor role that deism and atheism played across Europe, the Spanish case appears not as an exception, but as one more among the Christian Enlightenments—in this case, Catholic. The majority of enlightened Hispanics (Spaniards and criollos, American-born descendants of Spaniards) positioned themselves within orthodoxy, although there was a lukewarm or skeptical minority on the question of religion, particularly among the younger generation (Juan Meléndez Valdés, Francisco de Cabarrús, Manuel José Quintana). Many of them maintained anticlerical, royalist positions (defending the authority of the monarchy over the Holy See on ecclesiastical questions), and opposed the more ritualistic, showy manifestations of Catholicism in favor of a more internalized, sober spirituality, Christ-centered and devoted to the Bible (which was translated into Spanish in 1791–1795, after three long centuries of prohibition). They also sought a greater role for laypeople in Church life (Mestre 1979; Egido 1987). In this sense, the recent historiographical growth of the notion of a “Catholic Enlightenment” (Lehner 2016; Smidt 2010) has not been a particular novelty in Spain, where since the 1970s historians (along with their French and Italian colleagues) have been exploring the manifestations of reformist or enlightened Catholicism (Bolufer 2018).
Likewise, the widening of the Enlightenment canon to other countries where enlightened men maintained closer ties to the government (as was the case in Spain, and also in Prussia and Portugal), in contrast to the French, has contributed to its being understood as more than simply a system of ideas, but also as having a practical, reformist aspect, understood not as a lack, but as a realistic response to its context. Indeed, as María Victoria López-Cordón explains in her chapter in this volume, the Enlightenment in Spain had a decidedly bureaucratic bent. We know now that the social and cultural changes of the Enlightenment involved all sectors of the population in one way or another, and not just an enlightened minority opposed to the inert masses, passive and attached to tradition. However, the Enlightenment movement was supported significantly by a new power elite in service to the monarchy. They were no longer recruited only from the aristocracy, but also from among the lesser nobility (hidalgos) and from the professional classes. They were increasingly trained and convinced of their mission to serve not only the king, but also the nation. Most men of letters and sciences held bureaucratic or judicial positions in the monarchic machine in Spain and the Americas (Álvarez Barrientos 2006), which explains the decidedly pragmatic character of the Hispanic Enlightenment: many expressed their reflections as memoirs, reports, and concrete measures (for example, the most notable texts on political economy were a product of heated debates and legislative proposals, such as the Informe sobre el expediente de la ley agraria by Jovellanos [1795; Report on Agrarian Law]), rather than in philosophical or theoretical treatises. In the case of enlightened women, those who were not aristocrats also belonged to families connected to the professional and administrative fields in which education (together with contacts and influence) was the path to social advancement and prestige for their male relatives. Some of these enlightened women explicitly shared their families’ appreciation for the importance of personal merit and education, but expressed a specific and painful awareness that their sex was denied “jobs, honors and interests” (empleos, honores e intereses), as Josefa Amar y Borbón (1994, 66)—the daughter and granddaughter of doctors in service to the king, and wife and mother to lawyers—wrote.
Understanding the particularities of the Spanish Enlightenment within the wider frame of revising the general Enlightenment has also allowed us to consider the multiple forms in which “public opinion” emerged. Contradicting Jürgen Habermas’s theory, which attributed a bourgeois, anti-absolutist character to the “public sphere” of the British Enlightenment, in Spain (but also in most of Europe) many spheres of debate and more open experimentation with forms of sociability developed in the heart of the professional class, and occasionally under the aegis of the absolute monarchy, rather than in opposition to it: academies, Economic Societies of Friends of the Country, and tertulias in private homes. In some of these venues a new language of patriotism, citizenship, merit, and civic pride was being created that would imperceptibly move away from the political culture of the ancien régime (Franco 2004; López-Cordón and Luis 2005; Arias de Saavedra 2012). Other spaces of discussion were articulated from an increasingly broader, more diverse publishing market, with classic forms (theater, satirical lampoons, etc.) and new ones (the periodical press) that fostered conversations not only in cafés and more or less elite, enlightened tertulias, but also in the most public places on the street and in the plazas. In this way, forms of “public opinion” were developing that intellectuals and servants of the State made an effort to direct and shape, considering it to be an ever more necessary support for government measures (Calvo 2013). At the same time, they feared and tried to exorcise the danger of a plebian public opinion, the most stunning manifestation of which were the Esquilache Riots in 1766 (Medina 2009).
Thus, historiography and Spanish society itself in the 1970s and 1980s were shedding the legacy of Francoism, opening up to Europe, and losing a certain inferiority complex and sense of isolation. Concurrently, perspectives on the history of Spain began to turn away from a very influential paradigm in intellectual circles and in the collective imaginary of both Spain and Europe: the perennial Spanish “exceptionalism” or “anomaly,” commonly read as backwardness, but also as an attractive exoticism (A...
