Spain - The Enlightenment

HISTORY CONTENTS
IBERIA
HISPANIA
AL ANDALUS
CASTILE AND ARAGON
THE GOLDEN AGE
Ferdinand and Isabella
Charles V and Philip II
Spain in Decline
BOURBON SPAIN
War of the Spanish Succession
The Enlightenment
The Napoleonic Era
THE LIBERAL ASCENDANCY
The Cadiz Cortes
Rule by Pronunciamiento
Liberal Rule
THE CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY
The Cuban Disaster
The African War
REPUBLICAN SPAIN
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
THE FRANCO YEARS
Franco's Political System
Policies, Programs, and Growing Popular Unrest
Foreign Policy under Franco
THE POST-FRANCO ERA
Transition to Democracy
Disenchantment with UCD Leadership
Growth of the PSOE
Foreign Policy in the Post-Franco Period

The enlightenment

Charles III (r. 1759-88), Spain's enlightened despot par excellence, served his royal apprenticeship as king of Naples. He was one of Europe's most active patrons of the Enlightenment, a period during which attempts were made to reform society through the application of reason to political, social, and economic problems. Despite Charles's attempt to reform the economy, the impact of the Enlightenment was essentially negative. Anticlericalism was an integral part of Enlightenment ideology, but it was carried to greater lengths in Spain than elsewhere in Europe because of government sponsorship. Public charities financed by the church were considered antisocial because they were thought to discourage initiative, and they were therefore abolished. The state suppressed monasteries and confiscated their property. The Jesuits, outspoken opponents of regalism, were expelled. Their expulsion virtually crippled higher education in Spain. The state also banned the teachings of medieval philosophers and of the sixteenth-century Jesuit political theorists who had argued for the "divine right of the people" over their kings. The government employed the Inquisition to discipline antiregalist clerics.

Economic recovery was noticeable, and government efficiency was greatly improved at the higher levels during Charles III's reign. The Bourbon reforms, however, resulted in no basic changes in the pattern of property holding. Neither land reform nor increased land use occurred. The rudimentary nature of bourgeois class consciousness in Spain hindered the creation of a middleclass movement. Despite the development of a national bureaucracy in Madrid, government programs foundered because of the lethargy of administrators at lower levels and because of a background rural population. The reform movement could not be sustained without the patronage of Charles III, and it did not survive him.

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