Cambridge concise histories: A Concise History of Spain by Phillips Jr William D. & Rahn Phillips Carla

Author:Phillips, Jr, William D. & Rahn Phillips, Carla
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

Map 5.2 Map of Spanish America, c. 1790, showing the empire at its greatest extent.

In domestic policies, the new king continued the reform program of his forebears, particularly with regard to the agrarian economy. Some of his principal advisers, most notably Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, were determined to wipe away traditional privileges that hindered the workings of the marketplace. Following upon the work of Campomanes, Jovellanos wrote a strongly worded “Report on the Agrarian Law” in 1795 that anticipated the arguments of nineteenth-century liberalism. To Jovellanos, the ownership of land and other private property was a “natural right,” a basis for all other rights and privileges of citizenship. The state should not intervene to restrict that right in support of traditional ways of managing the economy through price ceilings, usage rights to un-owned land, or other restraints. Because of his firm convictions regarding private property, Jovellanos opposed the Mesta, the guilds, and other corporate groups that had in the past enjoyed royal protection from the harsh realities of the market economy.

Manuel Godoy, the most famous – or infamous – of Carlos IV's ministers, shared Jovellanos's views on the need for internal reform and had no compunction about alienating important sectors of Spain's economic and social elite after he came to power late in 1792. Godoy, born without any particular social distinction, rose to dizzying heights of prestige and authority through the patronage of the king and queen and was widely believed to be the queen's lover. That career trajectory did nothing to enhance his credibility as a bureaucrat or to make the internal reforms he promoted palatable to the traditional sectors of Spanish society. In any case, after the French Revolution erupted in 1789, foreign affairs increasingly overshadowed internal affairs.

In Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, the early years of the revolution presented France's neighbors with a set of difficult choices, ranging from watchful waiting to outright hostility. For the English government, there was no choice: the revolution simply provided one more reason to oppose France. Nonetheless, many private citizens in England reacted with approval to the news of righteous reform at Versailles from May 1789 to May 1791. In Bourbon Spain, long allied with France, the official stance favored neutrality, at least as long as the king's cousin Louis XVI seemed to be sponsoring, or at least acquiescing to, the political and economic changes proposed in France. The count of Floridablanca, in charge of domestic policy since the previous reign, had no illusions about the revolution from the outset. While officially maintaining a neutral stance toward France, he hoped to keep the revolution from contaminating Spain. Until he left office in February 1792, he worked to restrict people, publications, and even news about the revolution from seeping over the Pyrenees and the Spanish coastal defenses. By then the French Legislative Assembly had declared war on some of its neighbors to combat threats to the revolution and to spread its message. Although Louis XVI publicly supported that policy, his fellow monarchs knew that the revolutionary leaders were effectively holding him and his family hostage.

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