Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, C. 1750-1830

Enlightened Reform in Southern
Europe and its Atlantic Colonies,

c. 1750-1830
Edited by
Gabriel Paquette
Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe

and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 17501830
Empires and the Making of

the Modern World, 16502000
Series Editors:
Philippa Levine, University of Southern California, USA
John Marriott, University of East London, UK
This new monograph series seeks to explore the complexities of the relationships
among empires, modernity and global history. In so doing, it wishes to challenge
the orthodoxy that the experience of modernity was located exclusively in
the west, and that the non-western world was brought into the modern age
through conquest, mimicry and association. To the contrary, modernity had
its origins in the interaction between the two worlds. In this sense the imperial
experience was not an adjunct to western modernization, but was constitutive
of it. Thus the origins of the defining features of modernity the bureaucratic
state, market economy, governance, and so on have to be sought in the
imperial encounter, as do the categories such as race, sexuality and citizenship
which constitute the modern individual.
This necessarily complicates perspectives on the nature of the relationships
between the western and non-western worlds, nation and empire, and centre
and periphery. To examine these issues the series presents work that is
interdisciplinary and comparative in its approach; in this respect disciplines
including economics, geography, literature, politics, intellectual history,
anthropology, science, legal studies, psychoanalysis and cultural studies have
much potential, and will all feature. Equally, we consider race, gender and
class vital categories to the study of imperial experiences.
We hope, therefore, to provide a forum for dialogues among different
modes of writing the histories of empires and the modern. Much valuable
work on empires is currently undertaken outside the western academy and has
yet to receive due attention. This is an imbalance the series intends to address
and so we are particularly interested in contributions from such scholars.
Also important to us are transnational and comparative perspectives on the
imperial experiences of western and non-western worlds.
Enlightened Reform in Southern

Europe and its Atlantic Colonies,
c. 17501830
Edited by
Gabriel Paquette
Trinity College, Cambridge
Gabriel Paquette and the contributors 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Gabriel Paquette has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the editor of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Enlightened reform in southern Europe and its Atlantic colonies, c. 1750-1830. (Empires and
the making of the modern world, 1650-2000)
1. EnlightenmentEurope, Southern. 2. Europe, Southern Politics and government
18th century. 3. Europe, SouthernPolitics and government19th century. 4. Colonies
AdministrationHistory18th century. 5. ColoniesAdministrationHistory19th century.
I. Series II. Paquette, Gabriel B., 1977
940.253dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Paquette, Gabriel B., 1977
Enlightened reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic colonies, c. 17501830 / Gabriel
Paquette.
p. cm. (Empires and the making of the modern world, 16502000)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6425-3 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. Europe, SouthernPolitics and government18th century. 2. Europe, SouthernPolitics and
government19th century. 3. EnlightenmentEurope, Southern. 4. Political cultureEurope,
SouthernHistory. 5. Europe, SouthernIntellectual life. 6. EuropeColoniesAmerica
Administration. 7. Latin AmericaPolitics and governmentTo 1830. 8. EnlightenmentLatin
America. 9. Political cultureLatin AmericaHistory. 10. Latin AmericaIntellectual life. I. Title.
D974.P29 2009
940.2dc22
ISBN 9780754664253 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409409281 (ebk) I
2009014723
Contents
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Series Editors Foreword
INTRODUCTION: Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its
Atlantic Colonies in the Long Eighteenth Century

Gabriel Paquette*
ix
xi
xvii
1

PART I Southern

Europe
and its
Atlantic
Colonies, c. 17501830: An Overview
1

Enlightenment, Reform, and Monarchy in Italy

John Robertson
23
Enlightened Reform in the Spanish Empire: An Overview

Jorge Caizares-Esguerra
33
Enlightenment and Reform in France and the French Atlantic37

Emma Rothschild
Enlightened Reform in Portugal and Brazil

Francisco Bethencourt
41

PART
II The

Rise
of
Public Political Culture:
The Efflorescence of Civil Society and its
Connection to State Reform
5

Rethinking Enlightened Reform in a French Context

John Shovlin
Searching for a Middle Class? Francesco Mario Pagano and the

Public for Reform in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples
Melissa Calaresu*
47
63
vi
Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies
The Spanish Monarchy and the Uses of Jesuit Historiography in the

Dispute of the New World
83
Vctor Peralta Ruiz
8 Conceiving Central America: A Bourbon Public in the

Gazeta de Guatemala (17971807)

Jordana Dym*
9 Montesquieus Persian Letters and Reading Practices in the
Luso-Brazilian World (17501802)

Luiz Carlos Villalta*
99
119

PART
III The

State
as
an
Incubator
of
Enlightenment and an Engine of Reform
10 In the House of Reform: The Bourbon Court of

Eighteenth-Century Spain

Charles C. Noel
11 Legal Despotism and Enlightened Reform in the les du Vent:

The Colonial Governments of Chevalier de Mirabeau and
Mercier de la Rivire, 17541764

Pernille Rge
12

The Coming of Enlightened Reform in Bourbon Peru:

Secularization of the Doctrinas de indios, 17461773
Kenneth J. Andrien
13

The Savoyard State: Another Enlightened Despotism?

Christopher Storrs*
14 Derecho Indiano vs. the Bourbon Reforms:

The Legal Philosophy of Francisco Xavier de Gamboa

Christopher Peter Albi*
145
167
183
203
229

PART
IV Political
Economy
and the
Reform
of
Society and the State
15

The Sultans Republic: Jealousy of Trade and Oriental

Despotism in Paolo Mattia Doria
Sophus A. Reinert
253
Contents
16 Observing the Neighbours: Fiscal Reform and Transnational

Debates in France after the Seven Years War

Florian Schui
17

vii
271
The Proud Epithet of Enlightened: Ferdinando Galiani and the

Neapolitan Debate on Colonies, Commerce and Conquest 287
Koen Stapelbroek

PART
V The Limits
of
Enlightened
Reform
18

The Limits of Reform in Spanish America

Manuel Lucena-Giraldo*
307
19 Pombals Government: Between Seventeenth-Century Valido and

Enlightened Models
321

Nuno Gonalo Monteiro
20 Enlightened Reform after Independence: Simn Bolvars
Bolivian Constitution

Matthew Brown*
21

339
Jos da Silva Lisboa and the Vicissitudes of Enlightened Reform in

Brazil, 17981824
361
Gabriel Paquette*
Index
389
This page has been left blank intentionally
Acknowledgments
This volume has emerged from the paper presentations, discussions, and
debates which took place during the Enlightened Reform in Southern
Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 17501830 workshop that was held at
Trinity College, Cambridge in December 2007. In addition to the scholars
whose essays are published in this volume, a significant number of historians
generously participated in the workshop proceedings as speakers, discussants,
chairs, or interrogators from the audience. The ideas, concepts, and arguments
contained in this volume would be considerably weaker were it not for their
indispensable involvement. These historians are: Professor Derek Beales,
Professor Tim Blanning, Professor David Brading, Professor Paul Cheney,
Professor Richard Drayton, Professor Sir John H. Elliott, Ms. Carrie Gibson,
Dr. Maurizio Isabella, Professor Kenneth Maxwell, Professor Anthony
McFarlane, Dr. William Nelson, Dr. William OReilly, Dr. Joan-Pau Rubis,
and Professor Hamish Scott.
Many material debts were assumed during the course of both the
development and the completion of the project. Several institutions in
Cambridge generously sponsored the workshop at which this volume of
essays was conceived: the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences,
and Humanities (CRASSH), the Programme on Exchanges of Economic and
Political Ideas since 1760 based at the Centre for History and Economics
(Kings College), Trinity College, the Faculty of Historys G.M. Trevelyan
Fund, and the Centre of Latin American Studies. Beyond the Fens, the
Royal Historical Society and the British Academy offered crucial material
assistance. In addition, several of these organizations offered other forms
of valuable assistance. CRASSH provided the main venue for the meeting
and also lent its formidable logistical support to the project. The Master,
fellows, and staff of Trinity College provided workshop participants with
splendid and undoubtedly memorable hospitality. The Centre for History
and Economics sponsored, designed, and hosted a marvellous workshop
website. The support of several individuals was crucial to the projects success
and they deserve special mention: Professor David Armitage, Professor Tim
Blanning, Mrs. Hansa Chauhan, Professor Richard Drayton, Ms. Sarah
Horal, Ms. Catherine Hurley, Mr. James Lees, Ms. Inga Huld Markan,
Ms. Michelle Maciejewska, Professor Cecilia Miller, Dr. Chris Morley,
Dr. William OReilly, Professor Vijay and Mrs. Jennifer Pinch, Ms. Amy Price,
Professor Michael Proctor, Dr. Rod Pullen, Dr. Pedro Ramos Pinto, Mr. Ian
Reinhardt, Ms. Johanna Bard Richlin, Professor Emma Rothschild, Dr. David
Todd, Mr. Brian Trow, and Mr. Tony Weir. I also thank my former students at
Harvard University who survived my seminar Reform and its Discontents in
the Southern Atlantic World and, more importantly, enthusiastically engaged
with the historiography of enlightened reform.
As editor, I extend my appreciation to Professor Philippa Levine and
Dr. John Marriot for selecting this volume for publication in the Empires
and the Making of the Modern World, 16502000 series and for their kind,
eminently helpful suggestions and guidance at each stage of this process.
Mr. Tom Gray and Mrs. Emily Ruskell of Ashgate have been extraordinarily
patient and I appreciate their timely assistance and sage counsel. I also offer
my gratitude to the two anonymous, expert peer reviewers for their astute,
thorough comments and criticism which improved the volume immensely,
not least my own essays.
The publication of this book has been made possible by a grant from the
Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research
(University of London). The College Council of Trinity College provided
a further subvention which enhanced additional features of the books
production. I thank both the Scouloudi Foundation and Trinity College for
their generous support of this project.
I thank the contributors to this volume for believing in the project from
its inaugural stirrings until its completion and, most importantly, for offering
such stimulating essays for publication. They have made the task of editing
this book both a joy and a memorable intellectual experience.
Gabriel Paquette
Cambridge, Massachusetts
21 September 2009
Christopher Peter Albi teaches Latin American history at Trinity University
in San Antonio, Texas. He received his B.A. from the University of Manitoba,
his law degree from the University of Toronto, and his Ph.D. in 2009 from
the University of Texas at Austin. His current research interest is legal culture
in colonial Mexico.
Kenneth J. Andrien is Humanities Distinguished Professor in History at
Ohio State University. He received his B.A. at Trinity College and his M.A.
and Ph.D. degrees at Duke University. He is the author or editor of six books
and numerous articles dealing with the Spanish American Empire, focusing
primarily on the Andean region.
Francisco Bethencourt is currently Charles Boxer Professor of History at
Kings College London. He was director of the National Library of Portugal
(19961998) and director of the Gulbenkian Foundation Cultural Centre
in Paris (19992004). He taught at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (1982
1998). He obtained his Ph.D. at the European University Institute, Florence
(1992). He co-edited Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 14001800 (2007) and
Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 14001700 (2007). His
main publications are LInquisition lpoque moderne. Espagne, Portugal et
Italie, XVeXIXe sicles (1995, followed by Portuguese, Brazilian and Spanish
editions, plus a forthcoming English edition), and as co-editor Histria da
Expanso Portuguesa, 5 vols (19981999). He is currently working on the
history of race relations and racism in the Atlantic world, 15001800.
Matthew Brown is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University
of Bristol, the editor of Simn Bolvar: The Bolivarian Revolution (2009) and
Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital (2008),
and the author of Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simn Bolvar,
Foreign Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations (2006). Before Bristol he
held fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence and the
Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville.
xii
Melissa Calaresu is the Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History at Gonville and

Caius College, Cambridge. She has published on historical writing, the Grand
Tour, and the public sphere in Naples and is currently writing a cultural history
of the Neapolitan enlightenment.
Jorge Caizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History
at University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of How to Write the History of
the New World (2001); Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic 1550
1700 (2006); Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science
in the Iberian World (2006); and (co-edited with Erik Seeman) The Atlantic
in Global History, 15002000 (2006). He has been the recipient of several
prestigious fellowships and book awards.
Jordana Dym is associate professor of History and Director of Latin American
Studies at Skidmore College, and author of From Sovereign Villages to National
States: City, State and Federation in Central America, 17591838 (2006), and
articles in journals including Mesoamrica, Hispanic American Historical
Review, and The Americas. She is co-editor of Politics, Economy and Society in
Bourbon Central America (with C. Belaubre, 2007), Napolon et les Amriques
(with C. Belaubre and J. Savage, 2008) and Mapping Latin America; Space and
Society, 14922000 (with K. Offen, 2010).
Manuel Lucena-Giraldo is Research Fellow at the Spanish Council for
Scientific Research (C.S.I.C.) and currently is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard
University. He previously was a Visiting Fellow at the Venezuela Institute for
Research (I.V.I.C.) as well as a Visiting Professor at Tufts University (Boston),
Javeriana University (Bogot), St Antonys College (Oxford), and the Colegio
de Mxico (Mexico City). His publications include a number of books on
eighteenth-century Spanish American scientific expeditions. He was the
editor of Historiography of European Empires, published as part of the series
Debate y Perspectivas (2002). He is also the author of A los cuatro vientos. Las
ciudades de la Amrica hispnica (2006) and Ciudades y Leyendas. Un recorrido
por la historia de Espaa a travs de sus relatos urbanos (2007). His most recent
book is Naciones de rebeldes. Las revoluciones de independencia latinoamericanas
(2010).
Nuno Gonalo Monteiro is Senior Research Coordinator at the Institute of
Social Sciences (I.C.S.), University of Lisbon. He obtained his Ph.D. at the
Universidade Nova de Lisboa (1995). His main recent publications include
O Crepsculo dos Grandes. A Casa e o Patrimnio da Aristocracia em Portugal
(17501834) (2 edn, 2003), D. Jos. Na sombra de Pombal (Lisbon, 2006),
xiii
Nobility and Aristocracy in Ancin Rgime Portugal, in H.M. Scott (ed.),

The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2nd edn
(2006), and Elites e Poder, 2nd edn (2007). He is also co-editor of ptima
Pars. Elites Ibero-Americanas do Antigo Regime (2005), Poder e movilidad
social. Cortesanos, religiosos y oligarquias en la Pennsula Ibrica (siglos XVXIX)
(Madrid, 2006) and O Terramoto de 1755. Impactos histricos (2007). He is
currently the editor of the volume on the early modern period of The History
of Private Life in Portugal.
Charles C. Noel, F.R.H.S., received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton
University where he taught before moving on to Columbia University and for
many years at Thames Valley University in London. He has published articles
in the American Historical Review, and a number of other American, British,
French and Spanish journals on his specialty of eighteenth-century Spanish
culture and politics. He is preparing a book on the Spanish enlightenment
and teaches for Syracuse and New York Universities in London.
Gabriel Paquette is Junior Research Fellow in History at Trinity College,
University of Cambridge. He has held visiting teaching appointments at
Wesleyan University and Harvard University. His monograph, Enlightenment,
Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 17591808, was published
in 2008. His articles have appeared in the Historical Journal, the Journal of
Latin American Studies, European History Quarterly and the Bulletin of Spanish
Studies.
Vctor Peralta Ruiz is a researcher at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Cientficas (C.S.I.C.) in Madrid. His research interests include Spanish
bureaucracy, Peruvian Enlightenment, and the political culture in the Hispanic
World. His most recent book is Patrones, clientes y amigos. El poder burocrtico
indiano en la Espaa del siglo XVIII (2006). He is editor of Eptome cronolgico
o idea general del Per. Crnica indita de 1776 (2005).
Sophus A. Reinert is a Junior Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College,
Cambridge. His research and publications focus on intellectual, economic,
and political history from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. He is
currently completing a monograph on international competition, emulation,
and the translation of political economy in early modern Europe and its
colonies. He has been a Carl Schurz Fellow at the University of Erfurt and a
Fellow of the Einaudi Foundation in Turin.
xiv
John Robertson teaches history at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow

of St Hughs College. He recently published The Case for the Enlightenment.
Scotland and Naples 16801760 (2005), a comparative study which argues
that the two countries experienced a common process of Enlightenment.
Earlier, he worked on the debates and political thought associated with the
Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, editing A Union for Empire. Political Thought
and the British Union of 1707 (1995), and Andrew Fletcher: The Political Works
(1997).
Pernille Rge is Lecturer and Research Fellow in history at Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge. Her research interests include European colonial and
intellectual history in the early modern period. Her work has appeared in History
of European Ideas and Annali della Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.
Emma Rothschild is the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at
Harvard University, and Director of the Centre for History and Economics at
Kings College, Cambridge and Harvard. She is author of Economic Sentiments:
Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment.
Florian Schui is Lecturer in Modern European History at Royal Holloway,
University of London. His research interests include the history of political
and economic ideas and economic history. His latest publication is the volume
Global Debates about Taxation (co-edited with Holger Nehring).
John Shovlin is an associate professor of history at New York University,
where he teaches courses on eighteenth-century European society, politics and
culture. He is the author of The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism,
and the Origins of the French Revolution (2005).
Koen Stapelbroek is a Dutch Academy researcher at Erasmus University
Rotterdam and visiting fellow of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and published
Love, Self-Deceit and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan
Enlightenment (2008).
Christopher Storrs is Reader in Modern History at the University of Dundee.
He is the author of War, Diplomacy & the Rise of Savoy 16901720 (1999)
and The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy 16651700 (2006). He has
published widely on seventeenth and eighteenth century European history,
and is currently preparing a study of the resurgence of Spain as a power in
xv
the western Mediterranean and Italy in the generation after the War of the
Spanish Succession.
Luiz Carlos Villalta is a professor of History at the Universidade Federal de
Minas Gerais (U.F.M.G.). He received his doctorate in Social History from
the Universidade de So Paulo. His research interests include: censorship,
libraries, reading practices and political movements in the Luso-Brazilian
world in the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Named a Productivity Scholar by the Brazilian National Council of Scientific
Development (CNPq), he participated in the research project Ways of the
Novel in Brazil 18th and 19th Centuries (Caminhos do Romance no Brasil
Sculos XVIII e XIX; http://www.caminhosdoromance.iel.unicamp.br), coedited the book As Minas Setecentistas (2 vols, 2007), and wrote 17891808:
O Imprio Luso-Brasileiro e os Brasis (2000), in addition to authoring many
chapters, articles and essays in a variety of scholarly journals and books
published in Brazil, Portugal, Spain and France.
Series Editors Foreword

The rich collection of essays Gabriel Paquette has assembled here offer some
challenging ways to consider the question of colonial modernity that lies at
the heart of what this series hopes to achieve. Paquette and his contributors
suggest that perhaps we might look to a period (the eighteenth century)
and a place (Southern Europe and its colonial possessions) not always at the
forefront when questions of modernity are scrutinised.
It is this volumes contention that the contours of both the intellectual
and the political history of the eighteenth century will be enhanced if we
encompass the more traditional category of enlightened despotism (or
enlightened absolutism) within that of enlightened reform. The consideration
of this new category through the lens of Southern Europe and Ibero-America
productively disrupts existing paradigms, both through its concentration on
an arena beyond Western Europe and by its focus on colonial rather than
metropolitan or domestic rule.
No one perusing this volume of essays can fail to be impressed by its sheer
ambition, for in their various ways the contributors invite us to reconsider
the contours of the Atlantic world in the long eighteenth century. This is not
merely a question of shifting the centre of gravity from Northern and Central
Europe to the neglected South, or of expanding conventional periodizations,
but of rethinking the Age of Revolution itself.
Historians have tended to condemn Spain, Portugal, and Italy as enlightened
despotisms or absolutisms, largely because of their putative resistance to
Enlightenment thought, and/or their egregious record of imperial expansion.
And the British, mindful of the example of early Iberian colonialism, forged
liberal conceptions of empire which drew heavily upon Enlightenment
thought. The notion of enlightened reform necessarily complicates this
rather too convenient typology for it suggests that the monarchical states of
Southern Europe were more amenable to Enlightenment ideas than we have
supposed. This porosity was facilitated by the complex diplomatic, cultural and
intellectual networks of the European Atlantic, and by the shared experience
of overseas empires, which promoted and sustained exchanges of ideas on
vital issues such as commerce, freedom, citizenship, slavery and governance.
Indeed, it is on the understanding that the French Atlantic was interlinked
xviii
with other European empires to a far greater extent than the British Atlantic
in the eighteenth century, that France is also included in the agenda.
Such perspectives open up exciting avenues of inquiry for historians, for at
stake here is the integrity of the notion of the European Enlightenment, the
geopolitics of modernization, and therefore the periodization of modernity. In
the longer term, we can dare to imagine that by integrating also the experience
of European expansion to the East a yet more complete and satisfying account
of colonial modernity will emerge.
Posing the larger question of what shapes politics and policy, these
diverse essays which bring into focus hitherto neglected sites for studying
eighteenth-century politics draw out the webs and threads which linked
Southern Europe and its empires through cross-national collaboration and
an increasingly international cultural capital. Bringing together the strands
of political, cultural and imperial history, Paquettes volume pushes the
boundaries for both metropolitan and imperial histories in intriguing ways.
Philippa Levine and John Marriott
INTRODUCTION
Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe

and its Atlantic Colonies in the
Long Eighteenth Century
Gabriel Paquette*
Efforts to ascertain the influence of enlightenment thought on state action,

particularly government reform, in the long eighteenth century have
provoked stimulating, still-unresolved scholarly quarrels. Generations of
historians have grappled with the often-elusive intersections of enlightenment
and absolutism, of intellectual currents and government policy, of political
philosophy and statecraft. To what extent, and in what manner, did emergent
political and economic concepts penetrate the consciousness of monarchs,
ministers, and royal councilors and, subsequently, influence the fiscal and
administrative reform programmes inaugurated by many European states
*I thank Derek Beales (University of Cambridge), Alexander Grab (University of
Maine), Tim Hochstrasser (London School of Economics), Darrin McMahon (Florida
State University), and H.M. Scott (University of Glasgow) for their detailed, insightful,
and useful comments on earlier drafts of this introductory essay. I further acknowledge
the generosity of Trinity College, Cambridge for the material support that made this
collaborative project possible.

In this introduction, the term enlightened reform serves to encompass the
more familiar concepts of enlightened absolutism and enlightened despotism. In this
volume, these two terms are considered to be facets, components, or sub-sets of the more
expansive, malleable category of enlightened reform. Derek Beales offers an illuminating
discussion of the earliest usages of enlightened despotism in his Enlightenment and
Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London and New York, 2005); formal discussion of
enlightened reform in contemporary historiography may be dated from Michel Lhritier,
Le Rle Historique du Despotisme clair, Particulirement au XVIIIe Sicle, Bulletin
of the International Committee of the Historical Sciences, 1 (1928): 60112 passim. and his
Rapport Gnral: le Despotisme clair, de Frdric II la Rvolution Franaise, Bulletin
of the International Committee of the Historical Sciences, 9 (1937): 185225.
in the long eighteenth century? And how were these new policies, and the
ideas that underpinned them, interpreted and implemented by magistrates,
intendants, and other agents of local government? The conclusions reached
by historians who have researched these types of questions have been wideranging and hotly contested. Some scholars even cast doubt on the claim
that government policy was affected at all by enlightenment thought, no
matter how this capacious category is defined. They portray the apparatuses
of political power as hostile or at least impervious to, instead of permeated
and shaped by, new currents of thought. Enlightened reform, then, is hardly
an ossified concept, but rather one whose features and contours continue to
arouse fierce debate in contemporary scholarship.
The essays in this volume reappraise the utility of enlightened reform, a
term which encompasses and subsumes the well-established sub-categories of
enlightened absolutism and enlightened despotism, as an organizing concept
for the study of Southern Europe states and their Atlantic empires in the
period 17501830. This type of analysis has rarely occurred in a systematic
way. It has, perhaps, been assumed that models based on the evidence from
certain regions are applicable universally. The lions share of the existing
scholarship has considered the concept of enlightened reform in the context of
developments in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Southern Europe,
let alone Portuguese, Spanish, and French America, has largely been ignored
or relegated to the historiographical periphery. This tendency undoubtedly
For an indispensable review of the historiography of enlightened absolutism,
see H.M. Scott, The Problem of Enlightened Absolutism, in Scott (ed.), Enlightened
Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Late Eighteenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke, 1990).

In the case of Spain, for example, one historian adhering to this view is Francisco
Snchez Blanco, particularly his El Absolutismo y las Luces en el Reinado de Carlos III
(Madrid, 2002).

In addition to the essays and bibliographical references in H.M. Scotts edited
volume, see, for example, Derek Beales, Joseph II: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741
1780 (Cambridge, 1987); and Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police-State: Social and
Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia (New Haven and London,
1983).

Though Southern Europe and its Atlantic colonies have been largely marginalized
in historiography, there is no paucity of books which engage with the concept in one
form or another. Among the most outstanding are: Richard Herr, The Eighteenth Century
Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958); Franco Venturi, Settecento Riformatore (5 vols,
Turin, 196990); D.A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico (Cambridge,
1971); Kenneth Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal 17501808
(Cambridge, 1973) and Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge,
1995); Carlo Capra, Il Settecento, in Capra and Domenico Sella (eds), Il Ducato di Milano
Introduction
reflects long-cherished assumptions about the enlightenment itself. As Carla

Hesse has noted,
the geography of the advance of the enlightenment thus mirrored that of modernity
itself, producing a cultural landscape with advanced and backward areas of Europe,
with leader nations and follower nations the story of the triumph of light over
darkness was a story of diffusion from a Western European core to the peripheries of
the continent and beyond.
The absence of studies that integrate the histories of European states and
their overseas colonies, too, is glaring. In particular, few historians have sought
to show how European and ultramarine reforms were fundamentally, and
inextricably, linked and how the rhythm, direction, and scope of metropolitan
reform was influenced, often decisively, by colonial affairs. The unfortunate
result of both the prevailing consensus concerning the enlightenments
diffusion from core to periphery and the Europe-centered approach to
reform has been to shroud, discard, or portray as anomalous many aspects of
the Southern European and extra-European past.
This volume aims to redress these imbalances and to fill these lacunae by
presenting a series of case studies that bring Southern Europe and its Atlantic
colonies both under the same analytical lens and fully into the historiographical
mainstream. As a result, the contributors to this volume seek to broaden and
dal 1535 al 1796 (Turin, 1984); Giuseppe Galasso, La Filosofa in Soccorso de Governi:
La Cultura Napoletana del Settecento (Naples, 1989); Anthony McFarlane, Colombia Before
Independence (Cambridge, 1993); and Jos Lus Cardoso (ed.), A Economia Poltica e os
Dilemas do Imprio Luso-Brasileiro (17901822) (Lisbon, 2001).

Carla Hesse, Towards a New Topography of Enlightenment, European Review
of History, 13:3 (2006): 500; As Richard Butterwick has pointed out, those who ignore
the enlightenment on the periphery may run the risk of missing important aspects of the
enlightenment as a whole: a flash of light can be disorienting, even blinding at its source.
Projected, refracted and filtered, light can be clearer, and its effects more easily analyzed,
at a distance, from the peripheries of the illuminated space. See Butterwick, Peripheries
of Enlightenment: an Introduction, in Butterwick, Simon Davies and Gabriel SnchezEspinosa (eds), Peripheries of the Enlightenment Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth
Century (Oxford, 2008), p. 6.

The exceptions, of course, are notable: Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution
in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, 2006); Jorge Caizares-Esguerra, How to Write the
History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century
Atlantic World (Stanford, 2001); Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies; Stanley J. Stein and
Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern
Europe (Baltimore and London, 2000) and Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the
Age of Charles III, 17591789 (Baltimore and London, 2003).
reinvigorate a long-running scholarly discussion of the connections tenuous

and robust, explicit and subterranean between enlightenment thought and
government reform in the long eighteenth century. The scope and contours
of enlightened reform must be adjusted in order to accommodate atypical,
unfamiliar, or divergent conditions and factors, many arising from the peculiar
conditions wrought by colonialism or the vast gulf separating social and
economic conditions in Southern Europe from the rest of the Continent.
The relative neglect of Southern Europe and its Atlantic colonies in histories
of enlightened reform is not, however, a hackneyed, facile case of regional
chauvinism, of the Norths dismissive attitude toward the South. Historians
of Spain, Portugal, and Italy, let alone those of Ibero-America, with notable
exceptions, have done little to engage with their Northern counterparts. They
have not devised alternative conceptual frameworks that are genuinely panEuropean or transoceanic in scope. The rise of Atlantic History, fortunately,
affords an opening for historians of both the Americas and Europe to enter
into a common dialogue.10 The contributors to this volume have seized
the opportunity to demonstrate that Europe and the Americas, far from
The way that Neapolitan reformers and political writers grappled with the
persistence of feudalism is a good example of this divergence between Southern and
Central-Northern Europe and the intellectual challenges posed by this gap. John Robertson
has deftly summarized the matter: Even if the Neapolitans were far from peripheral to
the enlightenment in the eighteenth century, there is, nevertheless, a sense in which they
encountered in the feudal system a social and political reality at the margin, or extremity,
of European experience, and found the resources of enlightenment political economy
inadequate to the task of its comprehension. See Robertson, Political Economy and
the Feudal System in Enlightenment Naples: Outline of a Problem, in Butterwick et
al., Peripheries of the Enlightenment, p. 85; Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando LpezAlves have made a complimentary point in a very different context: the local should help
to define the supposedly universal the practically monopolistic position of a set of
Western European and North American cases within the comparative historical canon has
reduced the scope of possible comparisons. It has removed potentially critical variables
from the analysis. See the Introduction to their edited volume The Other Mirror: Grand
Theory through the Lens of Latin America (Princeton, 2001), pp. 7, 13.

John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New 14921650 (Cambridge, 1970) and
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 14921830 (New Haven and
London, 2006); Kenneth Maxwell, The Atlantic in the Eighteenth Century: A Southern
Perspective on the Need to Return to the Big Picture, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 6th series, 3 (1993): 20936.
10
For an overview of the divergent trends in the historiography of the Atlantic
World, see William OReilly, Genealogies of Atlantic History, Atlantic Studies, 1:1 (2004):
6684. On the pitfalls and opportunities presented by Atlantic (and comparative) History,
see Elliotts masterly introduction to Empires of the Atlantic World, esp. xvixviii.
Introduction
being two self-contained political and cultural worlds in the long eighteenth
century, can only be understood fully when their histories are fused.
Treating Southern Europe and its overseas appendages as a single unit of
analysis is not a choice guided solely by geographic and linguistic convenience.
It rather reflects the prevalence of shared assumptions, as well as common
threads, connecting the European states and ultramarine territories to one
another. A broad consensus existed in Southern Europe. As Derek Beales has
argued, a system in which the monarch possessed the full legislative power,
under whatever name, was widely regarded as the best form of government
and the best hope of securing rational reforms.11 In addition to this shared
conviction, there were at least three types of links that make comparative
study both possible and fruitful. The first type was dynastic and diplomatic.
For example, not only did the Bourbons sit on the thrones of France, Naples
and Spain, but Charles III of Spain had ruled at Naples for twenty-five years
before moving to Madrid in 1759.12 Even after his accession to the Spanish
throne, Charles brought many of his Neapolitan advisors with him to Madrid
and remained in constant communication with Bernardo Tanucci, his former
chief advisor in Naples.13 The so-called Family Compact between Bourbon
monarchs of Spain and France, concluded in 1761, was a factor in the final
phase of the Seven Years War and then again during the American War of
Independence (17751783).14 Furthermore, the ministers of Portugal, Spain,
France, Naples, and Parma collaborated intimately in the expulsion of the
Jesuits from their respective states, both American and European, in the 1750s
and 1760s and cooperated as they sought the Societys suppression.15 These
episodes, and others, suggest an elevated level of interaction, cooperation,
and mutual influence on both the spheres of international diplomacy and
domestic policy making.
Derek Beales, Philosophical Kingship and Enlightened Despotism, in Mark
Goldie and Robert Wokler (eds), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political
Thought (Cambridge, 2006), p. 522.
12
Anna Maria Rao, Carlos de Borbn en Npoles, Trienio: Ilustracin y Liberalismo
[Madrid], 24 (1994): 541.
13
On Tanucci, see the special issue Bernardo Tanucci. La Corte, Il Paese, 1730
1780: Atti del Convegno. Catania 1012 Oct. 1985, Archivio Storico per la Siciliana
Orientale [Catania], 84 (1988).
14
H.M. Scott, The Birth of the Great Power System, 17401815 (Harlow, 2006), esp.
chs 4, 8.
15
H.M. Scott, Religion and Realpolitik: The Duc de Choiseul, the Bourbon Family
Compact, and the Attack on the Society of Jesus, 17581775, International History
Review, 25:1 (2003): 3762.
11
The second set of connections linking the kingdoms of Southern Europe in

the eighteenth century were cultural and intellectual. The mutual influence of
the visual arts, opera, and political economy in Spain and Naples, for example,
is well documented.16 Tiepolo painted frescos at royal palaces both in Caserta,
near Naples, and in Madrid. Economic and agricultural societies sprang up
across Europe and quickly became enthusiastic disseminators of scientific
and other varieties of useful knowledge across state borders.17 Individuals,
like ideas, frequently crossed state boundaries in the service of enlightenment
and reform. The Padua-born Domenico Vandelli (17351816), for example,
became director of the royal botanical garden in Lisbon and proved
instrumental in the scientific expeditions sent to Portuguese America in the
latter decades of the eighteenth century.18 Furthermore, as several of the essays
in this collection make clear, emulation and the patriotic cosmopolitanism
spawned by rivalry among these states influenced many aspects of public life,
from historiography to political economy.19
The third variety of connection is the common experience of overseas
empire, which raised an analogous, though not identical, set of questions in the
ultramarine dominions of Spain, Portugal and France. In fact, the persistence
of Frances colonial ambitions in the Americas during the decades following
the Seven Years War is one of chief justifications for Frances inclusion in a
volume devoted to Southern Europe and its Atlantic colonies.20 Furthermore,
Franco Venturi, Spanish and Italian Economists and Reformers in the Eighteenth
Century, in Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century (New
York, 1972); and Niccol Guasti, Claroscuros de la Fortuna de Camponanes en la Italia
de la Ilustracin, in Dolores Mateos Dorado (ed.), Campomanes, Doscientos Aos Despus
(Oviedo, 2003).
17
For an overview of these and other related themes, see Tim Blanning, The Pursuit
of Glory: Europe 16481815 (London, 2007), esp. chs 4, 8, 9, 10.
18
Jos Lus Cardoso, From Natural History to Political Economy: the Enlightened
Mission of Domenico Vandelli in late Eighteenth-Century Portugal, Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science, 34:4 (2003): 781803.
19
Caizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World and his chapter
Eighteenth-Century Spanish Political Economy: Epistemology and Decline, in Nature,
Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford,
2006), pp. 96111; and Allan Kuethe and Lowell Blaisdell, French Influence and the
Origins of Bourbon Colonial Reorganization, Hispanic American Historical Review, 71:3
(1991): 579607.
20
As Emma Rothschild has observed, the post-1763 French administration was
preoccupied with the colonial relationships of the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean,
considering the Kourou colony (French Guiana) as a means to console the nation for the
loss of Canada, and to provide a continental base for an eventual war of retribution against
16
Introduction
the Iberian states and France often came into prolonged and extensive contact
where colonial affairs and oceanic commerce were involved. Not only did
French merchants exercise remarkable influence in Cdiz, Spains chief
maritime port,21 but Bordelais slavers would also insinuate themselves in the
littorals of Portuguese-claimed Mozambique and Angola.22 More generally,
France and the Iberian states were forced to meet the following challenges:
colonial administration and far-flung economies built around the extraction
of precious metals and export-oriented commodities; the accommodation of
indigenous peoples and a rising tide of discontent; the slave trade, chattel
slavery and the spectre of revolt; autonomy-seeking colonists of European
descent; the regulation of oceanic commerce and emigration schemes; and
clashes arising from contact between free-wheeling merchants of diverse flags
in distant precincts of the earth. Policy-makers in European states without
empires, with certain crucial exceptions, could avoid such subjects.23
No single historian, working alone, could write a history that did justice
to the complex issues involved in studying the intersection of enlightenment
ideas and policy-making in Ibero-America, Brazil, France, Italy, Portugal, and
Spain in the long eighteenth century. The chronological and geographical
breadth, social and economic complexity, and political heterogeneity
appear to conspire to frustrate efforts at generalization across national and
geographical boundaries, thus accelerating the trend toward historiographical
fragmentation. Local factors and conditions, of course, exercised a powerful
influence. Historians must appreciate the local adaptation of cosmopolitan
themes and regional needs and traditions.24 Notwithstanding this recognition,
the contributors to this volume have sought to identify and describe patterns,
the English. She concludes that there were indeed innumerable connections between the
oceanic or colonial world and the interior France, see Rothschild, A Horrible Tragedy in
the French Atlantic, Past & Present, 192 (2006): 69, 71, 107.
21
Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, esp. ch 10.
22
Richard Drayton, The Globalisation of France: Provincial Cities and French
Expansion, c. 15001800, History of European Ideas, 34 (2008): 429.
23
Though it would be intriguing to consider to what extent policies in the Atlantic
colonies of Portugal, France and Spain resembled the new territories within Europe,
particularly Corsica and, after 17723, Galicia. Furthermore, it could be fruitful to
examine the similar features of population expansion schemes pursued in places like
Patagonia not only with the Nuevas Poblaciones of Southern Spain, but also together
with the internal colonization initiatives undertaken in Catherine the Greats Russia. I
am grateful to Professor H.M. Scott for pushing me to think along these lines. Personal
communication with the author, 12 August 2008.
24
Till Wahnbaeck, Luxury and Public Happiness: Political Economy in the Italian
Enlightenment (Oxford, 2004), p. 193.
matrices, tendencies, and dynamics which transcend regional, national,

oceanic, linguistic, and chronological boundaries. This effort to move above
national context25 makes it exigent to organize the volume along thematic,
not geographic, lines.
Before describing the structure and content of the book, however, let me
first try to allay the potential methodological anxiety it may provoke. Among
the most salient of the possible questions are: to what extent may a concept
developed in one context (national, geographical, chronological) be applied
without modification in another? Does stretching a concept to incorporate
distinctive factors dilute its explanatory potency?26 Specifically, does the
refurbishment of the concept of enlightened reform, compelling its integration
of rather unfamiliar phenomena from Southern Europe and the New World,
result in unwieldy vagueness and incoherence? Should enlightened reform be
overhauled so that data culled from such contexts becomes central instead
of ancillary, imitative, or heterodox in relation to it?27 Or should historians
of Southern Europe and its Atlantic colonies embrace exceptionalism and
develop their own frameworks with little regard for the organizing concepts
that structure the broader continental European historiography? As the essays
amply demonstrate, the contributors are not oblivious to the perils hazarded
by such approaches. There may be some institutions for example, slavery
which are peculiar to colonial contexts and simply diverge too radically from
the continental European experience to make comparison worthwhile.
The incorporation of the colonial, in addition to the metropolitan, theatre
into the framework of enlightened reform raises further nettlesome questions,
some of which are addressed, both indirectly and directly, by the contributors
to this volume. Among the most crucial are: to what degree did enlightened
reform, particularly in its Iberian and French manifestations, emerge from or
reflect the colonial experience? Recent scholarship has suggested the impact of
In this sense, they follow the lead, whether consciously or not, of John Robertsons
trail-blazing article The Enlightenment above National Context. Political Economy in
Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Naples, The Historical Journal, 40 (1997): 66797.
26
In considering this idea, I endorse the conclusion reached by David Cohen
and James Mahon, who argue that an overly strict applications of classical principles of
categorization can lead to the premature abandonment of potentially useful categories
[this can be avoided] by adopting techniques that do not depend on the assumption
that members of a category share a full set of defining attributes. See their Conceptual
Stretching Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis, American Political
Science Review, 87:4 (1993): 852.
27
The questions enumerated in this paragraph are informed by Jorge CaizaresEsguerras provocative analysis of the dominant paradigms in Atlantic History. See his Puritan
Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 15501700 (Stanford, 2006), esp. pp. 2313.
25
Introduction
the Americas on the refashioning (and even genesis) of fundamental European

concepts, including citizenship in the case of the Spanish Atlantic World
and republicanism in the French Caribbean.28 Might styles of rule, modes
of governance, and the relation between political writers and the framing
of policy have been shaped by similar pressures? In short, was enlightened
reform something which had more than a casual connection with colonial
institutions and the conditions wrought by empire? If so, should the concept
of enlightened reform be recast in light of this recognized link? One of
this volumes intended contributions to the existing scholarship, then, is to
re-formulate, in a preliminary way, the concept of enlightened reform to
reflect a full engagement with overseas empire and ultramarine institutions
after the end of the Seven Years War in 1763.29
Yet as much as enlightened reform must respond to the challenge posed
by the incorporation of the extra-European world, so must this revamped
understanding of the category respond afresh to the formidable criticism
to which its earlier iterations were subjected. Leo Gershoy contended that
definitions of enlightened absolutism break against the profusion of its
contradictory strivings and its incompatible realization.30 Both enlightened
absolutism and despotism were dismissed by M.S. Anderson as little more
than a set of theories and aspirations which lent an intellectual veneer to
Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain
and Spanish America (New Haven and London, 2003); Laurent Dubois has rightly argued
that to understand the Atlantic as an integrated intellectual space is the only way
to destabilize the still strong, at times seemingly unmovable, presumption that Europe
and European colonists were the exclusive agents of democratic theory. Instead we might
understand more about the complex and contradictory inheritances of the enlightenment if
we explore the possibility that it was crafted not only in Europe but also in the Caribbean.
See Dubois, An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the
French Atlantic, Social History, 31:1 (2006): 7.
29
One of the major contributions of scholarship informed by postcolonial theory has
been to reveal that metropolitan ambitions were never unilaterally imposed in colonies. As
Gyan Prakash argues, colonial categories were never instituted without their dislocation
and transformation colonial power [was] a form of transaction and translation. See
Prakash, After Colonialism, in Prakash (ed.), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and
Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton, 1995), p. 3; on the relevance of postcolonialism to
Latin America, see Fernando Coronil, Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global
Decolonization, in Neil Lazarus (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary
Studies (Cambridge, 2004).
30
Leo Gershoy, From Despotism to Revolution 17631789 (New York, 1944),
p. 318.
28
10
policies which were seldom genuinely new and frequently selfish.31 These
appraisals undoubtedly have presented a challenge to which earlier generations
of historians were compelled to respond.
H.M. Scott has argued convincingly that the Enlightenment should be
interpreted as the intellectual context within which political reforms were
fashioned, not the direct inspiration of specific legislative acts. Enlightened
reform, in Scotts view, is a matter of mental attitudes, not of trying to plant
physiocratic doctrines in foreign soils.32 Furthermore, as Alexander Grab
has shown, many different strands of enlightenment thought were often
commingled, thus complicating the identification of particular influences in
the making of policy.33 These insights serve as a point of departure for the
contributors to this volume. A more flexible approach to enlightened reform
does not demand that the historian identify an exact, discernible trace of a
particular tract of political philosophy on a discrete policy measure. Nor does
it necessitate identifying the direct influence of an individual monarch in the
pursuit of specific reform initiatives, though many examples of this sort could
be found.34 It rather encourages the reconstruction of the broad intellectual
milieux in which both texts and policies were produced.
Yet even as the enlightenments relation to reform has been revised,
historians have come to disagree about the nature of the enlightenment itself.
As a monolithic Enlightenment has been undermined and a multiplicity
of enlightenments as vital in Sweden as in France, as robust in Valencia
as in Madrid uncovered, some scholars have noted a scattering effect
which may deprive the category of enlightenment of real analytical weight.35
M.S. Anderson, Historians and Eighteenth-Century Europe 17151789 (Oxford,
1979), pp. 12022, 131; N.B. later editions of Andersons Europe in the Eighteenth Century,
1713-83 reflect a more positive appraisal of the concept.
32
Scott, The Problem of Enlightened Absolutism, pp. 1718. Though, interestingly,
T.J. Hochstrasser has demonstrated how physiocracy was exported as far afield as India.
See his Physiocracy and the Politics of Laissez-Faire, in Goldie and Wokler (eds), The
Cambridge History, pp. 43841.
33
Alexander Grab, The Politics of Subsistence: The Liberalization of Grain
Commerce in Austrian Lombardy under Enlightened Despotism, Journal of Modern
History, 57:2 (1985): 205.
34
Professor Derek Beales has kindly pointed out to me that the reigns of both
Joseph II and Leopold II furnish numerous examples of a rulers direct impact on reform
policy and its implementation, particularly in Lombardy, with regard to the legal code,
education, the Church, and the betterment of the peasantry. Personal communication
with the author, 2 July 2008.
35
On a multiplicity of enlightenments, see Roy Porter and Mikul Teich (eds),
The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981); Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment
31
Introduction
11
It has been argued recently that enlightenment is best understood as a series

of communicative practices, including translation, travel, informationcollecting, opinion-making, and ethno-geographic mapping.36 John Robertson
recently published a powerful rebuttal to those who argue for the fragmentary,
heterogeneous nature of the enlightenment. He stresses the coherence of the
enlightenment as a concept and emphasizes the centrality of political economy
to it.37 The scope of reform, too, has been widened. What was once a term that
described a narrow range of government actions for example, modifications
to fiscal policy, trade regulation, and the penal code now encompasses many
additional areas, including the creation of learned academies, societies, and
libraries; the revamping of universities; the quest for agricultural improvement;
investment in infrastructural projects (the construction of canals, roads, and
bridges, along with the modernization of existing ports); and the outfitting of
scientific expeditions.38 Furthermore, it should be pointed out that there was
considerable overlap between these different registers of reform, as government
officials often moonlighted as political writers and academicians. In Spain, for
instance, Count Pedro Rodrguez de Campomanes (17231802) combined
his duties on the Council of Castile with the post of director of the Royal
Academy of History, not to mention the important tracts on industry and
education he penned in his spare time.39 Historians, then, are increasingly
sensitive to the variety of institutions that proved a fertile breeding ground for
new thought as well as the diversity of actors who participated in the processes
that resulted in both enlightenment and reform.
Against Empire (Princeton, 2003), p. 264; the quotation is taken from Jonathan Sheehan,
Enlightenment, Religion and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay, American
Historical Review, 108:4 (2003): 1075.
36
Hesse, Topography of Enlightenment, p. 505.
37
John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 16801760
(Cambridge, 2005).
38
Though the scope of reform has been broadened in recent years, it is perhaps
lamentable that one of the chief areas studied by earlier generations of historians of
enlightened reform religious reform (both the reform of certain features of Catholicism
and of the Church itself ) and the recalibration of ChurchState relations in an international
context has attracted less attention in recent years. While the essays by Kenneth Andrien
and Vctor Peralta directly address this subject, much more work in this area needs to be
done. For a fascinating and pioneering recent study, see Dale K. Van Kley, Religion in the
Age of Patriot Reform, Journal of Modern History, 80 (2008): 25295.
39
On Campomanes, see Vicent Llombart, Campomanes: Economista y Poltico de
Carlos III (Madrid, 1992) and Concepcin de Castro, Campomanes: Estado y Reformismo
Ilustrado (Madrid, 1996).
12
A more expansive understanding of enlightenment and reform has not

meant, in the judgment of some historians, that the appellation of enlightened
reform should be conferred upon all projects which aimed to overhaul public
administration, the economy, and social and religious institutions. Specifically,
the reform projects conceived and pursued by politically conservative writers
have been excluded from much of the historiography. It is difficult to determine
into which category their writing and political activities fit. The full inclusion
of such writers and their projects would complicate the already contentious
demarcation between the enlightenment and the counter-enlightenment.40
Jurists, one prominent historian of Naples recently declared,
although deeply entangled in politics, were not enlightened reformers. They were
judges, lawyers, or juridical historians; they lacked the enlightenment viewpoint
and its talent for radical criticism. Their ideas had neither philosophical breadth nor
anthropological depth.41
In spite of the prevalence of broader understandings of both enlightenment and

reform, then, some historians prefer a more selective criterion for enlightened
reform. New work on Naples, however, to take but one example, suggests that
provincial administration, the military, scientific institutions and academies
offer a picture of reform that while not triumphal did engage nonetheless
with real administrative, institutional and economic problems. 42 A similar
conclusion may be reached concerning the port cities of the Spanish empire
particularly VeraCruz, Havana and Buenos Aires in the final two decades of
the eighteenth century. In those nodes of empire, revitalized merchant guilds
The term was coined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay The Counter-Enlightenment,
in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1980). For a brilliant
discussion of the shortcomings of this category and for the connection between it and The
Enlightenment itself, see Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French
Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), ch. 1.
41
Girolama Imbruglia, Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Naples, in Imbruglia
(ed.), Naples in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth and Death of a Nation State (Cambridge,
2000), p. 73; for a pioneering study, however, that demonstrates that lawyers succeeded in
turning French courtrooms into an open forum for the discussion of religious toleration,
judicial reform, and the abuse of privilege three of the issues dearest to the philosophes,
see David A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime
France (New York and Oxford, 1994), p. 207. See also ch. 6 The Vanguard of Reform.
42
Anna Maria Rao, Enlightenment and Reform: an Overview of Culture and
Politics in Enlightenment Italy, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10:2 (2005): 156.
40
Introduction
13
and economic societies sought to adapt new-fangled insights into agronomy,

nautical techniques, and political economy to local conditions.43
The debate concerning the initiatives deserving of the appellation
enlightened reform may be irresolvable or at least involve scrutinizing
minutiae which will fail to arouse broader historiographical curiosity. But
it is clear that shifting conceptions of enlightenment and of reform have
forced historians to renew the debate about their interaction. There are at
least four themes emerging from the essays contained in this volume around
which a new discussion concerning enlightened reform may take as its basis.
The essays are sub-divided along these thematic lines, though the themes,
naturally, intersect and overlap in numerous significant ways.
The first theme emerges from the new awareness of the diffuse nature
of political, intellectual, and cultural power in the late eighteenth century.
A new, dynamic public culture had a major impact on government reform.
Recent research also suggests the limits on centralization to which monarchs
and their ministers aspired. The effective authority of reputedly paradigmatic
absolutist regimes has been undermined by a new wave of scholarship. The
coherence of the concept of absolutism has been disputed. Monarchs, it now
appears, relied on patronage powers to clients and other corporate bodies to
control their realms. John Elliott has shown just how composite European
monarchies (and their ultramarine appendages) actually were. Authority was
premised on multiple, overlapping compromises. It involved negotiation with
local elites and the survival, indeed, the reinvigoration of robust corporate
entities.44 Undoubtedly, it must be admitted, certain monarchs, such as Joseph
II in the Habsburg lands and Charles III in Spanish America, aspired to
homogenize the varied lands under their dominion and create a unified state.45
Yet their inability to fully realize this ambition should not prompt historians
to dismiss their reigns, and enlightened reform as a whole, as failures.46 Rather
On this theme, see Gabriel Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in
Spain and its Empire, 17591808 (Basingstoke, 2008), ch. 4 Colonial Elites and Imperial
Governance, pp. 12751.
44
John H. Elliott, A Europe of Composite Monarchies, Past & Present, 137 (1992):
4871.
45
On Habsburg attempts to undermine the power and privileges of the nobility,
clergy, urban patriciates and guilds in order to establish a unified state, see Alexander Grab,
Enlightened Despotism and State Building: The Case of Austrian Lombardy, Austrian
History Yearbook, 1920, part 2 (19831984): 4372; on Bourbon efforts along the same
lines in Spanish America, see David Brading, Bourbon Spain and its American Empire,
in Leslie Bethell (ed.), Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 1, pp. 389440.
46
This conclusion was reached by R.R. Palmer, at least with regard to the Habsburg
empire: enlightened despotism in the Austrian empire was over. Aristocracy, estates rights,
43
14
it should be recognized that where central authority triumphed it often did so,
paradoxically, through decentralizing administration and delegating authority
and additional privileges to local mercantile and agrarian elites, the nobility
and an array of councils, juntas and tribunals.47 Regimes may have survived
because of, not in spite of, devolution and the rejuvenation of composite
monarchy structures.
What impact has this shifting understanding of absolutism had on the
concept of enlightened reform? To a greater degree than the older emphasis
on crown-led despotism or absolutism permitted, historians now accept the
major function played by what might be classified as civil society institutions,
or the burgeoning public sphere, in the creation of a milieu in which reform
initiatives could flourish.48 To be sure, as Tim Blanning has demonstrated, the
enlightenment was not always a subversive movement. It often developed
within and in support of the established order, not outside and against it. Civil
society and the crown commonly enjoyed amicable and mutually supportive
relations.49 Indeed, the essays in this volume make clear that a broader notion
of reform facilitates an enhanced appreciation of the role of institutions, such
as provincial academies and economic societies, both in the making of state
policy and in initiating projects to which government officials were compelled
states rights, traditional constitutions and constituted bodies had prevailed. See Palmer,
The Age of Democratic Revolutions: A Political History of Europe and America, 17601800.
I: The Challenge (Princeton, 1959), p. 396.
47
Among the recent efforts to demonstrate the limits of absolutism in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, see Nicolas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and
Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London and New York, 1992); Peter
Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France (London and New York, 1996); and
Ruth MacKay, The Limits of Royal Authority: Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth
Century Castile (Cambridge, 1999).
48
Much of this recent research, of course, is indebted to some extent to Jrgen
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA, 1989); in addition to the abundant literature on
Southern Europe, great interest in the public sphere has been shown by historians of Latin
America: see, for example, Vctor M. Uribe-Uran, The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin
America during the Age of Revolution, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42:2
(2000): 42557; Renn Silva, Los Ilustrados de Nueva Granada, 17601808: Genealoga de
una Comunidad de Intrepretacin (Medelln, 2002); and Kirsten Schultz, Royal Authority,
Empire and the Critique of Colonialism: Political Discourse in Rio de Janeiro, 1808
1821, Luso-Brazilian Review, 37:2 (2000): 731.
49
T.C.W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 17431803 (Cambridge,
1974), pp. 347; Joseph II (London and New York, 1994); and The Culture of Power and
the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 16601789 (Oxford and New York, 2001).
Introduction
15
to respond.50 Enlightened reform resulted, to use an anachronism, as part of

a public-private partnership. It was not a top-down imposition. On the
contrary, the crown frequently rewarded private initiative, strove to follow its
lead, and created new spaces for it to flourish. In this volume, as the essays
by Melissa Calaresu, Jordana Dym, Vctor Peralta, John Shovlin, and Luiz
Carlos Villalta suggest, reform is reconceived along very different lines than
it was several decades ago. It emanated less from government unilaterally
than emerged gradually, often unpredictably, from complex interactions,
not always benign, between the state and various merchant, agrarian, and
intellectual elites that flourished in a heterogeneous, and surprisingly robust,
civil society.
The second theme, which is arguably the mirror image of the first, is
governments function as an incubator of enlightenment or, indeed, an engine
of reform. If enlightened reform is no longer portrayed as the attempt, often
clumsy, of government officials to appropriate and then apply the pristine
political and economic ideas of the enlightenment to the rough-and-tumble
arena of policy, the crowns role as a producer and instigator, not only
a mere consumer, of ideas has received considerably less attention. As the
essays by Christopher Albi, Kenneth Andrien, Charles Noel, Pernille Rge,
and Christopher Storrs indicate, the crown often played such a directing
role, situating itself at the very centre of intellectual life. It did not merely
react to the ideas and proposals generated by academies, learned societies,
and independently-operating philosophes. Instead, in certain cases, it was
the crown (often in conjunction with local government officials) that
galvanized initiatives to which civil society actors responded both in Europe
and in the colonies of the New World. Crucial, too, were the experiences of
administration, diplomacy, and policy formulation in intellectual innovation.
Among the duties of a diplomat who resides at a foreign court, the Portuguese
emissary to the Savoyard court, Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, remarked in a
dispatch from Turin in 1789, perhaps there is none more interesting and
useful than that of recording and transmitting the current state of affairs in the
country, the causes which have secured its prosperity or hastened its decline.51
In my view, such a capacious notion of reform, embracing both crown policy and
civil society/public sphere initiative, was implicit in the project inaugurated by Lhritier
in his Le Rle Historique du Despotisme clair.
51
Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, Reflexes Polticas sobre os Motivos da Prosperidade
da Agricultura deste Pas, que Servem a Fazer Praticamente as Vantajosas Consequncias
dos Sbios Princpios Adoptados (1789), in Souza Coutinho, Textos Polticos, Econmicos
e Financeiros (17831811) (Lisbon, 1993), vol. I, p. 141; Souza Coutinho later held
the post of Secretary for the Navy and Colonial Dominions from 1796 until 1801.
50
16
Government, therefore, was not always a lumbering, blithely inert behemoth,

responding belatedly and ineffectively to dynamic civil society actors. Often
it played a rather entrepreneurial role in its effort to identify and nurture the
best ideas which it would later harness in its pursuit of economic, political and
even aesthetic goals.
Political economy is the third major theme addressed by the contributors
to the volume. Of course, the pursuit of economic growth together with
the closely-related objectives of streamlining the fiscal apparatus and the
implementation of food security measures to overcome the persistent threat
of famine is generally accepted as one of the pillars of enlightened reform.
Tim Hochstrasser has persuasively demonstrated that the French conomistes
sought to demonstrate that mutual self-interest existed between the monarchy
and the holders of property, and strove to develop a framework in which
economic individualism [could] flourish, while also preserving social
harmony.52 But the use of political economy as a lens for comparing and
contrasting enlightened reform initiatives across state lines and imperial
boundaries is a less familiar phenomenon. The study of political economy
enables historians to grasp how widespread and formative emulation and
transnational borrowing were in the long eighteenth century. Such practices
were so pervasive, in fact, that Europe and its ultramarine dominions drifted
toward institutional isomorphism between 1750 and 1830, giving rise to a
world of surprising resemblances.53 The essays of Sophus Reinert, Florian
Schui, and Koen Stapelbroek demonstrate how the study of commerce and
fiscal administration played a pivotal role in the emergence and evolution of
discourses about the states function, particularly the potential and pitfalls of
government action in the generation of material prosperity. In these essays, the
remarkable degree of transnational intellectual cross-pollination is established
as a defining trait of enlightened reform.54
He subsequently served as Secretary of State for War and Foreign Affairs, following the
Portuguese Monarchys forced relocation to Rio de Janeiro from 1808 until his death in
1812.
52
Hochstrasser, Physiocracy, pp. 4334, 442.
53
As Chris Bayly has pointed out in his magisterial The Birth of the Modern World
17801914 (Oxford, 2004), in one of the most vivid of several pertinent examples, land
revenue arrangements from the Cape to India to Continental Europe began to resemble
each other more and more. This aided the state by providing it with a stable group of
notables to whom it could devolve local responsibility. See Bayly, Birth of the Modern
World, p. 111.
54
On emulation, see Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition
and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), pp. 11521; for
its application to Southern Europe and the broader Atlantic world, see W.J. Callahan,
Introduction
17
The fourth topic addressed in this volume concerns the periodization of the
epoch which historians consider the apogee of enlightened reform. There was
a discernible acceleration of the pace of reform initiatives during the second
half of the eighteenth century, particularly following the Seven Years War.
Yet this recognition should not discount the significant reform activity which
occurred before 1750. There was a keen interest in reshaping government
stretching at least to the seventeenth century, whether one looks to Richelieu
and Colbert in France or to Olivares and the arbitristas in Spain.55 The
institutional foundations for many of the initiatives which flourished in the
eighteenth century were laid in the seventeenth.56 Indeed, as Nuno Monteiro
argues in his essay, it was to these earlier traditions that the Marquis of Pombal
appealed when he embarked on his overhaul of Portuguese institutions after
1755. The existence of formidable precursors begs the question of whether
this notion of a late eighteenth-century age of reform is itself enveloped
in myth, a relic of the self aggrandisement and self fashioning of officials to
justify policies, particularly departures from past practices, which triggered
widespread resistance or dismayed entrenched, privileged groups. Manuel
Lucena-Giraldos essay, in particular, suggests that the 1740s were a heyday
of enlightened reform. He thus presents a serious challenge to the widelyaccepted periodization in the historiography of the Bourbon reforms in Spain
and its empire which privileges the aftermath of the Seven Years War in the
The Crown and the Promotion of Industry in Eighteenth-Century Spain (PhD

dissertation, Harvard University, 1964); Richard Drayton, A Lcole des Franais: Les
Sciences et le Deuxime Empire Britannique (17831830), Revue Franaise dHistoire
DOutre-Mer, 86: 3223 (1999): 91118 and Drayton, Natures Government: Science,
Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the World (New Haven and London, 2000),
chs 34; John Shovlin, Emulation in Eighteenth-Century French Economic Thought,
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36:2 (2003): 22430; Paul Cheney, Finances, Philosophical
History and the Empire of Climate: Enlightenment Historiography and Political
Economy, Historical Reflections, 31:1 (2005): 14167; and Sophus Reinert, Blaming
the Medici: Footnotes, Falsification and the Fate of the English Model in EighteenthCentury Italy, History of European Ideas, 32:4 (2006): 43055.
55
Among the studies which describe and analyze seventeenth-century reform
initiatives, see J.H. Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge, 1984); Cayetana Alvarez
de Toledo, Politics and Reform in Spain and Viceregal Mexico: The Life and Thought of
Juan de Palafox (Oxford, 2004); and Chris Storrs, The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy,
16651700 (Oxford, 2006).
56
Paula De Vos, Research, Development and Empire: State Support of Science in
the Later Spanish Empire, Colonial Latin American Review, 15:1 (2006): 5579.
18
mid-1760s.57 The year 1750, therefore, is far from unchallengeable as the

starting point of reform. It would be foolish to neglect the line of descent
linking earlier generations of reformers with their late eighteenth-century
successors.
If reform initiatives flourished in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
century, it is equally true that enlightened reform, in many cases, survived
the demise of the ancien rgime. It did not perish alongside it, regardless
of whether the autopsy is conducted in 1789, 1799, 1808, 1822, or 1830.
Especially in Southern Europe and its former ultramarine colonies, there was
an unmistakable continuity in personnel and ideas.58 A surprising amount
of colonial legislation remained on the books in the successor states to the
Spanish Empire. For example, in 1824 a British consul in Gran Colombia
complained that her present rulers have left in existence and operation the
old Spanish laws in all matters wherein their application and observance
may not repugn against the new order of things.59 Elsewhere in independent
Latin America, the colonial-era trifecta of Amerindian tribute, high customs
duties and levies continued as main sources of public revenues well into the
nineteenth century.60
The chronological boundaries of enlightened reform, therefore, must be
expanded because the same issues and debates persisted into, and even became
more important during, the tumultuous epoch which coincided with the French
Revolutionary wars and the dissolution of the Iberian empires.61 To be sure,
For an excellent recent study on the Bourbon reforms in Peru (and the reactions
their implementation provoked), see Charles F. Walker, Shaky Colonialism: the 1746
Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and its Long Aftermath (Durham and London,
2008).
58
For an argument to this effect concerning the Luso-Brazilian world, see Ana Rosa
Cloclet da Silva, Inventando a Nao: Intelectuais Ilustrados e Estadistas Luso-Brasileiros na
Crise do Antigo Regime Portugus 17501822 (So Paulo, 2006).
59
Edward Watts to George Canning, 9 May 1824, quoted in R.A. Humphreys
(ed.), British Consular Reports on the Trade and Politics of Latin America 182426 (London,
1940), p. 265.
60
Kenneth J. Andrien, The Kingdom of Quito, 16901830: The State and Regional
Development (Cambridge, 1995), p. 215.
61
Though this would be a controversial claim: many historians note continuities
between the policy ambitions of the Ancien Rgime and those of Napoleons empire. As
Alexander Grab observes, reform programs that transformed and modernized the internal
structures of various countries constituted a highly significant component of Napoleons
continental impact [reforms included] a centralized bureaucracy, a uniform tax system, a
conscripted army and an effective police force. See Grab, Napoleon and the Transformation
of Europe (Basingstoke, 2003), p. x; Charles Esdaile has gone so far as to argue that the
57
Introduction
19
many of the institutions and much of the rhetoric associated with enlightened
reform was subject to cosmetic change. Yet a great many of the aims and
techniques of the enlightened reformers persisted amidst the political turmoil,
laying the groundwork for nineteenth-century institutions and political
language.62 In France, as John Shovlin has pointed out, a language promoting
economic improvement as a form of patriotism was one of the ideological
foundations of the post-revolutionary order.63 Indeed, it may be argued that
a second era of enlightened reform in Spanish America and Brazil began after
its ostensible demise in Europe. Reform-from-above remained an irresistible
model for many political leaders in post-independence Spanish America.64
Some influential participants in the struggle for independence, as Matthew
Browns essay strikingly reveals, went so far as to contend that the installation
of a European prince might serve as a panacea for post-colonial Spanish
Americas political ills.
As an alternative, I would argue, historians would benefit from shifting
away from chronological periodization, which largely reflects (geo-)political
turning points and dynastic changes. Instead, they might favour a stylistic
periodization. Such a reorientation would enable historians to account for the
persistence of certain approaches to governance, of intellectual tendencies,
of fashions of government, of particular configurations of state and civil
society, and of political writers and state policy. Enlightened reform was
Napoleonic era was the last, and not very impressive, gasp of enlightened absolutism
confronted with enlightened absolutism writ large, the emperors opponents sought
similar improvement in their own states; see Esdaile, The Wars of Napoleon (London
and New York, 1995), p. 216; in his recent work on Naples, however, John Davis has
connected the enlightened reform programmes of the late eighteenth century with the
goals of the legitimists of the Restoration who still conceived of the state as the critical
agent of change, but whose trust in an enlightened prince had now been undermined;
see Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions (17801860)
(Oxford, 2006), p. 278.
62
J. Luis Maldonado Polo, for example, has shown that Spanish economic
societies and botanical study groups developed infrastructure that survived the political
convulsions of 17891815 thus permitting a relatively smooth transition to nineteenthcentury scientific institutions. See Maldonado, Agricultura y Botnica: La Herencia de la
Ilustracin, Hispania, 65:3 (2005): 106398.
63
John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins
of the French Revolution (Ithaca and London, 2006), p. 213.
64
See, for example, Klaus Gallo, The Struggle for an Enlightened Republic: Buenos
Aires and Rivadavia (London, 2006).
20
not exclusively a feature of the Old Regimes landscape. Its forms and chief
attributes often survived well into the nineteenth century.65
This volume of essays will neither solve all of the problems it identifies nor
answer all of the questions it provokes concerning enlightened reform. Nor is
its coverage of fundamental themes comprehensive. Nevertheless, it is hoped
that this books publication will serve to renew debate about one of the most
enduring concepts common to all of the branches and sub-disciplines of an
increasingly fragmented European and Latin American historiography. While
drawing attention to the splendour of the Southern European and Atlantic
past for its own merits, it also aspires to make the subject relevant to historians
of unrelated specialisms in the hope that historians of vastly different periods
and approaches might once again enter into a common conversation.
For a fuller discussion of the advantages of aesthetic periodization in the history

of art, which I believe could have considerable application to enlightened reform, see Paul
L. Frank, Historical or Stylistic Periods?, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 13:4
(1955): 4517; and Meyer Schapiro, Criteria of Periodization in the History of European
Art, New Literary History, 1:2 (1970): 11314. All typologies, to a degree, are arbitrary,
artificial and incorrect, but they are still useful tools for historical analysis.
65
PART I
Southern Europe and its Atlantic
Colonies, c. 17501830:
An Overview
Chapter 1
Enlightenment, Reform, and

Monarchy in Italy
John Robertson
In the second half of the twentieth century, study of Enlightenment and

reform in Italy developed under the aegis of two models or, more accurately,
a model and an anti-model. Commanding the field was the model established
by Franco Venturi, in a succession of volumes devoted to individual
Illuministi italiani, and subsequently in the several more volumes of Settecento
riformatore. In Venturis view of eighteenth-century Italy, reform was intrinsic
to Enlightenment. A commitment to Enlightenment was a commitment
to reform to transforming the countrys economic, social, and political
structures and the Enlightenments reforming agenda was the only one with
credibility; the alternative to Enlightenment reform was reaction. A natural
concomitant of this view was a focus on illuministi as the champions and
agents of reform. The principal subjects of Venturis research were men of
letters and publicists intellectuals not the rulers of the several Italian
states and their ministers.
Venturis understanding of the nexus between Enlightenment and reform
was enriched and complicated by what he saw as inherent tensions. One of
these was between the cosmopolitan and the patriotic. The Enlightenment was
inherently cosmopolitan: its adherents communicated across Europes borders,
Italians looking to France, but also to England, Scotland, the United Provinces,
and Germany for ideas and examples of good practice, while assuming that
Franco Venturi, Illuministi italiani, III: Riformatori Lombardi, piemontesi e toscani
(Milan and Naples, 1958), V: Riformatori napoletani (Milan and Naples, 1962), and, with
Giuseppe Giarrizzo and Gianfranco Torcellan, VII: Riformatori delle antiche repubbliche,
dei ducati, dello Stato Pontificio e delle isole (Milan and Naples, 1965); followed by the five
volumes of Settecento riformatore (Turin, 19691990).

Franco Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, ed.
Stuart Woolf (London, 1972), Preface.
24
their values and goals were universal in scope. At the same time, the illuministi
were intensely patriotic, committed to harnessing ideas, wherever they had
been acquired, to the reform of their own societies. By these they understood
the individual states monarchies, principalities, and republics, to which
they belonged. But they also thought in peninsular terms, writing a common,
Tuscan Italian, and associating the particular predicaments of their states with
the more general decline of Italy since the Renaissance. These illuministi were
not nationalists; from the first Venturi insisted that Enlightenment was not
to be understood as the antecedent of Risorgimento. But, in their patriotism
as in their cosmopolitanism, the adherents of Enlightenment transcended the
ancient particularisms of Italian society and politics.
A second tension, to which Venturi attached even more significance, was
that between utopia and reform. It was a characteristic of Enlightenment in
Italy that the drive to reform should be drawn towards utopian objectives.
Some illuministi were, by temperament and intellectual conviction, more
inclined to practical reform, and thus resisted the urge to utopian solutions;
others, by contrast, concluded that such solutions were the only viable basis
of reform. Given the conditions which faced them in Italy, however, all felt
the urge to radicalise their objectives, to quicken the pace of reform. Thus
economic development was sought not only to strengthen the state, or
to make more goods available to consumers; it must also achieve a much
greater degree of social equality, increasing the numbers of medium and small
property-owners on the land, and ameliorating the condition of the urban
poor. Likewise, penal reform was not only a matter of efficient government;
abolition of torture and the death penalty were requirements of common
humanity and equality before the law. The inherently utopian tendency of
Enlightenment reform, in short, was what ensured that such reform was never
to be limited to reinforcing and modernising the authority of existing rulers,
whether individual monarchs and princes, or the oligarchies who governed
the surviving city republics. Enlightenment reform was the antithesis of the
ragion di stato cultivated by the states of the antico regime.
Disdain for the existing states of Italy and their rulers notwithstanding,
Venturis model did allow for distinctions between them. On the whole,
monarchies and principalities were more open to reform, and gave the
illuministi more opportunity for its advocacy, than the surviving republics.
In Venice and Genoa, the patriciates were socially closed and politically
Franco Venturi, La circolazione delle idee, Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, 41
(1954): 20322, a manifesto for the research to come, in which he set out his understanding
of the difference between the reforming Settecento and the Risorgimento.

Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971).
25
defensive. They knew about and discussed new economic ideas, but feared
their utopian, egalitarian tendency; as for the new, expansive republicanism
of the American colonists, with its rhetoric of the universal rights of man,
they shut their ears to it. (It would be in Geneva, not in Italy, that the debate
between the old and the new republicanisms would be articulated and given
political form.) By contrast, individual rulers recognised incentives to reform.
The regalist arguments of civilian jurists held out the prospect of gaining or
recovering property and revenue from the Church, and of asserting control
over the numbers and even appointment of clergy. Their confidence boosted
by the jurists, the Duke of Parma and King of Naples were not slow to follow
the lead of their Bourbon relations in France and Spain in expelling the Jesuits
(17671768); in Tuscany the Grand Duke Leopold actively supported the
anti-curial Jansenist Synod of Pistoia (1786). Potentially even greater were
the rewards of taking on the nobility, whose feudal privileges and usurpation
of royal jurisdiction and revenue were as damaging to the state as to the rural
population. In Naples, leading critics of the feudal system were promoted to
government office, and encouraged to develop policies which would break up
feudal estates.
Venturi and those who followed him did not pretend that this model of
Enlightenment and reform applied uniformly across the peninsula. Savoy was
the most notable exception, its rulers reforming early, in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, and according to maxims of ragion di stato, not
the ideals of Enlightenment. Their object was to strengthen their own state;
and they were quite prepared to compromise with the Church to achieve this,
whether by exiling and hounding the home-grown dissident Alberto Radicati,
or by kidnapping and imprisoning the Neapolitan Pietro Giannone as an
earnest of their loyalty to Rome. Tuscany too had differed from the model:
for all the radicalism of Leopold, and the economic awareness of officials, the
Grand Duchy had not produced an intellectual elite to match those of Milan
Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore V LItalia dei lumi 176490 2. La repubblica di
Venezia 17611797 (1990); and the posthumously-published fragment: Saggi preparatori
per Settecento riformatore. LItalia dei lumi: La repubblica di Genova 17611797 (Rome,
2002). See also the collection of extracts from Venturis works: Pagine repubblicane, ed.
Manuela Albertone (Turin, 2004).

Franco Venturi, Church and Reform in Enlightenment Italy: the Sixties of the
Eighteenth Century, Journal of Modern History, 48 (1976): 21532; Settecento riformatore
II La chiesa e la repubblica dentro i loro limiti 17581774 (1976).

Savoy barely features in Settecento riformatore. On the theme of Enlightenment
and reform, so far as it went, Giuseppe Ricuperati, Il Settecento, in Storia dItalia VIII Il
Piemonte sabaudo. Stato e territori in et moderna (Turin, 1994), pp. 441834.
26
and Naples. It was in these two that the flag of Enlightenment and reform
flew most prominently, because intellectuals had seized the initiative from
the established governing classes of magistrates and officials, and pushed their
monarchs in more radical directions. In Milan, a debate begun by the Il caff
group in the 1760s, and sustained by its leaders Cesare Beccaria and Pietro
Verri, built upon and reinforced initiatives promoted from Vienna since the
late 1740s; in Naples, the economic teaching of Antonio Genovesi and his
pupils, and later the anti-feudal polemics of Filangieri and Francesco Mario
Pagano, seemed to win over, if not the veteran minister Tanucci, then at least
the young Queen Maria Carolina and her ministers. Just as the monarchies
geared up to implement Enlightened reform, however, events in France in
the first half of the 1790s caused them to lose their nerve and backtrack. In
the new climate of reaction the intellectuals were isolated and radicalised:
given what Venturi had identified as the utopian tendency of Enlightenment
reform, it was no surprise that many of them now turned to revolution, as
offering a more immediate prospect of realising their goals.
The anti-model to Venturis account of Enlightenment and reform was
elaborated by Mario Mirri, in a long cry of protest published in 1992.10
Behind Venturis model, Mirri diagnosed the idealism of Benedetto Croce and
especially of the French literary historians Daniel Mornet and Paul Hazard:
ideas and their exponents were the agents of historical change, to the exclusion
of other possible causes. Mirri objected to the necessary identification of
Enlightenment with reform, as if one were inconceivable without the other.
He charged Venturi and those who thought like him, notably Giuseppe
Ricuperati, with devaluing the material and the particular in history. Their
model overlooked specific economic circumstances, misleadingly assumed
that all reforms could be assimilated to a single movement of reform, and
failed to respect the historically deep-rooted differences between the various
antichi stati italiani. Above all, Venturi had put too much weight on the
Naples and Milan are the principal reference points of Volumes I and V of
Settecento riformatore: I Da Muratori a Beccaria, 17301764 (1969), chs 6, 9 (Milan), 7,
8 (Naples); V LItalia dei lumi, 17641790, pt 1 La rivoluzione di Corsica: le grandi carestie
degli anni sessanta; la Lombardia delle riforme (1987), pp. 221305 (Naples), pp. 425834
(Lombardy).

A clear and compelling statement of this thesis is Anna Maria Raos brilliant chapter
Enlightenment and Reform, in John A. Marino (ed.), Early Modern Italy 15501796
(Oxford, 2002), pp. 22952.
10
Mario Mirri, Dalla storia dei lumi e delle riforme alla storia degli antichi stati
italiani, in M. Verga and A. Fratoianni (eds), Pompeo Neri, Atti del Colloquio di Studi di
Castelfiorentino, 1988 (Castelfiorentino, 1992), pp. 401540.
27
anachronistic social category of intellectuals, neglecting the commitment to

reforms shown by many government ministers and magistrates.
Mirris chosen ground was Tuscany, where he could point to a long
tradition, going back to the early decades of the eighteenth century, of intraministerial debate about the agricultural base of the Grand Duchy and the
means of improving it. These officials were well versed in French economic
writing on the subject, notably the work of Boisguilbert; they did not need
intellectuals to instruct them. They saw no conflict between the interests of
government and those of the society they governed, and their application of the
new ideas was pragmatic, free of the distorting temptations of utopianism.11
A similar case might be made for reform in Savoy, especially if one extended
to it a term more usually applied to monarchies in central and eastern Europe,
Enlightened absolutism. Its compromise with the Church notwithstanding,
Savoys rulers envisaged many of the same reforms as Tuscany and other Italian
states; as Christopher Storrs argues in his contribution to this volume, it is
hard to see why it should be denied an Enlightenment programme of reform,
simply because it lacked a radical intelligentsia.12
It would be a mistake to assume that the two approaches to Enlightenment
and reform outlined here have been completely incompatible. Even before
Mirri had voiced his protest, the work of Carlo Capra on Milan had offered an
admirable example of how an appreciation of the ideas and moral qualities of
reforming thinkers could be combined with a hard-headed understanding of
the fiscal and administrative priorities of government ministers.13 Likewise, in
the case of Naples, Anna Maria Rao has modified Venturis model, the better
to do justice to the monarchys own reforming initiatives alongside the more
radical demands of the Neapolitan illuministi.14
See also, Till Wahnbaeck, Luxury and Public Happiness. Political Economy in the
Italian Enlightenment (Oxford, 2004), Part 2, on Tuscany.
12
Christopher Storrs, The Savoyard State: Another Enlightened Despotism?, in
this volume, pp. 20328. The absolutist character of the Savoy monarchy by the early
eighteenth century is argued by Geoffrey Symcox, Let di Vittorio Amadeo II, Il Piemonte
sabaudo, pp. 269438, esp. pp. 4269: un modello di assolutismo.
13
Carlo Capra, Il Settecento, in D. Sella and C. Capra (eds), Il Ducato di Milano
15351796 (Turin, 1984), pp. 151617.
14
Anna Maria Rao, LAmaro della feudalit. La devoluzione di Arnone e la questione
feudale a Napoli alla fine del 700 (Naples, 1984); Esercito e societ a Napoli nelle riforme
della seconda met del settecento, Studi Storici, 28 (1987): 62377; more generally,
her warning against assimilating the work of very different scholars to Venturis model:
Enlightenment and reform: an overview of culture and politics in Enlightenment Italy,
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10 (2005): 14267.
11
28
Nevertheless, it was clear that by the turn of the century research into
Enlightenment and reform stood in need of being refreshed by new agenda.
Three of these have emerged; at least two of them are represented in the
Italian studies included in this volume. The first of the new research agenda
has focussed on the intellectual content of Enlightenment thought, exploring
both its complexity and the extent of disagreement between its exponents.
Attention is now being directed to areas of intellectual enquiry, such as history
and the philosophy of history, which were marginal to Venturis account of
Italian Enlightenment.15 No less significant, however, has been reassessment
of the discipline which most obviously articulated Venturis identification
of Enlightenment with reform, political economy. The previous tendency
to homogenise Enlightenment political economy, and to assume that
Physiocracy was its culminating expression, has been disrupted from several
angles. It is now recognised that older strands of economic thinking, such
as those associated with ragion di stato and with Fnelons ideal of agrarian
self sufficiency, were more persistent than an emphasis on the novelty of
Enlightenment thinking would lead one to expect. In contrasting essays below,
Sophus Reinert and Koen Stapelbroek argue that both of these strands may be
found in the writings of the most lucid Neapolitan economic commentator of
the early eighteenth century, Paolo Mattia Doria.16 The inspiration of hitherto
neglected contemporaries is also receiving greater attention. The most obvious
example is Jean-Franois Melon, the interest of whose Essai politique sur le
commerce (1734) was picked up in Naples by 1740, and was subsequently
publicised by Genovesi and his pupil Francesco Longano.17
Although Venturis early work on Boulanger addressed precisely this subject:

Franco Venturi, LAntichit svelata e lidea del progresso in N.-A. Boulanger 17221750
(Bari, 1947), and Ricuperatis first and deepest interest has always been in the historian,
Pietro Giannone: Giuseppe Ricuperati, LEsperienza civile e religiosa di Pietro Giannone
(Milan and Naples, 1970).
16
Sophus Reinert, The Sultans Republic: Jealousy of Trade and Oriental Despotism
in Paolo Mattia Doria; Koen Stapelbroek, The Proud Epithet of Enlightened:
Ferdinando Galiani and the Neapolitan Debate on Colonies, Commerce, and Conquest,
both in this volume, pp. 25370 and pp. 287303 respectively.
17
Vincenzo Ferrone, Scienza, natura, religione. Mondo Newtoniano e cultura italiana
nel primo Settecento (Naples, 1982), pp. 55660; John Robertson, The Case for the
Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 16801760 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 34047, 354,
383; Koen Stapelbroek, Love, Self-deceit, and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early
Neapolitan Enlightenment (Toronto, 2008), pp. 625. See also Istvan Hont, Jealousy of
Trade. International Competition and the Nation State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge,
MA, and London, 2005), pp. 3034.
15
29
More complex still was the process by which economic ideas passed
through translation. Admiration for the English economic model reached Italy
through French translations of English writings. In the case of John Carys
1695 Essay on the State of England, the translation by Vincent de Gournay and
Georges-Marie Butel-Dumont included additional material as well as offering
a distinct interpretation of the original. Overseeing its further translation
from French into Italian, as the Storia del commercio della Gran Bretagna
(17571758), Genovesi added discursive notes of his own, complicating
its message yet again.18 Physiocracy itself, when it came, would be mediated
by a writer from outside the ranks of the sect, the German-Bernese Georg
Ludwig Schmid DAvenstein.19 Even once a range of available ideas had
been absorbed and adapted to address Italian circumstances, doubts might
remain about their applicability. Ferdinando Galianis hostility to Physiocratic
ideas about the grain trade is the best-known example of such scepticism.20
But others are coming to light, notably Paolettis criticisms of the effects of
luxury on an agrarian society such as Tuscanys,21 and Palmieris unpopular
questioning whether the feudal system was really the key to the economic
weakness of the kingdom of Naples.22 It is clear that economic commentators
were unable to offer government ministers a straightforward, intellectuallycoherent programme of reform; if Enlightenment was to inspire reform, those
in government would themselves have to be educated to choose the policies
which best suited the circumstances of their states.
Alongside this new interest in the content of Enlightenment thought has
been a second research agenda, intended to broaden and deepen the setting in
which ideas were received. Venturi was well aware that Enlightenment thinking
Sophus Reinert, Emulazione e traduzione: la genealogia occulta della Storia
del Commercio, in B. Jossa, R. Patalano, E. Zagari (eds), Genovesi economista, Atti del
Convegno di Studi di Napoli del 56 maggio 2005, (Naples, 2007), pp. 15592; and
Blaming the Medici: Footnotes, Falsification, and the Fate of the English model in
Eighteenth-Century Italy, History of European Ideas, 32 (2006), Special Issue Commerce
and Morality in Eighteenth-Century Italy: 43055
19
Schmid DAvensteins principal work was the Principes de la legislation universelle
(Amsterdam, 1776), Italian translation published in Naples in 1791; Vieri Becagli,
Georg-Ludwig Schmid DAvenstein e i suoi Principes de la legislation universelle: oltre la
fisiocrazia, Studi settecenteschi, 24 (2004): 21552.
20
Stapelbroek, Love, Self-Deceit and Money, reassesses Galianis significance in the
Neapolitan context.
21
Wahnbaeck, Luxury and Public Happiness, pp. 12034.
22
John Robertson, Political Economy and the Feudal System in Enlightenment
Naples: Outline of a Problem, in R. Butterwick, S. Davies and G. Snchez Espinosa (eds),
Peripheries of the Enlightenment, SVEC, 1 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 6586.
18
30
was as likely to be found in newspapers and journals as in formal treatises; but

he was less interested in the wider public which provided their readership.
As a result, research inspired by the idea that Enlightenment was associated
with an emerging public sphere seems to have been slower to get under way
in Italian than in Anglophone scholarship. Recent years, however, have seen
significant strides in this direction. Publishing and bookselling, academies,
patriotic societies, Freemasonry, and the coffee house have all been explored,
albeit unevenly.23 (Academies and Freemasonry, for example, have received
more attention than coffee houses.) Establishing the extent to which there was
what historians call a public sphere in Italian states is the more urgent given the
importance which leading exponents of Enlightenment attached to reaching
a wider audience. To thinkers such as Genovesi, Beccaria and Verri, ragion di
stato was not only an inadequate doctrine; it was associated with a secretive
world of private counsel, which they wanted to replace through the education
of a literate public. Il caff was to be read in coffee houses, not ministerial
closets, while Genovesis lectures on commerce were addressed to the studiosa
giovent of the kingdom, not to Tanucci. Even more explicit in this objective
was the second generation of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. To Filangieri,
an educated public opinion was the precondition of good legislation; opinion
was the expression of the peoples sovereignty, and rulers should govern by its
suffrage. Paganos rhetoric was less elevated; but his analysis of the importance
of opinion, as Melissa Calaresu shows in her important essay below, was
even more perceptive.24 It was precisely the difficulty of envisaging a political
solution to the problem of the feudal nobility which made it so important to
create an educated public to support a reforming monarchy.
Overviews by: Renato Pasta, The History of the Book and Publishing in
Eighteenth-Century Italy, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10 (2005): 20017; and
Brendan Dooley, The Public Sphere and the Organisation of Knowledge, in Marino (ed.),
Early Modern Italy, pp. 20928. More specifically: Anna Maria Rao (ed.), Editoria e cultura
a Napoli nel XVIII secolo (Naples, 1998); Eric Cochrane, Tradition and Enlightenment in
the Tuscan Academies 16901800 (Chicago, 1961); Vincenzo Ferrone, The Accademia
Reale delle Scienze: Cultural Sociability and Men of Letters in Turin of the Enlightenment
Under Vittorio Amadeo III, Journal of Modern History, 70 (1998): 51960; Elvira Chiosi,
Intellectuals and academies, in Girolamo Imbruglia (ed.), Naples in the Eighteenth Century:
the Birth and Death of a Nation State (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 11834; Vincenzo Ferrone,
I profeti dellIlluminismo (Bari, 1989); Melissa Calaresu, Coffee, Culture and Consumption:
Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples, in A. Gatti and
P. Zanardi (eds), Filosofia, scienza, storia: il dialogo fra Italia e Gran Bretagna (Padua, 2005),
pp. 14250.
24
Melissa Calaresu, Searching for a Middle Class? Francesco Mario Pagano and
the Public for Reform in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples, below, pp. 6382.
23
31
As Calaresu also shows, however, Enlightenment thinkers who appealed

to the existence of an informed public opinion may have expected more than
historians can deliver. In a kingdom such as that of Naples, where the royal
court and the magistrates tribunals, along with the multifarious institutions
of the Church, still dominated public space, there was limited scope for the
development of a separate, associative public sphere of independent publishing
and voluntary societies. Until research proves otherwise, the existing evidence
suggests that throughout Italy royal as well as republican authorities remained
acutely suspicious of the kind of public expression of opinion found in the
free countries of northern Europe.
This does not mean that the cause of reform was doomed and that
violent revolution, such as occurred between 1796 and 1799 with French
assistance, was the only remedy available to Enlightenment reformers after
1790. On the contrary, the third of the new research agenda unfortunately
not represented here has been to re-focus attention on the 1780s, and reevaluate the reforming efforts of the monarchies, especially those in Milan and
Naples. Assisted but not directed by Enlightenment thinkers, Firmian and
Martini in Milan and Acton in Naples pushed forward a series of reforms, for
which they commanded the effective support of their respective sovereigns,
Joseph II, and Ferdinand and Maria Carolina. In relation to the Church, the
monarchies now reaped the fruits of regalism, following up the suppression
of the Jesuits with further acquisitions of ecclesiastical property, and reducing
their ceremonial dependence on the Papacy. But the substance of reform
was now concentrated on state-building: on fiscal reorganisation, economic
development which would also benefit revenue, strengthening royal courts
and jurisdictions at the expense of feudal rivals, and drawing the nobility
into royal service, not least in the army. None of these measures was either
popular or more than partially successful. But their impact was nonetheless
felt: previously rigid economic and social structures began to buckle, causing
new divisions and creating opportunities for change.25
The new research not only emphasises the comparative vigour and
seriousness of monarchic reform in the 1780s. It also suggests that its impetus,
while disrupted, was not entirely lost over the next three decades. Precisely
because the reform programmes were undertaken for the benefit of the
monarchies, rather than being pressed on them by intellectuals, they were
For Milan, the round-up of recent scholarship by Carlo Capra, Habsburg Italy in
the Age of Reform, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10 (2005): 21833; for Naples, the
major new study by John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon. Southern Italy and the European
Revolutions 17801860 (Oxford, 2006), ch. 3 Undermining the Old Order, as against ch. 2
Projecting Reform.
25
32
less readily abandoned in the 1790s than the traditional narrative of reaction
has led us to expect. Moreover, there were under-appreciated continuities
between the reforms undertaken by the monarchies and those attempted
by the revolutionaries. Verri in Milan and Pagano in Naples might find
themselves participating in revolution in the company of much younger,
Jacobin radicals; but securing the new republics required economic, social and
institutional measures not so different from those applied by the monarchies
they replaced.26 Defeated once, the revolutionaries of 17961799 were given
a second chance by Napoleons conquest of Italy in 1806; as John Davis shows
for Naples, many of the reforms implemented during the French Decennio
(18061815) were initiated in 1799. (That Naples lost its intellectual elite in
1799 is a Crocean myth; for every Pagano who was captured and executed in
1799, there was at least one Cuoco who fled into exile, returning to resume
the work of reform in 1806.) When the Bourbons did finally return in 1815,
their reactionary rhetoric belied the debt they owed to the revolutionaries and
their French masters. If the rudiments of a modern state existed in Milan or
Naples by 1820, it was because the reform initiatives of the 1780s had, in the
meantime, been continued and consolidated, not abandoned. 27
Whether it is appropriate to take the further step of interpreting the
persistence of reforming initiative after 1790 as a prolongation of the
Enlightenment is another matter. There are good arguments for limiting the
use of the term Enlightenment to an intellectual movement in eighteenthcentury Europe, and for concluding that the social and political as well as
intellectual preconditions for the movements existence disappeared in the
French Revolution. But whether or not we persist in speaking of Enlightenment
up to the 1820s, reform and state-building are longer-term themes, which
historians may identify where and when they find them appropriate. If the case
of Italy suggests that we should be alert to continuities in reform and statebuilding from the 1780s to the 1820s, then we have every reason to look for
them elsewhere, in the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds of the Mediterranean
and the Atlantic.
Carlo Capra, La mia anima sempre stata repubblicana. Pietro Verri da patrizio
a cittadino, in Carlo Capra (ed.), Pietro Verri e il suo tempo (2 vols, Bologna, 1999),
pp. 51935; Davis, Naples and Napoleon, chs 46.
27
Davis, Naples and Napoleon, Parts IIIII.
26
Chapter 2
Enlightened Reform in the

Spanish Empire: An Overview
Jorge Caizares-Esguerra
Enlightenment historiography has not been kind to Spain and its colonies.
The very category of the Enlightenment allegedly originated as a reaction to
the religious, political, and economic worlds Spain did so much to foster in the
early modern period. In the long eighteenth century, the Spanish Empire came
to stand for a world of unparalleled colonial brutality; murderous, stultifying,
inquisitorial religious intolerance; arbitrary and misguided monarchical
power that horded silver as it produced widespread poverty; and medieval
scholasticism that churned out scores of ignorant, bookish priests, lawyers,
and physicians. In short, Spains was a world enveloped in darkness ready to
be lit by the lights of science, the rule of law, and humanitarianism.
We have been told, that to bring the empire back from the doldrums,
enlightened reformers limited the power of the church and created new
institutions of learning; produced new wealth through manufacturing and
trade; strengthened the navy and the army to defend and chart the lands
and resources of the empire; and reigned in Creole corruption and autonomy
by the application of uniform legal practices and standards throughout the
colonies. Yet these so-called Bourbon reforms triggered revolts and discontent
throughout, heightening political awareness among the Creole elites who
rushed to declare independence after Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula.
Getting away from this narrative has not been easy. It offers a satisfying account
of the Enlightenment that furthermore links reform to the undoing of the
Spanish Empire. The essays on Spain and its Atlantic colonies in this volume
demonstrate many of the weaknesses of this narrative.
The first weak spot lies in the very concept of Enlightenment. Charles
Noel deftly synthesizes an alternative interpretation: the Enlightenment had
less to do with the triumph of reason over superstition and more with
the creation of new institutions and practices of bourgeois sociability and
consumption. Thus, according to Noel, the pulse of this movement ought to
34
be found in tertulias, salons, coffee shops, printing houses, newspapers, and

in the case of Spain, the court. The new public sphere spawned by all these
private and public institutions was long in the making and might have well
originated with the Hapsburg, not the Bourbon. The chronology of the Age
of Reform therefore also requires some rethinking as Manuel Lucena-Giraldo
suggests in his chapter.
Lucena also shows that reformers were not as oblivious to the consequences
of reform as the historiography would like us to believe. Enlightenment reform
has been associated with the rise of regalism, a euphemism for absolutism:
the triumph of the will of the king over common law and legal custom. Such
assault on the cultural and political underpinnings of the composite monarchy
created resentment and revolts, leading to urban riots and widespread peasant
and indigenous rebellions in the colonies. Yet Lucena shows that prominent
reformers spearheaded reforms to deepen, not weaken, local autonomy. There
were those who did indeed find in regalism a formula for reform, but there
were also others who were deeply aware that the composite monarchy was the
key to the stability of the empire. Thus, Lucena shows that many metropolitan
reformers proactively sought to transform the empire into a commonwealth.
This interpretation of the Enlightenment and reform as separate from
regalism and absolutism also lies at the core of Christopher Albis essay.
Albi demonstrates the depth and complexity of traditions of colonial legal
pluralism in an empire that has long been seen as riddled with corruption and
undermined by graft. The saying obedezco pero no cumplo (I acknowledge
but do not enforce the law of the king) has long been used to epitomize
the working of colonial society allegedly built on the arbitrary will of local
cliques. For Albi, however, obedezco pero no cumplo captures rather pithily
a culture built on respect for the law. In Spanish America, common law and
legal custom trumped the law of the king. Historians are only beginning to
realize the importance of this complex legal culture, one of the main sources
of imperial legitimacy among the Indians, for example. Like Lucena, Albi
shows that when these legal traditions clashed with the absolutist agendas
of metropolitan reformers it was the pluralists who in the long term won
the upper hand. Moreover, the pluralists were as informed by Enlightenment
trends of thought as their absolutist rivals.
The obstacles reformers faced as they carried out their absolutist agendas
come through clearly in the essay by Kenneth Andrien. When an earthquakeBrian Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford,
CA, 2008).

These are also themes emphasized in Gabriel Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance,
and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 17591808 (Basingstoke and New York, 2008).
Enlightened Reform in the Spanish Empire: An Overview
35
tsunami wiped out the city of Lima in 1746, the new viceroy sought to take
advantage of the catastrophe to limit the power of some of the religious orders
by giving away their rural parishes (and income) to the secular clergy. What is
remarkable about the account offered by Andrien is not so much the efficacy
of the absolutist reformers but the success of the religious in slowing down
the will of the crown. It should be recalled that the secularization of Indian
parishes in the hands of the orders was a process that had already began in the
late sixteenth century.
Riots and revolts spawned by the Bourbon reforms notwithstanding,
the Spanish Empire remained resilient. As Jordana Dym demonstrates, it
was the crown that spearheaded the creation of public sphere in the colonies
by financing and promoting the creation of newspapers. The public of
Guatemala, for example, used newspapers to popularize useful knowledge to
promote commerce and trade, not to spout patriotic municipal agendas and
thus not to sow the seeds of independence thought. The breakdown of the
Spanish Empire in the wake of Napoleons invasion ought not to be linked
to the reforms of the eighteenth century. Independence was not inevitable.
Contingency (particularly the poor political and military choices of an
incompetent monarch, Ferdinand VII) might explain the unraveling of the
empire after 1815 better than any account that foregrounds inevitability due
to deep structural trends.
It remains to be seen whether the patterns of Enlightenment and reform
in Spanish America found in these essays differ from those in other Southern
and Northern Atlantic empires. In this volume, Gabriel Paquette invites us to
interpret the case of Spain and its colonies comparatively, along with those of
Italy, France, and Portugal and its Atlantic colonies. This is a long overdue and
welcome invitation. It is now up to the readers of this volume to draw, from
the essays, daring new interpretations.
For a recent, more general, account of the reforms (and their limits) introduced in
the wake of the earthquake-tsunami, see Charles F. Walker, Shaky Colonialism: The 1746
Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Durham, NC, and London,
2008).

Jeremy Adelman, An Age of Imperial Revolutions, American Historical Review,
113 (2008): 31940.
Chapter 3
Enlightenment and Reform in France

and the French Atlantic
Emma Rothschild
France was the most universal of empires, in the long age of reform with
which this book is concerned. The interwar period of 1748 to 1756 was a
time of euphoric expansion in the French Atlantic empire, and so was the
postwar restoration of the 1820s. In the interrevolutionary period of 1783 to
1789, there were more slaves imported into the French part island of SaintDomingue, the modern Haiti, than into mainland North America and all of
the British Caribbean combined. France was a new kind of empire, in the
early years of the French Revolution; an empire of the land, or of the Eurasian
land mass, in opposition to the British empire of the oceans; an enlightened
empire; a new Rome, in opposition to the British Carthage; the First Empire
of the first Napoleon.
The French enlightenment, too, was an Atlantic and imperial enterprise.
The popular best-sellers of the late enlightenment, from Louis-Sbastien
Merciers Lan deux mille quatre cent quarante to the Anecdotes sur Mme. la
comtesse du Barri and Raynals Histoire philosophique et politique des deux
Indes were panoramas of naval and colonial connections. Voltaire, Diderot
and Condorcet were intricately involved in the details of colonial policy.
The French economists, including Quesnay, Gournay, Turgot, Dupont de
Nemours, Morellet, Mirabeau and Mercier de la Rivire, produced elaborate
plans of the reform of overseas as well as national administration. Turgots
objective as minister in 17741776, Dupont de Nemours wrote in his
biography, was to protect freedom on the entire surface of the globe. The end
of the enlightenment, for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, came with the restoration
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, available at http://www.slavevoyages.org/
tast/assessment/estimates.faces [last accessed 21 July 2009].

See Emma Rothschild, The Transnationalization of the History of France, Centre
for History and Economics, 2008.
38
of slavery in the French colonies, in 1802; O France, that mockest Heaven ...
Are these thy boasts, Champion of human kind?
But the French Atlantic empire has been oddly invisible, for more than
two centuries, in histories of the enlightenment, of Atlantic reform, and of
the origins of the French revolution. The peace settlement of 1763, in which
France and Spain lost the scorching sands of Florida, and the icy rocks of
Canada, and which was seen at the time as one vicissitude among others
in the ebb and flow of eighteenth-century wars, has been identified, in
retrospect, as the outset of the inexorable rise of the Anglo-American empires.
The brilliance of the French economy, which grew faster, in the eighteenth
century, than the British economy, and in which the heart of growth was
overseas commerce, was obscured, in subsequent economic history, by the
industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century. The political history
of France in the eighteenth century has been the largely national story of the
origins of the French Revolution; a story which ends in the discontinuity of
new times, new institutions, and a new (or first) empire.
The expectations of the late eighteenth century are extraordinarily difficult
to imagine, now, in the light of the subsequent history of the United States
and the British Empire. It is very difficult, for example, to think oneself
into the ideas of the writers on commerce of the 1780s, for whom SaintDomingue was the richest and most promising economy of the Americas, and
the Spanish part of the island of Santo Domingo a new Eldorado, under the
influence of French administrative reform. But these different futures are a
part of how it really was, in the long age of reform and revolution. The French
Atlantic empire, both before and after the French Revolution, was far more
intricately intertwined than the British with other European empires, Spanish,
Portuguese, Dutch, and Danish. It had a different legal regime of slavery,
and a different organization of the slave trade, which reached its apogee, in
total numbers of slaves shipped across the Atlantic, in 1790. It had different
relationships to native Americans, and different understandings of the use and
ownership of land. It was an empire of the Caribbean America, oriented east
to west across the Gulf of Mexico, and north to south, towards Guiana and
Brazil.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, France: An Ode (1798), reprinted with additional

comments on France in The Morning Post in 1802.

John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the
British Colonies (Boston, 1768), p. 84.

Guillaume Daudin, Commerce et prosperit: la France au XVIIIe sicle, intr. Franois
Crouzet (Paris, 2005).
Enlightenment and Reform in France and the French Atlantic
39
France was not only a Southern European power, in the long eighteenth
century. It was a power in the north and the east, the Levant and the Ponant (in
the classification of the French navy of the times); a central European power,
and also, as in so many contemporary observations, the center of Europe.
It was a universal monarchy, and a universal empire, the object of interest
to Persian, Chinese, Russian and American visitors. But the French Atlantic
empire was also a Bourbon empire, as Gabriel Paquette points out in his
introduction to this volume, and a Catholic empire, in which the practices of
war, administration, conversion, and long-distance commerce, including the
practices of the Cdiz merchants in manufactures and the Nantes merchants
in slaves, were Franco-Spanish.
The essays in this volume present a long-overdue prospect of the Atlantic
world of the Southern Europe or Mediterranean empires. John Shovlin
provides a fascinating account of the multiplicity of reforms undertaken by the
French monarchy in the generation before the French Revolution, and of the
incorporation, within the royal administration, of the political culture of the
enlightenment. The kings officials were both influenced by and an influence
on the spaces, practices, ideas and sensibilities of enlightenment. Economic
reform, including the reform of colonial and commercial policies, was at the
heart of the enlightened administration, as Shovlin shows. The old regime
should not be judged, in this revisionist history, by the retrospective criterion
of whether or not it caused (or averted) the French Revolution; nor should
it be judged within the counter-revolutionary story, already well-established
in the 1790s, of an insidious enlightenment of philosophers, outside and
abstract influences on the minds and institutions of the state.
Pernille Rge, in her original and illuminating chapter, examines the
relationship between enlightenment and reform, in the micro-history of the
French administration of the Antilles. The colonial experience, she shows, was
one of the important sources of the French economists or physiocrats ideas
of legal despotism; and thereby of the abstract enlightenment which was so
important to Tocquevilles story of the first French revolution. The French
islands can be seen, in the correspondence of the Chevalier de Mirabeau and
Mercier de la Rivire, as a chaos of illicit commerce and of endless change in
the relationships between empires and varieties of authority. The islands were
slave societies, with semi-enlightened administrations. As in Tocquevilles
description of Canada under Louis XIV one would imagine oneself in the
midst, already, of complete modern centralization, and in Algeria the origins
of enlightened despotism were to be found in the overseas France.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Lancien rgime et la rvolution, ed. J.-P. Mayer (Paris, 1967),
pp. 3512.
40
Florian Schui, too, looks at the micro-history of the French administration,

in the transnational exchanges of ideas about taxation following the Seven
Years War. His study of the preoccupation with foreign fiscal institutions
among high officials, including Moreau de Beaumont, whose memoirs
on taxation were one of Adam Smiths principal sources for the Wealth of
Nations, and the lawyers of the Paris Parliament is an important illustration
of the reciprocal influence of enlightenment and administration, and also of
the extent to which French officials, much like Mirabeau and Mercier de la
Rivire in Antilles, found inspiration in the outside and overseas world. The
early politics of the French Revolution was to a considerable extent a politics
of taxation, and in respect of this fluctuating political scene, France was a
source of enlightened ideas, as Schui shows, and a destination, too, of ideas
from other countries and continents.
The prospect of an overseas history of France is full of possibility, as the essays
in this volume make clear, for the new historiography of the long eighteenth
century. The age of reform and revolution would be far more southern, in
such a history; the history of the Atlantic economies would be a story, to a
considerable extent, of exchanges of officials, slaves, merchandise and ideas
between the French and the Spanish empires. It would also be a story which
continued, like the slave trade and French commerce in the Indian Ocean,
long after the end of enlightened reform (in 1789, 1799, 1808, 1822, or
1830, as Gabriel Paquette writes.) The disputes over economic reform, as all
the essays on France demonstrate, were of central importance to the process of
political change. There are other interesting economic disputes to be explored;
the rise and fall and rise of the French Compagnie des Indes, for example, or
the very early opposition, in France, to the slave trade and to slavery, or the
overseas history of free trade in France. These are histories of continuity as
well as revolutionary change, from the old to the new regimes.
See David Todd, Lidentit conomique de la France: Librechange et protectionnisme,

18141851 (Paris, 2008).
Chapter 4
Enlightened Reform in
Portugal and Brazil
Francisco Bethencourt
The government of Pombal, under the reign of King Jos of Portugal (1750
1777), dramatically enlarged state intervention and introduced significant
changes in government, relations with the Church, education, maritime
trade, urban development, industrial and agrarian production. The reform
of royal finances, with the creation of the Errio Rgio, centralised state
accountability with deep consequences at all levels of administration including
overseas territories. The specialisation of government was developed through
the creation of new secretariats of state. In Brazil, private captaincies were
suppressed; the autonomous state of Maranho and Par was abolished; a large
judicial reform was implemented; new financial and fiscal institutions, juntas
da fazenda, were created in each captaincy. The traditional recruitment of
viceroys, governors and captains among the high nobility received a temporary
set-back with the nomination of experienced bureaucrats. The assertion of the
power of the state before the Church implied an open conflict with the Jesuits
which resulted in their expulsion from Portugal and its colonies in 1759.
The Inquisition was explicitly placed under state control and the tribunal
of Goa was suppressed in 1774. The state also limited recruitment by the
religious orders. The reconstruction of Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755
benefited from the expropriation of land. Pombal chose the most modern
urban plan, a geometric grid that wiped out nearly all of the old churches
in downtown Lisbon. Maritime trade with the Northeast and North Brazil
came to be controlled by chartered companies. Wine production in Portugal
was geographically defined and a privileged company was created. Industrial
production was stimulated by protective laws and privileged companies,
such as the silk factory in Lisbon. The reform of the university included the
introduction of natural law and the establishment of laboratories linked to
the teaching of modern science. Primary and secondary schools also were
created to replace the old educational system controlled by the Church.
42
A programme concerning the civil rights of oppressed ethnicities was drafted

for the first time: restitution of freedom, property and trade to Brazilian
Indians; recognition of freedom for the Chinese in Macao, allowing them
access to public offices; the free migration of Timorese women into Macao;
measures to counteract discrimination against baptised Asian Indians, who
were given preferential access to public offices; suppression of discrimination
against new Christians of Jewish origins; and the abolition of slave trade into
Portugal and abolition of slavery in Portugal (though not in the colonies)
under certain circumstances.
It is fashionable nowadays to highlight the despotic rule of Pombal,
the anachronistic references (whether to Richelieu or the duke of Sully) of
his political thought, the absence of a concrete plan of reform at the very
beginning of his government, the maintenance of a system of censorship,
which excluded printed newspapers, the perpetuation of the colonial pact,
which continued Portuguese monopoly of trade and industrial production,
the political model of the seventeenth century favourite of the king, valido,
ennobled as it happened with Pombal, who became count and marquis,
or the enrichment of the politician, who vastly benefited from his own
legislation, namely the agrarian reforms, the reconstruction of Lisbon, and
the protection of the new entrepreneurial elite he invested so much effort in
creating. This kind of analysis is useful and reminds us of the limits of the
moderate Catholic type of Enlightenment that reached Portugal, much more
in dialogue with Austrian and Italian models than with British or French
models. It is also correct to try to set the record straight and to call attention
for the ambiguities of the government of Pombal, obscured by two centuries of
political propaganda, used by liberals against absolutists, by republicans against
constitutional monarchists or by pro-fascist nationalists against communists.
But the scope of such an exercise is also disputable if it is confined to the strict
definition of the political status of the minister, without sufficiently taking into
consideration the actions developed and the consequences of those actions in
the following fifty years. This is why I decided to present a rough rsum of
the main decisions that clearly contrasted with the structural conservatism of
the Portuguese Ancien Rgime, based on the careful checks and balances of a
corporatist state, partly dominated by the interests of the main noble houses,
the hierarchy of the Church, the two universities, the royal bureaucracy and
the tiny business elite. Many of Pombals reforms might have taken place in the
seventeenth century, but the point is exactly that they did not. Even if some
decisions were short-lived and the political grip of the aristocracy was restored
after Pombals fall, his economic policies were not substantially modified.
They set the stage for a long and unique period of prosperity, from circa 1790
to the first French invasion in 1807. The expulsion of the Jesuits was the first
Enlightened Reform in Portugal and Brazil
43
in Europe, precisely in the country where they had the strongest influence
at all levels, triggering expulsions in other countries and forcing the pope
to suppress the order. This and other measures meant that the relationship
between the state and the Church was disrupted and never returned to the
situation that had existed before Pombal, in which religious reason would
generally prevail. Pombals policies, then, opened the way for the creation of a
secularised political culture.
The problem of Brazil is that the colony, in contrast with Spanish
America, neither possessed a university nor a printing press. Moreover, the
introduction of factories was impeded by the central government. Brazilian
elites had to rely on local Jesuit colleges or send their children to the university
of Coimbra, in Portugal, which would reinforce loyalty to the centre. Yet,
when the university culture started to change in the second half of the
eighteenth century, Brazilian students were among the first to open up to
the new ideas of the Enlightenment. The absence of a local printing press
meant that Brazilians depended on imported books and the oral transmission
of knowledge. Censorship never means that books do not circulate at all; it
means that they cannot be used in a productive way, feeding conversations
and new printed reflections. But the penetration of liberal ideas, visible in the
sequence of conspiracies and revolts triggered by the Inconfidncia Mineira in
1789, means that we have to be more sensitive to an oral culture based on the
smuggling of manuscripts and forbidden printed books. The main problem
of the colony was, obviously, slavery: it clashed with the liberal ideas of the
colonial elite and blocked the issue of general citizenship for a long time. It
was not solved by the transfer of the royal court to Brazil in 18071808, after
the French invasion of Portugal, which carried with it the opening of the
ports to direct foreign trade, the introduction of the main organisms of the
state, print culture, industry, and colleges. It was not solved, either, by the
independence of Brazil in 1822: the late abolition of the slave trade in 1850
and slavery in 1888 left marks for the following generations. Slavery defined
the limits of liberal political reasoning in the tropics.
The issues raised here are contemplated by the three chapters concerning
Enlightenment in Portugal and Brazil included in this innovative collection.
Nuno Gonalo Monteiro develops his vision of the backward-gazing
references that framed the political status of Pombal and his promotion to
the titled nobility. Luiz Carlos Villalta tackles the crucial issue of the existence
of a public opinion in Portugal and Brazil and how it evolved based on the
circulation of forbidden books and oral transmission of knowledge. Gabriel
Paquette uses the fundamental work and action of Jos da Silva Lisboa, a
Brazilian conservative liberal favourable to independence, in order to question
44
the time framework and the pertinence of the classification of Enlightenment

in the context of Iberian America.
Bibliography
The best book on the ambiguities of the Portuguese Enlightenment is Kenneth
Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995). It is still useful to read the classic works by Jorge
Borges de Macedo, A situao econmica no tempo de Pombal [1951], 3rd edn
(Lisbon: Gradiva, 1989) and Problemas de histria da indstria portuguesa no
sculo XVIII [1963] 2nd edn (Lisbon: Querco, 1982); Carlos Guilherme Mota,
Ideia de revoluo no Brasil (17891801) [1970], 4th edn (So Paulo: tica,
1996); Kenneth Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal,
17501808 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Fernando
Novais, Portugal e Brasil na crise do antigo sistema colonial (17771808)
[1979], 5th edn (So Paulo: Hucitec, 1989); Francisco Calazans Falcon, A
poca pombalina: poltica econmica e monarquia ilustrada (So Paulo: tica,
1982); Jos Augusto Frana, Une ville des Lumires: la Lisbonne de Pombal, 2nd
edn (Paris : Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 1988).
New perspectives were opened by Valentim Alexandre, Os sentidos do
imprio: questo nacional e questo colonial na crise do Antigo Regime (Porto:
Afrontamento, 1993); Jorge Pedreira, Estrutura industrial e mercado colonial.
Portugal e Brasil (17801830) (Lisbon: Difel, 1994); Laura de Mello e Souza
(ed.), Cotidiano e vida privada na Amrica Portuguesa (So Paulo: Companhia
das Letras, 1997); Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri (eds), Histria
da Expanso Portuguesa (Lisbon: Crculo de Leitores, 1998), vols 3 and 4;
Iara Liz Carvalho Souza, Ptria coroada: o Brasil como corpo poltico autnomo,
17801831 (So Paulo: UNESP, 1998); Antnio Almodvar and Jos Lus
Cardoso, A History of Portuguese Economic Thought (London: Routledge,
1998); Ana Cristina Arajo, A cultura das Luzes em Portugal: temas e problemas
(Lisbon: Horizonte, 2003); Nuno Gonalo Monteiro, D. Jos. Na sombra de
Pombal (Lisbon: Crculo de Leitores, 2006).
PART II
The Rise of Public Political Culture:
The Efflorescence of Civil Society and
its Connection to State Reform
Chapter 5
Rethinking Enlightened Reform in a

French Context
John Shovlin
Between the 1750s and the 1780s, the French monarchy experimented albeit
hesitantly and inconsistently with a broad array of reforms. Among other
innovations, it extended de facto religious toleration to French Protestants
from the late 1750s, followed by a fuller measure of legal toleration in the
1780s. In the 1760s, it temporarily deregulated the grain trade, relaxed aspects
of the exclusive trading regime in the Caribbean colonies, and abrogated the
monopoly of the French Indies Company. The royal government fostered
agricultural improvement by establishing agricultural societies in Paris and the
provinces and by subsidizing the economic and agronomic press. Censorship
of the book trade loosened somewhat in the final decades of the old regime, and
the administration permitted the establishment of numerous new periodicals.
Royal officials promoted industrial innovation and presided over a relaxation
of regulations governing manufacturing. Successive comptrollers general
(effectively, ministers of finance) sought to reform the fiscal administration
by centralizing receipts and payments in a single treasury, and by organizing
revenue collection in publicly controlled rgies. During a final, especially
ambitious, reform drive in the late 1780s, the monarchy abolished the
remnants of Crown serfdom and encouraged the few remaining French serfholders to do the same.
See, on censorship, Raymond Birn, La censure royale des livres dans la France des
Lumires (Paris, 2007), and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution,
trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, 1991); on toleration, Geoffrey Adams, The Huguenots
and French Opinion, 16851787: The Enlightenment Debate on Toleration (Waterloo, ON,
1991), and Dale K. Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Rgime,
17501770 (Princeton, 1984); on the grain trade, Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and
Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (2 vols, The Hague, 1976), and Judith A. Miller,
Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 17001860
48
Neither Louis XV nor Louis XVI was a reformer by conviction and, as

a consequence, innovation came in the form of erratically pursued, ad hoc
initiatives rather than as a concerted and coherent program for transforming
society and government. However, by the eighteenth century the French
monarchy, as an institution, transcended the personality of the ruler, and the
regularity (if not the consistency) with which these reluctant monarchs were
drawn to reforming strategies, and reforming ministers, suggests that they
found themselves in a situation that stirred them to innovate and experiment.
Ministers and middle-ranking servants of the Crown carried the reform
impulse forward and it ebbed and flowed with their careers. In the period
of his ascendancy during the 1760s, the duc de Choiseul sponsored a raft of
innovations, while the triumvirate of Maupeou, dAiguillon, and Terray, who
replaced him, undid much of this work. In the 1770s, the most ambitious
reforms were the work of Jacques Turgot and Jacques Necker; Neckers fall
in 1781 marked a return to a more conservative practice. Yet the monarchy
found itself drawn back to a reforming strategy within a few years, when
comptroller general Charles-Alexandre de Calonne told Louis XVI that to
solve the monarchys financial crisis it would be necessary to revitalize the
entire state by reforming all that is defective in its constitution.
Though Louis XV and Louis XVI were not enlightened absolutists in
the mold of Joseph II or Charles III, the kinds of innovations initiated in
their name were similar in kind to those pursued by more thorough-going
reformers. Across Central and Southern Europe, and in Spanish America,
in this period, governments sought to renovate fiscal systems, promote
economic growth, improve the performance of armies and navies, and expand
educational opportunities. Since the late nineteenth century, some historians
(Cambridge, 1999); on colonial trade, Jean Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France
la fin de lAncien Rgime: Lvolution du rgime de lExclusif de 1763 1789 (2 vols, Paris,
1972); on the Indies Company, Edouard Moisson, Dupont de Nemours et la question de
la Compagnie des Indes (New York, 1968 [1918]); on agricultural improvement, Andr
J. Bourde, Agronomie et agronomes en France au XVIIIe sicle (Paris, 1967); on industrial
policy, Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution,
17501830 (Cambridge, MA, 2006), and Philippe Minard, La fortune du colbertisme:
Etat et industrie dans la France des Lumires (Paris, 1998); on fiscal reform, J.F. Bosher,
French Finances 17701795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1970), Jol Flix,
Finances et politique au sicle des Lumires: Le ministre LAverdy, 17631768 (Paris, 1999),
and Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France:
Libert, Egalit, Fiscalit (Cambridge, 2000); on serfdom, J.Q.C. Mackrell, The Attack on
Feudalism in Eighteenth-Century France (London, 1973).

Jean Egret, The French Prerevolution, 17871788, trans. Wesley D. Camp (Chicago
and London, 1977), p. 2.
49
have discerned, in initiatives such as these, a commitment on the part of rulers

to the new value system of the Enlightenment. Other more skeptical scholars
have questioned the authenticity of monarchs commitment to Enlightenment;
they emphasize the incompatibility between authoritarianism and enlightened
values, and represent enlightened reform as an extension of earlier strategies
aimed at increasing the power of the state. In this essay, I will suggest that
recent trends in the historiography of the Enlightenment render even more
problematic the concept of enlightened reform, as traditionally understood.
Yet the same historiographical developments may point the way out of debates
that have grown sterile and suggest ways to conceptualize eighteenth-century
reform more fruitfully.
A challenge to defining any specifically enlightened program of reform
derives from shifts in the way Enlightenment has come to be defined and
understood over the last three decades. If scholars ever ascribed a doctrinal
coherence to a unitary Enlightenment, this sense has mostly given way to
a vision of multiple Enlightenments, distinguished not just on national
and confessional lines, but further divided into radical, moderate, and even
conservative tendencies. Historians disagree on the defining intellectual
character and basic objectives of the Enlightenment. Further complicating
this historiographical shift, in the French context, has been the proliferation of
research and writing on political culture in the eighteenth century. Focusing,
in most instances, on ideas and texts, and borrowing some of the interpretative
techniques of intellectual history, the work of scholars in this area has given
The best introduction to these debates remains H.M. Scott, Introduction: The
Problem of Enlightened Absolutism, in H.M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism: Reform
and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ann Arbor, 1990). See also Charles
Ingrao, The Problem of Enlightened Absolutism and the German States, Journal of
Modern History, 58, supplement: Politics and Society in the Holy Roman Empire, 1500
1806 (1986): S16180.

Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity
16501750 (Oxford, 2001); Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists,
Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981); J.G.A. Pocock, Conservative Enlightenment
and Democratic Revolutions: The American and French Cases in British Perspective,
Government and Opposition, 24 (1989): 81105; Roy Porter and Mikul Teich (eds), The
Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981). In no domain, perhaps, has the
revisionist trend been more fundamental than in questioning the relationship between
religion and Enlightenment. See, for example, the forum God and the Enlightenment,
American Historical Review, 108:4 (2003): 10571104.

Some continue to make a case for a unitary Enlightenment project. See, notably,
John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 16801760
(Cambridge, 2005).
50
51
us a sense of the sheer diversity of thought and expression in this period. Not
everything that was critical, new, or contestatory can be lumped under the
umbrella category of Enlightenment.
Recent work has shown that reforms, once regarded as inspired by the
philosophes were, in many cases, actually linked to more various constituencies.
The now classic example is the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in the early
1760s. Claimed by some in the party of enlightenment as a triumph against
superstition and priestcraft, historians now regard the defeat of the Jesuits
as the culminating triumph of political Jansenism. It was supporters of this
austere and heterodox strand of Roman Catholicism in the Parlement of Paris
who played the key role in proceedings against the Society. The philosophes
may have applauded the move, but their ideas did not drive it. The program
of military reform perhaps the most consistent and successful of all the
reform initiatives of the old monarchy found its most enthusiastic support
among provincial nobles, who sought to shore up their own professional and
social position against courtiers and wealthy anoblis. The rhetoric of merit, so
central to army reform, was an extension of a long-standing noble discourse
on royal service, not an Enlightenment novelty. Middling nobles also played
a role in forwarding an agenda of agriculture-based political economic reform.
They sought to recover Frances international influence, damaged by the loss
of the Seven Years War, and the patriotic language in which they couched
calls for economic regeneration reflected this commitment.
The whole notion of philosophic influence over rulers, or their agents, on
which conceptualizations of enlightened reform have traditionally been based,
must be treated with caution. Influence can imply that ideas have a kind of
causal logic of their own, leading scholars to pay inadequate attention to the
contexts in which those ideas are received. As Keith Baker observes, texts, if
For a brief overview of this scholarship, see William Doyle, Origins of the French
Revolution, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1999), pp. 3541.

Dale K. Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757
1765 (New Haven, 1975).

David Bien, The Army in the French Enlightenment: Reform, Reaction and
Revolution, Past & Present, 85 (1979): 6898; Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army, 1750
1820: Careers, Talent, Merit (New York, 2002); Jay M. Smith, Culture of Merit: Nobility,
Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 16001789 (Ann Arbor,
1996). The position that a language of merit, as used by eighteenth-century nobles,
represented an enlightenment-derived novelty is that of Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The
French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. William
Doyle (Cambridge, 1985).

John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of
the French Revolution (Ithaca, 2006).
52
read, are understood, and hence reinterpreted, by their readers in con-texts that
may transform their significance; ideas, if received, take on meaning only in
relation to others in the set of ideas into which they are incorporated. Thus it
is important ... to avoid treating ideas as if they were causal, individual agents
of motivation and determination.10 The notion of influence implicitly locates
agency in the wrong place with intellectuals, or even with ideas rather
than where it belongs, with the actors being influenced. It might be more
fitting to speak of appropriation when dealing with the relationship between
government and enlightenment. When eighteenth-century policy makers
confronted novel challenges for which conventional conceptual or practical
tools were inadequate, they could look to philosophes for new resources or new
solutions. In so doing, however, they took what seemed useful, and modified
it for their own purposes. It was the needs of the consumers of ideas rather
more than the intentions of the producers that shaped the interaction.
A further challenge to the idea of enlightened reform, as generally
conceived, arises from the ongoing reconceptualization of the Enlightenment
in sociological terms. A definition of Enlightenment framed within a history
of ideas tradition has given way, at least partially, in recent decades, to
conceptions that define the phenomenon primarily in terms of sensibilities,
practices, and spaces. Historians emphasize that humanitarian campaigns
against torture and slavery may have had as much to do with social practices,
such as novel reading, as with the influence of Enlightenment ideas.11 Scholars
argue that aspirations to rational improvement were enacted within, and
fostered by, institutions such as masonic lodges, muses, and socits de penses.
Intellectual exchange flourished in a renewed and expanded republic of letters
with its foundations in academies, scientific societies, and the correspondence
they sustained. The eighteenth century saw the emergence or transformation
of a critical public sphere grounded in print culture, especially the periodical
press and an expanded book trade. In short, Enlightenment is often viewed,
today, less as a body of ideas or texts than as a new public culture, linked to
novel modes of sociability, and organized around commitments to rational
improvement, intellectual exchange, and the advancement of shared notions
of the common good.12
Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political
Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), p. 19.
11
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007).
12
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, LEspace des francs-maons: Une sociabilit europenne au
XVIIIe sicle (Rennes, 2003); Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, LEurope des Lumires (Paris, 2004);
Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment
(New York and London, 2000); Daniel Roche, La France des Lumires (Paris, 1993);
10
53
This reconceptualization of Enlightenment in terms of spaces and practices

unsettles the whole notion of enlightened reform, or at least renders the
meaning of such a category less self-evident. Yet, such a sociological vision
may also offer a useful way to think about many aspects of eighteenth-century
reform. If we see the Enlightenment as a new public culture, the monarchy
can be regarded as playing an active role in the elaboration of that culture.13 In
the final decades of the old regime the French monarchy began to experiment
with new modes of communication and social mobilization. Several closely
related and overlapping practices are at issue here. First, the Crown sought
to intervene in the public sphere, to shape public opinion, and to deploy it
to promote projects of rational improvement. It did so both by deliberately
creating institutional spaces in which opinion might be elaborated, and from
which it might be shaped, and by directly encouraging certain intellectual
tendencies in the public sphere more broadly. Second, using its regulatory
and administrative power, the monarchy sought to construct pockets in
which certain kinds of liberties especially economic and scientific could
be exercised, though in limited ways. It is in this experimentalism, perhaps,
that we can most clearly distinguish enlightened tendencies.
If the French Crown sought new ways to articulate its relationship with civil
society in this period, it did so, in large measure, because traditional forms of
mediation proved ineffective or unwieldy. The old regime monarchy mediated
its relationship with its subjects through corporate bodies the Catholic
Church, the parlements, provincial estates, guilds, and corps of venal office
holders and also via informal patron-client relationships that ran vertically
through French society from Versailles to the provinces.14 As the monarchy
Daniel Roche, Les rpublicains des lettres: Gens de culture et Lumires au XVIIIe sicle
(Paris, 1988); Daniel Roche, Le sicle des Lumires en province: Acadmies et acadmiciens
provinciaux, 16801789 (2 vols, Paris and The Hague, 1978); Franco Venturi, Europe des
Lumires: Recherches sur le 18e sicle (Paris and The Hague, 1971); Franco Venturi, The End
of the Old Regime in Europe, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (2 vols, Princeton, 19849).
13
For a contrary view that the French monarchy signally failed to alter its cultural
policy in the face of the emergence of a new public sphere see T.C.W. Blanning, The
Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 16601789 (Oxford, 2002),
pp. 357427.
14
An older historiography, which construed absolutist monarchy in an antipathetic
relation to such corporate bodies, has largely given way, in recent decades, to a more
nuanced view which sees cooperation between the Crown and privileged elites as the key
to the success and stability of this form of government. See William Beik, Absolutism and
Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc
(Cambridge, 1985); Peter R. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France (London
and New York, 1996); Sara E. Chapman, Private Ambition and Political Alliances:
54
expanded its sphere of governance in the eighteenth century, however, the

traditional mediators often emerged as obstacles to royal initiatives. A case in
point is the troubled relationship between the Crown and corporate bodies
over taxation.15 Immediately following the War of Austrian Succession, the
administration met with sharp resistance when it established a peacetime tax,
the vingtime, designed to amortize the inflated public debt. The Catholic
Church and some of the provincial estates led the opposition. The Seven Years
War had hardly begun in 1756 before further signs of tax resistance became
apparent; this time it was the parlements that attempted to block higher
taxes.16 If it was more difficult for the monarchy to mediate its relationship
with the political nation via traditional corporate channels, it was increasingly
easy to do so via the public sphere, thanks to shifts in the size, literary culture,
and social composition of the elite. Nobles had become far more oriented to
print culture by the eighteenth century than they had been before and, more
importantly, there was rapid growth in the size of the non-noble elite that
class of city dwellers living comfortably on its investments or from work in
The Phlypeaux de Pontchartrain Family and Louis XIVs Government, 16501715

(Rochester, NY, 2004); James B. Collins, Classes, Estates, and Order in Early Modern
Brittany (Cambridge, 1994); Fanny Cosandey and Robert Descimon, LAbsolutisme en
France: Histoire et historiographie (Paris, 2002); Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism:
Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London and New York,
1992); Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France
(Oxford, 1986); Roger Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIVs France (Oxford, 1988);
David Parker, Class and State in Ancien Rgime France: The Road to Modernity? (London
and New York, 1996).
15
Tax resistance was far from the only problem state finances faced in the eighteenth
century, but it was a significant one. See Peter Mathias and Patrick OBrien, Taxation in
Britain and France, 17151810: A Comparison of the Social and Economic Incidence of
Taxes Collected for the Central Governments, Journal of European Economic History, 5
(1976): 60150. On structural problems in French finances, a useful overview is Kathryn
Norberg, The French Fiscal Crisis of 1788 and the Financial Origins of the Revolution
of 1789, in Philip T. Hoffman and Kathryn Norberg (eds), Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and
Representative Government 14501789 (Stanford, 1994). On the 1750s, see James C.
Riley, The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France: The Economic and Financial Toll
(Princeton, 1986).
16
Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation. Ultimately, the sense that taxpayers
could not, or would not, pay more led the administration to finance most of the cost of
the war through borrowing, a policy that proved disastrous in the long run. See Riley, The
Seven Years War, pp. 1423.
55
the expanding professions and in trade. By a conservative estimate, this group

expanded from 700,000 or 800,000 in 1700 to 1.7 million in 1789.17
Historians have long recognized that the Crown engaged in public debate
in the latter half of the eighteenth century, but most read such interventions
as defensive measures, or as a supplement to a policy of repression. In the
face of repeated resort to the public sphere by the parlements to contest the
policies of the monarchy, royal publicists had to respond. Unable to stifle
these processes of political contestation, Keith Baker writes, the government
found itself under increasing pressure to participate in them.18 The point is
well taken, but in some areas of debate the role the Crown played was less
reactive. Its objective was not so much to curb criticism as to stir civil society
and tap its dynamic potential. A parallel may be found in the use of the public
sphere by the administration to animate patriotism during the early stages of
the Seven Years War. Publicists in the service of the monarchy, among them
Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, Antoine-Lonard Thomas, and Jean-Bernard Le Blanc,
advanced a patriotic and proto-nationalist vision of the conflict with Britain,
representing the war as a struggle between nations rather than royal houses,
and equating love of country with loyalty to the Crown.19 The monarchy did
not resort to print simply in self-defense, or because it was forced to give an
account to a critical public, but because it (or some of its servants) saw, in the
public sphere, a mode of mediating its relationship with society outside the
traditional corporate channels.
The monarchy patronized institutions designed to be permanent sites of
intellectual exchange and practical improvement. In the early 1760s, the royal
government established thirteen agricultural societies. Certainly, strictures
were placed on what it was permissible for members to discuss global issues
of political economic reform, like recasting the fiscal system, were placed out of
bounds. But, within these limits, the administration hoped the societies would
be engines of innovation and education for the agricultural sector. Similar
Jacques Dupquier, Histoire de la population franaise, vol. 2, De la Renaissance
1789 (Paris, 1988). Already, in the seventeenth century, the monarchy had launched the
first national newspapers in an effort to reach elites. See David Bell, The Public Sphere,
the State, and the World of Law in Eighteenth-Century France, French Historical Studies,
17:4 (1992): 91234.
18
Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, p. 171.
19
David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 16801800
(Cambridge, MA, 2001), pp. 77106; David A. Bell, Jumonvilles Death: War Propaganda
and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century France, in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman
(eds), The Age of Cultural Revolution: Britain and France, 17501820 (Berkeley, CA, 2002);
Edmond Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme franais, 17501770: La France face la
puissance anglaise lpoque de la guerre de Sept Ans, SVEC, 365 (Oxford, 1998).
17
56
expectations were invested in provincial academies. These institutions had

functioned in the seventeenth century principally as sites for the production
and representation of monarchical glory.20 By the latter part of the eighteenth
century the monarchy was treating them primarily as nodes of intellectual
innovation and practical improvement. The essay competitions run by
provincial academies reflected a new interest in economic and social progress.
Artificial meadows, interest rates, woodland management, silk manufacture,
and canals these were all topics of academic essay competitions in the final
decades of the old regime.21 The Crown looked to the Academy of Sciences as
a body of experts whose knowledge might be drawn upon, by the government,
to serve useful public ends.22 As is well known, the Acadmie franaise became
a bastion of the parti philosophique in the 1770s and 1780s a development
that could hardly have occurred without the knowledge and assent of the
administration. The monarchy was by far the most important patron of
writers and intellectuals, employing many as censors or in the official press,
and pensioning others through the official learned societies. In 1786, the king
paid out pensions of over 300,000 livres to writers and intellectuals.23 Should
we interpret this solely as an effort to manipulate, control, and repress public
opinion to curb potentially dangerous voices? Or should it also be viewed,
in part, as an effort to promote and encourage useful discussion?
Censorship was another area in which government policy evolved in
the second half of the century. In theory, all books (barring a few special
categories24), had to receive prior publication permission from a royal censor:
either a formal privilege, implying royal approval of the text in question,
or a simple permission, which implied no such sanction. A shift came with
the appointment of Chrtien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes as
Directeur de la Librairie in 1750. As Raymond Birn has noted, Lamoignon
de Malesherbes and some of his royal censors envisaged transforming the
classic institution of repression, the Direction of the Book Trade, into a
Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992), pp. 4959.
See the list of essay competitions inventoried in Antoine-Franois Delandine,
Couronnes acadmiques, ou Recueil des prix proposs par les socits savantes (Paris, 1787).
22
Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics
(Chicago, 1975), pp. 4041, 678.
23
Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA,
1982), p. 10.
24
Books published at the Imprimerie royale were exempt, as were memoranda written
by lawyers for use in the law courts, prayer books and some other classes of devotional
works issued by dioceses, and the edicts of parlements and other sovereign courts. See
Birn, La censure royale des livres, p. 72.
20
21
57
mechanism which encouraged a public discussion of ideas.25 In a series of

memoranda written in the late 1750s, Malesherbes outlined a new philosophy
on censorship.26 He expanded a system of tacit permissions to publish as
a quasi-legal way to loosen restrictions on publishing. In practice, such
informal permission did not always shield authors from prosecution, as the
parlements and the Church also enjoyed the right to prosecute works they
deemed subversive. If Malesherbes loosening of restrictions proved very
partial, a more liberal spirit nonetheless began to pervade the personnel and
the practice of censorship by the 1770s. As the censor Jean-Baptiste-Claude
Cadet de Saineville noted in 1777, Truth always appears precious to me ...
and so long as discussions are wisely presented, without invective or slights, I
believe that one cannot leave to it a field too broad.27
Servants of the Crown did not simply relax censorship; they actively
promoted debate they regarded as useful to the monarchy. The case is
especially clear for French political economy. In the 1750s, figures within the
royal administration (notably Jacques-Claude-Marie Vincent de Gournay and
Daniel Trudaine) launched public discussion of political economic questions
by patronizing a stable of young writers, many of whom would go on to
become key figures in French political economic debate. As Loc Charles
shows, Vincent de Gournay believed that France was in danger of losing its
preeminence in Europe because prejudices and misapprehensions concerning
commerce, long dispelled in England, continued to enjoy credence in France.
In the words of Franois Vron de Forbonnais, one of the most prominent
of Gournays acolytes, It is no longer conquests, slaughters and fright which
decide the superiority of an empire; it is the happiness of its subjects. It is
to trade, father of industry, that the world owes these happy changes.28 In
Gournays view, it was vital that French elites especially the high nobility
of the sword and robe be enlightened about trade, that the science of
commerce be disseminated.29 The writers linked to Gournay published
Birn, La censure royale des livres, p. 135.
Chrtien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Mmoires sur la Librairie.
Mmoire sur la libert de presse, ed. Roger Chartier (Paris, 1994).
27
Quoted in Birn, La censure royale des livres, p. 37.
28
Franois Vron de Forbonnais, Considrations sur les finances dEspagne (Dresden,
1753), pp. iiiiv.
29
Loc Charles, French New Politics and the Dissemination of Humes Political
Discourses on the Continent, in Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind (eds), David
Humes Political Economy (London and New York, 2008). See also Simone Meyssonnier, La
balance et lhorloge: La gense de la pense librale en France au XVIIIe sicle (Montreuil, 1989);
Antoin E. Murphy, Le dveloppement des ides conomiques en France (17501756),
Revue dhistoire moderne et contemporaine, 33 (1986): 52141.
25
26
58
dozens of translations of foreign works and numerous writings of their own,

and succeeded in giving an enormous stimulus to political economic debate in
France. In March 1755, the Correspondance littraire remarked that over the
last eighteen months nothing has been more common than works on trade.
Six months later Grimm noted that This subject is becoming each day more
interesting; and as the public fixes its attention on it, as it seems bent on doing,
we will have the double advantage of being instructed in a science which will
soon become the basis for the superiority ... of the French government.30
Some scholars have read the activities of Gournay and his circle as a challenge
from outside the monarchy to the pervasive practice of government secrecy
in the name of political publicity.31 But Gournay and his chief collaborators,
Malesherbes and Trudaine, worked within the structure of the monarchy,
using the power of censorship (vested in Malesherbes hands as Directeur de
la Librairie) to accord tacit publishing permissions to Gournays acolytes, and
to grant them an unofficial protection. They did so as loyal servants of the
Crown, not as hostile critics, and with the intention of increasing the power
of the monarchy. Gournay and his collaborators certainly had to deal with
opposition to their initiative from within the administration. This opposition
might be viewed as an instance of what Kenneth Banks has called the fractured
royal voice the fragmentation of royal authority that was such an evident
feature of French government in the eighteenth century.32 Such factionalism
does not alter the insider status of Gournay and his collaborators, or make their
interventions any less an instance of the monarchy acting on civil society.
As traditionally understood, enlightened reform entailed a one-way flow
of influence: from Enlightenment to government. It may be more realistic to
posit a two-way model with the French monarchy advancing some of the key
reform ideas putatively influencing it. It became common in the 1750s and
1760s for French administrators to stage political economic debates around
new policy initiatives. There is good reason to believe that the abb Coyers
La noblesse commerante (1756), which famously argued that the poor nobility
Quoted in Antoin E. Murphy, Richard Cantillon: Entrepreneur and Economist
(Oxford, 1986), p. 308. Studies of political economic publishing bear out this anecdotal
evidence. Jean-Claude Perrot, Une histoire intellectuelle de lconomie politique XVIIeXVIIIe
sicle (Paris, 1992); Christine Thr, Economic Publishing and Authors, 15661789, in
Gilbert Faccarello (ed.), Studies in the History of French Political Economy: From Bodin to
Walras (London and New York, 1998).
31
Robin J. Ives, Political Publicity and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century
France, French History, 17:1 (2003): 118.
32
Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in
the French Atlantic, 17131763 (Montreal and Kingston, 2002), p. 194.
30
59
ought to be encouraged to go into trade, was intended to pave the way for
an edict reiterating arrts of 1669 and 1701 that conferred on the nobility
the right to engage in wholesale commerce without derogation.33 In 1758,
the abb Morellet was commissioned by Daniel Trudaine to write a work
arguing in favor of lifting restrictions on the manufacture of printed calicoes
in France.34 An edict legalizing the practice followed in 1759.35 In the late
1760s, the Physiocrats functioned as virtual official propagandists for the
policy of the monarchy on the liberalization of the grain trade. Comptroller
general tienne Maynon dInvau hosted a dinner each week to which the
Physiocrat Pierre-Samuel Dupont was invited, along with two former
associates of Gournay, Louis-Paul Abeille and the abb Morellet. In 1769,
Maynon dInvau invited Morellet to write an attack on the French Indies
Company, whose monopoly on the China and India trades he had decided
to suspend.36 I am not suggesting that all initiatives for political economic
reform emanated from within the royal government. Moreover, those which
did originate there would have enjoyed little success had they not tapped an
authentic vein of public engagement in problems of political economic order.
But the fact remains that the monarchy was a participant in this public debate,
not an idle bystander.
Policies of fostering debate and creating spaces for exchange always
within limits can be seen as analogous to the royal governments efforts
to create spaces of liberty and innovation in the French economy. In the
aftermath of the War of Austrian Succession prescient observers judged that
France was falling behind economically and that if the French monarchy was
to preserve its preeminence in Europe it would have to borrow aspects of
the Anglo-Dutch model.37 Economic actors should be given more liberty to
make their own choices because such freedom spurred innovation and created
prosperity. Government policy on the grain trade is a case in point. As Judith
Miller shows, the heavy-handed regulatory measures of the early eighteenth
Gabriel-Franois Coyer, La noblesse commerante (London, 1756). On the context
in which the work was published, see Guy Richard, Noblesse daffaires au XVIIIe sicle
(Paris, 1974).
34
Abb Andr Morellet, Rflexions sur les avantages de la fabrication et de lusage des
toiles peintes en France (Geneva, 1758).
35
Pierre Deyon and Philippe Guignet, The Royal Manufactures and Economic and
Technological Progress in France before the Industrial Revolution, Journal of European
Economic History, 9:3 (1980): 61132.
36
Andr Morellet, Mmoire sur la situation actuelle de la Compagnie des Indes (n.p.,
1769).
37
Henry C. Clark, Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old-Regime
France (Lanham, MD, 2007).
33
60
century grain censuses and confiscations, capital punishment for rioters and
hoarders were gradually replaced in the fifty years before the Revolution
with more gentle strategies that sought to channel market forces rather than
attempting to coerce economic agents into behaving in a manner contrary to
their interests. One strategy pursued by officials with responsibility for urban
provisioning in the 1750s and 1760s was to use simulated sales. When prices
were high, publicly owned grain supplies were sold, often at a loss, through
a straw man, who masked the official intervention as a private transaction.
The goal was to assure buyers that there was no shortage of supply while
convincing sellers that prices would not continue to rise. Under Turgot, such
official market manipulations were briefly prohibited in favor of a more purely
market model.38
In its policies on colonial trade, the monarchy indicated a willingness to
introduce spaces of relative freedom, or to relax restrictions in an effort to
animate commerce. The French Antillean colonies were governed under what
was known as the Exclusif, a legal regime that required colonists to buy all their
provisions and manufactures from the mother country. Because supplies were
available from North America at much lower prices, contraband trade was
rife between the French sugar islands and their British neighbors. Successive
ministers of the navy and colonies in the 1760s and 1770s sought to improve
the situation by maintaining what Jean Tarrade has called the Exclusif mitig,
a trading regime under which colonists were permitted to buy some of their
provisions locally while remaining tied to taking metropolitan manufactured
goods. The monarchy extended freedom of trade on a limited basis to Guyana
and to Saint-Lucia, and tacitly tolerated a certain level of smuggling. Any
greater measure of liberty was strongly resisted by commercial interests in the
metropole which stood to gain from a monopolistic trading relationship with
the islands.39
A key goal of the Crown in its regulation of the manufacturing economy
during the 1770s and 1780s, as Philippe Minard shows, was to animate the
dynamic, innovative capacities of entrepreneurs and workers by allowing
a greater degree of freedom. The most important policy shift occurred
under Necker when the comptroller general redefined the mission of the
Inspectorate of Manufactures from enforcing quality-control regulations on
textile manufacturers to animating trade and gathering information.40 In the
royal bureaux with responsibility for industrial policy, as Jeff Horn shows,
Judith A. Miller, Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern
France, 17001860 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 26, 567, 65, 72.
39
Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France.
40
Minard, La fortune du colbertisme, pp. 32024.
38
61
administrators sought to foster local invention and innovation, and to aid in

technology transfer from Britain.41 The shift in regulatory philosophy since
the heyday of Colbertism was quite striking. In the earlier period, as Henry
Clark notes, the monarchy saw its role as one of attracting a reluctant and
unreliable polity into self-interested enterprises the monarchy [had] chosen
for it.42 By the latter half of the eighteenth century, the monarchy, or some
of its servants, had come to the conclusion that civil society had dynamic
qualities which the administration must learn to tap.
The monarchy even flirted with introducing a measure of political
liberty in order to improve local and provincial government and reform a
tax system perceived to be illegitimate. In 1764 and 1765, the comptroller
general, Clment-Charles-Franois de Laverdy, issued edicts reforming
municipal government. The goal of the reforms was to revivify moribund local
authorities by making more positions subject to election.43 Turgot dreamed of
regenerating the kingdom by establishing a network of local and provincial
elective assemblies that would have responsibility for apportioning the tax
burden, directing projects for local improvement, and acting as consultants
to the central government on administrative questions. His secretary, Dupont
de Nemours, drew up an elaborate plan for such a network of assemblies, but
Turgot fell from power before any such reform could be undertaken.44 His
successor, Jacques Necker, moved in the same direction when he established
two pilot assemblies in the provinces of Berry and Haute Guyenne. The
assemblies, initially raised by a combination of appointment and cooptation,
were intended eventually to become elective; half of their delegates were drawn
from the Third Estate, and they voted by head. Necker intended the assemblies
to weaken the claim of the parlements to exercise a representative political
function testament to the decreasing utility of the traditional channels of
communication and mobilization.
It is customary to assess the significance of the French monarchys reforms
in the late eighteenth century in terms of their failure to avert revolution in
1789. Reforms had been too timid, or they had come too late. Reformers lacked
Horn, Path Not Taken, pp. 1787.
Clark, Compass of Society, p. 20.
43
The reforms were undone by the abb Terray, comptroller general from 1769 to
1774. See Maurice Bordes, LAdministration provinciale et municipale en France au XVIIIe
sicle (Paris, 1972), pp. 254310. See also Marie-Laure Legay, Un projet mconnu de
dcentralisation au temps de Laverdy (17631768): Les Grands Etats dAquitaine,
Revue historique, 306 (2004): 53354.
44
Gerald J. Cavanaugh, Turgot: The Rejection of Enlightened Despotism, French
Historical Studies, 6:1 (1969): 3158.
41
42
the will, or the power, to stop change from being blocked by constituencies
that stood to lose their privileges. It is perfectly reasonable to consider reform
from such a perspective, but viewed in a less teleological light we might also
recognize that the French monarchy played an important and deliberate
role in fashioning the spaces, practices, ideas and sensibilities of the French
Enlightenment. One can discern a shift, in the second half of the eighteenth
century, in the strategies of rule adopted by the monarchy a move to sidestep,
or supplement, traditional, corporate forms of mediation between Crown and
society. In this period, the monarchy resorted ever more to the public sphere
as a way to communicate with, and mobilize, its subjects. It did so by staging
public debates, by creating spaces for the kinds of intellectual exchanges it
believed would
generate public utility, or by constructing social spaces for the
exercise of a limited freedom. In so doing, the monarchy became a significant
actor in the new public culture of the Enlightenment. This is the sense, I
would argue, in which it is most meaningful to speak of enlightened reform
in a French context.
Chapter 6
Searching for a Middle Class?

Francesco Mario Pagano and the
Public for Reform in Late EighteenthCentury Naples
Melissa Calaresu*
Several months after its collapse, as a political exile in Milan, Vincenzo

Cuoco (17701823) wrote of the Neapolitan republic of 1799: Because the
revolution was a passive revolution, the only way for it to be successful was
to win over the opinion of the people. Reluctantly, I begin with the words
* This essay began as a chapter in my Cambridge doctoral dissertation on Pagano
but has been transformed as my interests have gone beyond the Neapolitan reformers to
the public which they were so keen to address. It is not possible to thank all those who
have taken an interest in my work on Pagano over the years but I would like to thank John
Robertson and Joan Pau Rubis for having reading read and commented on the earliest
and latest versions of my essay and more importantly for their unremitting enthusiasm
for the settecento napoletano over the years. I would also to thank Gabriel Paquette for
his invitation to participate in this important project and for his encouragement and
comments.

Vincenzo Cuoco, Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 [1801], ed.
F. Nicolini (Bari, 1929), p. 90. All translations from Italian are my own unless indicated
otherwise. Cuocos account of the revolution was written after his exile from Naples in
1800 and published anonymously in Milan the following year. The modern standard
edition is based on the second edition of 1806 edited by Nicolini above. On the original
two editions, see Nicolinis note in ibid., pp. 35768. Antonino de Francesco has published
the most recent annotated edition as Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana (Manduria/
Bari/Rome, 1998). Vincenzo Cuoco came to study law in Naples in 1787 and was a friend
of Giuseppe Maria Galanti and other key figures of the Neapolitan reform movement.
He held a minor administrative office in the republican government of 1799. In exile,
in Milan, he published many newspaper articles which have been published in the first
volume of Cuoco, Scritti vari, eds N. Cortese and F. Nicolini (2 vols, Bari, 1924). Cuoco
64
of Cuoco, the first historian of the revolution, whose characterisation of it

as a passive revolution has framed and has done so much to distort, until
recently the historiography of the revolution and of the reform movement
which preceded it. Cuocos argument centred around the failure of the
revolutionaries completely disconnected and separated by language and
culture from the Neapolitan people to gain their support. There is no doubt
that the establishment of the Neapolitan republic had depended on French
military force and on the complete absence of the monarchy, and there had
been little popular support for the revolution. Nonetheless, Cuocos claim not
only contrasts with the continuity of the concerns of Neapolitan enlightened
writers for the need for a wider public to support reform before 1799 and into
the revolutionary period, but it can also be set against recent historical writing
on the significance of the creation of such publics, especially in relation to
revolution, in eighteenth-century Europe. The hope for such a public clearly
emerges in the writings of late eighteenth-century Naples as writers analysed
the limits of their own society and political traditions. With its significantly
lower literacy rates and a limited market economy, the Kingdom of Naples
can not quite match the dimensions of what constituted the public sphere
in France or Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. In fact, I would
argue, democratic reform in southern Italy, as in the rest of southern Europe,
has been limited by these constraints into the modern period. Nonetheless,
as John Davis has recently emphasised in his study of Napoleon and Naples,
the power of the paradigm of the passive revolution has obscured the extent
of new forms of political mobilisation which were developed in the South,
eventually returned to Naples in 1806 and held various offices under the Napoleonic
government from which he was dismissed with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.
For a recent account of Cuocos life, see A. de Francesco, Vincenzo Cuoco: Una vita politica
(Rome/Bari, 1997).

A relatively recent, and refreshing, account of the question has been written by a
French historian: H. Burstin, Ancora sulla rivoluzione passiva: Riflessioni comparative
sullesperienza giacobina in Italia, Societ e storia, 79 (1998): 7595. On this question,
see also A.M. Visceglia, Genesi e fortuna di una interpretazione storiografica: la rivoluzione
napoletana del 1799 come rivoluzione passiva, Annali della Facolt di Magistero della
Universit degli Studi di Lecce, 1 (1972): 188204, and A.M. Rao, Sociologia e politica del
giacobinismo: il caso napoletano, Prospettive settanta, 2 (1979): 21239.

See Cuoco, Saggio storico, p. 90. On this theme, see my article The Patriots and the
People in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples, History of European Ideas, 20 (1995): 2039.

See, for example, R. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-revolutionary France
(London, 1996), T.C.W. Blanning, Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics (Oxford,
2002), and D. Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley, 2002).
65
more than anywhere else in Italy, before and after 1799. In fact, Neapolitan
reformers had hoped for and imagined a new role for a literate public which
would support a reform programme under the Bourbon monarchy and hold
strong against the entrenched powers of a feudal nobility. Similarly, under
the short-lived Neapolitan republic, revolutionaries appealed to this public
and even made steps to widen it. This essay will analyse the hopes for this
wider public through the role of the middle class (or ordine mezzana) in the
writings of Francesco Mario Pagano, whose life and career spanned the shift
from enlightenment to revolution in Naples at the end of the eighteenth
century. In turn, and more ambitiously, this essay is also an initial attempt to
find a middle ground between the concerns of intellectual historians trying
to establish genealogies of ideas and the concerns of cultural historians who
are more interested in the interplay between ideas and the cultural spaces in
which they are imagined.
Vincenzo Cuoco believed that the revolutionaries could never have won
over the support of the public because they were so distant in their ideas
and in their language from the people of Naples. He wrote: The Neapolitan
nation could be considered as divided in two peoples, diverse for two centuries
and by two degrees of climate. This gap had been created by the admiration
for foreign ideas and customs by reformers under monarchy and had been the
greatest obstacle to the establishment of liberty under the republic. Cuocos
judgement has distracted historians for two hundred years with discussions about
the originality of the constitution of 1799, in particular in comparison to the
earlier French constitutions. His analysis also highlighted the problem of the
public in the Neapolitan context. Cuoco recognised the difficulty of establishing
a democracy in a society without democratic traditions, writing: What is there to
hope from this language which is in all the proclamations directed to the people?
Finalmente siete liberi ... The people did not yet know what liberty was. It was
J.A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions
(17801860) (Oxford, 2006), p. 10.

Cuoco, Saggio storico, p. 90.

Ibid.

A detailed analysis of the 1799 constitution and its relation to Paganos earlier
writings under monarchy and earlier French and Italian constitutions is developed in
the final chapter of my dissertation: M. Calaresu, Political Culture in Late EighteenthCentury Naples: The Writings of Francesco Mario Pagano (Cambridge Ph.D, 1994). On
the French constitutions as sources, see also Mario Battaglini, Mario Pagano e il Progetto di
costituzione (Rome, 1994), pp. 325, and, on Gaetano Filangieris Scienza della legislazione,
as a source, see Vincenzo Ferrone, La societ giusta ed equa: Repubblicanesimo e diritti
delluomo in Gaetano Filangieri (Bari/Rome, 2003), pp. 22547.

Cuoco, Saggio storico, p. 104.
66
a problem that reformers like Pagano, as we shall see, had already recognised in
their writings. Most Neapolitans reform writers, however, would have argued that
this gap was not the result of slavish imitation and admiration of foreign models
but of centuries of feudal government. It was against the powers of the feudal
nobility that reformers hoped to cultivate a public which would be educated in
its own traditions and history of both liberty and oppression and to which it
could make appeals for support for an enlightened reform programme under the
Bourbon monarchy.10
Francesco Mario Pagano (17481799), like many other Neapolitan writers
of the eighteenth century, pointed to the political traditions of the Kingdom
as the fundamental problem, in which the monarchy had been made weak
by competing jurisdictional frictions with the feudal nobility and with the
Papacy.11 Many had argued that this weakness of monarchical government
had been allowed to develop during the two centuries of misrule by the
Spanish (and briefly by the Austrians). It was not until the arrival of Charles
of Bourbon in 1734, as the resident monarch of an autonomous kingdom,
that the authority of the crown, it was believed, could be asserted with some
effect against the powers of the feudal barons and the Church as landowners.
See, for example, on the writing of pre-Roman history in the context of the
Neapolitan feudal debates in this period, M. Calaresu, Images of Ancient Rome in Late
Eighteenth-Century Neapolitan Historiography, Journal of the History of Ideas, (1997):
64161.
11
For a biography of Pagano, see Franco Venturis introduction to a selection of
Paganos writings, including in Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, vol. V of Illuministi italiani
(Milan/Naples, 1962), pp. 785833. Gioele Solaris Studi su Francesco Mario Pagano
(Turin, 1963) is the only monograph which attempts to provide a coherent analysis of
Paganos thought. For an introduction to the Neapolitan enlightenment in English, see
Venturi, The Enlightenment in Southern Italy, in Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in
a Cosmopolitan Century, ed. S. Woolf (London, 1972), pp. 198225, and for the earlier
enlightenment and a comparison with the Scottish enlightenment, see J. Robertson, The
Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 16801760 (Cambridge, 2005). See also
Giuseppe Galasso, La filosofia in soccorso de governi: La cultura napoletana del settecento
(Naples, 1989), and, on Pagano, see Vincenzo Ferrone, I profeti dellilluminismo: Le
metamorfosi della ragione nel tardo Settecento, 2nd edn (Rome/Bari, 2000), esp. ch. 6, and
La societ giusta ed equa, chs 7, 8. The most recent account of Naples to the end of the
eighteenth century is G. Imbruglia (ed.), Naples in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth and
Death of a Nation State (Cambridge, 2000).
10
67
To the end of the century, reformers considered the institutions of the feudal
system as the primary obstacles to political reform in the Kingdom.12
Paganos Saggi politici (or Political Essays), first published in 17831785
with a second edition in 17911792, provide one of the most vociferous
criticisms of the feudal system in the Kingdom of Naples as a study of political
change through the history of human society from the origins of the earth to
the eighteenth century.13 At the centre of Saggi was an attempt to understand
the nature of feudalism and its consequent effects on the development of
civil society. The possession of land by feudal rights, exclaims Pagano, is the
greatest political absurdity that can be imagined.14 Feudal institutions, he
continues, destroy civil liberty, for not only do they include people and their
personal rights, by their labour, as property, but they also restrict and often
prohibit the selling and distribution of the products of the labour of others
with feudal monopolies and tariffs.15 For Pagano, the kind of property which
destroys the nature of property itself (defined according to the personal rights
exercised in the working of land) and a right which annuls another right is no
less than a civil monster.16 Pagano calls this imperfect form of government,
See A.M. Rao, Nel settecento napoletano: la questione feudale, in R. Pasta (ed.),
Cultura, intellettuali e circolazione delle idee nel 700 (Milan, 1990), pp. 8592, and The
Feudal Question, Judicial Systems and the Enlightenment, in G. Imbruglia (ed.), Naples in
the Eighteenth Century, pp. 95117. See also P. Villani, Il dibattito sulla feudalit nel Regno
di Napoli dal Genovesi al Canosa, in Saggi e ricerche sul settecento (Naples, 1968). On the
question of feudalism within an analysis of political thought at the end of the century, see
M. Calaresu, Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples, ch. 4. Most recently, see
J. Robertson, Political Economy and the Feudal System in Enlightenment Naples:
Outline of a Problem, SVEC, 1 (Oxford, 2008): 6586.
13
The full title is Saggi politici del civile corso delle nazioni o sia de principii, progressi,
decadenza delle societ (2 vols, Naples, 178385). The title of the second edition was
shortened to Saggi politici de principii, progressi, decadenza delle societ (3 vols, Naples,
17912). On the differences between the two editions, see Beatrice Sasso, I Saggi
politici di F.M. Pagano dalla prima alla seconda edizione, Atti dellAccademia di scienze
morali e politiche, (Naples), 93 (1982): 11355. For the definitive modern edition of the
second edition, see Pagano, Saggi politici, eds L. Firpo and L. Salvetti Firpo (Naples, 1993)
which has retained the original pagination. An anastastic edition of the first edition was
published in 2000: De saggi politici ed. F. Lomonaco (Naples, 2000). There are often
substantial differences between the two editions and, therefore, all references here will cite
the book, chapter and page number from the two original editions, unless the quotation
only appears in one edition.
14
Saggi (1792), V, xxi, p. 163.
15
Ibid.
16
Saggi (1792), V, xxi, pp. 1634.
12
68
which is characteristic of all barbaric societies, feudal aristocracy.17 Paganos

essays then continue with an account of the development of moderate
government which inevitably comes out of this barbaric stage, and, in his fifth
essay, the amelioration of society brings the development of the three models
of moderate government (in Aristotelian idiom) which are characteristic of all
civilised societies aristocracy, monarchy and democracy.18 Pagano believed,
following Montesquieu, that the kind of moderate government established
in each country was determined by a number of diverse external and internal
circumstances and that there was then no universal hierarchy between the
various types of moderate government which could develop from feudal
aristocracy.19
For Pagano, moderate government which had not yet developed in Naples
was defined as having successfully broken away from the anarchy of feudal
aristocracy while keeping at bay the possibility of its development into
despotism.20 To find a balance between the absolute power necessary to break
private feudal independence and, at the same time, moderation to guarantee
civil liberty was, according to Pagano in the first edition of the Saggi, the great
problem on which in every age the geniuses of the most profound political
thinkers have focused.21 In a new chapter on sovereignty in the second edition
of the Saggi, Pagano attempted to find that solution. The two properties of
moderate government could only come together when the law had reached its
greatest power (il sommo potere), when both the weak and strong bend their
Saggi (1785), V, ii, p. 90; (1792), V, ii, p. 81.

He wrote: essendo sempre lo stesso quel costante corso delle nazioni, per cui
dalla barbarie passano alla coltura, dalla schiavit del popolo ed eccessiva libert de nobili
alluniversale moderata libert civile, da un oppressore imperfetto governo ad uno de
tre moderati, cio temperata aristocrazia, regno o democrazia (Saggi (1785), V, ii, p. 90;
(1792), V, ii, pp. 812).
19
Pagano describes all the possible factors in the development of moderate
government in chapters three to eleven in the fifth essay (Saggi (1785), V, iiixi, pp. 91
125; (1792), V, iiixi, pp. 82125), concluding, however, that non si possono ancora
ridurre le particolari combinazioni, essendoci per anche ignoti i segreti legami de principi
tra loro. (Saggi (1785), V, xi, p. 124; (1792), V, xi, p. 123). This distinction helps clarify
the ambiguity over Paganos apparent shift from his support for reform under monarchy
into the 1790s to his later participation in the revolutionary government of 1799.
20
Emphasizing the precipitous position of moderate government within the course
of nations, he wrote: Due sono gli estremi tra quali eternamente ondeggiano le societ;
due sono i mortali suoi morbi, anarchia e dispotismo. Le societ tutte partono sempre
dallanarchia, e corrono a piombare nel dispotismo. (Saggi (1792), V, xxii, p. 166).
21
Saggi (1785), V, xvii, p. 143.
17
18
69
heads to the law.22 Thus, for Pagano, a moderate government was possible only
if it was underpinned by a clear well-written legislation that would protect
the interests of the public good while guaranteeing civil liberty, essentially
a balance between private and public interests.23 All of Paganos moderate
governments at this most developed civil stage in the course of nations can
then be identified by having civil liberty and a legislation to guarantee this.24
Any moderate government must then find a way of maintaining civil liberty
while ensuring civil dependence a balance which the law should guarantee.
Paganos models of moderate government aristocracy, democracy, and
monarchy all work around this particular framework. Having reached
civil perfection, as Pagano pointed out in a published letter to his critics in
1785, each kind of government should guarantee civil liberty and ensure
civil dependence by legislation. In the Lettera, he denied that he favoured
one model (democracy) over any other model (aristocracy or monarchy) of
moderate government.25 However, while Pagano did not treat these models
separately in the Saggi, his discussion of each model reveals his own awareness
of the realities and limits of Neapolitan society and of Naples past in relation
to each of them. For example, although recognised as one of the three forms of
moderate government, aristocracy was most often dismissed and analysed for
its disadvantages. Because of the continuing existence of feudal institutions
in the Kingdom and a historiographical tradition in which the nobility was
portrayed as having prevented effective government for Neapolitans, it was
difficult for writers such as Pagano to envisage the flourishing of civil liberty
under any kind of aristocratic government.
Democracy, as a model of moderate government, presented a different kind
of problem for Pagano and his analysis reveals once again his awareness of the
limitations of Neapolitan society and his reservations about the suitability
of such a model for Naples. Democracies, according to Pagano, can only
be founded on a numerous and united plebeian class.26 This unity must be
complemented by education, since an uneducated demos was clearly incapable
Saggi, (1792), V, xxii, p. 166.
Ma quando la societ colta e perfetta, la civile libert viene rispettata. E questa
libert civile non pu esser mai sicura senza una saggia e regolare inalterabile legislazione
(Saggi (1785), V, xi, p. 125; (1792), V, xi, p. 124).
24
Ibid.
25
Pagano reminds his accusers that io chiamo regolari e perfetti the three types of
government, that is monarchical, aristocratic, and popular, in Lettera di Francesco Mario
Pagano avverso le imputazioni fatte a Saggi Politici [Naples, 17856], p. 24. For the dating
of the Lettera, see Solari, Studi, p. 63, fn. 68.
26
Saggi (1785), V, iv, p. 97; (1792), V, iv, p. 90.
22
23
70
of constituting government.27 An uneducated populace was simply not capable

of putting a long-term plan into action for its actions are like passing storms,
impetuous floods, born from sudden and unexpected rains.28 Furthermore, an
ignorant populace would be unable to establish a popular government unaided
because it could not desire a kind of government of which it had no prior
knowledge. Those who do not know their rights and ignore them, Pagano
wrote, can not possibly have any idea of liberty words which, as we have seen,
were later echoed in Cuocos account of the 1799 revolution.29 In order for the
people to make their own laws, declare war, conclude peace, administer their
finances, and determine the merit of those on whose salvation they depend,
they have to be enlightened and educated, as had been the case in the ancient
democracies such as Athens.30 They have to know their own rights and duties
in order to govern themselves. If they have no notion of their past or of the
world beyond the city they inhabit, government inevitably declined into either
despotism or oligarchy.31 Pagano argued, therefore, that the level of education
in any society, above any other cause, determines the kind of government
established after feudal aristocracy.32 Education, he argued, was the key to the
establishment of popular government and its maintenance.
The sorry situation of the Neapolitan people had been recognised by many
writers such as Antonio Genovesi (17131769) and his most prolific student,
Giuseppe Maria Galanti (17431806), as a fundamental obstacle to any reform
programme. Public education had been one of the concerns of Neapolitan
reformers in this period, most notably, Gaetano Filangieri (17531788) who
dedicated an entire book to a detailed programme of public education in the Scienza
della legislazione.33 They argued that the situation was a result of the persistence
and power of the feudal regime.34 Pagano followed their lead and was therefore
Ove il popolo ignorante, e incolto dellintutto, ove molle, e corrotto, ivi
impossibile cosa affatto di fondare il governo popolare (Saggi (1785), V, v, p. 99; (1792),
V, v, p. 92).
28
Saggi (1785), V, iv, p. 98; (1792), V, iv, pp. 9091.
29
Saggi (1785), V, v, p. 100; (1792), V, v, pp. 934.
30
Saggi (1785), V, v, p. 99; (1792), V, v, p. 92.
31
Saggi (1785), V, v, p. 100; (1792), V, v, p. 93.
32
Saggi (1785), V, v, p. 102; (1792), V, v, p. 96.
33
See the chapter, Delle leggi che riguardono leducazione, i costumi e listruzione
pubblica, in Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione [Naples, 1780-91], Lib. IV. A new critical
edition by various editors has appeared as La scienza della legislazione (7 vols, Venice, 20034)
which maintains the original pagination and to which all further quotations will refer. For a
comparison of Filangieri and Pagano, see Ferrone, La societ giusta ed equa, pp. 22547.
34
For an introduction to the writings of Genovesi, Filangieri, and Galanti, see the
relevant chapters in Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, cited above. The commonplace of the
27
71
careful to outline the specific limits of establishing popular government in a

society like Naples. If the Neapolitan people were not yet comparable to the
citizens of ancient Athens, who then should rule? Pagano believed that such
circumstances demanded some form of representative government, at least
in the short term, writing: It is true that representative government does not
need many enlightened people in the masses, for it requires less enlightenment
to recognise the talents of others than actually having those talents.35 Here
Pagano used the ignorance of the people rather than the physical limits of
republican democracy (as many contemporaries had done) to suggest the
need for representation in a modern republican government.36 The nature
and makeup of this representative body are not clear in Paganos text but, in
the second edition, Pagano did explore the model of mixed government as
well as the possibility of a tribunal, modelled on the Spartan ephorate, which
would guarantee the rule of law in any moderate government, including a
democracy.37
The question of representation did not go away in Paganos Saggi and, within
his discussion of the development and nature of the three kinds of moderate
government, the concept of a middle order, or ordine mezzana, frequently
appeared. While Pagano wrote more consistently of this middle order in the
second edition of the Saggi, its role remained unclear and can be understood
variously as a magistracy or independent judiciary, as an administrative class,
and as an intermediary nobility based on virtue and merit. There was of course
the model of the ceto civile or togati which from the late seventeenth century
was traditionally portrayed as a legal and administrative class, usually without
poor and ignorant people of Naples can also be found in the accounts and guidebooks of
visitors to Naples; see M. Calaresu, The End of the Grand Tour and the Cosmopolitan
Ideal: Neapolitan Critiques of French Travel Accounts (17501800), in J. Elsner and
J.P. Rubis (eds), Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London, 1999),
pp. 13861.
35
Saggi (1792), V, v, p. 96. The paragraph on representative government was added
in the second edition. Filangieri also suggested the necessity of a guide in a democracy, in
Scienza della legislazione, Lib.I, ch.x, p. 135.
36
For example, Filangieri wrote: Da quel che si detto si pu facilmente dedurre
che una perfetta democrazia non pu avere che in un picciolissimo stato. Se la repubblica
singrandisce, se dopo dessere stata una citt, diventa una nazione, allora o bisogna
interamente mutare la costituzione, o bisogna ricorrere alla rappresentazione (Scienza
della legislazione, Lib.I, ch.x, p. 136, fn. h).
37
For an analysis of Paganos ephorate, see M. Calaresu, Political Culture in Late
Eighteenth-Century Naples, pp. 1878 and pp. 2679.
72
noble privilege.38 Under the Bourbons, a similar class, as regalisti, defended

the interests of the Neapolitan government and opposed the jurisdictional
pretensions of the Papacy and the prerogatives of the nobility. It was in fact
this class, made up of intellectuals, administrators and lawyers, which most
welcomed the arrival of an autonomous Bourbon monarchy in 1734, and
it was this tradition, through writers such as Pietro Giannone (16761748)
and Paolo Mattia Doria (16671746), with which reformers at the end of
the eighteenth century, such as Pagano, most easily identified.39 While the
function of Paganos middle order is not always clear, he described an order
made up of citizens being neither too rich nor too poor who would by their
greater virtue have the interests of public good at heart and therefore would be
best for government. Its civil importance lay in the balance it would provide to
any developed society. Pagano assigned no obvious specific political role to the
middle order, as there is no suggestion that this order should necessarily act
as an intermediary or representative power in government (except to provide
administrators and counsellors). And, behind it, of course, lay Paganos
anxieties about any class, like the existing aristocracy, having too much power,
without checks, in any moderate government.
How then did one identify these virtuous citizens who would uphold
public good and guarantee the sovereignty of government? According to
Pagano, Aristotle provided a clue, suggesting that virtue must not always be
looked for individually but collectively to a class of citizens where virtue is
in the majority, that is, in those who possess a moderate censo, for moderate
On the ceto civile in the late seventeenth century, see Salvo Mastellone, Pensiero
politico e vita culturale a Napoli nella seconda met del seicento (Messina/Florence, 1965).
Briefly, on the ambiguities of this term, see Giuseppe Ricuperati, Una lettura di Vico,
Giannone e Genovesi nei decenni della crisi dellantico regime a Napoli: Lesperienza
intelletuale e storiographica di Francesco Antonio Grimaldi, Studi Filsofici (Istituto
Universitario Orientale, Napoli), XXI (19878): 2067. More recently, see a discussion
of this class from the writings of Antonio Genovesi to the end of the century, see
G. Imbruglia, Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Naples, in Imbruglia (ed.), Naples
in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 7094.
39
See M. Calaresu, Constructing an Intellectual Identity: Autobiography and
Identity in Eighteenth-Century Naples, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 6 (2001):
157177. See also A.M. Rao, Intellettuali e professioni a Napoli nel Settecento, in
M.L. Betri and A. Pastore (eds), Avvocati, medici, ingegneri: Alle origini delle professioni
moderni (Bologna, 1997), pp. 4160, and Fra amministrazione e politica: gli ambienti
intellettuali napoletani , in J. Boutier, B. Marin and A. Romano (eds), Naples, Rome,
Florence, Une histoire compare des milieux intellectuels italiens (dix-septimedix-huitime
sicles) (Rome, 2005), pp. 3588.
38
73
fortune nourishes virtue.40 Here then are Paganos virtuous citizens, a middle
order between two material extremes:
Virtue is not ordinarily found in those who are very poor or very rich. Poverty creates a
vile and abject spirit and disposes it to corruption [...]; great wealth, on the other hand,
makes the spirit inert and lazy [...] not open to feelings of humanity, the foundation
and support of social virtues, promoting egoism which extinguishes the sacred fire of
patriotic zeal.41
The greater virtue of the members of this middle class (mezzana classe)
necessitates that they take over the major functions of government and this
principle must be established by legislation.42 In this way, love of luxury
would be replaced by love of glory, honour and virtue. Pagano even specified
a kind of vocational training by candidates for government posts who would
not only have a legal education but earlier experience in minor civic and
military offices.43 In this description he seemed to be suggesting some kind
of administrative class or magistracy, that is, not an independent legislative
power but a middle-class bureaucratic order.
The role of Paganos middle order is ambiguous and the question remains
whether this order has a concrete political function in the political models of
moderate government outlined in the Saggi politici. In its historical context,
the middle order developed with the establishment of civil liberty in all regular
governments. It provided an essential group of industrious and virtuous
citizens for government and society. However, by defining the middle order
as the most virtuous class in any society and asserting that government must
be guided by virtue, Pagano was clearly suggesting some sort of political role
for the members of this order. In a democracy, the middle order would have
the talents necessary to fulfil the role of a representative class in a society in
which the people are uneducated. In an aristocracy, the traditional model of a
hereditary nobility would be replaced by one based on virtue and merit. The
role of the middle order as an intermediary power in a monarchy, however,
is trickier and only becomes clearer if it is placed within the context of the
feudal debates.
Filangieri, in the Scienza della legislazione, had suggested that, instead of
a hereditary nobility which necessarily divides the sovereignty of government
Saggi (1791), Introduzione, p. LXIII.
Ibid.
42
Si devono adunque fare tali indiretti stabilimenti dal legislatore, che su quella
mezzana classe di cittadini venga a cadere lelezione alle cariche maggiori (ibid.)
43
Here Pagano was referring to the example of the civic requirements for the Roman
senate in ibid., p. LXIV.
40
41
74
with its competing jurisdictional powers, a separate body of independent

magistrates must provide the necessary balance as the intermediary power in
a monarchy.44 In an earlier passage, he also suggested that the law should state
that offices of government be given by merit, for he who has knowledge and
virtue is certainly preferable to one who has nothing but illustrious ancestors.45
Both Pagano and Filangieri were acutely critical of the feudal system and, in
particular, of the role of the feudal nobility in dividing the sovereignty of
government. Both authors emphasised the supremacy of law and the need
to safeguard it. One could then suggest, from this criticism of a hereditary
nobility, that an enlightened middle order mediating between the monarch
and people, a kind of aristocracy of virtue, could replace a nobility which
rarely had been guided by public good. Paganos and Filangieris descriptions
of a government weakened by the jurisdictional prerogatives of a feudal
nobility were inspired by their understanding of the particular situation of the
Neapolitan monarchy and suggested the need for an intermediary body which
would defend the rule of the law and the sovereignty of the government
either as some kind of independent judiciary or, more likely, as a public which
would possess the political force to limit and curb the power of the nobility
and monarchy. Unfortunately, Pagano does not provide a clear answer and,
instead of considering what Montesquieu might have suggested, we could
investigate further the kind of public which Pagano envisaged in the context
of late eighteenth-century Naples, and, in this way, adding a new dimension
to an analysis of Paganos conception of the middle order.46
At this point, we can then turn to the possibility of a public for reform
at the end of the eighteenth century, for it is to this public that the writings
of Pagano and his contemporaries were addressed. A generation earlier,
Antonio Genovesi had recognised that reform could not depend solely on
the crown but would also have to reach a wider public for support in order
for reform to be implemented and maintained. Genovesi, whose teachings
were tremendously influential for writers such as Pagano, had recognised the
In this case, the nobility would remain as un corpo luminoso, ma non potente;
esse deve avere alcune prerogative di onore, ma niuna dimpero; esse deve ornare il trono,
ma non dividerne il potere (Filangieri, Scienza della legislazione, Lib.III, ch.xviii, p. 289).
45
Filangieri, Scienza della legislazione, Lib.I, ch.xii, p. 203.
46
A fuller understanding of Paganos conception of the public allows us to recognise
the consistency of his shift from reform to revolution and, in turn, to counter existing
interpretations which either find radicalism, following the lead of Filangieri, in his earlier
writings, as Ferrone has claimed, or emphasise a break in response to the new circumstances
of the 1790s, as Robertson has suggested. See, respectively, Ferrone, La societ giusta ed
equa, ch. 8, and Robertson, Enlightenment and Revolution, pp. 423
44
75
limits of creating such a public in Naples and had proposed a network of

academies and societies as well as a programme of public education through
the setting up of new schools and the distribution of catechisms, and technical
manuals.47 Academies had been set up by the crown (and, as Elvira Chiosis
work has shown, had failed48) but there were alternative spaces in the city, such
as libraries and bookshops, and even entertainments called accademie, which
were not directly connected to the court, where Neapolitans could meet.49 The
crown had also established its own theatre in the city but there was also a very
lively theatrical life outside of it, as many Grand Tourists noticed when they
visited the city, and which contributed to the formation of a public for music
and theatre at the end of the century.50 In fact, Pagano recognised the didactic
power of theatre in creating an enlightened public in his very first published
work in 1768.51 In the preface of his 1789 play, Corradino, Pagano wrote:
Tragedy is a public action, great, interesting and national, to bring scenes for usefully
moving and pleasantly instructing the people [...]. In order to interest actively an
entire people, it is not enough to present them with an event, which moves them only
as a part of humanity, but rather to interest them as a nation to which that event has
special importance.52
See Maria Luisa Pernas excellent and suggestive article, Luniverso communicativo
di Antonio Genovesi, in A.M. Rao (ed.), Editoria e cultura a Napoli nel XVIII secolo
(Naples, 1998), pp. 391404. Although there is no time here to analyse Genovesis
ideas, see, for example, his Discorso sopra il vero fine delle letterre e delle scienze which was
published with two agricultural tracts in 1753 (the Discorso appears separately in Venturi
(ed.), Riformatori napoletani, pp. 84131).
48
E. Chiosi, Intellectuals and academies, in Imbruglia (ed.), Naples in the Eighteenth
Century, pp. 11834. In the same volume, on the role of the court in attempting to
encourage social interaction amongst the nobility, see G. Montroni, The Court: Power
Relations and Forms of Social Life, in G. Imbruglia (ed.), Naples in the Eighteenth Century,
pp. 3842.
49
On these more informal spaces, see M. Calaresu, Coffee, Culture and Consumption:
Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples, in A. Gatti and
P. Zanardi (eds), Filosofia, scienza, storia: Il dialogo fra Italia e Gran Bretagna (Padova,
2005), pp. 14250.
50
On theatres and the public sphere, see Calaresu, Coffee, Culture and Consumption,
pp. 16170. In English, on a public for music in Naples, see also R. de Benedetto, Music and
Enlightenment, in Imbruglia (ed.), Naples in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 14751.
51
Pagano, Politicum universae romanorum nomothesiae examen (Naples, 1768),
p. 128. A translated extract has been published by Venturi as Riforma della legislazione e
della educazione pubblica in Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, p. 841.
52
Pagano, Corradino (Naples, 1789), p. 3. In the same passage, Pagano also wrote
that he had presented an early play, Il Gerbino (Naples, 1787) in order to promuovere
47
76
For the play which followed, Pagano chose a theme from Neapolitan history
to educate the people directly from their own past.53 Corradino was based on
the life of the Swabian heir to the Neapolitan throne who was eventually
killed by the Angevins with the collusion of the Papacy. There were three other
plays with the same titled produced in Naples in this period testimony not
only to the power of the story itself but also to the power of a public which
would have recognised its historical and political significance.54 Reformers, in
fact, had worked hard to recover a Neapolitan past in the last decades of the
century. Giuseppe Maria Galanti, a student of Genovesis and an acquaintance
of Pagano, owned a typographical society which translated important French
works from the period in to Italian but also wrote and published a series of
historical works on Naples and the Kingdom, precisely to provide a wider public
with a greater historical awareness.55 As recent historical research has shown,
there was a lively print culture in the city of Naples (and, some have argued,
to a lesser extent in the provincial cities of the Kingdom).56 Local newspapers,
such as the Gazzetta civica napoletana which was printed twice a week between
1787 and 1793, with permission of the crown, attest to a readership which
was informed of the activities and movements of the royal family between the
palaces at Portici, Caserta, and Naples as well as international political news
nella mia Patria il sopito genio teatrale, cotanto giovevole a render colta, e polita la nazione
(ibid.) There is a new edition of Corradino, ed. G. Distazo (Cassano Murge, 1994).
53
Amaury Duval wrote of Pagano, Parmi plusieurs pices de thtre quil a
composes, on distinguait surtout une tragdie de Corradino (Conradin) quil offrait des
situations dautant plus intressants pour les Napolitains, quelle tait tire de lhistoire de
leur pays (Grgoire Orloff, Memoires historiques, politiques et littraires sur le Royaume de
Naples, ed. A. Duval (Paris, 1819), vol. I, p. 386, fn.1).
54
In his work on theatre, Pietro Napoli-Signorelli names four contemporary plays
entitled Corradino, including the one written in 1790 by Paganos friend, Francesco
Saverio Salfi (Napoli-Signorelli, Storia critica de teatri antichi e moderni (6 vols, Naples,
179790), VI, p. 219).
55
On Galanti, see Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, pp. 94185. On his editorial
activities, see the useful article by M.L. Perna, Giuseppe Maria Galanti Editore, in G.
Torcellan (ed.), Miscellanea Walter Maturi (Turin, 1966), pp. 22158. In the last fifteen
years, there has been more historiographical interest in Galanti whose life and writings
did not, until recently, play a major role in histories of the revolution because of, I would
argue, his ambivalent role in the revolution and during the restoration of the Bourbon
monarchy. See the recent editions of Galantis writings edited by Augusto Placanica. On
Galantis role in creating a Neapolitan intellectual tradition at the end of the century, see
M. Calaresu, Constructing an Intellectual Identity.
56
See Rao (ed.), Editoria e cultura, pp. 391401. For a summary of the Neapolitan
book trade in this period, see Calaresu, Coffee, Culture and Consumption, pp. 15061.
77
from courts across Europe. More importantly, they also reveal a reading public
in the city to which the announcement of books, the description of scientific
discoveries, and the advertisement of the availability of French tutors were
also addressed.57 The extent of this public can not be more accurately gauged
until more research is done on these more ephemeral but indicative sources
(only recently has there been an initiative to catalogue the eighteenth-century
newspapers in the State Archives in Naples). One could move beyond lawyers
and publishers as readers of such newspapers and widen our conception of
a middle order to include new professional categories and army officers,
as Anna Maria Rao has suggested recently.58 Alternatively, historians have
pointed to Masonic networks as the key to understanding the dissemination
of political ideas, especially in the provinces of the Kingdom.59 The vast
existing literature on Freemasonry in the Kingdom has been dominated by a
concern to establish links between Masonic lodges and the 1799 revolution.60
More recent research, however, has begun to investigate the social networks of
Freemasonry in the capital and the provinces.61 Other areas of research could
include an analysis of legal briefs (several by Pagano survive) which were the
mainstay of many Neapolitan publishers and which have proved such useful
and evocative sources for historians of the public sphere in France such as Sarah
For example, Paganos Considerazioni sul processo criminale (Naples, 1787) was
advertised along with announcements of recent military promotions, the selling of sheet
music for recent theatrical productions, and the arrival of merchant ships in the citys
port, in Gazzetta civica napoletana, 15 (14 April 1787): 10512. The Archivio di Stato in
Naples holds several runs of contemporary Neapolitan journals such as the Gazzetta civica
napoletana, the Gazzetta civica familiare, and the Gazzetta universale.
58
A.M. Rao, Esercito e societ a Napoli nelle riforme del secondo Settecento, Studi
storici, 28 (1987): 62377; also, Rivista italiana di studi napoleonici, XXV (1988): 93159,
and Organizzazione militare e modelli politici a Napoli fra Illuminismo e rivoluzione, in
V.I. Comparato (ed.), Modelli nella storia del pensiero politico: La rivoluzione francese e i
modelli politici (3 vols, Florence, 1989), II, pp. 3963.
59
Davis, Naples and Napoleon, p. 34. For a recent review, see E. Chiosi, Massoneria
e politica, in A.M. Rao (ed.), Napoli 1799 fra storia e storiografia (Naples, 2002),
pp. 21737.
60
For the former, see, for example, Vincenzo Ferrones analysis of Paganos writings
before 1799 in Ferrone, I profeti dellilluminismo, in which he describes Paganos Saggi as
uno dei capolavori della letteratura illuministico-massonica (p. 278).
61
Giarrizzo, for instance, has uncovered evidence that conversazioni were used
by Masons to meet in the provinces of the Kingdom. See G. Giarrizzo, Massoneria e
illuminismo nellEuropa del settecento (Venice, 1994), pp. 39092. On Masonic catechisms,
see P. Matarazzo, I catechismi degli stati di vita alla fine del Settecento, in Rao (ed.),
Editoria e cultura, pp. 50711.
57
78
Maza.62 In fact, taking Mazas most recent study of the French bourgeoisie
as a social imaginary as a model is one way through which one could argue
that, although the crown and reformers were unsuccessful in creating such a
public because of the economic and political problems in the Kingdom, they
did address one.63 Although Neapolitan reformers knew these problems very
well and had done much to disseminate knowledge of them, they continued
to give a role to a public and to public opinion in their political writings.64
While the public to which his writings were addressed might have only
been limited to fellow lawyers, administrators, and university teachers, Pagano
was aware of the limitations of his public but nonetheless gave a significant
role to what he called the ordine mezzana, or middle order, in balancing
power of government between the crown and the people in a constitutional
monarchy and against the powers of the feudal nobility. Although the Saggi
did not outline in any detail a specific reform programme for Naples, as it
was primarily a historical work, Paganos contribution, which was relevant to
the problems of contemporary Naples, was to understand and highlight the
destructive effect of feudal institutions, in particular, a hereditary nobility, for
the development of moderate government. While his political models were
conceived with his experience as a lawyer, the hindsight of a historian, and the
formation of a philosopher, Pagano (unlike Filangieri who died in 1788) was
given a unique chance to put his political ideas into practice in the Neapolitan
republic of 1799.65
On 8 January 1799, a few days before the liberty of Naples and Neapolitans
had yet been proclaimed, Carlo De Nicola wrote in his diary that, They even
say that our emigrant, former magistrate in the Admiralty, Francesco Mario
Extant legal briefs or allegazioni del foro written by Pagano include Contro di
Antonio Gioia [Naples, 1777] and Contro Sabato Totaro, reo dellomicidio di D.Giuseppe
Gensani [Naples, 1784] which have not been analysed even by Gioele Solari. On their
importance to the printing industry, see L. Giustianini, Saggio storico-critico sulla tipografia
del Regno di Napoli (Naples, 1793), p. 199. On France, see Sarah Maza, Private Lives and
Public Affairs: The Causes-clbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, CA, 1993).
63
Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary
17501850 (Berkeley, CA, 2003).
64
Filangieri, for instance, had recognised the importance of public opinion in
curbing the power of the monarchy; see A.M. Rao, Lopinion publique en Italie au XVIIIe
sicle, The European Legacy, I (1996): 202. On the importance of encouraging literacy
for the development of civil society, see Galanti, Nuova descrizione storica e geografica delle
Sicilie (4 vols, Naples, 178690), I, pp. 3667.
65
For a further discussion of Paganos activities after his arrest and imprisonment
in 1794 and exile in 1796, which is relevant to my argument, see M. Calaresu, Political
Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples, pp. 23745.
62
79
Pagano, is coming with the constitution for the Vesuvian Republic.66 In the
chaos and uncertainty of those days before the establishment of the Neapolitan
Republic on 23 January 1799, Paganos name was already associated with the
new constitution. He came to play a central role in the government of the
new republic as president of the legislative committee for which he wrote the
Progetto di costituzione della repubblica napoletana, published in April 1799
and distributed to members of the provisional government for discussion.67
The projected constitution of over four hundred articles is preceded by a long
preamble, the Rapporto del Comitato di Legislazione al Governo Provvisorio,
which discussed the theoretical and historical foundations of the new
constitution.68 In this preamble, one sees many of the concerns and themes of
Paganos earlier works. For example, in his discussion of the right of the people
to overthrown an oppressive government, Pagano was careful in his definition
of the people (il popolo):
For when we say people what we mean is the people who have been enlightened as
to their own true interests and not indeed a plebian class dozy in their ignorance and
degraded by slavery, and not indeed the gangrenous aristocratic part.69
Once again we find the suggestion of a virtuous middle order, although

here, Pagano rather ambiguously wrote that we do not have the word to
Carlo de Nicola, Diario napoletano: dicembre 1798-dicembre 1800, ed. P. Ricci

(Milan, 1963), p. 57.
67
The constitution was published in Naples without a date. On 30 March, the
revolutionary newspaper Il Monitore napoletano noted: E dato gi lordine che si dia alle
stampe il progetto della Costituzione per dispensarne una copia a ciascuno de membri
del Governo Provvisorio, e subito intavolarne la discussione (M. Battaglini (ed.), Il
Monitore Napoletano 1799 (Naples, 1999), p. 369). On the dating, revision, and editions
of the Progetto di costituzione, see Battaglini, Mario Pagano e il Progetto di costituzione,
pp. 1328. On Paganos role in the legislative Committee, see Battaglini, Mario Pagano
e la Commissione legislativa della Repubblica napoletana, Pensiero politico, 28 (1995):
8794.
68
The Progetto di costituzione della Repubblica napoletana presentato al Governo
provvisorio dal Comitato di legislazione was first published by the Stamperia Nazionale in
1799 for members of the Provisional Government (of which only four copies survive).
All references will be made to the original pagination of this edition. Venturi published
the preamble in Venturi, Riformatori, pp. 90819. A critical edition of the Progetto
has been recently published with an introduction by Anna Maria Rao, and edited by
F. Morelli and A. Trampus, as Progetto di costituzione della Repubblica napoletana (Venice,
2008).
69
Progetto di costituzione, p. vi.
66
80
express in any modern language the notion of what we mean.70 One does
not to read much further to understand exactly what he meant. There were
obvious limits to the political equality of the new citizens of the Neapolitan
republic, for once again equality was related to ones faculties and political
equality did not mean that all citizens had the right to govern.71 For Pagano,
the limits of these rights were clear in a democracy such as Naples, writing
evocatively:
In democracies a man of the lowest class can arm himself with the consular fasces, when
he possesses the valour of a Marius or the intelligence of a Livy. An uneducated salami
vendor if elected to the government of Athens would inevitably lose the republic.72
The law must then predefine the moral qualities of citizens who can
be elected. Eligibility for public office would be established, above all, by
educational requirements.73 Echoing his words in the Saggi, Pagano wrote:
The right to elect can be more extensive than the right to be elected, requiring
less talent to discern talent in others than to administer the republic.74 This
also extended to the right to vote. Citizens would have to be able to read
and write, practise a profession or trade (this included agricultural workers),
and recite the Republican Catechism to acquire this right.75 In a language,
not completely dissimilar to the Preamble, the author of the preface to a
revolutionary catechism dedicated to Pagano, explains that it was meant for
those with less enlightened talents.76 Political equality in the republic was
then defined by literacy and limited by ones faculties until ones eventual and
expected enhancement through education.
This qualification of political participation in the 1799 republic, therefore,
explains the importance given to education in the preamble and the constitution
as well as in the activities of the revolutionaries such as the printing and teaching
Ibid.
Luguaglianza politica non deve far s, che venga promosso allesercizio delle
pubbliche funzioni colui, che non ne ha lingegno per adempirle. Il dritto passivo di ogni
Cittadino , secondo la nostra veduta, ipotetico, vale a dire che ogni Cittadino, posto che
rendasi abile, acquista il dritto alle pubbliche cariche (Progetto di costituzione, p. XII).
72
Ibid.
73
Progetto di costituzione, pp. XIIXIII.
74
Progetto di costituzione, p. XIII. See the corresponding passage in the Saggi (1792),
V, v, p. 96.
75
Progetto di costituzione, Article 13, p. 3.
76
C. Pisciotta, Al cittadino Mario Pagano, in F. Astore, Catechismo repubblicano
[Year I of the Neapolitan Republic], in Cattechismi repubblicani: Napoli 1799, ed.
P. Matarazzo (Naples, 1999), p. 5.
70
71
81
of revolutionary catechisms.77 It can also be linked back to the prominence

of education in the writings of Filangieri and Pagano. Neither could envisage
successful reform without a wider literate population, a problem, one could
argue, shared by reformers across Southern Europe and its colonies. The
obstacle of feudalism and the power of the feudal nobility remained central
to debates about reform at the end of the eighteenth century in Naples but,
even after the abolition of the rights and privileges of the feudal order in
1799, the absence of a broader public to which the language of liberty could
understand and have meaning remained a problem. The question of how
effective the revolutionaries were in reaching out to a broader public, for many
historians, is answered simply by the revolutions failure but more could in
done in uncovering networks of communication and looking again at the
social makeup of the revolutionaries themselves in order to reconstruct what
constituted the public for reform before 1799.78 The reconstruction of a public
for reform, and later for revolution, in Naples remains to be done, but there
is no doubt that a public was envisaged by reformers such as Pagano, despite
Cuocos criticisms.79 An analysis of his writings before and after the revolution
show continuities in his ideas such as his awareness of social and political
limits for reform in the Kingdom and his vision of a public imaginary or
not.
Pagano was executed late on 29 October 1799 by the restored Bourbon
government for his involvement in the republic and as a traitor to the
crown. His canonisation as a martyr for popular government began with
the announcement of his execution.80 However, as we have seen, Pagano
On the popular political literature in the Italian triennio, see L. Guerci, Istruire
nella verit repubblicane: La letteratura politica per il popolo nellItalia in rivoluzione (1796
1799) (Bologna, 1999). See also A.M. Rao, Popular Societies in the Neapolitan Republic
of 1799, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 4 (1999): 35869.
78
See, for example, Claudia Petraccones important work on the social origins of the
revolutionaries, in Napoli nel 1799: Rivoluzione e propriet (Naples, 1989), which analyses,
in great detail, the information available from a list of the revolutionaries and their goods
and properties confiscated by the Bourbon government. Alongside recent interest in
consumption patterns and the public sphere, a new analysis of the Nota di beni confiscati
ai rei di Stati (Naples, 1800) might reveal further material in understanding the extent of
a wider public in Naples.
79
On the limits of interpreting the reform movement against the failure of the
revolution, see J. Robertson, Enlightenment and Revolution: Naples 1799, Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society, 10 (2000): 1744.
80
Solari, Studi, pp. 1558; Flaminio Massa, Elogio storico di Francesco Mario
Pagano [1801], in Opere filosofico-politiche ed estetiche di Francesco Mario Pagano (Capolago,
1837), p. 38.
77
82
was wary of the effective working of popular government in a society such

as Naples and this caution came through in the limitations he placed in the
1799 constitution. Although the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 lasted less
than six months, it continues to have an incredible resonance in the political
life of Naples as the Neapolitan scholar, Anna Maria Rao, makes clear: The
Neapolitan Republic of 1799, despite the brevity of its dramatic events, was
a fundamental moment not only in the history of southern Italy but in the
elaboration of the Italian democratic tradition.81 Over the last two centuries,
the political aspirations for southern Italy, and for the south within Italy, have
been played out in the historiography of the revolution. Not surprisingly, by
trying to reconstruct the public sphere at the end of the eighteenth century,
the historian necessarily brings out some of the central concerns of observers
of political culture in the South, that is, the relationship between the people
and the government and the need to create an informed and literate public.
A.M. Rao, La repubblica napoletana del 1799 (Naples, 1997), p. 7.
81
Chapter 7
The Spanish Monarchy and the

Uses of Jesuit Historiography in the
Dispute of the New World
Vctor Peralta Ruiz
Introduction
In the second half of the eighteenth century, the controversy over the New
World became one of the main issues in the philosophical debate of the
European Enlightenment. The most famous books related to this affair, written
by William Robertson, Cornelius de Pauw, and Guillaume Thomas-Franois
Raynal, coincided in their judgment that the American continents inferiority
in nature and population was explained by the destructive, degenerative effects
of the Spanish conquest and colonization. Antonello Gerbi summarized
the history of this dispute and unravelled the philosophical, political, and
cultural motivations of these theories of the inferiority of American nature.
More recently, David A. Brading and Jorge Caizares-Esguerra have,
respectively, emphasized the rise in Creole patriotism and the generation of
a patriotic epistemology among the Jesuits exiled in Italy that fomented this
controversy.
The negative vision of America held by thinkers of the European
Enlightenment in the second half of the Eighteenth century caused some
politicians of the Spanish monarchy to encourage an information counterAntonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 17501900
(Pittsburgh, 1973); David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole
Patriots and the Liberal State, 14921867 (Cambridge, 1991); Jorge Caizares-Esguerra,
How to Write the History of the New World. Historiographies, Epistemologies, and Identities in
the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (Stanford, 2001). For the Atlantic context, see John
H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America, 14921830 (New
Haven and London, 2006).
84
attack to repudiate Spains detractors. The best-known examples of this

counterattack were the freely-adapted translations by the members of the
Royal Academy of History of Raynals and Robertsons works. The edition of
the Historia poltica de los establecimientos ultramarinos de las naciones europeas
by Raynal, with the Duke of Almodvar practically kidnapping its authorship,
was published, incompletely, in five volumes between 1784 and 1790. The
translation under the Count of Campomanes patronage of Robertsons
History of America was forbidden in 1779 by Jos de Glvez, minister of the
Indies, as a result of the outbreak of the war between Spain and England. But
the work that without a doubt represented the official Spanish response to the
attacks by the writers of the European Enlightenment was the 1793 edition of
the first volume of the Historia del Nuevo Mundo by the Valencian philosopher
Juan Bautista Muoz. This project was, however, left unfinished by Muozs
death in 1799.
The role of the histories of America written by Jesuits exiled in Italy within
the information counter-attack is almost unknown. Miguel Batllori called
attention to the importance of the Americanism that the members of this
religious order practiced in their confrontation with the theses of Robertson,
Raynal, and de Pauw. This essay intends to analyze the attempt by some
politicians of the Enlightenment during the reigns of Charles II and Charles IV
to instrumentalize the historiographic production of the Jesuits exiled in Italy
in order to vindicate Spains continued presence in America. Based on the
different steps taken by the Jesuit authors themselves to publish their works
in Spain, my intention is to discuss the heterogeneous and contradictory uses
that the Spanish monarchy made of the Americanist historiography practiced
in Italy. A review of the conflicts and controversies created by the publication
in Spanish of the works by the Jesuits Juan Nuix y Perpia, Francisco Javier
Clavijero, Juan Ignacio Molina, and Juan de Velasco will allow us to establish
Gonzalo Zaragoza and Ricardo Garca Crcel, La polmica sobre la conquista
espaola de Amrica. Algunos testimonios en el siglo XVIII, in Alberto Gil Novales (ed.)
Homenaje a Nel Salomn. Ilustracin espaola e independencia de Amrica (Barcelona,
1979), pp. 3739.

Gabriel Paquette, Enlightened Narratives and Imperial Rivalry in Bourbon Spain:
The Case of Almodvars Historia Poltica de los Establecimientos Ultramarinos de las
Naciones Europeas (17841790), The Eighteenth Century, 48:1 (2007): 6180; Ovidio
Garca Regueiro, Ilustracin e intereses estamentales: la versin castellana de la Historia
de Raynal, in Gil Novales (ed.), Homenaje a Nel Salomn, pp. 165205.

Mara Teresa Nava Rodrguez, Reformismo ilustrado y americanismo. La Real
Academia de la Historia 17351792 (Madrid, 1989), pp. 63046.

Miguel Batllori, La cultura hispano-italiana de los jesuitas expulsos. Espaoles,
hispanoamericanos, filipinos (Madrid, 1966).
The Spanish Monarchy and the Uses of Jesuit Historiography
85
an idea of the Spanish governments incapacity to create a homogenous

information counter-attack to rebut the reasoning of the foreign writers of
the Enlightenment. On the contrary, as this study will show, the attempt by
some Jesuits to publish their histories promoted another controversy in Madrid
on America, a controversy that pitted the members of the Royal Academy of
History against the Jesuits and, later, the Jesuits against the most well-known
authors of the official information counter-attack.
The Double Translation to Spanish of Juan Nuixs Reflexiones Imparciales
In 1780, the Catalan Jesuit Juan Nuix y Perpia published, from his exile
in Venice, his Riflessioni imparziali sopra lumanita degli spagnuoli nellIndie.
This work had immediate repercussions in the Madrid court because,
contrary to its title, Nuix passionately defended the Spaniards behaviour in
the discovery and governing of the Indies, directly criticizing the works of
Raynal and Robertson. Although Nuix never crossed the Atlantic (when he
was expelled, he was teaching rhetoric in the Catalan school in Vich), in his
exile he progressively acquired a first-rate knowledge about Spanish America
thanks to his close friendship with the American Jesuits.
One copy of the edition of the Riflessioni imparziali that circulated in Spain
was acquired by Pedro Varela y Ulloa, a Galician with low-level bureaucratic
positions such as ships accountant and provincial commissary of artillery. In
1776, Varelas trajectory in administration changed when he became an official
in the Ministry of the Indies and came under the protection of Jos de Glvez.
Varelas command of Italian allowed him to translate Nuixs text in less than a
year. The text was sent, with a prologue written by the translator, in the form
of a preliminary speech, for evaluation by the Council of the Indies, whose
officials gave it a favourable report on 28 September 1781. This guarantee,
which did not require the intervention of the Royal Academy of History, was
sufficient to allow its immediate publication in Madrid in 1782. For Varela,
the translation meant the double acknowledgement of being named, almost
immediately, secretary of His Majestys Council and member of the Royal
Academy of History. It was also a merit for his promotion to third-ranking
Caizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History, pp. 1826; Manfred Tietz, Las
Reflexiones imparciales de Juan Nuix y Perpi (17401783). El saber americanista de
los jesuitas y las trampas de la fe, in Manfred Tietz and Dietrich Briesemeister (eds), Los
jesuitas espaoles expulsos. Su imagen y su contribucin al saber sobre el mundo hispnico en la
Europa del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 2001), p. 615.

He reached the high point of his trajectory as a bureaucrat in 1795 when Charles IV
named him Minister of the Navy and, one year later, Minister of Finance.
86
official in the Ministry of the Indies. Hypothetically, there can be little doubt
about the invisible hand of Jos de Glvez as patron of Varelas translation,
perhaps to compensate for the decision he made on the same date to prevent
the publication of Robertsons History of America.
For the Spanish government, the publication of the Reflexiones imparciales
was a favourable circumstance for putting Raynal and Robertson on the
same side of the scale as supposed philosophers who were attempting to
discredit the heroic and humanitarian character of the Spanish conquest
and colonization of America. In his Preliminary Discourse, Varela added to
what Nuix had said, that, even though violence undeniably conditioned the
conquest of America, these were not official orders but the fault of some
specific men. Varela also justified the incorporation of two variations with
regard to the Venetian edition. The first variation was the incorporation in the
notes of all the texts of Bartolom de las Casas quoted by Nuix, a measure that
was justified because Raynal and Robertson both based their reasoning on the
Dominican friars writings. The second modification was the inclusion of the
translators personal perceptions to clarify or correct Nuixs statements. There
are a few additions as well, but when they do occur their purpose is to correct
dates or information in order to complement the Catalan Jesuits statements.
One of the peculiarities of the publication in Spain of Nuixs Reflexiones
imparciales is that there were two officially authorized editions. The difference
between one and the other is that Varela y Ulloas translation was never
coordinated with the author. Jos Nuix y Perpi, lawyer of the royal
council and brother of the exiled Jesuit, clarified this. The Nuix brothers
coordinated the translation of the Reflexiones imparciales in order to present
it to the Council of Castile. But Jos found out, from the Gazette of Madrid,
on 29 January 1782, that don Pedro Varela of His Majestys Council had
recommended and decorated with his name the same Reflexiones, translating
them into Castilian and publishing them. At first, Jos Nuix abandoned
Pedro Varela y Ulloa, Discurso Preliminar, in Juan Nuix y Perpia, Reflexiones
imparciales sobre la humanidad de los espaoles en las Indias contra los pretendidos filsofos
y polticos. Para ilustrar las historias de M.M. Raynal y Robertson, escritas en italiano por
el abate don Juan Nuix y traducidas por D. Pedro Valera y Ulloa, del Consejo de S.M., su
secretario con ejercicios de decretos en la tercera mesa de la secretara de estado y del despacho
universal de Marina (Madrid, 1782), p. XXII.

Jos de Nuix y Perpia, El Traductor al que leyere, in Juan Nuix y Perpi,
Reflexiones imparciales sobre la humanidad de los espaoles en Indias, para servir de luz
a las historias de Raynal y Robertson, de Don Juan de Nuix de Perpi; aadidas por el
mismo autor; y traducidas del idioma italiano al espaol por su hermano Don Josef de Nuix
de Perpi, Bachiller en Leyes, Doctor en Sagrados Cnones y Abogado de los Reales Consejos
(Cervera, 1783), p. 1.
87
the project, considering it useless, but later he reconsidered his decision and
finished his work, mentioning that his version contained additions made by
his brother that distinguished it from the Venice and Madrid editions. In the
brief prologue by Jos Nuix, he explained this novelty by pointing out that,
when he revised his book, his brother had extended his criticisms to Mr. de
Pauw and Mr. Marmontel [who] have recently tried to darken the name of
Spain.10 The Royal Academy of History made the same statement when it
censored the Reflexiones imparciales. Jos de Guevara y Vasconcelos, a member
of the Academy, pointed out in his report that the new translator undertakes
this reflection in the prologue and says that it cannot and must not be seen as
a repetition [of Pedro Varela y Ulloas translation] due to the many additions
and corrections by the original author, which he intends to include in the
publication.11 In conformity with this approval, the printing license was given
on 5 July 1782.
In 1783, the University of Cervera undertook the publication of the
Reflexiones imparciales translated by Jos Nuix. But despite this being the
edition that synthesized Juan Nuixs thinking against the work of Raynal, de
Pauw, Robertson, and Marmontel the best, it could not compete with the
Madrid edition, considering all the copies that had been printed. Aware of
this limitation, Jos Nuix did not give up and he made a final effort to achieve
the fame and broad dissemination that the edition prepared by his brother
deserved. In June 1785, Jos Nuix went to the University of Salamanca in
order to propose a new edition of the Reflexiones imparciales, this time with a
prologue by a professor from the university. But the university staff answered
that, although they considered this work a worthy contribution to the defence
of Spaniards humanity in the Indies, they did not usually sponsor works that
were not books of kings and popes.12 This negative response put an end to the
Nuix brothers determination to try to disseminate the Reflexiones Imparciales
according to their own wishes.
Surprisingly, Reflexiones imparciales was hardly valued as the most
representative works of the official Spanish information counter-attack.
Pedro Varela y Ulloas translated version was hardly quoted by the Duke of
Almodvar in his adaptation of the Historia poltica de los establecimientos
ultramarinos de las naciones europeas by Raynal, despite coinciding in the main
Ibid., p. 1.
Archivo de la Real Academia de la Historia (henceforth ARAH), Censuras, Leg.
11/8018.
12
Angel Benito y Durn, La Universidad de Salamanca y la apologa de La
humanidad de los espaoles en las Indias del padre Juan Nuix y Perpi, Revista de Indias,
578 (1954): 53947.
10
11
88
critical arguments against this author of the French Enlightenment. But what
was most notorious was the absence of Nuix from the Historia del Nuevo
Mundo published by Muoz. The destiny of the Cervera edition of Reflexiones
imparciales was even worse. It was consulted by the jurist and politician
Juan Sempere y Guarinos and he used it to prepare the article related to this
Jesuit that he included in his bibliographic repertory of Spanish authors in
the time of Charles III. In this work, Sempere pointed out that Juan Nuix
was praiseworthy for his zeal and that his Reflexiones imparciales can serve to
repair, to some extent, the malignant way that some foreigners have spoken
of the Spaniards, regarding their conduct in the discovery and governing of
the Indies.13 But immediately afterward, he describes Nuixs defense of the
Spanish presence in America as excessive, when he should have acknowledged
that there were undisguisable deficiencies. These had already been pointed
out by Jos del Campillo y Coso in his Nuevo sistema de gobierno econmico
de Amrica, even before Robertson and Raynal mentioned them. Sempere
recalled that Campillo not only drew attention to these vices but proposed
a series of remedies that the government of Charles III had implemented
to correct them. Because of this, he concludes, in a disparaging tone, that
Mr. Nuix would have served the nation better and more honourably by
showing the foreigners the useful steps taken by the Spanish Ministry to
stop the abuses in governing America, rather than excusing them.14 Despite
being officially published, it is possible to conclude that Nuixs book was
not especially well received by the most influential politicians of the Spanish
monarchy.
Vicissitudes of Censure in the Works of Clavijero, Molina, and Velasco
The case of the publication in Madrid of the Storia Antica del Mexico by the
Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, originally printed in Cesena in
1780, is an example of an edition failing due to the professional jealousy of
the multiple personalities involved in the case. This work, which criticizes
Buffon, Raynal, and Robertson, had wide repercussions in Europe, although
its impact on the court in Madrid is unknown. Clavijero himself undertook to
translate his two-volume work into Spanish and sent it to the Madrid publisher
Antonio de Sancha, intending for him to begin the paperwork for publishing
it. On 22 April 1784, Sancha initiated the process to obtain the license from
the Council of the Indies. The officials sent the work to the Royal Academy
Juan Sempere y Guarinos, Ensayo de una biblioteca espaola de los mejores
escritores del reynado de Carlos III (Madrid, 1787), vol. IV, p. 154.
14
Ibid., p. 155.
13
89
of History to be censored. The report was prepared by Joseph Miguel Flores

and the Duke of Almodvar, members of the academy, who emphasized the
usefulness of this work, although both considered that all reference to Las
Casas and Sols should be omitted from the prologue. The members of the
academy did not understand why, in one passage, the Mexican Jesuit described
Las Casas as famous and even gave veiled support to such a pernicious writer,
while totally ignoring Sols, who at that moment represented the imperial,
official version of the conquest of New Spain. The censors added the excessive
use of Italianisms to this criticism.15 With these observations, the manuscript
was returned to the Council of the Indies on 4 November 1784.
The Academy members suspicions regarding Clavijeros history were not
the only ones. The definitive stumbling block for its publication came from
Italy when, in 1785, the Mallorcan Jesuit Ramn Diosdado Caballero, under
the pseudonym Filibero de Parri Palma, sent the Council of the Indies a work
divided in three volumes entitled Observaciones americanas y suplemento
crtico a la Historia de Mxico del exjesuita D. Francisco Xavier Clavijero
por otro exjesuita. This manuscript intended to show that Clavijero, on the
one hand, praised the pre-Hispanic past of Mexico excessively and, on the
other, underrated the role of the Spaniards in pacifying and Christianizing the
Amerindians. It is worth mentioning that Diosdado Caballero created this work
under the protection of the minister Jos de Glvez, from whom he received
assistance to defray costs to the amount of 600 duros.16 On 11 December
1785, the advisors requested the Valencian philosopher Juan Bautista Muoz,
entrusted by Charles III in 1779 to write a history of America, to give his
opinion on Diosdado Caballeros text. The report presented by Muoz on 5
January 1786, came to the conclusion that the Observaciones americanas did
not contribute any historiographic novelties about the history of New Spain,
despite its good intentions in defending the civilizing work of the Spaniards
that had been ignored by Clavijero.17
Muoz took advantage of his criticism of Diosdado Caballero to tackle
the author of the Historia antigua de Mxico. Muozs criticism focused on the
ARAH, Censuras, Leg. 11/8019, no. 17.
Vctor Peralta Ruiz, Patrones, clientes y amigos. El poder burocrtico indiano en la
Espaa del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 2006), p. 240.
17
Cargos hechos por el Sr. Juan Bautista Muoz contra el abate Filibero de Parri
Palma o sea el abate D. Ramn Diosdado Caballero a la obra que en tres tomos manuscritos
escribi titulndola Observaciones Americanas y Suplemento crtico a la Historia de
Mxico publicada en idioma italiano por el abate D. Francisco Xavier Clavijero y de la que
tomaron armas el conde Carli, Robertson y otros extranjeros para denigrar a los espaoles,
in Carlos W. de Onis, Las polmicas de Juan Bautista Muoz (Madrid, 1984), p. 44.
15
16
90
inexistent methodological apparatus used, as well as on the statements made,

without any back up from primary sources. For Muoz, Clavijeros text was
little more than a summary taken from the Monarqua Indiana by Juan de
Torquemada. Nor did Muoz like the way Clavijero extolled the Jesuits
work in America because it was a veiled criticism of Bourbon regalism. It
was evident that Muozs sentence was conditioned by his jealousy, as he
considered himself to be the only one worthy to write this history. His criticism
definitively interrupted publishing for the works of Diosdado Caballero and
Clavijero.
The third character involved in publishing the Historia antigua de Mxico
is Antonio Porlier y Sopranis, minister of Grace and Justice of the Indies,
who became responsible for the least valuable section of the ministry of the
Indies after it was divided following the death of Jos de Glvez in 1787.
Coincidentally, in that same year, Francisco Javier Clavijero died in exile in
Bologna. On 23 November 1789, Porlier told Muoz, who was under his
protection, that the Council of Indies had consulted him about the notes and
suggestions that should be prepared in order for Clavijeros book to finally be
published. It was not hard for Muoz to convince Porlier to do everything
in his power to prevent the books publication.18 That is what happened and
the possibility of the Historia antigua de Mxicos appearance thus came to a
definitive end.
The appearance in Madrid of Saggio sulla storia naturale de Chili and of
Saggio sulla storia civile de Chili, both published in Bologna, in 1782 and 1787,
respectively, by the Chilean Jesuit Juan Ignacio Molina, was better served by
fortune. The main idea of these works was to criticize Raynal and Robertson.
One crucial factor that explains why Molinas work could be published in
Spain was that the moment was favourable for the ministers of Charles III
to reach an agreement with the exiled Jesuits whose works were considered
of public usefulness for the nation. Coinciding with Porliers entry into the
ministry of Grace and Justice of the Indies, the Court gave him, and other
ministers, the authority to offer economic aid for the costs or otherwise to
double the pension of the Jesuit writers who obtained the privilege of seeing
their work published in the metropolis.19 In the case of Molina, the minister
Antonio Porlier was directly involved in the offer to double his pension in
exchange for publishing his two volumes on the history of Chile in Madrid, as
the Italian edition had had wide repercussions because it contradicted reviews
expressed by foreign philosophers.
Peralta Ruiz, Patrones, clientes y amigos, p. 241.
Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga, El destierro de los jesuitas castellanos (17671815)
(Salamanca, 2004), pp. 100101.
18
19
91
The first volume, covering the geographic and natural history of the
kingdom of Chile, was sent by Molina to Manuel de Lardizabal y Uribe,
a jurist from New Spain and at the time member of the Royal Spanish
Academy and very influential in Enlightenment circles thanks to his personal
friendship with Jovellanos. Lardizabal entrusted the translation of the volume
to Domingo Joseph de Arquellada Mendoza, a member of the Royal Academy
of Buenas Letras in Seville. Once this task was completed, the printing license
was applied for from the Council of the Indies on 25 July 1786. When this step
was completed, this organism gave Molinas Compendio to the Royal Academy
of History to be censored, a task that was entrusted to the Asturian academy
member and politician Melchor Gaspar de Jovellanos, who appraised it in a
concise sentence describing the work and its translation as a recommendable
work of public utility.20
Molinas first volume was published by Antonio de Sanchas press in
1788.21 One curious circumstance is that, in a footnote of the preface included
by Arquellada Mendoza, it was announced that the same publishing house
would soon be publishing the Cartas americanas of Count Juan Rinaldo Carli.
Molinas edition was a merit for minister Porlier. But the Spanish commissioner
in Rome, Luis Gneco, who from the start had mediated in the correspondence
between the Chilean priest and the minister of Grace and Justice of the Indies,
was also involved in this publication. Once he knew that the first volume
had been published, Gneco continued to coordinate the publication of the
second volume, devoted to the civil history of the kingdom of Chile, with
Molina. But this publication suffered unexpected delays and was practically
paralyzed when Porlier left his ministerial post in 1792 in order to take up
that of governor of the Council of the Indies. In addition to this circumstance,
the Spanish government failed to increase the Jesuits pension, which would
have been compensation for his labour. On 24 October 1792, Molina wrote
a letter to the new Spanish representative in Rome, Josef Capelletti, hoping
that he would transmit the failure to fulfill the pact that had been made with
him to the new minister of Grace and Justice of Spain and the Indies, Pedro
de Acua, because the excellent Seor don Antonio Porlier had deigned, at
the beginning of his administration, to communicate to him, by means of
the royal commissioner don Luis de Gneco, that His Majesty Charles III
(God rest his soul) had ordered him to be given a double pension as a reward
when the second volume saw the light of day. It has been five years since
that condition was fulfilled but the royal concession had not been put into
ARAH, Censuras, leg. II/8020.
Juan Ignacio Molina, Compendio de la historia geogrfica, natural y civil del reyno
de Chile (Madrid, 1788).
20
21
92
effect, despite the reclamations that had been made at different times.22 This
complaint had an immediate effect and the Spanish government admitted its
error and made the increase in the Chilean Jesuits pension official by a royal
order on 3 April 1793.
In 1795, the second part of Molinas work, dedicated to the civil history
of the kingdom of Chile, appeared in Madrid. This time, Nicols de la Cruz
y Bahamonde was in charge of the translation. In the note that precedes the
preface written by Molina, he explains that, in order to carry out this task with
precision, he had had a series of manuscripts related to the history and customs
of the Araucanians brought from Chile. This can be said to be an annotated
edition of Molinas history. In the prologue, the Chilean Jesuit laments the
delay of this edition, which appeared seven years after the first part had been
published, and blames the delay on human promises (which) are by their very
nature conditional.23 Similarly, Molina publicly acknowledged his ex-Jesuit
companion Miguel de Olivares and confessed that his Compendio took the
history written by Olivares as its reference to the middle of the seventeenth
century. This is how the only case in which Spain actually published the
historiographic work of an American Jesuit ended. The history prepared by
the Jesuit from Quito, Juan de Velasco, would not be as lucky.
In contrast to the works of Nuix, Clavijero, and Molina, La Historia del
Reino de Quito en la Amrica Meridional had not previously been published
in Italian, so its first edition was in Spanish. The intervention of both the
minister, Porlier, and the commissioner, Gneco, in the steps for publication
are similar in this case to those in the case of Molina, but that is where the
similarities end. Contact began on 23 November 1788, when a letter by
Velasco was given to Gneco, addressed to Porlier, requesting his mediation
to obtain royal favor for his three-volume manuscript on the history of the
kingdom of Quito. In this letter, Velasco authorized the Spanish minister to
make whatever corrections to his work that he considered necessary in order
to expedite its publication. It is surprising that in this letter Velasco did not
demand the reward that this involved, that is, an increase in his pension.
His only expectations were for the Spanish government to cover the costs
of printing his work, whether through the kings patronage or through the
eventual profits on its sale, and to receive two copies upon its publication.
The letter ended with an acknowledgement of the patronage of the Spanish
minister, to whom he offered to dedicate his work.24 On 4 January 1789,
Archivo Histrico Nacional (henceforth AHN), Diversos, leg. 29, no. 2.
Juan Ignacio Molina, Compendio de la historia civil del reyno de Chile (Madrid,
1795), p. v.
24
AHN, Diversos, leg. 29, no. 1.
22
23
93
the manuscript was ready and the General Directorate of the Ministry of
Grace and Justice of the Indies considered that the nation is enriched by these
works, while they are, at the same time, a monument that proves the integrity
and behavior that the Spaniards employed in their conquests.25 Porlier gave
the manuscript to the Council of the Indies. Following custom, the official
gave the work, in turn, to the Royal Academy of History for a first censoring.
The minister was so confident that his patronage would be successful that,
in a letter of 15 September 1789, he wrote to Velasco that King Charles IV
was aware of the merit of his work and that he would, in due time, receive
compensation for his contribution. But Porlier failed to count on the way
that the Royal Academy of History would come between this desire and its
fulfilment and frustrate the publication.
The first and second volumes of Velascos work, which treat, respectively,
the natural history and ancient history of Quito, arrived at the Royal Academy
of History in June 1789. The task of censoring them was entrusted to two
members of the academy with established Americanist credentials: Antonio
de Alcedo and Casimiro Gmez Ortega. They presented their report on 14
August 1789, judging the work worthy of coming into public view, as long
as the author corrected a series of errors in content and improved the general
method of his work. In reality, the sentence was unusually severe. Alcedo and
Ortega believed the volume devoted to natural history to be quite imperfect
because its classification followed the natives names and uses of plants;
therefore, they proposed it be excluded or, in the best case, published as an
appendix with the title Repertorio o manual de noticias y nombres vulgares
pertenecientes a las producciones naturales del reino de Quito.26 The two
members of the academy felt it to would be a good idea for Velasco to consult
Ignacio Molinas natural history of Chile as a model to follow. Regarding the
second volume devoted to the ancient history of Quito, which covered the
period from the year 1000 to 1550, the members of the Academy prepared
an extensive list of up to sixty observations that, according to their judgment,
diminished the value of the work. As a result, they concluded that Velasco
should rewrite his work in order for it to be considered publishable.
Surprisingly, on 15 September 1789, Porlier had written a letter to Velasco
to tell him that the first two volumes of his history had been approved by
the Royal Academy of History, although with some objections that could be
Seccin General al Ministro de Estado sobre las pretensiones del exjesuita para
que se imprima su obra, 4 de enero de 1789. Reproduced in Juan de Velasco, Historia del
reino de Quito en la Amrica Meridional (Quito, 1977), vol. 1, p. 25
26
Nota de la Secretara al Ministro remitiendo copia del dictamen de la Real
Academia de la Historia, 3 de octubre 1789, in Velasco, Historia del reino, p. 32.
25
94
removed [] it will immediately go on to be printed and published.27 This

letter concealed the extent of the criticism in the evaluation from Velasco. The
truth is that this missive raised great enthusiasm in Velasco, who finished the
third volume of his work relating to modern history and sent it to Porlier.
The Council of the Indies made no objection to the publication of this third
volume, but the objections came, once again, from the Royal Academy of
History. In the report prepared by Antonio de Alcedo and Casimiro Gmez
Ortega, this last volume was recommended for publication, but they warned
of an excessive defense of the works of the Jesuits, to the detriment of the
labor of secular parish priests. After this evaluation, Porlier, finally convinced
of the impossibility of publishing this work, went from deceit to silence with
Velasco. Not only did he not communicate the results of the censoring of
the third volume to Velasco, but he omitted any reference to the state of
publication of the first two volumes. Suspecting that something was wrong,
Velasco wrote a letter to Porlier on 16 November 1791. In this letter he
attributed the delay in printing the Historia del reino de Quito to the negative
effects that reading the third volume had caused among the censors. Because
of this, he requested Porlier to remove this volume because if this, Sir, is
the cause, why do all three need to come out together? The third could be
buried if it were an impediment or a hindrance to the first ones, which were
approved.28 Porlier did not respond, making it clear that he was intentionally
distancing himself from this work. The ministers attitude can be explained
by the difficulty inherent in correcting the three volumes according to the
demands of the members of the academy. The fact that he had already ceased
his functions as minister of Grace and Justice of the Indies could also have
provided Porlier with a justification to abandon the Chilean Jesuit. Whatever
the deep motivation for the Canary Island politicians attitude, Velasco was no
longer able to continue fighting to publish his history because he passed away
on 29 June 1792, in Faenza.
With Molinas Compendio de la historia geogrfica, natural y civil del reino
de Chile being the only history of an American Jesuit published in Spain, one
must wonder about the repercussions in the circle of Enlightenment thinkers
in the Spanish monarchy. We can state with some certainty that its impact
was minimal. Muoz ignored it in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo. By contrast,
Molinas account would be highly valued by the Neapolitan sailor Alejandro
Malaspina, who ordered several copies, both the Italian and the Spanish
editions, to be included in the library that he prepared on his two corvettes,
Carta de Antonio Porlier a Juan de Velasco, in Velasco, Historia del reino, p. 31.
Carta del exjesuita Velasco al Ministro, 16 de noviembre de 1791, in Velasco,
Historia del reino, p. 47.
27
28
95
the Atrevida and the Descubierta, on which he undertook his scientific and
political expedition throughout the dominions of the Spanish monarchy
between 1789 and 1794.29
Regarding Molinas role in the controversy about the New World generated
in Madrid, his understanding with a group of Jesuits ready to criticize the
Spanish information counter-attack remains to be pointed out. Molina
signed a petition to the court in Madrid that is not dated but is suspected to
have been written between 1786 and 1788, the same petition that was upheld
by the priests Francisco Iturri, Joaqun Caamao, and Miguel Castro. The four
Jesuits reported that, by means of the public papers that had arrived in Rome,
they had found out about the publication of Antonio de Alcedos Diccionario
geogrfico and that, considering this novelty, they requested the court to send
them a copy to review, in view of the practical knowledge that the undersigned
have of His Majestys important domains, having penetrated, in the missions,
into many unknown countries, examining their production, their geography,
the customs of their natives, and other circumstances necessary for history.30
The four signers then pointed out that they did not intend to criticize Alcedo,
but that they were not confident that a single person could possibly write
correctly about all subjects relating to America. That was why they, drawing
upon their experience and knowledge of America, offered to perfect the
aforesaid Diccionario geogrfico with a series of additions and corrections,
assuming Alcedos authorization of them. What the four requested, in short,
was for the Spanish government to allot them a stipend so that they could
devote themselves completely to the collective task of improving a book which
was thought to be of public importance. In other words, what the four Jesuit
historians wished was to join efforts with a member of the Royal Academy of
History, in this case Alcedo, to refute the myth of Americas inferiority. But
this chance for collaboration between the members of the academy and the
members of the Jesuit order was frustrated when the Madrid court did not
respond to this petition.
Of the four Jesuits who wrote to the court, the Rioplatense Iturri would, at
a later date, play a key role in the ultimate defeat of the Spanish information
counter-attack, becoming the author of the Carta crtica sobre la historia de
Amrica del Sr. Dn. Juan Bautista Muoz, in which he accused the author
of the Historia del Nuevo Mundo of servilely translating Robertson and
Blanca Siz (ed.), Alejandro Malaspina. La Amrica imposible (Madrid, 1994),

p. 48.
30
Jaime Eyzaguirre, Correspondencia de los jesuitas expulsos chilenos con el
gobierno espaol, Boletn de la Academia Chilena de la Historia, 58 (1958): 100.
29
96
De Pauw and not understanding America through ignorance of its reality.31

Despite Muozs reply, Iturris work, financed and published by the Count of
Campomanes, was decisive in preventing the second volume of the Historia
del Nuevo Mundo from being published. Iturri died in 1799, the same year in
which Muoz died.
Conclusions
The idea of some politicians of the Spanish monarchy to have the histories
of America written by the Jesuits exiled in Italy included in the Spanish
information counter-attack against the works of Raynal, Robertson, and
De Pauw was a delicate operation. To begin with, it was quite difficult to
make the counter-Enlightenment, humanist thinking of the Jesuit historians
compatible with the Catholic Enlightenment embraced by the politicians and
academy members of the Spanish monarchy, a trend that was not homogeneous
within itself either as the prolonged conflict between the members of the
Royal Academy of History and Juan Bautista Muoz suggests. A series of
insurmountable obstacles would show the impossibility of this official attempt
to fuse two different ways of conceiving history.
The first obstacle came from the members of the Royal Academy of History,
who did not want the Spanish edition of these histories to overshadow their
two productions devoted to fighting the foreign Enlightenment thinkers:
on one hand, the translation and adaptation of the Historia poltica de los
establecimientos ultramarinos de las naciones europeas by Raynal published by
the Duke of Almodvar and, on the other, the Diccionario geogrfico-histrico
de las Indias Occidentales written by Antonio de Alcedo. Although the members
of the academy gave positive reports on the histories of Mexico, Chile, and
Quito written, respectively, by the Jesuits Francisco Javier Clavijero, Juan
Ignacio Molina, and Juan de Velasco, they also presented serious reservations
about the methodology and context of these works in order to delay or
compromise their publication.
The second obstacle that caused problems for disseminating Jesuit
historiography was personified by the philosopher Juan Bautista Muoz, who,
due to evident academic jealousy of his position as official in charge of writing
the history of America, criticized the possible publication of Clavijeros Historia
antigua de Mxico in Spain. In addition, in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo,
Muoz ignored the rest of the representatives of Jesuit historiography.
Francisco Iturri, Carta crtica sobre la historia de Amrica del Sr. Dn. Juan Bautista
Muoz escrita en Roma, impreso en Madrid, ao 1797 (Buenos Aires, 1818).
31
97
The third obstacle arose from the Spanish politicians themselves. The
case of the publication of the Reflexiones imparciales by the Mallorcan Jesuit
Juan Nuix shows that not even a work that was an absolute defense of Spains
actions in America won the sympathy of the members closest to the court.
The influential politician Juan Sempere y Guarinos criticism of Nuix focused
on Nuixs ignorance of the Bourbon reforms devoted to correcting the defects
of the old colonial pact that Roberston and Raynal had pointed out.
The fourth, and final, obstacle was that the Jesuits provoked the erosion of
the information counter-attack by criticizing some of its most emblematic
productions. This was the case with Alcedos Diccionario geogrfico as well as
with Muozs Historia del Nuevo Mundo. The Ro de Plata Jesuit Francisco
Iturri played an outstanding role in taking apart the Spanish discourse against
foreign Enlightenment thinkers because his criticism undercut the publication
of the second volume of the Historia del Nuevo Mundo. As a result of all of
this, the heterogeneity of the actors discursive positions, personal jealousies
and animosities, and internal discrepancy regarding the comprehension of
America were characteristics that (marred) the Spanish information counterattack and led, ultimately, to the failure of this discourse.
Translated by Nancy Konvalinka.
Chapter 8
Conceiving Central America:

A Bourbon Public in the Gazeta de
Guatemala (17971807)
Jordana Dym*
For the study of cultural and political identity in late colonial Central America
(the Kingdom of Guatemala), the Gazeta de Guatemala (17971816)
is one of few published sources with which to study what a modern elite
such as that posited by Franois-Xavier Guerra might be up to in a public
sphere outside the metropolitan centres of Mexico and Peru, where scholars
including David Brading and Anthony Pagden have shown the steady rise
of a Creole patriotism in books and manuscripts produced, often in exile,
and for a primarily European audience. These scholars analysis tracked
development of a Creole cultural identity, or growing affective identification,
by American-born Spaniards with the colonies of their birth, their patrias
or homelands, which accelerated in the waning years of empire. Guerra also
highlighted the political nature of turn-of-the-century economic reform
* Thanks to Skidmore Colleges Office of the Dean of the Faculty Travel-To-Read
funds, and Harvard Universitys Seminar in the History of the Atlantic World for an
opportunity to present an earlier draft of this paper.

The Kingdom of Guatemala (15241821), a captaincy general, comprised the
territories of five countries (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa
Rica) divided in multiple districts, and of Chiapas, which became a Mexican state in
1823.

Franois-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: ensayos sobre las revoluciones
hispnicas (Madrid, 1992), p. 105.

David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the
Liberal State, 14921867 (New York, 1991) and Anthony Pagden, The Uncertainties of
Empire: Essays in Iberian and Ibero-American Intellectual History (Aldershot, 1994). For
discussion of the development of Creole identity, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991).
100
programs, advocated largely through the work of patriotic societies modelled

on those of Spain, formed to increase productivity and include all members of
society in economic advancement. The Gazeta de Guatemala seemed a useful
source to investigate whether the elites of kingdom capital Guatemala City
particularly Creoles who had come from the provinces to study at the regions
sole university paralleled or differed from strains of thought emerging in
Spanish Americas literary capitals. The newspaper offered the possibility to
track change over time, for a colony that boasted few books, from the period
from its 1797 prospectus through 1807, just before Napoleons invasion of
Spain and Portugal shook and changed the imaginings of leaders on both sides
of the Atlantic.
Initial analysis of the Gazeta produced an argument that the Gazeta
established the developing of political and cultural identities among Creole
elites, an argument I had not yet seen in print. Subsequently, scholars,
including Anthony McFarlane, have supported Benedict Andersons argument
that, while the Enlightenment-inspired imaginings of the modern Creole elite
did not yet call for sovereignty within empire, they were indeed political, and
grew partly due to print culture, especially newspapers, including the Gazeta
de Mexico (17841809), Mercurio Peruano (17911795), and Gazeta de
Guatemala (17971816). Similarly, if Guerra initially dismissed newspapers
as ephemeral print culture and less important than a private republic of
letters among elites, scholars of nineteenth century politics, including Hilda
Sabato, Renn Silva, Gustavo Paz, and even Guerra himself, subsequently
viewed newspapers as influential vehicles shaping political processes in late
Anthony Pagden and Nicholas Canny Afterword: From Identity to Independence,

in their edited volume, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 15001800 (Princeton,
1987) and Pagden, The Uncertainties of Empire.

Jordana Dym, Conceiving Central America: Public, Patria and Nation in the
Gazeta de Guatemala (17971807), NYU Graduate History Students Workshop, May
1997.

Anthony McFarlane, Identity, Enlightenment and Political Dissent in Late
Colonial Spanish America, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6:8 (1998): 30935.
See Jorge Caizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford, 2001),
esp. chs 4, 5, for discussion of Creole use of history to develop political identity in late
colonial Mexico. Caizares-Esguerra emphasizes Jesuit writing, manuscript sources and
published histories.

Guerra, Modernidad e independencias, pp. 10711. J.H. Elliott also emphasizes
ephemerality, especially before 1750. J.H. Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and
Spain in America, 14921830 (New Haven and London, 2006), pp. 33031.
Conceiving Central America
101
colonial and post-independence Spanish America, generally applying Jrgen

Habermas concept of a public sphere, and, in the case of Renn Silva,
exploring the ambiguous support by colonial officials of the press as a tool
for communicating Enlightenment innovations. The 2006 ICA even hosted a
30-paper session on eighteenth through twentieth-century Spanish American
newspaper culture.10 Thus, while scholarship of Spanish American late colonial
newspapers remains scarcer than studies of print culture in North American
independence11 and the French Revolution,12 there is growing attention to
Creole political identity and political ideas expressed in newspapers, pamphlets
Gustavo Paz, Reporting Atlantic News: Newspapers and the Rise of the Public
in Late Colonial Argentina, Harvard University Seminar on the History of the Atlantic
World, 10th Anniversary Conference, August 2005, Cambridge, MA; Renn Silva,
Prensa y revolucin a finales del siglo XVIII: contribucin a un analisis de la formacin de la
ideologa de independencia nacinoal (Bogot, 1988) and Jean-Pierre Clment, Lapparition
de la presse priodique en Amrique Espagnole: le cas du Mercurio Peruano, in LAmrique
Espagnole lpoque des lumires. Tradition-Innovation-Reprsentations (Paris, 1987),
pp. 27386.

Renn Silva, La ilustracin en el virreinato de Nueva Granda; estudios de historia
cultural (Medelln, 2005), pp. 112, 114; Victor M. Uribe-Uran, The Birth of a Public
Sphere in Latin America During the Age of Revolution, Comparative Studies in Society
and History, 42:2 (2000): 42557; Franois-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lemprire, Los
espacios pblicos en Iberoamrica. Ambigedades y problemas. Siglos XVIIIXIX (Mxico,
1998). See Hilda Sabato, Citizenship, Political Participation and the Formation of the
Public Sphere in Buenos Aires, 1850s1880s, Past & Present, 136 (1992): 13963,
esp. 15053. For a review of recent scholarship, see Elias Jos Palti, Recent Studies on the
Emergence of a Public Sphere in Latin America, Latin American Research Review, 36:2
(2001): 25566.
10
Celia del Palacio Montiel (Universidad de Guadalajara) and Adriana Pineda
Soto (Universidad Michoacana), coordinators, Historia de la prensa y el periodismo en
Iberoamrica, siglos XIX y XX, ICA, 1719 July 2006, Seville.
11
For a recent argument that newspapers helped create an American consciousness,
see Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665
1740 (New York, 1994). Print culture studies include Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological
Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967); Bailyn and John B. Hench,
The Press and the American Revolution (Worcester, MA, 1980); and Richard B. Kielbowicz,
News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 17001860s (Westport,
CT, 1989).
12
See Jermy D. Popkin, The Right Wing Press in France, 17921800 (Chapel Hill,
1980) and Revolutionary News: the Press in France, 17891799 (Durham, 1990); Jean-Paul
Bertaud, La presse et le pouvoir de Louis XIII Napolon Ier (Paris, 2000); Jack R. Censer,
Prelude to Power: The Parisian Radical French Press, 17891791 (Baltimore, 1979) and
The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (New York, 1994).
102
and other printed matter designed to reach an extended public that supported
my original finding of political ideas in Guatemalas Gazeta.
However, in revisiting the Gazeta from the perspective of its place within
the context of Bourbon empire, the emphasis on its development of a Creole
political culture and identity, rather than a Bourbon project, no longer seems
accurate. Returning to my sources and existing scholarship, the Gazeta seemed
not a Creole publishing project, but a joint effort that relied on interest
from royal officials, both Creole and Spanish, and from local elites born
in Central America. In other words, it seemed a quintessential product and
project of Bourbon reform not just Creole modernity, that is, a part of an
Enlightenment shift in political culture such as identified by Renn Silva.13
Second, the Gazeta did not seem to call into being a Creole identity in Central
America, nor seek to justify long-standing racial and socio-economic divisions
among inhabitants; nor did it fail to open rhetorical or potentially political
space for power-sharing with the Indian, African and mixed-race majority.14
On the contrary, following and adapting Spanish calls for uniformity and
progress through administrative reform, education, agriculture and industry,
the Gazeta in a very self-conscious, didactic way, seemed to call into being
Central America as a patria with a political history tied to its status as a
praetorian captaincy general within the Spanish imperial system, and also a
Central America with a public in which membership was gained by utility
to the community, not a pre-ordained status in society guaranteed by birth or
profession.15 In other words, rhetoric that attempted to construct one people
(or at least one public) and not just distinct classes and races appeared in the
Gazeta. However, the public called into being was not meant as a precursor
to revolution. Rather, the Central America conceived in the Gazeta would
be an ideal Bourbon state, developing the uniformity touted by imperial
reformers with a place for resident Spaniards and immigrant provincials who
contributed to the common good, as well as for the mixed-race majority.
The chapter that follows suggests how the Gazeta de Guatemala represented
a joint venture by the modern elite of Guatemala City, local and imperial in
Silva, La ilustracin.
McFarlane, Identity, Enlightenment and Political Dissent, pp. 313, 316.
15
See Sajid Herrera, Primary Education in Bourbon San Salvador and Sonsonate,
17501808, pp. 1745, in Jordana Dym and Christophe Belaubre, (eds), Politics, Economy
and Society in Bourbon Central America, 17591821 (Boulder, CO, 2007). The underlying
program to render uniform the government of the great empires can be seen in Article 1,
Instruccin e ordenanza de intendentes[Buenos Ayres (1782), Nueva Espana (1786)].
Uniformity meant replicable governmental systems with fixed rules and regulations,
producing predictable results, rather than based on tradition and shifting allegiances.
13
14
103
origin, to develop a political identity among the colonys elites that would
permit more effective transmission of Bourbon projects to improve agriculture
and industry by creating a public that linked all residents in a shared effort
to improve as individuals and as a community.16 The idea that splits among
Guatemala City elites occurred as often along network or kinship fault lines
or intellectual affinities as Creole and Spanish divides is not new; however, the
idea that newspapers such as the Gazeta served as agents of imperial as well
as Creole policy-making is less common.17 This is not to say that the Gazetas
program, in its conception of Central America as a territory with a history,
geography, culture, and people, provided a conceptual framework useful
only for Bourbon reformers; the generation of Creole leaders who engineered
independence in 1821 drew selectively from this rhetoric as well. However,
the reform program as presented reflects more the spirit of imperial reform
than revolution, and the commitment by both local and imperial elites to
diffuse las luces as far as possible into the multiple power centres within their
jurisdiction.
The Gazeta de Guatemala and the Modern Elite
The Gazeta de Guatemala was published weekly in Guatemala City from 1797 to
1816, across two different political moments. Up to 1807, a time of continuity
within imperial government and the period considered here, the newspapers
articles focused on fomenting a common project of political, economic and
social development and on the parameters of Central American identity. After
1808, a period of imperial crisis, the newspaper strongly supported Spains war
against Napoleon Bonaparte and constitutional monarchy. In both periods,
the Gazeta served as the first regular, public platform for engaging literate
Central American society in a discussion of local, regional and imperial reform
and development.
For my analysis of the Bourbon Reforms, see Introduction in Dym and Belaubre,
(eds), Politics, Economy and Society, pp. 115.
17
See Jordana Dym, El Poder en Nueva Guatemala: La disputa de los Alcaldes de
Barrio, 17611821, in Stephen Webre and Robinson Herrera (eds), Cultura y sociedad
en Guatemala colonial (Plumsock, VT, 2008); Jos Manuel Santos Prez, La prctica de
autogobierno en Centroamrica: conflictos entre la audiencia de Guatemala y el cabildo de
Santiago en el siglo XVIII, Mesoamrica, 40 (2002): 6994; Christophe Belaubre, In the
Shadow of the Great: Church Financiers Everyday Resistance to the Bourbon Reforms,
Guatemala City 17531808, and Michel Bertrand, The Social Elites of Guatemala on
the Eve of Independence: Internal Structures and Dynamics, in Dym and Belaubre (eds),
Politics, Economy and Society, pp. 4774, 23964.
16
104
The Gazetas contributors were an elite, and rather youthful, group of

Creoles and Spanish officials educated in Enlightenment methods and ideas
whose members fit Guerras idea of a modern elite. Historian John Tate
Lanning dubbed this group the Gazetas coterie in 1955, well before current
scholarship emphasizing intellectual, as well as genealogical, kinship drew
attention to bonds as well as divisions between Creoles and Peninsulars.18
In 1796, this coterie established Guatemala Citys Real Sociedad Econmica de
Amantes de la Patria de Guatemala, a patriotic society modelled on a Spanish
original of the 1770s whose main goal was to extend the Enlightenment
influences, las luces and promote Crown programs to stimulate modern
agricultural production, commerce, industry and education in the Spanish
nation, that is, peninsular Spain.19 As in Spains other New World dominions,
members of Guatemala Citys Enlightened elite promoted these reforms
locally by establishing a Sociedad de Amantes and then founding the Gazeta,
which, in addition to reporting on international news, served as the Sociedads
link to the provinces.20
This modern elite was a hybrid group comprised of Creoles and imperial
officials, both Peninsular and Creole in origin. Creole Ignacio Beteta, the
publisher, worked with Spanish officials committed to progress, Enlightenment
and a newspaper. These included 40-year-old Jacobo de Villaurutia, a judge
of the colonys audiencia and its juez de imprenta, who had contributed to
Spains Correo de Madrid in the 1780s.21 The Gazetas first two editors
For analysis of the Gazeta coterie, see Catherine Poupeney-Hart, Tierra e
historia, del Mercurio peruano a la Gazeta de Guatemala, in Karl Kohut and Sonia Rose
(eds), La formacin de la cultura iberoamericana. Siglo XVIII, (Madrid, 2006), pp. 30718;
John Tate Lanning, The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment in the University of San Carlos
de Guatemala (Ithaca, 1956), pp. 8391, and Dewitt S. Chandler, Jacobo de Villaurrutia
and the Audiencia of Guatemala, 17941804, The Americas, 32:3 (1976): 40217.
19
For discussion of these societies as a new form of socialization, see Guerra,
Modernidad e independencias, p. 94 and Gabriel Paquette, State-Civil Society Cooperation
and Conflict in the Spanish Empire: The Intellectual and Political Activities of the
Ultramarine Consulados and Economic Societies, c. 17801810, Journal of Latin American
Studies, 39:2 (2007): 26398.
20
Printer and editor Ignacio Betetas 1793 request for permission to publish cited
the Mercurio Peruano prospectus. I. Beteta to B. Troncoso, Captain-General of Guatemala,
18 June 1793, in Toribio Medina, La Imprenta en Guatemala, 2nd edn (Guatemala, City,
1960), p. 299.
21
See Chandler, Jacobo de Villaurrutia. Born in 1757 in Santo Domingo to an oidor
father, Villaurrutia grew up in Mexico (17631772), studied and had early bureaucratic
posts in Spain (17721792), and became an oidor in Guatemala in 1794. After transferring
to Mexicos audiencia in 1805, he helped found the Gazeta de Mexico.
18
105
a Spaniard and imperial secretary, Alejandro Ramrez, and a Guatemalan

scribe and poet, Simn Bergao y Villegas were both in their twenties.22
The papers other contributors, like this pair, were largely reform-minded
royal officials and professors and graduates of the University of San Carlos
in Guatemala City, a progressive institution that from the 1770s abandoned
scholasticisms rote memorization for the scientific method.23 The universitys
graduates (over 1300 from 17751821) included priests, lawyers, secretaries,
scribes, merchants, doctors and landowners who came from the capital, the
provinces, other colonies, and even Spain; two important examples include
important provincial-born San Carlos graduates Jos Antonio Goicoechea,
a Costa Rican-born San Carlos professor, and Chiapas-born friar Matas de
Cordoba.24 The Gazetas coterie was an important minority of the colonial
population, and particularly of the elite population of Spaniards and Creoles
(around 40,000 according to an 1811 census).25 Given Spanish Americas
tradition of incorporating immigrants as full members of a municipality
(vecinos), it is not surprising that provincials and royal officials who fully
integrated into elite cultural life were members rather than critics of this
community.26
Subscribers, too, reflected the development of a Bourbon public sphere of
exchange stitching together Creoles from across the provinces with imperial
officials living and working in provincial capitals. For both Crown agents
and Creole participants, this Gazeta provided a means to imagine their
relationship to each other in a new way, both through interactions with the
Gazeta as consumers (subscribers) and producers (contributors), and through
the Gazetas content.
In the Gazetas first year, two thirds of the two hundred known subscribers
lived in the provinces; many were officials responsible for transmitting news
Arrested in 1809 for fomenting dissension among Americanos y Europeos, it
seems his real name was Simon Carreo; after trial for sedition in Guatemala, he was
exiled to Havana, and later Spain. AGI Guatemala 624, Carta 481, Autos de la causa
contra Simon Carreo por sedicin y otros, 18 March 1809.
23
Lanning, Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, p. 76.
24
John Tate Lanning, The University in the Kingdom of Guatemala (Ithaca, NY,
1955), pp. 2035.
25
An 1811 census listed 646,666 Indians, 313,334 castas, and 40,000 whites.
Manuel Mier y Teran in Carlos Melndez, Textos fundamentales de la independencia
centroamericana (San Jos, Costa Rica, 1971), p. 336. Figures are approximate.
26
See Jordana Dym, From Sovereign Villages to National States: City, State and
Federation in Central America, 17591839 (Albuquerque, 2006), chs 1, 2, and Tamar
Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish
America (New Haven, 2003).
22
106
and shaping residents opinions: governors, treasury officials, friars, parish

priests, postmasters, and military commanders.27 Each important town had
at least one subscription; many had several, including bordering Mexican
towns Oaxaca and Puebla although Central America alone was part of the
original marketing plan. Almost 200 subscribers is significant, especially when
considering the postmasters, whose subscriptions likely reached communities
as well as individuals.28 This figure is also comparable to circulation of Lima,
Bogot and Buenos Aires newspapers.29 Further, if this paper meant to sell a
Creole set of ideas, how can we explain a subscription base that was as much
institutional as individual, and as much Spanish as Creole? The list, and similar
lists for Buenos Aires, suggest that Benedict Anderson erred in claiming that
many a peninsular official avoided the local papers.30 The captain-general,
audiencia and Creole merchants resident in the capital would all benefit from
convincing provincial readers of a shared community whose institutions and
capital just happened to be located in their municipality.
The new public sphere offered an opportunity for exchange with provincial
subscribers, allowing them to help produce the paper. The Gazeta frequently
published and responded to letters from readers purporting to live throughout
the colony; subjects ranged from complaints about Indian labour to support
for Guatemala City womens right to wear finery, from the difficulty in making
real friends in the kingdom to the need for better naval protection of the
colonys Caribbean coast.31 This public correspondence demonstrated Central
Americans willingness to engage in a debate moderated by the capitals
lettered men. Whether or not letter-writers agreed with views expressed in
the Gazeta, by debating, they tacitly accepted membership in this republic
of letters which extended a shared identity based not on Spanish, provincial,
kinship or class identity, but on participation in a group tied together by
common identification as members of the kingdoms community, addressing
Gazeta de Guatemala, Listado de Abonados, Tomo I (1798). First semester
subscribers totalled 199: 66 in the capital, 42 in Mexico (Mexico City, Oaxaca, Puebla,
Veracruz), 3 in Madrid, 11 in Chiapas (Ciudad Real, Tuxtla), 1 in Costa Rica, 16 in
Nicaragua (Len, Masaya, Granada, Managua, Nicaragua, Mazatenango), 17 in Honduras
(Comayagua, Tegucigalpa Gracias, Truxillo), 35 in El Salvador/Sonsonate (Santa Ana,
Ahuachapn, Sonsonate, San Salvador, San Vicente, Xacatecoluca, San Miguel) and 8 in
Quesaltenango (Guatemala).
28
Ibid., No. 22, 3 July 1797, p. 176.
29
See Silva, Prensa y revolucin, pp. 3032; Paz, Reporting Atlantic News, note 27,
which suggests 400 subscribers to the Mercurio Peruano and 265 for the Correo de Madrid
(1787).
30
Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 62.
31
Gazeta, Nos 198 and 199, 6 and 13 April 1801.
27
107
issues of local concern. Such a result interested Guatemala Citys royal officials
and Creole elites, as both believed in the Bourbon mantra of the benefits of
uniformity, which facilitated government by the former and reinforced the
centrality of the latter. A more uniform society which adopted reformist goals
would be easier to govern and influence.
A Useful and Pedagogical Agenda
In Betetas 1797 prospectus, the Gazeta offered a quintessentially Bourbon
agenda, proposing to contribute to practical improvement of Central
American society by communicating Enlightenment ideas and ideals to a
public not confined to Guatemala City.32 News would be informative, aimed
at fomenting public instruction on Economy, Commerce, Industry, Politics,
the sciences and the fine arts.33 For the Gazetas sponsors, the paper would
be a university without walls bringing the latest ideas and techniques to the
provinces, a professor to convince both recalcitrant and willing students of
the new systems worth, a textbook to explain ideas and a training manual for
practical implementation. Despite supposedly little affection for reading in
the provinces,34 the newspaper would repeat in Guatemala the service it had
provided in Europe, serving as midwife to a commercial society:
The necessity and utility of the newspaper have been considered and repeated a thousand
times. It certainly has contributed importantly to the extension and propagation of the
Enlightenment in Europe ... In Guatemala, more than in any other place, a work of
this kind is necessary. Without it, the society aborning will not succeed in prospering,
or its progresses will be unknown to the rest of the world.35
Very practically, as an approved publication, the Gazeta published royal

decrees and announced appointments of civil, military, and ecclesiastical
officials relevant to the colony. The government also permitted the paper to
report on news from Europe copied from the Gazeta de Madrid.36 For the
Medina, La Imprenta en Guatemala, II: 1, p. 301; Gazeta, Prospecto, pp. 1, 3.
Gazeta, Prospecto, pp. 2, 3.
34
In 1797, the Gazeta sighed, Philosophy still has few converts in this Kingdom
[of Guatemala]: ... there is little affection for reading: the education of our provincianos is
generally little compatible with a love of letters. Gazeta, No. 14, 15 May 1797, p. 107.
Unless otherwise noted, translations from Spanish are mine.
35
Ibid.
36
The Gazeta consistently published royal decrees and orders, news of military,
gubernatorial and ecclesiastical appointments and elections to the Consulado de Comercio
and important municipal councils.
32
33
108
Spanish government, this hybrid official and Creole newspaper publicly

communicated official news to the kingdoms residents beyond a small circle
who received official correspondence as members of cabildos, consulados and
church councils, expanding the number of residents with first-hand knowledge
of policy.
More theoretically, the Gazeta lived up to its promise of promoting
agriculture, commerce and industry. Through 1807, it regularly devoted space
to practical economic information, such as the price of indigo in different ports
at different seasons, the dates of arrival and cargoes of foreign ships, and the
price of gold in Mexico. It solicited and published facts about the kingdoms
counties and provinces. It announced the Sociedad Econmicas colony-wide
competitions for intellectual and artisan alike. For intellectuals, the Sociedad
funded essay-writing competitions on topics on improving society, such as
the benefits and best means of acculturating Indians. For artisans and farmers,
Indians and Creoles, practical contests rewarded the artisan who wove the
finest muslin or the Indian who cultivated the most cacao plants, in a bid
to stimulate individual productivity. The Gazeta explained the benefits of
applying scientific methods to business and development, for example,
exhorting merchants to use political arithmetic, what we might call marketing
strategy, as opposed to relying on custom to improve business. It also reported
on advances in science and promoted medicine, including instruction on how
to carry out smallpox vaccination and updates on epidemics.
Similarly, the Gazeta offered didactic articles in other areas, especially
language instruction. In its early years, the paper promoted an important
Bourbon policy to reform society by increasing the spread and use of Spanish.
For imperial reformers in Europe, replacing the empires multiple languages
would bring uniformity and teach Hispanic values, and was primarily geared
at indigenous vassals.37 Indian progress would be measured by acculturation
and commercial productivity. In the newspaper, though, an entire public
was deemed in need of language education. In 1801, the Gazeta celebrated
Castellano (Spanish) as our language to mark the Universitys decision
to conduct oral exams in Spanish rather than Latin.38 In 1801, the Gazeta
published a Spanish alphabet, informing on the correct pronunciation and
use of each letter. In 1802, it provided an extensive series explaining Spanish
Herrera, Primary Education, pp. 1745.

Still, the Gazeta accepted articles recommending that Latin remain part of the
education system. See Gazeta, No. 257, 3 May 1802 and No 259, 17 May 1802, pp. 1034,
11516. See Lanning, Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, pp. 1726, for the decline and
demise of the University chair of Caqchiquel.
37
38
109
grammar, Language for All.39 A common Spanish language would help

homogenize Central Americas community.
As part of its educational mission, the Gazeta set out to teach readers about
the history and geography of the kingdom, deploring that little was known
about Guatemala in the world because of the little that we ourselves know
about it.40 Since the colonys overall jurisdiction, generally, had been stable
for two hundred and fifty years, claimed the Gazeta, history and geography
were to be one and the same thing.41 By describing the territory that set its
boundaries in relation to neighbouring colonies (New Spain to the North and
New Granada to the South), the Gazeta defined Guatemala as a patria that
was a government, a kingdom, with a territory separate from peninsular Spain
but part of the Spanish empire and whose history began in the 1540s, with
the audiencias establishment. 42 To emphasize political-geographic unity, the
first-year Gazeta compiled and published a statistical picture of the colony
described as pueblo by pueblo, province by province, including population,
number of towns, political situation and economic production.43
At first glance, this piece of the Gazetas agenda might seem to indicate a
discreet proto-national push by Creole journalists. However, this was not a
seditious imagining. Given the number of visitas the Crown commissioned,
to compile just such information about Mexico, Cuba, and South America,
it is easy to imagine that Gazeta interest in collection and dissemination of
statistical information found inspiration in imperial policy. Further, this
political patria was conceived in connection with, rather than opposition to,
Spanish government. King and patria were not mutually exclusive; Guatemala
was part of the Spanish nation. As such, civil servants were in the service of
king and patria.44 Royal official and Creole elite alike could appreciate that
a colony-patria served first to clarify Central American identity in relation to
Spain, but also Spains other American colonies, especially Mexico and, less
frequently, Peru.45 The Gazeta responded virulently in 1806 when Frances
Lengua para Todos, Gazeta, 1801 and 1802.
Gazeta, Prospecto, p. 6.
41
Ibid., No. 14, 15 May 1797, p. 105.
42
Ibid., No. 18, 5 June 1797, p. 143.
43
Ibid., No. 14, 15 May 1797, p. 107; and Nos 314, 39, 41, 43, 45, September
December 1797. See also Nos 256, 259, 261, 286, AprilDecember 1802. In 1802, the
Gazeta published several provincial censuses from the 1770s1790s, then produced an
article analysing different population estimates published in various encyclopaedias, then
published its own.
44
Ibid., Prospecto, p. 4.
45
Ibid., No. 14, 15 May 1797, p. 107.
39
40
110
Encyclopaedia reported that Guatemala was part of New Spain. Who told
this gentleman that the Kingdom of Guatemala recognizes as its Capital that
of Mexico, when the whole world knows that it has the necessary courts and
gymnasia to be what it is, independent of the other American Governments?
editors fumed.46 Ambitious bureaucrats and Creole merchants might differ on
why greater external, as well as internal, recognition of Guatemalas autonomy
mattered, but both might benefit from such awareness.
Finally, the Gazeta spread las luces by publishing literary works by
Guatemalan authors, letters from readers (and responses), news of Europe
and, occasionally, news from other colonies and the United States, all of
which indicated an understanding that Guatemala operated within the
confines and interests of an Atlantic system.47 However, the paper steered clear
of overtly controversial topics, such as discussion of the internal workings
of Spanish politics, the political ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau, the
French Revolution and Declaration of Rights of Man, and the American
Continental Congress, claiming to publish nothing contrary to Religion or
the Government.48 In fact, the first issue explicitly noted that the paper would
cover politics (poltica), but not the great science of Government, or the rights
of war and peace, nature and nations.49 Its political section would instead
provide a general idea of the nations of Europe, particularly the belligerents,
with respect to the current war in order to satisfy public curiosity and
contribute to extending the Enlightenment (las luces) in the Kingdom.50
Throughout the period in question, the Gazeta stayed true to this promise.
Even after the Sociedad Econmicas suppression in 1799 and earning the
opprobrium of a conservative archbishop, it retained support from Spanish
officials and continued to publish.51
The Gazeta, then, explicitly stated its intention to transform society
through economics and education while steering clear of criticism of the
government, and, in effect, politics. Yet it is hard to believe that the elite behind
Ibid., No. 432, 13 April 1806, pp. 7867.
For example, in April and May 1801, Nos 202 and 204 reported economic
analyses for New Spain and Guayaquil, Thomas Jeffersons election as US president, and
the ousting of Britains prime minister.
48
49
Ibid., No. 1, 13 February 1797, p. 1.
50
Ibid., p. 4.
51
Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Guatemala 415, Consulta 7: Sociedad Econmica,
Real Cedula, 17 May 1802. Medina, La imprenta, p. 310. In 1806, Archbishop Casaus
y Torres denounced the Gazetas advocacy of schooling in Spanish instead of Latin. In
1810, Captain General Antonio Gonzlez wrote that the paper had acted as como cosa de
oficio, with credit and impartiality.
46
47
111
the newspaper believed that political could be divorced from economics

especially in a period where political theory was called political economics.
As Anthony Pagden noted, the discourse of economics came increasingly to
dominate Spains mid-eighteenth-century political agenda, driving Charles III
to reconceptualize his legitimacy as sovereign not in terms of divine right, but
through his office and service as king. Prominent reformer Jos Campillo had
emphasized that the economic system was the principal branch of political
science.52 So, transforming colonial society was a political project in which
Enlightened elites reconceived the colony as a patria and its inhabitants as a
single public, a project advancing both imperial and local interests.
Bourbon Public
If the public sphere of writers to and for the Gazeta represented an elite
community, an important implementation of Enlightenment ideals was
elite use of the Gazeta as a tool to develop the idea that Central America
could support a non-hierarchical society. This meant creating a language that
found common ground among geographically, as well as ethnically and socioeconomically, diverse residents. Although the Gazeta did not use the term
public sphere, it regularly appealed to the public (el pblico) to participate in
its reformist program. What did appeals to the public mean? Gazeta authors
did not endorse the traditional Spanish meaning, the common part of the
people, or lower classes (1737 Diccionario de Autoridades).53 The public
embraced learned elite to Indian and mestizo masses as participants in the
project of birthing the new commercial society if not as equals, at least as
interested, active parties; utility to the kingdom, not membership in a caste or
professional group, determined belonging.
From its inception, the Gazeta sought men of ideas, of whatever birth
or class, who know the obligation to be useful to [their] origin.54 On the
one hand, the public was especially learned men (hombres instruidos)55 who
should contribute by writing, for [h]e who does not write does not use his
knowledge in the way of most interest to the patria.56 However, through the
newspaper, any citizen (ciudadano) can communicate his ideas to the public ...
In the Nuevo sistem de gobierno econmico para la Amrica (1743). Cited in Pagden,
Liberty, Honour, p. 7, n. 20.
53
Real Academia de Espaa , Diccionario de Autoridades, 1737, v. 3(5), p. 451. The
noun derived from the adjective pblico meaning vulgar or common.
54
55
Ibid., No. 20, 19 June 1797, p. 156.
56
Ibid., No. 424, 8 April 1806, p. 790.
52
112
which can have an impact on the common good.57 Addressing a specific public,
defined in terms of the kingdom, communicated to the reader that there was a
Central American public made up of citizens whose contributions to public
life were useful and capable of improving the common good. The common
good was the responsibility and purview of all inhabitants; Indians who
participated in cacao-growing contests and artisans disturbed by cheap British
fabrics impact on their textile industry were part of the public.
For this inclusive redefinition of public, the Gazeta coined a new word
to encompass its broadened understanding of Central American community.
Before the newspaper, this colony lacked a standard adjective to denominate
a resident of the Kingdom of Guatemala, relying on caste and class categories
common to the Americas since the sixteenth century and still used in Central
American publications: Creole, Spaniard, Indian, Ladino, and American.58
None of these adjectives described the new public. For different reasons, Creole,
Indian, Ladino and Spaniard were too exclusive, denoting only segments of
Guatemalan society; American was too inclusive, failing to limit this public to
the colony. In the first issues, the authors couldnt decide whether their fellow
colonials were guatemalenses or guatemaltecos.59 Identifying this new public
as guatemaltecos (the name that stuck), in addition to shared identities as
Spaniards and Spanish Americans, Guatemala Citys Bourbon elite called into
existence a Central American public to inform, educate and galvanize. Other
categories of identity were not abandoned; Creoles still excluded Indians;
Spaniards and Spanish Americans maintained some distance. In 1797,
Guatemala Citys elite were far from conceiving their Guatemalan identity
as incompatible with a Spanish American, and even Spanish identity. What
it did say was that those who had a shared interest in the specific colony,
regardless of race or class, could share a sense of community.
This definition of extended public, or colonial community, that crossed
race, class and regional lines, was new to colonial discourse. In setting up
government institutions in the New World, the Spanish had devised the
two republic system, with one set of laws and institutions for Spaniards and
their descendants, and another for Indians. These laws, including required
Indian tribute, still existed. Many landholders, dependent on Indian labour,
still supported separation of the two classes, as well as limiting opportunities
for gentes de color (ladinos, mestizos, castas) and blacks: neither they nor
Indians could hold military or civil service office. Those who favoured keeping
Indians subordinate subscribed, at least in public, to the view that they were
Ibid., No. 20, 19 June 1797, p. 156.
Francisco Antonio Fuentes y Guzmn, Recordacin Florida (Guatemala, 1932).
59
Gazeta, Nos 1 and 2, 13 and 14 February 1797.
57
58
113
incapable of managing themselves, lazy and unprepared to become the small

landholders who would be the engines of capitalist development.60
How was this discourse of an extended public constructed? Drawing
creatively from Spanish reformer Campillos Nuevo sistema de gobierno
econmico para la Amrica (1743), Guatemala Citys Bourbon elite perpetrated
a neat sleight of hand that used one strain of Enlightenment thought to
contradict another, while simultaneously preparing the groundwork for an
idea of universal citizenship in the independence period. In this rhetoric,
Indians and gente de color became peasants, capable of assimilation into
a Guatemalan identity. In this moment, the Indian as campesino makes an
early appearance. Campillo, dismissing as untrue reports of Indian uselessness,
proposed that they are the true Indies ... twelve or fifteen million rational
vassals of the King, the most submissive in the universe who bear uselessly the
heaviest charge of the earth. He proposed to make Indians useful producers
by providing them with the same stimulus required by Castillian peasants:
freedom from oppression from landowners, their own land, and education
on its use. For Indians to become useful subjects they must become more like
English labourers and less like Russian serfs.61
Campillos argument provided a useful starting point for a Guatemalan
approach to bringing progress to the Indian and incorporating him into the
new public. However, Guatemalas population contained many non-Europeans
caught somewhere between the Indian and the Spaniard/Creole. Hispanic in
dress and outlook, the gente de color were commonly represented as lacking
ambition, and, in an Encyclopaedists vocabulary, degenerate. Any reform
program had to address them. Furthermore, Campillo failed to discuss the
legal inequality imposed on Indians and those of mixed race. In the colonies,
the problem was not just land, but labour and law: Indians were legally
required to pay tribute, and the law made any non-Creole or non-Indian a
third-class subject. Industrializing European countries transformed peasants
into workers and commercial citizens; they were, in the end, nationals who
could change class and social status. Guatemala, like other Spanish colonies,
lacked both a homogeneous rural population and one of European descent
resembling peasants in elite eyes. A universalizing discourse needed to
In fact, the Gazetas educational agenda is somewhat self-serving. The city elite didnt
produce the colonys export products, and were resented as middlemen. Correspondent
Manuel Agricola, insisted that non-hacienda-owning chapetones (Spaniards/cityslickers)
not meddle where they had no knowledge: a hacienda visit would prove that Indians were
canalla (animals). Gazeta, No. 25, 24 July 1797, p. 198.
61
Campillo, cited in Pagden Liberty, Honour, pp. 1617.
60
114
incorporate Central Americas sizable Indian and mestizo populations into the
commercial world for reform to succeed.
Thus, the Gazeta elite conceived a homogeneous population by challenging
the Spanish legal systems policy of providing different laws for different classes
and Enlightenment philosophers categorization of non-white races as inferior.
So, unlike Campillo, Guatemala Citys elite addressed how to bring all groups
into the commercial system, and identified structural problems complicating
creation of a commercial society in the Americas: Spanish legal system and
European prejudice. They agreed with Campillo that commerce was a partial
remedy to underclass ills and that Indian indolence could be attributed to lack
of private property. An Indian given land would show industry and increase
the markets reach by beginning to purchase Spanish goods for his wife
(vain like all women).62 Yet the Gazeta also identified changes needed from
the other contributors to economic prosperity: white elites and mixed-race
workers. At least one article proposed that change should come from white
men who, protected by their position and the law, had to be persuaded that
work (la ocupacin) was seemly and honourable in anyone, a lesson available
in Spanish reformer Padre Jernimo Feijoos Teatro Crtico (17261739).63
However, they disputed Spanish tradition and Encyclopaedic analysis that
stated that nature explained why castas also lacked ambition. Instead, the
Gazeta argued that failure to produce stemmed from lack of incentive and
pointed out that while, in the metropolis, the lower classes (the peasant) could
dream of equalling the upper classes, in Guatemala, as in all of America, the
people (el pueblo) meant only people of colour, prohibited to think that their
luck might improve by regular or easy means. In other words, the law made
certain achievements impossible for non-Creoles; the European solution of
encouraging commercial dreams alone could not work.64 Changing the laws
preventing full participation would provide incentive for the gente de color,
to become productive members of society.
Private property, the touchstone of the capitalist development that Spain
and its colonies were trying to implement, was thus used by Gazeta writers
to attack legal and philosophical racism. Without specific arguments for
natural and legal equality for non-whites, the Gazeta pictured a homogeneous
society, with all classes equal under the law and contributing to societys
positive development. Indians and those of mixed race were re-conceived as
industrializing peasants who should be allowed to dream of , or have legal
access to, means of improvement. The Gazeta perception of Indians and other
Gazeta, No. 9, 10 April 1797, pp. 7071.
Ibid., No. 253, 5 April 1802, pp. 8081.
64
Ibid., No. 33, 18 September 1797, p. 259.
62
63
115
castas ability to learn and participate in commercial transformation of society

owed elements of its arguments to Spanish reformers, but moved beyond
peninsular recommendations. The arguments implications were radical,
and very political: reform laws to give Indians legal equality and expand the
idea of the pueblo. A commercial society demanded certain legal equality
which would improve the prosperity of all; after all, the vanity of women was
universal. Why not the right to private property, too?
Another important distinction between Campillo and the Guatemala City
elite is the audience of each reformist effort. Campillo addressed the Crown,
arguing for reforms in government of the Indies. Although also indirectly
addressing the Spanish government, the Guatemala City elite appealed
to fellow colonists to overcome their own prejudices to implement what
seemed like a model reform. As the letter of Manuel Agricola, cited above,
shows, these progressive views attributed to Guatemala Citys modern elite
did not represent the views of colonists as a whole, but that of Creole elites
and Bourbon reformers seeking to form opinion in the provinces. The issue
of integrating the Indian into a commercial society was introduced in the
Gazetas first issues, and remained a direct and indirect topic over several years,
especially with articles on the role of education in reshaping Indian life.65
This surprisingly egalitarian analysis does not mean the Gazeta was free
of traditional prejudices regarding Indian backwardness. Yet, more often
than not, correspondents and not editors used, unthinkingly, the rhetoric of
inferiority. The change, then, from Indian to labourer, was conceived by turn
of the century Guatemalan leaders as part of a project to transform a backwards
colonial society into a modern Guatemalan society. Changes remained
within the confines of the Spanish system: reform was advocated in Spanish
administration, not abandoning Spanish political authority. Nonetheless, the
reconceived community had more than cultural connotations. United together
under the same law, this new Guatemala was a political entity and one which
was not Creole but both Central American and human in nature.
Conclusion
In the age of economic reform that swept the Spanish empire in the late
eighteenth century, Guatemala Citys intellectual elite conceived and
Ibid., Nos 248, 255, 261, 267, 271, 273, 279, 285, MarchDecember 1802. See
for example, the March 1802 argument on whether Indians were lazy or did most of the
colonys work with Creoles as the real parasites, and August 1802 discussion of education
in the Yucatan (Mexico) which indicted failure to focus on schooling to improve Indian
relations with Creole society.
65
116
presented an ideology of Guatemalan (Central American) identity based on

abstract ideas: prosperity, patria and equality before the law. They believed
that these ideals, promulgated by Bourbon policy and officials throughout
the empire, would appeal to compatriots in the provinces who shared their
love of a historical and geographical Guatemala, a Guatemala that proposed
to bring all its inhabitants into the new Spanish-speaking commercial society
they advocated. They acknowledged racial, economic and political structural
inequalities, and so avoided specifics that might alienate their audience. No
Maya past was incorporated into the patria, because too many Maya lived
in Guatemala. No one profession was idealized, because the economic well
being of the whole, and desired industrial development, depended on many.
No common heritage, cultural or ethnic, was emphasized, because of the
kingdoms diverse population of recent migrs, conquistador descendants,
Indians, mestizos, blacks and mulattos. Each had a different heritage or
culture; none could be left out, so none could be included. Royal officials and
Spaniards interested in contributing to Central American prosperity were
not excluded either. Instead, a common cultural identity was shaped around
participation in the public, a community defined by participation and
contribution to the whole, and a political history was constructed around the
idea of a Central American polity, the geographic and institutional extension
of the Kingdom. This new unity, the authors hoped, would contribute to
prosperity within the context of a Bourbon Spain rebuilding and reorganizing
to compete with the commercial empires of France and Britain. In the end,
of course, the patria with a history, geography, language, public, and culture,
would be appropriated by independence-era leaders, as in the rest of Spanish
America. However, as originally presented, this conception of Central
America was part and parcel of Bourbon reformism.
As a result, the Gazetas public was not simply Creole in conception,
either in contrast to Peninsulares or Indians and castas. Without ignoring
the deep-rooted prejudice felt by many Central American elites towards the
colonys Indians and gente de color, it is evident that finding some way
to integrate the numerical majority into an ideologically common society
was high on the agenda of Guatemalas Creole and imperial elites. Similarly,
emphasis on animosity between Creoles and Spaniards may well be overstated
for regions like Guatemala City where new blood, and willingness to ally
with local reformers, were as often a benefit as they were a threat. Society
would continue to have separate classes, but connecting those classes would
be a common identity as Central Americans sharing efforts to increase
agricultural production, industrialization and commerce through love of the
patria they all belonged to, whether through ties of birth or by settling. This
emphasis on belonging, based on contributions and not status, one which
117
permeates Bourbon-era documentation, suggests that historians might want

to explore more fully the traditional emphasis on a rhetoric of Creoles against
Peninsulares and Indians in the revolutionary era.66
John Lynch, in 1997, lamented the lack of a general study of Enlightenment
ideas in Spanish America.67 Such a synthetic work is still lacking, although
the last decade produced important scholarship on Bourbon Reforms in
different regions of Spanish America68 as well as on the Age of Revolutions,
connecting eighteenth-century imperial reforms and nineteenth-century
revolutions, often in an Atlantic framework.69 This study of the Gazeta de
Guatemala suggests that one issue that would benefit from a study, such as
Lynch posits, would be how Enlightenment ideas were promoted, together
and separately, by both agents of Empire (Spaniards) and locals (Creoles and
Spaniards integrated into local society) persuaded that utility and commerce
were important shared bases for identity. The cooperation between local
and imperial elites in Guatemala City may be more extensive in a regional
backwater of empire than in a metropolis, and may not be generalizable to
other parts of Spanish America.70 Nonetheless, it seems likely that, elsewhere
in pre-crisis Spanish America, Bourbon reformers and Enlightenmenttrained royal officials forged alliances as well as enmities in their work, and
that other newspapers reflected a Bourbon rather than uniquely Creole
program supporting imperial as well as local interests. Even after 1808, when
Napoleons invasion of Iberia unleashed increasing numbers of autonomist
and independence movements the longer the Bourbon dynasty remained
in captivity, it is worth keeping in mind how a shared Enlightenment
agenda brought together supposedly incompatible and competing elements
Rebecca Earle, Creole Patriots and the Myth of the Loyal Indian, Past & Present,
172 (2001): 12545.
67
John Lynch, El reformismo borbnico e Hispanamrica, in Agustn Guimera
(ed.), El reformismo borbnico: Una visin interdisciplinar (Madrid, 1997), p. 56.
68
See for example, Dym and Belaubre (eds), Politics, Economy and Society; Charles
Walker (ed.), Entre la retrica y la insurgencia: las ideas y los movimientos sociales en los
Andes, siglo XVIII (Cuzco, 1996); and Anthony McFarlane, Colombia Before Independence:
Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (New York, 1993).
69
Yale University Press seems to lead such efforts in intellectual and political history.
See, for example, Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, Lester D. Langley, The Americas in
the Age of Revolution (New Haven, 1996), and Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World:
Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500c. 1800 (New Haven, 1995).
70
See, nonetheless, Paul Saffords comments about Enlightened reform in Colombia
when reviewing Anninos edited collection, De los imperios a las naciones: Iberoamrica
(Zaragoza, 1994), Journal of Latin American Studies, 28:2 (1996): 5067.
66
118
of colonial society. Even in crisis, remaining alliances might influence the

timing, pace and outcome of rebellions in the decades to come.
Chapter 9
Montesquieus Persian Letters and

Reading Practices in the
Luso-Brazilian World (17501802)
Luiz Carlos Villalta*
Among the records of the Portuguese Inquisition, there are accusations,

confessions and other documents that provide information about reading
practices, including novels and other literary genres, from the middle of the
eighteenth up to the early nineteenth century. Such reading practices indicate
that certain books served as an inspiration in the formulation or justification
of heretical propositions or reinforced ideas that their readers had previously
entertained. Among these books, some were more widely quoted and referred
to than others. One such book was Lettres Persanes [Persian Letters] (1721),
an epistolary novel by Montesquieu, comprised of letters supposedly written
by Uzbeq and Rica, two Persians travelling throughout Europe, or received
from them. This epistolary structure was a mechanism through which
Montesquieu, assuming a foreigners point of view, criticizes the Western
world, particularly faith (here including dogmas, such as the Holy Trinity)
and the Catholic Church, clergymen (especially monks, seen as unproductive,
and the Pope, classified as the greatest magician), the status-driven values of
the Old Regime society and absolutism.
*Translated by Priscila Campello.

These documents include testimonies resulting from investigations conducted by
Inquisition officers which could end in the holding of trials.

Montesquieu, Cartas Persas, trans. Mrio Barreto (Belo Horizonte, 1960). On
this, see: Michele Bissire, Graffigny, Riccobini et la tradiction des Lettres Persanes.
http://www.unca.edu/postscript/postscript12/ps12.2.pdf [last accessed 25 October 2007];
Jean Starobinski, As mscaras da civilizao: ensaios, trans. Maria Lcia Machado (So
Paulo, 2001), pp. 87104; Franklin Matos, O filsofo e o comediante: ensaios sobre literatura
e filosofia na Ilustrao (Belo Horizonte, 2001), p. 197; and Luiz Carlos Villalta, Robinson
120
The aim of this essay is to analyze the reading practices linked to this novel
by drawing on evidence that can be gleaned from Portuguese Inquisition
documents, especially those referring to Portugal or to Brazil, as well as to
discuss how readers appropriated the ideas contained in these books. Of
course, other books were also read and appropriated by these readers and it
has to be recognized that their intellectual universe was far from typical of late
eighteenth-century Portugal and Brazil. Although their universe was small (in
terms of the number of people it included), it also was enlightened. We have
to consider both of these peculiar features: on the one hand, it is necessary to
avoid misleading generalizations; on the other hand, it is crucial to focus on
the other books that were cited in addition to Montesquieus novel. This essays
central thesis is that the act/process of reading philosophical books (especially
novels, but not limited to the Persian Letters mentioned above, and other
book genres as well) enabled Luso-Brazilian readers to make a philosophical
appropriation of them. Such appropriation, furthermore, usually expressed
the readers creativity.
Coimbra Readers
Among the readers of the Persian Letters were certain students and former
students of the University of Coimbra, who, in 17781779, belonged to a
wider group consisting of Antnio de Morais Silva, Francisco de Melo Franco,
Manuel Joaquim Henriques de Paiva, and Antnio Pereira de Caldas, from
Brazil; Joo Laureano Nunes Leger, Francisco Jos de Almeida, Jos Maria da
Fonseca, Jernimo Francisco Lobo, Vicente Jlio Fernandes, Nuno de Freitas,
Diogo Jos de Morais Calado, Jos Antnio de Melo and Antnio Caetano
de Freitas, born in Portugal; and also, Antnio da Silva Lisboa, from Luanda,
Angola.
These students from the University of Coimbra did not restrict themselves
to reading of Montesquieus novel. They also read other books: the Marquis
dArgenss Cabalistic Letters; an unspecified title by Locke (where Antnio de
Morais would have read that Man was imbued with a false idea of God),
Rousseaus Emile (the most read of them all and subject to translation and
manuscript circulation); Letters from Marquis dArgens; Baron dHolbachs The
System of Nature, erroneously attributed to Mirabeau; Voltaires The Maid of
Orleans; Bielfelds Political Institutions, Rousseaus Social Contract; and the
Crusoe e Cartas Persas: romances, viagens e devir histrico (17191806), in Clia Maia
Borges (ed.), Narrativas e Imagens (Juiz de Fora, 2006), pp. 10255.

Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais da Torre do Tombo (hereafter, IANTT), Lisbon
Inquisition, Trial record no. 2015, p. 31v.
Montesquieus Persian Letters and Reading Practices
121
great work (probably the Complete Works, in eight volumes, in which Lockes
ideas are appropriated), by Antonio Genovesi (also referred to as Genuense).
All of these authors were Enlightenment thinkers, except for Locke, their
precursor. Antnio de Morais Silva, in his confessions to the Inquisition,
added other authors and titles: the Enlightenment thinkers Monsieur de
Felice (perhaps Code de lhumanit ou la lgislation universelle, naturelle, civile
et politique), Adrien Helvetius (probably, Le vrai sens du systme de la nature)
and Marquis of Beccaria (certainly, Trait de dlits et des peines), all of them
prohibited, and the jus-naturalist Samuel Puffendorf (probably, Introduction
lhistoire gnral et politique de lunivers), the ecclesiastic historian Joanne
Laurentio Berti, the English theologian Samuel Clarke, Guillaume Alexandre
Mhgan (Tableau de lhistoire moderne, depuis la chute de lEmpire dOccident,
jusqu la Paix de Westphale), Nicolas Sylvestre Bergier (Le Disme refut par luimme ou examen des principes dincredulit) and Abb Millot (Elmens dhistoire
gnrale), allowed by the Portuguese censorship after 1768. The reading of the
Persian Letters in association with other writings of Enlightenment thinkers
or those that influenced or, on the contrary, authors who attacked them,
observed among this group of Coimbra students was common among other
readers, especially titles by Voltaire, Bielfeld and Rousseau. The Persian Letters
was mentioned in the confession of Antnio Caetano de Freitas, a student
from the island of Madeira, arrested by the Inquisition of Coimbra accused of
heresy and apostasy, on 30 July 1779, as well as in the confessions of Antnio
da Silva Lisboa and Nuno de Freitas, two law students who were subjected to
public autos-da-f in 1781.
The books were exchanged or sold by the Coimbra students. The Persian
Letters was subject to loan. Antnio de Morais Silva gave a copy to the student
Diogo Jos de Morais Calado, who then lent it to Antnio Caetano de Freitas.
Antnio Caetano confessed that for some time he had wondered if suicide
might be a natural right, as we find that it was justified in a book entitled
Persian Letters. In the novel, Roxana, one of the wives of the tyrannical
protagonist, lived in a harem under the control of eunuchs. After committing
adultery, she chose to commit suicide (apparently an alternative act used
to redress dishonour and the loss of social position, therefore constituting
an appropriate response to specific situations). In one of the editions of the
I am grateful to Diogo Lcio Vieira for this information.
IANTT, Lisbon Inquisition, Prosecutors Notebooks no. 130 (17501790), Book
319, pp. 6578 and Trial record no. 2015.

IANTT, Coimbra Inquisition, Trial record no. 8094, pp. 34v43.

IANTT, Lisbon Inquisition, Trial record no. 2015 and Trial record no. 1557, n/p.

IANTT, Lisbon Inquisition, Trial record no. 2015, p. 9.

122
Persian Letters Montesquieu actually defended the right to suicide. Antnio

Caetano, based on the novel or on Montesquieus position in that particular
edition, broadened his justification of suicide, asserting that it should be seen
as a natural right and possessed of universal validity. It is quite likely that
Antnio Caetano associated the novel with a passage found in Lockes Second
Treatise on Government, in which the author defended the right of a slave
to commit suicide in response to oppression. Suicide became an especially
prominent theme in novels after the publication of Werther, as Mrcia Abreu
has shown.10
Antnio da Silva Lisboa also confessed to having perused the Persian
Letters. He said that he once mentioned to Antnio Pereira de Souza Caldas,
with whom he had begun to strike up a friendship, that he wanted to see
the work. Souza Caldas then asked Antnio de Morais to lend it to his
friend. Silva Lisboa read only two [letters] which ridiculed Roman Catholic
Religion.11 Nuno de Freitas also borrowed the book from Antnio Pereira,
knowing it belonged to Morais Silva. [H]e read the entire work and, among
the letters, there were three in particular, one satirizing the Holy Office, and
another mocking the Eucharistic Sacrament.12 Hence, from Montesquieus
novel, which passed from hand to hand, the Coimbra students retained their
criticisms of the Catholic faith and of the Inquisition and a justification
of suicide. These Coimbra students, investigated by the Inquisition, had
developed a bohemian literary circle characterized by the exchange of books,
the circulation of a manuscript version of Rousseaus Emile, oral readings and
intense debate, aside from their support for certain heretical propositions.
According to accusations, in their discussions these Coimbra students had
attacked the Inquisition and embraced the following propositions:
God being so benign, everything claimed about Hell and its punishments was
no more than a fable. There was no purgatory. The soul was mortal because, lodged
inside the body, it had to occupy a place, and by occupying a place, it was bodily and
consequently mortal. They denied the truth of the Scriptures, alleging that, in part,
[holy] doctrine was aimed at keeping the people in their proper place and that some
Locke says: the captive, whenever he finds the hardship of his slavery to outweigh
the value of his life, it is in his power, by resisting the will of his master, to draw upon
himself the death he desires John Locke, Segundo Tratado sobre o Governo, trans. Alex
Marins (So Paulo, 2002), p. 36.
10
Mrcia Abreu, Effluvios pestiferos da perversidade do Sculo: leituras de Werther no
mundo luso-brasileiro, Revista de Letras [Universidade Estadual Paulista], 46:2 (2006):
7895.
11
IANTT, Lisbon Inquisition, Trial record no. 2015, pp. 28v9.
12
Ibid., pp. 2727v.
123
passages were mere fable while in others it contained sinful and less licit permissible
lessons. The precepts of fasting and abstinence of meat on prohibited days were
unsubstantiated. The celebration of mass was an invention aimed at making money.
They denied the validity of indulgences, mocking them and their virtue, as well as
papal authority. From the instructor/priest Duros sermons they concluded that he
thought he had made a mistake in wanting to prove the purity of Our Lady by natural
reason, since it could only be proven by the Holy Scriptures, which they denied. They
were critical of friars and the ecclesiastical State.13
Moreover, these young men ate meat on forbidden days, cooked it at the
university laboratory and at the home of Manuel Joaquim Henriques de Paiva,
at the time a lecturer in chemistry.14 The attacks on the Inquisition, the Pope,
the ecclesiastical State and their understanding that religion served to repress
men in society, converged with positions defended in the Persian Letters,
although such positions were also present in other works examined by the
Coimbra students.15 At any rate, by reinforcing ideas from other books or even
those already defended by these readers or in suggesting new ways of thinking,
the Persian Letters were inserted in a setting of cultural enlightenment. Antnio
de Morais Silva was a particularly creative reader, as is shown in his readings
of permitted books in a heterodox way. For example, he approached Antonio
Genovesis work and the Bible by selecting, interpreting and confronting their
ideas with his own observations. Thus, upon observing a cat with labour
pains, Morais Silva was purported to have said: Here is Adams original sin,
everything is natural effects and there is no such sin,16 effectively questioning
IANTT, Inquisition of Coimbra. Trial record no. 8094, pp. 45v. On this, see:
Antnio Baio, Episdios dramticos da Inquisio portuguesa, 3rd edn (Lisboa, 1973),
vol. 2, pp. 11417.
14
IANTT, Lisbon Inquisition, Trial record no. 13369, n/p and Lisbon Inquisition,
Trial record no. 2015, pp. 8v9.
15
On religion as a societal restraint, see, for instance: Montesquieu, Do Esprito
das Leis, trans. Alex Marins (So Paulo, 2004), p. 454; [Anonymous], Tereza Filsofa ou
memrias, trans. Carlota Gomes (Porto Alegre, 1991), p. 101; and Marquis dArgens,
Le lgislateur moderne ou les mmoires du Chevalier de Meillcourt (Amsterdam, 1739),
pp. 3545. The Portuguese censorship itself defended this notion, although it could not
be construed as a reduction of religion. See: IANTT, Real Mesa Censria/ Real Mesa da
Comisso Geral, Edital de 24 de setembro de 1770, Caixa 1, pp. 12.
16
IANTT, Inquisition of Coimbra, Trial record no. 8094, p. 20v. In his own defence,
Morais Silva said that he arrived at this understanding of Genesis and womens labour
pains reading the heretical arguments in books written by the authors who defended the
Catholic faith, citing among them Samuel Clarke, Bergier and Genovesi. He also had
listened to the same arguments when he watched a presentation made by a Benedictine
friar in a Philosophy class in Rio de Janeiro (ibid., pp. 36v7). Books and orality would
13
124
the passage from Genesis, according to which Eves participation in the Fall
of Man caused women to suffer labour pains. Morais was also said to have
decried the Holy Office claiming that its practices contradicted the words
of Christ in the New Testament. Morais asserted that the Inquisition was
a tribunal devoid of authority since an Italian called Savedra had come to
Portugal establishing it by way of false decrees and with the help of Jesuit
priests. The Holy Office contradicted the Holy Scripture, for Christ demanded
that no one was obliged to believe in his law or his faith through the use of
violence, making it clear that the Holy Office should be condemned for doing
so. The only explanation for the Inquisition was political: to avoid differences
in beliefs in a single country.17
Involving the same network of libertine students, there is a confession
presented to the Inquisition in Coimbra in April 1778 by fellow student
Jernimo Francisco Lobo. In this accusation twenty-six students, three of
them born in Brazil, were accused of defending heretical propositions and
of reading prohibited books by Voltaire, Rousseau, Frederick II (the King of
Prussia), Mirabeau and other wicked men.18 Once again Voltaire is cited.
Jernimo confessed the bad ideas that he approved as his own, which he had
found in different wicked books in order to attack the Catholic Religion and
repudiate the true belief, exposing and teaching them to the foul coreligionists
who belonged to his wicked Society.19 In defending the proposition of the
mortality of the soul, he relied on arguments found in a certain book intending
to show that the soul does not survive the body given its dependence on the
body.20 In referring to the creation of the World, as Moses describes it, as
fabulous and an invention of the Human understanding, he again mentioned
a certain book which insisted upon the impossibility of God (a spirit) having
created the world a material reality and upon the notion that man did
not differ from animals in anything, except for his greater intelligence. Other
propositions extracted from the books were: that there was no Purgatory,
an invention of the clerics, nor was there a Hell; that the New and Old
Testament were the work of men; that the column of fire that preceded the
People of Israel was not something miraculous thing, but indeed a litter of
have led him, according to his words, to this heretical comprehension. He denied, in this
manner, his creativity.
17
Ibid., pp. 20v1.
18
IANTT, Lisbon Inquisition, Prosecutors Notebook no. 130 (17781790),
pp. 6578. Although it appears in a prosecutors notebook from the Lisbon Inquisition,
the confession took place at the tribunal of Coimbra.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
125
fire of common Oriental inspiration; that the end of the world by an all
engulfing fire originated in the thinking of Heraclitus and other philosophers
of Ancient Greece; that all fornication was freed, a heretical proposition
inferred from Saint Pauls words, Melius est nubere quam uri: which he said
jokingly, without really considering it as true.21
Lobo mentioned various other propositions learned with his comrades, but
regarding the one in which there was no God, he explained that he was simply
repeating an error based on the French verse la crainte fit les Dieux, laudace
a fait les Rois, that is, fear made the gods; audacity, the kings. Although
the author was not named, the verse is by Prosper Crbillon and appears
in the tragedy Xerxes.22 This shows how ideas probably emerged through an
articulation of oral exchanges such as in conversations and discussions with
other people and books that often must have served to legitimate, support or
lend an air of erudition to certain propositions. And it becomes quite clear
that works of Fine Art were used in this sense. The same reasoning is valid
in relation to the proposition in which Man could not be held accountable
for his bad acts, for he had no freedom to act a misconception [Lobo]
had imbibed from a certain book and hoped to prove with arguments.23 The
dialogue between oral culture and books, however, was complex. One of the
propositions, which clearly turns up in some of the books, was identified by
Lobo as derived from oral culture, or, in his words, from personal contact. Even
though he did not deny the existence of literary sources, Jernimo claimed
that the Revealed Religion was a political invention of man and in this
error he had been influenced by his comrades.24 There were still other cases for
which the origins of the propositions were not revealed, as can be seen in these
examples: it was not according to Gods Reasoning to send his Son to the
world for the salvation of men; that celibacy was not a more perfect state than
Matrimony; that all Saints had been hypocrites; that Saints only existed
among the ignorant; that the Inquisition was not a Legitimate Tribunal,
but disseminated ignorance; that the Marquis of Pombal had committed a
Ibid.
http://www.dicocitations.com/biographie/1181/Crebillon_pere.php [last accessed
21 October 2007].
23
A possible source is Thrse Philosophe, a book in which the protagonist refutes
mans freedom, perceiving him as an individual whose behaviour is determined by the
degrees of passion in which nature and sensations affect him, not being free to think, man
could not be free to act. [Anonymous], Tereza Filsofa ou memrias, pp. 379.
24
pp. 6578.
21
22
126
serious mistake in not having extinguished the Inquisition.25 As will be seen

shortly, others defended these latter propositions and, significantly, associated
them with books that they had read.
Among the various acts of disrespect committed by Jernimo such as,
in a jocose letter, he drew the Triangle that the Church uses, putting male
genital parts in the middle, with the following inscription here is the Trinity
and suggesting that holy water, which he held in contempt, be substituted
by writing ink, thus defiling the fanatically devout,26 some are associated
with authors of books, including novels. For instance, Jernimo confessed
that: he wrote a jocose letter, in which he said that there was no Hell, that the
Inquisitors were little more than butchers, and mocked the Martyr Saint Peter;
letter was signed using the pseudonym Voltaire; and he confessed to having
praised Voltaire, Rousseau, the King of Prussia [Frederick II], Mirabeau, and
other wicked authors of libertinism.27 He also revealed to the Inquisition that
he communicated with one of his comrades by way of a secret code so that
his depraved errors would not be discovered.28 These elements demonstrate,
on the one hand, an admiration for thinkers cited in other accusations and
confessions made to the Inquisition and, on the other hand, strategies of
reading and written debate that implied the use of ciphered language as a way
of escaping repression.
One of Jernimos comrades was a military man, Jos Maria Teixeira
from Valena do Minho, according to the inquisitional sources a veritable
nucleus of libertines, many of them foreigners and Protestants from England,
Ireland, France, Italia and Germany, officers with whom the Enlightened
mathematician Jos Anastcio da Cunha kept contacts, before joining the
University of Coimbra as a Professor, a post in which he would be persecuted
by the Inquisition in 1778.29 Teixeira, according to Jernimo, praised Voltaire,
Rousseau, the King of Prussia, Mirabeau, Luther, and other wicked Authors
of Libertinism.30 In this passage, it is curious to find the inclusion of one of
Ibid.
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Joo Pedro Ferro, O processo de Jos Anastcio da Cunha na Inquisio de Coimbra
(1778). Introduo, transcrio e notas de Joo Pedro Ferro (Lisboa, 1987), pp. XXI.
There were connections between libertines from Valena and others at the University of
Coimbra. On this theme, see Fernando Augusto Machado, Rousseau em Portugal (Lisboa,
2000), pp. 2445.
30
pp. 6578.
25
26
127
the leaders of the protestant Reform, Luther. Teixeira denounced that Joo da
Costa e Souza, a law student at the University of Coimbra and then a boarder
in the home of Monsignor Perim in Lisbon, had lent him the book entitled
system of Nature, by Mirabeau (in fact, Le systme de la nature, by Holbach),31
which served as an inspiration for many of their erroneous ideas [...] he [da
Costa e Souza] had copied a summary of this work by Mirabeau in secret
code sending it from Lisbon to Coimbra hoping that this communication
would not be discovered.32 Although involved in this story, Joo da Costa e
Souza himself had not denounced anything to the Holy Office. One Tom
Barbosa, who had previously attended the University of Coimbra, was accused
of proffering the following the proposition: Saint Dominic was in Hell, for
having persecuted the Albigenses according to Voltaire.33
Other Readers from the Kingdom of Portugal: A Friar, a Magistrate and
an Apothecary
Another example of the circulation of the Persian Letters, although not as
steeped in detail about reading practices and the appropriation of ideas, shows
up in the case of Dr. Joaquim de Maria Santssima, a resident of Colgio de So
Bento and whom Friar Bento de Nossa Senhora denounced to the Inquisition
of Coimbra in 1801.34 Friar Bento claimed to have seen the Persian Letters,
which contain various wicked propositions,35 in the hands of Dr. Joaquim.
From this accusation we can conclude that Dr. Joaquim not only owned the
book, but also let others consult it and, probably, lent it to the denouncer.
Moreover, Friar Bento appears to have either read the book or was aware of
the inquisitional proscribing of Voltaires heretical ideas, equally condemned
by the Portuguese censorial courts. The Friars knowledge of Voltaires wicked
propositions may have originated from oral exchanges, but, whatever his
Jean de Viguerie, Histoire et dictionnaire du temps des Lumires, 17151789 (Paris,
1995), p. 1035.
32
IANTT, Lisbon Inquisition, Prosecutors Notebook no. 130 (17781790), pp. 65
78. Holbach is cited in other documents. For example, D. Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho,
who studied for a time at the University of Coimbra, borrowed Professor Jos Anastcio
da Cunha Le Systme de la nature, by Holbach, and lent him a book by Hume (Ferro,
pp. 656), both of them prohibited in Portugal. Years later he would become a minister
of the Prince D. Joo.
33
Ibid., p. 6578.
34
IANTT, Inquisition of Coimbra, Prosecutors Notebooks no. 124 and 125 (1798
1802), Books 416 and 417, p. 29.
35
Ibid.
31
128
sources, he was clearly forthright in denouncing Dr. Joaquim. This example

also demonstrates that the book passed from hand to hand, a rather recurrent
practice similar to what took place among the Coimbra students.
Another Friar Bento, Bento de Nossa Senhora da Vitria, in Porto, not
aware that the Persian Letters were forbidden, took an entire year to denounce
Jos Antnio Barbosa, a magistrate from Lisbons Casa de Suplicao (a
Portuguese high court). Friar Bento had taken stock of Jos Antnios library
and actually read part of the Persian Letters, judging it a prohibited book given
the wicked propositions it contained.36 Here it can be seen that a forbidden
book could circulate even without the knowledge of its owner. There is another
recurrent situation: the accusers searched other peoples libraries. Aside from
the identification of wicked ideas in the book, the denouncer did not offer
any information pertaining to the actual reading of the novel, whether his
own reading or that of the magistrate from Lisbons highest court.
The readers of the Persian Letters so far identified were students, former
students, clergymen, and a magistrate. In the early nineteenth century at the
Portuguese Vila da Barca, however, the protagonist was Jos Lus Pinto, an
apothecary-surgeon who worked on the town council. The readings took
place in private homes, in the street (or perhaps in some sort of military
installation) and at an apothecary shop. Similar to what had taken place
among the Coimbra students some two decades earlier, reading was not
limited to the Persian Letters, or even to novels and forbidden books. The
reading practices included a book by the botanist Linnaeus, an enlightened
scientist; the Dialogue between two women, which the apothecary attributed
mistakenly and without certainty to Voltaire; and also a Psalm of David, from
the Old Testament.37 Jos Lus was denounced by the priests Francisco Antnio
de Barros and Joo Francisco Joyan, a Frenchman, and by a surgeon named
Custdio Lus de Couto. It seems that, aware that he had been accused, he
chose to present himself to the Inquisition.
The documents relating to this apothecary-surgeon reveal that he gave talks
on his readings in his shop, and in the homes of others (specifically, in the
library of one of the homes), thus reaching an audience consisting not only
of his clerical and surgeon accusers, but also of women. Jos Lus manifested
an authentic Enlightenment spirit. He presented himself as a Philosopher,
by which he meant someone who had, and practiced, the freedom to read
whatever he wanted, without recognizing any prohibitions. Everything was
judged by a standard of reason allowing for the acceptance of that considered
to be good and the rejection of that which, on the contrary, he considered bad.
Ibid., p. 34.
Ibid. pp. 3333v, 3939v, 1825.
36
37
129
He read uncensored authors and writings, such as Linnaeus book and the Old
Testament, in order to associate ideas they contained with those defended in
prohibited texts, such as Montesquieus and probably the writings of Voltaire.
He also perused obscene novels and orthodox writings. He used the texts
allowed by censorship to legitimate the heretical-libertine ideas picked up
in other writings. Among the many ideas defended by Jos Lus, the most
prominent was the principle of conservation of the species, essential in his
understanding of the world and an idea legitimated in Montesquieus writings,
including the Persian Letters, as well as in his monumental The Spirit of the
Laws, published in 1748.38
In a discussion about the human soul at the home of the widow D. Maria
Lusa, and in the presence of her ill sister-in-law, Jos Lus Pinto exclaimed,
that if it were not for Divine authority, he would not believe in such lies.39
As the discussion became agitated Pinto began to compare men with Brutes
or Puppets, apparently meaning that he doubted the existence of the human
soul, and made reference to authors, and books that shared the same belief .40
In response, he was told by those present there that he should burn these
books and stick to the catechism, to which he eventually replied that he
was neither a heretic nor were his books suspicious, and to prove it, he would
bring Linnaeus book in order to show them a Branch [presumably classified
by Linnaeus] figuring in a Psalm by David, from the Old Testament. As
the discussion continued, one of the denouncers ordered Pinto to burn the
heretical or suspicious books, but not the ones linked to his Profession or the
Catholic ones, and admonished that in front of women one should not talk
about such matters.41
On another occasion, when the surgeon Custdio Lus de Couto was
observing drills being practiced by militia soldiers, the apothecary showed
him an anonymous French book with the title Dialogue between two women,
requesting the denouncer to determine if its author was Voltaire. The surgeon
replied that he did not know and, after reading a few lines, realized that it was
wicked and libertine, and recommended that the surgeon should hide it, not
tell anyone, but the surgeon [that is, Jos Lus] replied that he had received it
from the hands of a wise man [...].42 Moreover, Custdio Lus recommended
that he should not publish the lesson that the aforesaid Book contained.
Montesquieu, Cartas Persas, p. 207.
1802), Books 416 and 417, p. 39.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid., p. 33.
38
39
130
On the same day, however, at Francisco Jos de Souzas apothecary shop,

Pinto began speaking about the books content.43 What, one asks, was the
subject matter of this book? It taught all of the possible and imaginable ways
for sin to be committed between a man and a woman and between a man and
another man. Jos Luss exposition astonished the listeners, among whom
were the surgeon Custodio Lus Couto and other people.44
In his confession, the apothecary-surgeon Jos Lus presented, in a
detailed, toned down and regretful manner, a list of prohibited titles and of
his interpretations of them. He declared: that without permission he had
read certain forbidden books, among them Letters to a Prioress (perhaps
Lettres portugaises de Marianna Alcoforado avec les rponses or Lettres compltes
dAblard et dHeloise by Pierre Abailard); Montesquieus Persian Letters; (in
draft form) Put erran (La putain errante by LArtin or Pietro Aretino);45
Henriade de Vulter, an edition coupled with considerations on the Poets (La
Henriade: avec lessai sur la posie pique, by Voltaire); Theological Medicine,
originally written in Portuguese (Medicina Theologica by Francisco de Mello
Franco), at first permitted and later prohibited by the censorial courts; Ovids
The Art of Love, in the original Latin.46 To these titles the apothecary added
Letters from a Mother to a Child in which false doctrines from heretical
works are amended [and] the Ecclesiastical History, an anonymous book
written originally in French (these last two works were not reproached by
the surgeons confessor).47 He affirmed he had access to the books by chance
and that he had given some to the confessor while, regarding the rest, he
declared I burnt them myself so that I would not live in sin. He also said that
the reading of these books will not alter the order of my morals, for I believe
in everything the holy Mother Catholic church believes and teaches, and I
am so secure in my faith that, if it were necessary, I would give my life for
it.48 These words can be read as an affirmation of the willpower of Jos Lus
Ibid., p. 33v.
Ibid.
45
Putain, la, Errante, ou Dialogue entre Julie, et Magdaleine, according: Catalogo dos
livros defesos neste Reino, desde o dia da Criao da Real Mesa Cenoria ath ao prezente,
in Maria Adelaide Salvador Marques, A Real Mesa Censria e a cultura nacional (Coimbra,
1963), pp. 118206.
46
On the censorship of such books, see: Luiz Carlos Villalta, Reformismo Ilustrado,
Censura e Prticas de Leitura: Usos do Livro na Amrica Portuguesa (PhD dissertation,
University of So Paulo, 1999), pp. 182239, available at http://www.caminhosdoromance.
iel.unicamp.br/estudos/teses/pdfs/Villalta99.pdf [last accessed 15 October 2008].
47
1802), Books 416 and 417, p. 182.
48
Ibid., p. 182v.
43
44
131
Pinto in resisting the ideas put forth in the books (that is, his own positions
were stronger than those found in the texts), or as a way to escape from the
accusations of heresy (after all, his position was unshakably in favour of the
Church and its dogmas).
Jos Lus went into some details regarding his discussions with a clergyman
of little literary knowledge.49 When he spoke of many natural things, he
confided only to the aforesaid clergyman that if it were not for our holy faith,
and the divine Authority that he respected so much, he certainly would doubt
the existence of our Soul after it was separated from the body. And he added:
Later, when discussing [in the company of D. Maria Lusa and her sister-inlaw] points contained in Linnaeus natural history, the system of nature, he
told me that it was a bad book, and in order for me not to give the ladies the
idea that I was a bad Christian, I got the book and showed it to him.50 The
apothecary went on to explain that he had a dispute about the souls of brutes.
He opined that there was no better manner to avoid the temptations of sin
than fasting because it weakened the forces and could lead to death.51 He
admitted having said, moreover, that some saints to which the church prayed
were in Hell because [their beatification had taken place] when the Criticism
was still in its cradle52 and this while others, who were true saints, remained
uncanonized. He confessed to having said that he had the faculty to advise
the infirm to eat meat on days of fasting and that, in case of doubt, it would
be better to eat, for God, our Lord, forgave this act of good will. Moreover, he
affirmed that Because I suffer [from certain aliments] and on the advice of my
doctor and confessor I used to eat meat almost always.53 From this it can be
concluded that the principle of conservation of life constituted a fundamental
basis for his beliefs.
He also said that he had a contention about sorcerers which natural
principles he felt showed that they did not exist.54 Pinto declared that he
used the book Elements of Ecclesiastical History to corroborate his ideas,
saying that it did not seem to him that in this book there were ideas defended
by heretics. In trying to defend himself from his accusers and, at the same
time, accuse them of ill faith, warped ideas and erroneous readings (given
that often they had read only parts of the books) he affirmed that since in
his library there were many authors to be read, it may be that [his accusers]
Ibid., pp. 182v3.
Ibid.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., p. 183.
53
Ibid., pp. 183183v.
54
Ibid., p. 183v.
49
50
132
glimpsed only at supposedly heretical fragments concluding that they were

dealing with a forbidden book, because a lack of principles makes one think
badly of what is essentially good.55 Hence, for the apothecary-surgeon, the
readers predisposition marred their judgment, which in order to be correct,
could not be based on a fragmentary reading, but on an examination of the
entire work. His confession, which was clearly marked by his astuteness and
intelligence, reveals that both forbidden and permitted books passed through
different hands, among bad and good readers. In concluding his defence,
Jos Lus observed that a situation, similar to the one verified regarding the
books from his library, could have occurred with people who heard him but
had turned upside down his declarations. Finally, he vehemently denied that
he was a spreader of heretical ideas: I protest [to] being mute in front of
almost everyone and do not find it easy to speak about these matters.56
In this case, the reading of Persian Letters seems less relevant, whether in
terms of the perusal of other novels and of books from other genres, or in
terms of the steadfastness of Jos Luss beliefs. Whether aiming at deceiving
the Inquisition of Coimbra or expressing his honest judgments, and obviously
capable of articulating a very reasonable argument against the accusations, the
apothecary-surgeon manifested a considerable degree of firmness. Beyond a
convergence with topical criticisms present in Montesquieus novel (seemingly
restricted to a defence of the concept of conservation of the species), what
stands out here is the affinity with the way of thinking specified in the Persian
Letters; the use of reason and observation as guides for interpreting human and
natural phenomena; the refutation of any authority that was not rationally
justified; and, finally, the use of reason, of Criticism, in the analysis of specific
situations involving religion, religious people and the acts, dogmas and
history of the Catholic Church. Apparently, in stating that only the authority
of Catholic and divine faith would make him believe in the existence of soul,
Pinto denied the principle of reason.57 Here, however, the rhetoric seems
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 182v.
57
According to Cassirer, in the eighteenth century, reason was conceived was a force
which would be understood in action. Firstly, reason separates the facts, the data given by
the senses and the beliefs found in the sources of revelation, from the tradition and the
authority. Secondly, it starts a reconstruction work, drawing a new structure evaluated
true. Ernest Cassirer, Filosofa de la Ilustracin, trans. Eugenio maz, 4th edn (Madrid,
1993), pp. 289. These two works were developed by Jos Lus. In fact he separated the
elements of some religious interpretations, examining its bases and concluding ones were
true and others false. He started the reconstruction work, but apparently he interrupted
it when he needed to admit the Church authority and the validity of Catholic principles,
trying to escape from the Inquisition persecution.
55
56
133
based on the juggling of opposing ideas, the meaning of which is quite exactly
to reaffirm reason as the basis of judgment. The convergence between the
apothecary-surgeons ways of thinking and the Persian Letters could, in point
of fact, be found in relation to other books cited by Jos Lus. Indeed, what
appears here is the immersion of the reader Jos Lus and the better part of his
books into a single atmosphere, one constituted by Enlightenment ideas and
modes of thinking. A single atmosphere and, therefore, a philosophical reading
of the novel.
Upon reflecting on the circuit of communication evident in this case,
it should be observed that, among the denouncers, there was someone (the
surgeon Custdio) who had direct access to one of the works. And the accused
himself declared that many people had had access to his library and could have
read at least parts of the books found there, thus concluding that there were
wicked ideas there. One of the denouncers discovered (or so he said) that the
Persian Letters was a forbidden work more than a year after first coming across
it. Whether or not they had read forbidden books, the denouncers and those,
including women, who had witnessed some of the discussions which had
taken place clearly argued with the accused (notwithstanding his denials or his
claims to have been a mute, the records undoubtedly point to much public
discussion and Jos Luss own statements attest to the frequency of verbal
quarrels). In light of all of this, it is obvious that ideas considered heretical
or libertine ended up reaching a wide circle of people, extending through
orality even to women. This fact made one of the denouncers defend the
principle according to which reading should be differentiated in consonance
with readers status, it therefore being necessary to prevent women from
having access to the type of ideas the apothecary had espoused. This principle
was also present in the works of enlightened writers such as Montesquieu
(in The Spirit of the Laws), Voltaire, Rousseau and DArgens (if we consider
that he is the author of the novel Thres Philosophe), and was defended by
the Portuguese censorship under the Old Regime.58 Even the accused himself
did not drift far from this perspective, both in claiming to be mute and in
distinguishing between good and bad readers, or those who drew conclusions
from fragments of works and those who read whole books. By way of indirect
routes and however fragmentarily, the Enlightenment reached a wide circle of
people, switching from a written to an oral culture (and, we can presume, but
not affirm here, vice versa). Uncensored enlightened scientific writings, such
Luiz Carlos Villalta, Tereza Filsofa e o frei censor: notas sobre a circulao
cultural e as prticas de leitura em Portugal, 17481802, in Eduardo Frana Paiva (ed.),
Brasil-Portugal: sociedades, culturas e formas de governo no mundo portugus, sculo XVI
XVIII (So Paulo, 2006), pp. 1468.
58
134
as those of Linnaeus, moreover, contributed to altering the world vision of the

readers, affecting not only how they understood the physical world, but also
metaphysics.
Readers from Minas Gerais: from Coimbra, Portugal to Mariana, Brazil
Regarding Brazil, there are also records about the circulation and/or reading
of the Persian Letters. Paulo Gomes Leite, upon examining many accusations
directed to the Inquisition of Lisbon by Father Joo Lus Saio, from Mariana,
found one in which there are references to the Persian Letters.59 In 1802, Saio
denounced Dr. Joaquim da Silva Brando, a Mariana resident, for possessing,
among the many books that he had bought from Dr. Jos Ribeiros library, a
volume whose cover was entitled Sermons de Neuville, but which contained,
in fact, Montesquieus Persian Letters. Saio had seen such a book at Dr.
Jos Ribeiros home, in Coimbra, before his return to Mariana. It had a fake
title page and, upon later finding a similar copy at Dr. Brandos home,
he concluded it to be the same book.60 Father Antnio Ribeiro told Saio
that he had read the Persian Letters and that the book entitled Sermons de
Neuville belonging to Dr. Brando was, in fact, Montesquieus novel. After
making the accusation, Saio decided to take further action and went to Dr.
Brandos home. There he confirmed his worst suspicions and found that the
volume entitled Sermons de Neuville in fact comprised Montesquieus Oeuvres,
compelling him to send a second accusation to the Holy Office.61 Saio saw
the same Father Antnio Ribeiro with the sixth tome of Montesquieus works,
consisting of his study about the rise and fall of the Romans and The Temple
of Gnide, a novel published in 1725, of which Ribeiro read a part, though
short, saying that it was either addressed to [those who] practice lechery or
to those who liked reading lascivious works.62 This same Father Antnio
Paulo Gomes Leite, Leitores e leitura em Mariana nos sculos XVIII e XIX,
Revista do Instituto Histrico e Geogrfico de Minas Gerais, 24 (2001): 21726.
60
Ibid., pp. 2212.
61
Ibid., pp. 2212.
62
IANTT, Lisbon Inquisition, Trial record 16.838, 21/11/1802, quoted by Leite,
pp. 2245. It seems that Antnio Ribeiros reading practices developed (or at least Ribeiro
knew it was a possibility) according to the way followed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who
admitted in Les Confessions that he used to borrow books at Tribu, a famous bookshop in
Genve, and that some of them were read with only one hand. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les
Confessions (Paris, 1994), pp. 724. On this subject, see: Jean-Marie Goulemot, Esses livros
que se lem com uma s mo: leitura e leitores de livros pornogrficos no sculo XVIII, trans.
Maria Aparecida Correa (So Paulo, 2000).
59
135
Ribeiro, according to Dr. Brando, had praised a passage from one of Father
Antnio Vieiras sermons transcribed in Histoire philosophique et politique des
etablissements et du commerce des europens dans les Deux Indes (1770), by Abb
Raynal, specifically the Sermon for the success of the arms of Portugal against
Holland. It can be concluded on the basis of such evidence that Father Ribeiro
had effectively read the sermon and, moreover, did so within the analysis
model of political reality that, as suggested in an earlier study,63 was used by
the Inconfidentes,64 that is, associating Abb Raynals ideas to those of Father
Antnio Vieira.65
From the accusations we can infer two similarities in relation to situations
previously mentioned about the readings of Montesquieus novel: the access to
it by readers who did not own a copy and the fact that it was read along with
other prohibited enlightened works (including the Histoire Philosophique,
a work of revolutionary impact in the Americas) and books permitted by
the censors (Antnio Vieiras Sermons, despite Portuguese censorship
prohibiting all of his millennialist works). Moreover, other manners of
evasion allow for the exchange and circulation of prohibited works: if in
Coimbra, Antnio de Morais and his comrades relied on a manuscript copy,
from that same university city, a prohibited book disguised with a fake title
Villalta, Reformismo Ilustrado, Censura e Prticas de Leitura, pp. 50215.
The Inconfidentes were conspirators in the Inconfidncia Mineira (Minas Conspiracy)
of 1789, a political movement against the Portuguese Crown, taking place in the captaincy
of Minas Gerais, in Brazil.
65
Some Inconfidentes, when explaining how to carry out the insurrections, explained
that it was by cutting off the Governors head and said that this was in Raynals work. In
the latter, in the part about the Independence of English America, there is no reference
to the idea, which does appear to exist in the tome on Portuguese America. Following
transcribing a sermon by Father Antnio Vieira and saluting the Portuguese Restoration in
1640 with enthusiasm, Raynal briefly describes the Philippine dominion and narrates how
the Portuguese freed themselves from Spanish oppression, without shedding a single drop
of blood, with the exception of Miguel de Vasconcelos, Secretary of State, an instrument
of tyranny. G.T. [Guillaume-Thomas Franois] Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique
des etablissements et du commerce des europens dans les Deux Indes. nouvelle edition, corrige
et augmente daprs les manuscrits autographs de lauteur ... par M. Peuchet (Paris, 1820),
vol. 5, p. 47. Other history books, circulating in Portugal and its domains in the late
eighteenth century, narrate the episode in more detail. The Portuguese books show an
influence of Second Scholastic corporative theories of power, relating the Restoration to
the resistance to tyranny. On this subject, see Luiz Carlos Villalta, As origens intelectuais
e polticas da Inconfidncia Mineira, in Maria Efignia Lage de Resende and Luiz Carlos
Villalta (eds), Histria de Minas Gerais: As Minas Setecentistas (2 vols, Belo Horizonte,
2007), v. 2, pp. 579607.
63
64
136
page arrived in Mariana. As Paulo Gomes Leite has demonstrated, Dr. Jos
Pereira Ribeiro managed to bring Montesquieus Persian Letters from Coimbra
to Mariana, deceiving the customs officials and the censorial apparatus through
a mechanism much used by book smugglers.66 These accusations also offer
another example of how reading practices accompanied heterodox behaviour:
in Coimbra, Antnio de Morais and his comrades ate meat on fasting days and
went on to defend simple fornication (that is, with a non-virgin, single woman
who was not a nun); in Mariana, Father Antnio Ribeiro read The Temple
of Gnide, Montesquieus novel published in 1725, and used it to enhance
the enjoyment of solitary pleasures. Besides sex, there are indications that the
books were used for political purposes, as seen mingling Raynal and Vieira,
a connection which fuelled Inconfidentes from Minas Gerais, particularly the
martyr Tiradentes, to criticize the Colonial System (even if their inspiration
did not come from the previously cited sermon), which was discussed in the
study mentioned earlier.67
Conclusion
Montesquieus novel seems to have been used in the Luso-Brazilian world by
a restricted group of readers, enforcing and nourishing typically Enlightened
critical thought with its methodological principles and its values. This assured
reason and observation as starting points and criteria in forming critical
judgments that, at different times, focused on sexual mores, on the sacred
history, dogmas and rules of the Catholic Church, and, perhaps, political
order.
In the situations examined regarding book titles, the principles defended
by the accused (reflecting their opposition to the Inquisition and the papacy)
and their professional profile (lawyers, magistrates, clergymen, surgeons,
merchants and officers), certain common features emerge, such as the repetition
of Enlightenment texts and authors or others valued by them (Voltaire,
Montesquieu, Rousseau, Bielfeld, Frederick II, Holbach, Locke, Ovid), ideas
and social types. This enlightened setting combined printed, manuscript and
oral cultures; books, manuscripts and oral and collective readings, disputes,
and conversations.
The objection could be raised that the cases examined here are too few
in number and that they were induced by an Inquisition anxious to fill up
its registers. The documentation, however, is replete with numerous other
Leite, pp. 2245.
The inconfidente priest Lus Vieira da Silva had Montesquieus complete works
and, consequently, the Persian Letters.
66
67
137
situations in which books by Enlightenment authors, their most celebrated

principles and, above all, ways of thinking unmistakably associated with
them all appear. Clearly, the Inquisition played a part in seeing to it that
accusations and testimony against the libertines came to light. Nevertheless,
that alone cannot explain the wealth of detail found in the archival records.
The inquisitional repression merely made more evident ideas, social types
and means of communication that, in fact, existed independently. More
instrumental in the diffusion of such elements were the cultural policies of the
Portuguese Crown, especially after the accession of D. Jos I and his minister
Sebastio Jos de Carvalho e Mello (Marquis of Pombal, by which he is best
known today). The Crown promoted reforms inspired by the Enlightenment.
These policies were justified on the basis of the notion that Portugal was thought
to have fallen well behind the rest of Europe. On the one hand, the policies
involved a heightened appreciation of the natural sciences, of observation
and experimentation, as well as the carrying out of scientific investigation in
Portuguese domains, though the latter was always marked by a heavy dose of
pragmatism. On the other hand, the Crown also vigorously sought to stamp
out elements of traditional Portuguese mentality (such as millennialism and
sebastianismo), while at the same time rejecting those more radical enlightened
thoughts, which condemned absolutism, colonialism or Catholic religion but
which together constituted the foundation of the Lusitanian monarchy.68 Such
royal policies, which employed the printed material to diffuse the reformism,
had an impact on the way people thought, leading to the emergence of more
critical and rational perspectives on institutions in general and on religious,
social and political order in particular. Thus, notwithstanding the persecutions,
The effects of enlightened reform policy were the object of satire on the part of
contemporary thinkers. See, for example, O Piolho Viajante (1802) [The Louse Traveller],
a novel by Antnio Manuel Policarpo da Silva, more specifically the chapter dedicated to
the character Filsofo [Philosopher], in fact a philosopher in name only, for his practices
negated his innovative principles, such as an appreciation of observation in forming opinions
or a belief in equality (Antnio Manuel Policarpo da Silva, O Piolho Viajante (1802)
http://www.unicamp.br/iel/memoria/MargensdoCanone/Piolho/index2.htm [last accessed
27 October 2007]). But the reform conducted by the Portuguese Crown did lend to the
enlightened atmosphere referred to here. On this subject, see: Jos Augusto dos Santos
Alves, A Opinio Pblica em Portugal, 17801820, 2nd edn (Lisboa, 1999); Ana Cristina
Arajo, A Cultura das Luzes em Portugal: temas e problemas (Lisboa, 2003); Francisco
Calazans Falcon, A poca pombalina: poltica econmica e monarquia ilustrada (So Paulo,
1982); Fernando Augusto Machado (2000); Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the
Enlightenment (New York and Cambridge, 1995); Fernando Antnio Novais, Portugal e
Brasil na crise do antigo sistema colonial: 17771808, 2nd edn (So Paulo, 1981); Villalta,
Reformismo Ilustrado, Censura e Prticas de Leitura.
68
138
the Portuguese Enlightened Reform indirectly contributed to the rise both of

heretical thinking and the so-called libertines among all sectors of society (or,
more precisely, from the middling sectors to its summit).
In this atmosphere, the reading of the Persian Letters concentrated on the
works philosophical aspects and less on the complexity of the plot and the
fortunes and misfortunes of the characters. For the libertine men focused
upon here, the conventions, mysteries and values that command social practice
were, moreover, human creations. They would not have an absolute or eternal
characteristic, would not come from divine determinations or necessarily
always be observed in social behaviour. In the enlightened setting characterizing
the passage from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, heterodox readers
engaged with philosophical novels, reading them philosophically.
Ultimately, the cases of heterodox individuals, who read their novels
philosophically, also show the incipient outlines of a sphere of public power,
information and opinion making including the existence of an audience
(that is to say, of a readership), of publicity (that is, actions aimed at
awakening and directing public opinion) and of publications69 (which shared
Jrgen Habermas, Mudana estrutural da esfera pblica, trans. Flvio R. Kothe

(Rio de Janeiro, 1984), pp. 1415. According to Habermas, the emergence of a public
sphere of power took place in the eighteenth century along with rise of capitalism and
the consolidation of the modern nation states. Those states counted upon the press to
promote their interests and used it to communicate with their citizenries, thus forming a
general public. For its part and in the midst of the process in which capitalism overtook
mercantilism, that public, of a socially variable composition, including the petit and the
grande bourgeoisie, as well as men of letters (ibid., p. 37), began to flex its muscles as
an antagonist conscious of public power (both of the State and the Crown) and turned
against authority (ibid., pp. 3842): first, however, it concentrated on literary discussion
where novels played an important role, later turning to politics (ibid., pp. 60, 68). Resting
within this public composed of private individuals, a domain lying between the private
sector and public power (the State), was the public sphere of power which served as an
intermediary by way of public opinion, between the State and the needs of society (ibid.,
pp. 456). The press played a central role in the constitution of this public sphere, as did
associative organizations (including the Masons), coffeehouses, salons which lent their
spaces, mechanisms of communication and forms of sociability (ibid., pp. 4851). The
press as the principal means of fuelling public opinion is something admitted by other
authors, who agree about the importance played by the associative organizations and the
arenas of sociability. On this theme, see Thomas Munck, The Enlightenment: A Comparative
Social History, 17211794 (London, 2000), p. 15 and James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of
the Public in Enlightenment Europe, 3rd edn (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 12.
69
139
space with manuscripts and oral transmissions of information).70 While

Portuguese enlightened reformism may have contributed to those outlines, it
maintained a series of restrictions: a vigilance on the part of censorial organs,
inquisitorial repression, a lack of freedom of the press, and the continued
existence of a single university the University of Coimbra in the entire
Portuguese Empire. Printing presses, furthermore, were prohibited in Brazil
until 1808.71
In the face of both new sources of encouragement and restrictions,
individuals of different social origins, of the third, second and first estates,
but mostly coming from middling socio-economic sectors, carried out a
lively debate72 based on ideas mostly concerned with religion, but also with
politics. It is true that, among the cases examined, the political background
is not emphasized, but in various other situations, not addressed in this essay,
political organization explicitly came to the fore.73 As could be expected, those
Robert Darnton emphasizes the role played by the orality in the corruption of the
Old Regime in France close to the Revolution of 1789. See specially: Robert Darnton, Os
livros provocam revolues?, in Os best-sellers proibidos da Frana Revolucionria, trans.
Hildegard Feist (So Paulo, 1998), pp. 31751. Melissa Calaresu understands that the
same role can be found in Naples in the late eighteenth century. See: Calaresu, Coffee,
Culture and Construction: Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Late Eighteenth-Century
Naples, in Andrea Gatti and Paola Zanardi (eds), Filosofia, Scienza, Storia: Il dialogo fra
Italia e Gran Bretagna (Pdua, 2005), pp. 13576. In the pre-1820 Luso-Brazilian world,
it is also impossible to establish a clear link between the outlining of a public sphere and
the press.
71
Despite these singularities, comparing Brazil and Portugal to other parts of Europe,
especially Germany, in the same period, we can notice there was something in common.
Firstly, the limits imposed upon the circulation of print (in Brazil, in fact, the prohibition
of print was suspended only in 1808). Secondly, the presence of Masonry, absent from
Brazil until the late eighteenth century (See Habermas, pp. 367, 51). But the lack of
political clubs lent a singularity to Luso-Brazilian world.
72
Habermas asserts that debate in the public sphere was founded upon the soundness
of arguments, on reason and a rejection of the weight of the social origin of the speaker
(thus making participants equal in status); nothing was free from criticism which was
aimed at music, literary and philosophical works, artwork in general, the privileges of
the elite and the government (Habermas, pp. 5052). Secrecy was also rejected as public
knowledge became essential (ibid., p. 53). Obviously, given the period under examination
here, when the Luso-Brazilian world was ruled by Absolutism and Inquisition, even when
discussions involved various actors and spaces, debate could not always be held in an open
fashion.
73
Habermas establishes a chronology within which, first, there would have been
literary discussion and, later, political debate. James Melton feels that that chronology
does not apply to France or to England (Melton, p. 10). The same could be said for the
70
140
involved in the debate were mostly clerics, professors, students and recent
graduates of Coimbra, although others were lawyers, doctors, magistrates,
surgeons and military men.74 Even craftsmen and women took part in the
discussions.75 The debates gave incentive to and, simultaneously, promoted
the circulation of publications and manuscripts both those permitted and
prohibited by censors. Texts became available to people by way of selling,
buying, and borrowing or by way of access to acquaintances libraries. Some
of the individuals focused on here relied on letter writing and, in attempting
to cover up prohibited ideas and books, they used secret codes and false book
covers. They also relied on an intense oral transmission of ideas, whether taken
from texts or not: at times texts were cited to substantiate their talks, at other
times oral traditions were used to back up those same texts. Social networks
fed on and fuelled discussions. It should be noted that books and other
publications may have played a smaller role than in other parts of Europe and
the Americas during the same period. Debates, publications, manuscripts,
and oral transmissions were present in diverse spaces: homes, pharmacies,
bookstores, libraries, the laboratory and other parts of the University of
Coimbra.
Luso-Brazilian world, given the force of restrictions placed on political discussion. In the
Inquisition documentation it is not hard to find signs of the interweaving of heresies and
political reflection or literary debates.
74
Habermas associates the emergence of a public sphere of power with the
bourgeoisie. James Melton insists that in England nobles also took part, while in both
France and Germany the middle classes were involved; in Germany that entailed the
participation of university professors, territorial officials and pastors, a pattern somewhat
similar to what has been seen in Brazil and Portugal (Melton, p. 11).
75
According to Munck, men and women participated in the public sphere in different
ways which is to say that during the eighteenth century the public sphere expanded much
more for men than it did for women (Munck, pp. 1617). In Portugal there were few
women who played an important role in private debates or in those happening in the
public sphere. Among them was the Marquise of Alorna, who wrote poems and letters,
keeping intellectual relationships with Portuguese thinkers, for eighteen years, while lived
in a monastery in Lisbon (Tefilo Braga, Histria da Literatura Portuguesa Os rcades,
3rd edn (Lisboa:, 2005), pp. 2324). Another was D. Isabel Forjaz, who organized literary
meetings in her house in Lisbon (Arajo, p. 91). Maria Madalena Salvada, a married
woman, for only a month in 1803, was Jos Joaquim Vieira Coutos concubine, having
French private classes paid by him, reading and debating libertine novels and books with
her lover. When the Inquisition arrested her and Jos Joaquim, a student at University of
Coimbra who belonged to one of the most eminent families of Minas Gerais, she decided
to confess her crimes to the Lisbon Inquisition (IANTT, Lisbon Inquisition, Trial record
no 9275, pp. 15v).
141
All of these elements point to the existence of an incipient public sphere,

of a domain lying between, on the one hand, public power represented by
the State and the Church (in the Iberian world still attached to the former)
and, on the other hand, the universe of the private.76 Publications were one
of the sources of this outline of a public sphere, extant in the Luso-Brazilian
world at the turn of the eighteenth century a moment when the boundaries
between the public and the private were far from defined and involving
individuals from different social conditions (but, above all, those of middling
sectors). Oral transmission, however, proved more important. It would not
be until the Liberal Revolution of Oporto, in 1820, that the omnipresence
of oral transmission would begin to fade in the face of freedom of the press, a
multiplication of printing houses and the profusion of political pamphlets, all
of which were to set the tone of future debate.77
The somewhat schematic distinction between public power and the private
domain has been nuanced in recent studies. First, it has to be recognized that the State
was composite in nature, uniting elements which, today, are considered as part of both
the public and the private domain: the King, a symbol of public power, was a private
magnate; around him a court was established with its network of aristocrats, professional
bureaucrats, venal office holders and private financiers (who, in the Luso-Brazilian case,
often leased the right to collects taxes and other public fees); moreover, public authority
itself was exercised by distinct and sometimes rival interests. Second, the different groups,
styles and networks of debate cannot be separated into fixed categories such as public and
private: such a division would have been alien to contemporaries who simply did not
take it into account; each individual, moreover, at the same time belonged to different
interest groups, operating under distinct norms of reference (Munck, pp. 1517). Another
important aspect is Habermas insistence on the inevitability of conflict arising among
varying instances of the public sphere, society and bourgeois institutions. James Melton
correctly defines this perspective as teleological when observing that by focusing solely
on the subversive dimensions of the Enlightened public sphere overlooks the resistance
and adaptability of Old Regime society and institutions, which were quite capable of
recognizing the communicative potential of the public sphere (Melton, p. 12).
77
On the role of print in Brazil in 18201822, see Lcia Maria Bastos Pereira das
Neves, Corcundas e constitucionais: a cultura poltica da Independncia, 18201822 (Rio de
Janeiro, 2003).
76
PART III
The State as an Incubator of
Enlightenment and an
Engine of Reform
Chapter 10
In the House of Reform:

The Bourbon Court of
Eighteenth-Century Spain
Charles C. Noel
In 1786 and 1787, two well-connected Englishmen began their travels in

Spain. Though they had a good deal in common, they perhaps never met.
Both were men of letters inquisitive gentlemen of what the English were
calling polite society. They were among the increasingly sizeable number of
foreign travellers in Spain who, since about 1760, were working up their notes
and journals to publish accounts of their visits. Like their counterparts, mainly
British or French, they used their letters of introduction or elevated social
standing to open many doors, and our two travellers moved easily among the
Spanish social and cultural elite. The first, Joseph Townsend, was an Anglican
cleric, keen amateur scientist and expert on the English poor law. He was an
eagle-eyed reformer who got to know and praise Pedro Campomanes, Jos
Moino, count of Floridablanca Charles IIIs chief minister and other
Enlightenment worthies. He enjoyed many tertulias afternoon or evening
gatherings hosted by intellectuals or aristocrats, and attended excellent free
public lectures in the natural sciences. But when in Madrid if he found himself
at a loose end around midday he went elsewhere to seek polite society, as he
tells us:
Having been once introduced at court, you are at liberty to go as often as you please.
I availed myself frequently of this privilege, both for the sake of viewing the paintings
at my leisure, and for conversation, because at court is the general rendezvous, where
men of distinction assemble every morning to pay their compliments to the several
branches of the royal family, whilst they are at dinner, and to talk of what is passing
in the world.
Then, once the king had left the palace to go hunting, Townsend continues,
146
The company retires; and as the corps diplomatique is here remarkable for hospitality,
a person well recommended is never at a loss for the most genteel society at all hours
of the day.
Townsends compatriot was William Beckford, novelist, aesthete, and

wealthy owner of Jamaican slaves and sugar plantations. Having fled England
after a nasty sex scandal involving an adolescent youth, Beckford found it
more difficult to be presented at court. Nevertheless, he moved in the highest
aristocratic circles around Madrid. One evening he attended a concert of
oriental music hosted by a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Finance, a
man who was also a gentleman steward (mayordomo) in the kings household.
The guest of honour was the Turkish envoy:
The Archbishop of Toledo [Francisco Antonio Lorenzana] and the Grand Inquistor
[i.e., the Inquisitor General, Agustn Rubn de Cevallos] sat listening to these grating
sounds with evangelical patience and resignation. Both these prelates have an air
of frankness and beneficence that promises a truce to autos-da-fe and persecutions.
The Archbishop came up to me the moment I entered, and without waiting for any
ceremonious introduction began addressing me in French with most good-humoured
civility. The rinfresco was magnificent.
Considering the experiences of Townsend and Beckford, of other travellers

and of many of the cultivated and ambitious men and women of mid- and late
eighteenth-century Madrid helps us understand the nature of enlightenment
and the society in which it existed. Our two Englishmen demonstrate many
of this societys salient characteristics. Its cosmopolitanism was founded on a
degree of easy toleration of outsiders attracted to the Spanish capital. It was,
to an extent, socially diverse a socially modest English vicar was welcomed
to the tables of grandees and powerful ministers; the hosts of the best tertulias
apparently opened them to anyone of talent and wit, and women joined men
in debate and jollifications. It was a society of worldly, somewhat secularized
values where even clerics like Lorenzana left God aside for the moment to
concentrate on the (Islamic) music and polite talk with a Protestant stranger.
It was a world of relaxed good manners which eased the intercourse of the
more or less cultivated. Its citizens valued sociability, as expressed for example,
by Antonio de Capmany, an outstanding Catalan enlightened thinker.
Capmany, summarizing the character and achievement of enlightenment,
J. Townsend, A Journey through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787 (3 vols, London,
1791), vol. II, p. 135.

W. Beckford, The Journal of William Beckford in Portugal and Spain 17871788, ed.
B. Alexander (London 1954), pp. 3056.
In the House of Reform: The Bourbon Court of Eighteenth-Century Spain
147
praised sociability [socialidad] which communicates all enlightened ideas.

Hours spent in the company of cultivated and benevolent friends allowed
good conversation to flourish and kindle enlightenment. Indeed, sociability
was so vital that Jos Clavijo y Fajardo, an important naturalist and editor
of the influential newspaper, El Pensador, in the early 1760s, went so far as
to equate it to virtue itself. For these men good taste, too, was important.
Typically, both Townsend and Beckford discuss the pictures in the venues they
visited and Capmany, in the same essay referred to above, proclaimed that
good taste, with its philosophical spirit, beautified and singled out the age.
But it is the locales where Townsend and Beckford conversed and looked
at pictures which strike us. The court of the Spanish Bourbons has not been
identified by historians as an important venue of enlightened culture. But,
as the two travellers show, the court and its offshoots provided spaces where
men and women of the Enlightenment gathered and discussed. Often more
significant even than the palace itself were other venues: the mansions of
Madrids cultivated court nobility; the homes of government officials and
servants of the royal household; and the academies, inns, cafes, and apartments
where aspiring writers and artists argued and plotted their way into court
and government posts which would bring home their bacon. Moreover, the
influence of the court, in ways both real and symbolic, often reached well
beyond Madrid to other cities and regions of the monarchy. The Bourbon
court, then, helped determine the nature of elite culture across the whole of
the eighteenth century. Then, from the 1750s perhaps, certainly from 1760 or
so, the court became a focal point of specifically enlightened, reformist culture.
Indeed, it was probably the single most important venue of reform political,
intellectual and artistic in the nation. This court, in the later part of the
century, could be called an enlightened court, much as the court of Philip IV
of Spain would be a baroque court or that of Francis I of France a renaissance
court. In this regard, the court of Madrid contrasts significantly with those
of her great imperial rivals, Hanoverian Britain and Bourbon France. From
neither Windsor nor Versailles emanated anything like the reformist cultural
authority we find in Spain.
The Enlightenment, it has often been thought by scholars, never truly
came to Spain. They have, correctly, found no Spanish Voltaire or Holbach
and saw, again correctly, that relatively few Spanish thinkers had a significant
impact beyond their national borders. They underestimated the importance
A. Morales Moya, La ideologa de la Ilustracin espaola, Revista de Estudios
Polticos, 59 (1988): 90.

Sebastin de la Nuez, Jos Clavijo y Fajardo. Su vida, su pensamiento y su obra (La
Laguna de Tenerife, 1988), p. 29.
148
of the large number of enthusiastic followers Voltaire, at least, attracted

amongst Spaniards, as well as the impact of many other enlightened figures.
But they have also been seeking a Spanish Enlightenment that has scarcely
existed anywhere in the last quarter century. The Enlightenment we know
today is a very different beast from the one we learned about in the 1960s.
Thanks, in part, to the musings of historians of France dissecting mentalits
and material culture, and to desperate Englishmen anxious to discover an
Enlightenment south of the Anglo-Scottish border, and to many others as well,
our Enlightenment has highly permeable borders, and is notably more varied
and inclusive. It reaches deeper down into the middling and lower ranges of
society. It includes some murky corners, too, of sexuality and delinquency.
And it embraces female readers and their affection for supposedly frivolous
novels. Sociability acquired a key role, the crucible in which ideas and
attitudes were formed or displayed, as Townsend could have told us. Regarding
material culture, historians have underlined the importance of understanding
attitudes toward and patterns of consumption. A part of this is the attention
now paid to the consumption of popular literature, the political libelles, livres
philosophiques, and other kinds of erotic and pornographic writings which, as
Robert Darnton pointed out, may have provided more dangerous propaganda
against the French Old Regime than Rousseaus Social Contract. There was
also the marketing of the enduringly popular bibliothque bleue among French
working men and peasants; and the peoples engagement in popular sports
and pastimes and their reform including of the Spanish bull fight. There
have been revealing examinations of sex clubs particularly the Beggars
Benison which flourished in rural, coastal Fife. David Stevenson, the historian
who has recently examined the club, has shown how its members carved their
group out of an enlarged social sphere where neither church nor state felt they
should or could effectively intervene. Its members, who comprised a wide
range of social groups, were witnesses, in their particular sort of sociability, to
declining religious restraint and a diminishing fear of secular authority. But
paradoxically, as historians have shown, any decline in religiosity has to be
measured against its continuing vitality, including among many prominent
enlightenment thinkers. This could be as true for a Scot, like the Presbyterian
leader and historian, William Robertson, as for a Spaniard like that model of
enlightened excellence, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Neither imagined their
Francisco Lafarga, Voltaire en Espagne (17341835) (Oxford, 1989).
R. Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA, 1982),
p. 204.

D. Stevenson, The Beggars Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland (East
Linton, 2001).

149
God was not a God of toleration and reform. The Enlightenment, it is now
understood, was a broad church or a great series of congregations, with some
common doctrines but numerous paths to salvation. Enlightenment varied
significantly from region to region, even from one city to another, always best
seen as a product of its particular social, cultural and political context. Finally,
most historians would also now agree that it would be a mistake to identify
the Enlightenment with any one social class. Enlightenment was at least as
likely to come to the sons of pastors or noble landowners as to the offspring
of merchants or artisans. Thus, the Enlightenment has ceased to appear a
bourgeois triumph, or the victory of any social class at all. This, and the other
recently revealed characteristics of enlightenment allow us to accept, now,
that there were, indeed, enlightened Spaniards. And that there is no reason to
believe an enlightened court was not possible.
The reality of enlightenment in Spain becomes even clearer when we add
another attribute to the list: a seriousness of purpose. It may be found in
the thinking and experiences of a host of committed reformers, from Benito
Feijoo in the 1720s to Jovellanos in the early 1800s and in a wide spread of
programmes, from reform of the theatre to penal reform. In matters of taste,
it is especially associated with the rise of neo-classicism. As suggested some
years ago, the varied tendencies in the neo-classical movement across Europe
included some common traits high-mindedness, gravity, sobriety, simplicity
and truthfulness and many similar ones. It encouraged a new moralizing
fervour the energies of which were directed toward what Robert Rosenblum
called new reformatory and propagandistic purposes. No wonder neoclassicism, especially in architecture, became the virtual house style of Spanish
enlightened reformers. Under Campomanes, the Council of Castile, which
he dominated for many years, enforced classicized baroque and neo-classical
taste in scores of ecclesiastical, municipal and government building projects
For recent suggestive studies see D. Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge,
1995); T. Munck, The Enlightenment. A Comparative Social History 17211794 (London,
2000), Introduction, and ch. 1; T.C.W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power
of Culture. Old Regime Europe 16601789 (Oxford, 2002); J. van H. Melton, The Rise of
the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001); R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), The
Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981); H.F. May, The Enlightenment in
America (New York, 1976) which examines the relationships between Protestantism and
enlightenment; R. Porter, Enlightenment. Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
(London, 2000); and J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination. English Culture in the
Eighteenth Century (London, 1997).

R. Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art (Princeton, 1967),
pp. 2850.
150
designed by the architect Ventura Rodrguez from the 1760s to the 1780s.10
But typically, even before he was taken up by Campomanes and the Council,
Ventura Rodrguez had been supported by Charles IIIs younger brother, the
infante Luis an early sign of the Bourbons enthusiasm for the neo-classical
with at least some of its moral and intellectual implications.
That taste should be both an expression of moral earnestness, and an
encouragement to it, was no surprise to enlightened men and women. Like
Jovellanos, they would agree that good taste was a question of virtue, a gateway
to the avenue of truth and uprightness. Most would have agreed with the
count of Teba in his Discourse of 1796. Teba, a translator of Voltaire, was
the son and heir of the well-known salon hostess and enlightened reformer,
Mara Francisca de Sales Portocarrero, countess of Montijo. Both were
eminent grandees and popular at court. In his essay, Teba insisted that the
purpose of the arts was to attain for man his true, solid happiness, for they
make virtue agreeable and, by means of beauty, excite us to follow [virtue]
opening the way to the sublime principles of philosophy, promoting the good
of the state, inspiring its members to heroic deeds which promote private
and public happiness.11 The ilustrados enlightened men and women
therefore sought poets, painters and architects who were philosophers, who
spoke a neo-classical, or at least a classicized baroque, language. Fortunately,
the intellectuals found in the Bourbon court and government a virtual fever
of artistic devotion. It was a devotion which, after its baroque and rococo
enthusiasms of the first half of the century, embraced the classicized taste
required of a philosopher.
Philosophers, however, were not always glum. The seriousness of purpose
they espoused could often be found, most obviously, when mixed with the
apparently frivolous or, as in the Beggars Benison, the erotic. When, in 1770 or
1771, the neo-classical dramatist and minor court official, Nicols Fernndez
de Moratn, described by his son, Leandro, as a man committed to the
happiness of his nation established a salon with a number of intellectual
friends, they claimed, playfully, to limit their talk to poetry, whores and bull
fights. In fact, their serious discussion of literature, and their resolve to reform
culture, made their tertulia, in the Inn of San Sebastin, one of the most
T.F. Reese, The Architecture of Ventura Rodrguez (2 vols, New York, 1976), vol. I,
pp. 141323.
11
La Farga, pp. 1534 and Ignacio Luis Henares Cuellar, La teora de las artes en
la Academia de San Fernando durante la segunda mitad del siglo xviii, Actas del XXIII
Congreso Internacional de Historia del Arte. Espaa entre el Mediterraneo y el Atlntico, III
(1978), pp. 4079.
10
151
influential of the age.12 The mixture may be found, too, in the enthusiasms
of the XIVth duke of Medina Sidonia, a rich grandee. The duke, Pedro Prez
de Guzmn el Bueno, was a Francophile protector and admirer of several
leading reformist thinkers, including Nicols Moratn and the Benedictine
Martn Sarmiento. He hosted an important salon attended by Campomanes,
amongst others, and was an enthusiastic supporter of theatre and its reform,
and of the masked balls, founded in Madrid and a few other large cities in
1767. Their patron was Medina Sidonias friend and fellow grandee, the count
of Aranda, one of Charles IIIs leading ministers. Aranda, a gentleman of the
kings bedchamber, intended the masquerades to be polite entertainment
for the respectable, a civilized diversion, and they quickly became popular
and fashionable especially among women. Many were attracted by their
promiscuous confusion of social ranks, of the dangerous with the good, and
of both genders, including sexual cross-dressers. They were inevitably attacked
by the clergy as dangerous and immoral. Medina Sidonia defended them as a
weapon. As he wrote to a friend, With this and other things, the black power
[of the clergy] is ever diminished, and later, as he said, the masquerades had
brought liberty without inconvenience. Medina Sidonia, a senior courtier
and Master of the Horse to Charles III, and Aranda and their supporters, saw
these occasions for what they were, deliberate provocations of the clergy.13
Other provocative frivolities could be found across Spains cities in, for
example, the newly gained freedoms of wives in aristocratic and bourgeois
households, as examined by Carmen Martn Gaite. She demonstrates how
women, some of whom would certainly have made it to Arandas masked
balls, flirted with the attractions and dangers of adultery its appearance or
reality. For them, as for Medina Sidonia and other enlightened men, flirtation
with what had been prohibited entailed a sense of triumph over tradition and
a sharing in cosmopolitan modernity.14
N. Fernndez de Moratn, La Petimetra. Desengaos al Teatro espaol. Stiras,
eds D.T. Gies and A.M. Lama (Madrid, 1996) and P. Alvarez de Miranda, Nicols
Fernndez de Moratn en la Sociedad Econmica Matritense, Revista de Literatura, XLII
(1980): 221 for Leandros words.
13
L. Coloma, Retratos de Antao (Madrid, 1895), pp. 22021 for the quotation
and pp. 2445; A. Morel-Fatio, Etudes sur lEspagne, 2nd ser. (Paris, 1890) pp. 434;
M. Sarmiento, Cartas al Duque de Medina Sidonia (17471770) ed. J. Santos Puesto
(Ponferrada, 1995), pp. 1822; A. Domnguez Ortiz, Un episodio de la lucha por el
teatro en el siglo xviii espaol, Nueva Revista de Filologa hispnica, XXXIII:1 (1984):
21317.
14
C. Martn Gaites Usos amorosos del dieciocho en Espaa (Barcelona, 1972) makes
an invaluable contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century society. Its English
translation is Love Customs in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Berkeley, 1991).
12
152
Perhaps the best-known face of seriousness at the time, however, was not
that of Jovellanos or any other intellectual, but of the king, Charles III. He is
represented in his well-known portraits, by Goya and Anton Mengs a founder
of neo-classical painting with the benevolent smile of a loving father of his
family and nation, and there is much evidence of his amiability. But he was
also a man of iron dedication to duty and discipline. He displayed his brand
of seriousness when, within weeks of ascending the throne, he dismissed and
exiled the famous Italian castrato, Farinelli, master of court ceremonies during
years of extravagant rococo splendour under his predecessor, Ferdinand VI
and his queen, Barbara of Braganza. Ferdinand, who once stated he was king
in order to secure the happiness of his people, was too self-indulgent and lazy
to work hard at his metier. Instead, he, Barbara and Farinelli had presided over
what has been called a spectacle state where concerts, illuminations, elaborate
picnics and costly Italian opera had flourished. Charles dismissal of the singer
was popular with taxpayers and demonstrated how he would transform his
court.15 He would emulate, then outdo the household of his father, Philip V,
with its respectability and decency, avoiding profligacy. He imparted to his
ministers and courtiers some of his own sense of order, serenity, and dedication
to hard work; he imposed on them his belief in his mission and much of the
personal austerity he displayed in his most private spaces. His prudishness
caused him to order a number of important pictures of nudes in the royal
collection to be burned. Fortunately, Mengs, his favourite artist, intervened
quietly to save these Rubenses and Titians. At the various royal residences,
including Madrid and Aranjuez, there were now few major diversions and
this scarcely changed under Charles IV: no theatrical amusements, no public
games, no grand assemblies except on gala [birth and anniversary] days,
and everyone restricted by the severe discipline of etiquette, according to
the French diplomat, Franois Bourgoing. As Manuel Godoy later admitted
(probably accurately) in his memoirs of the 1790s and 1800s, there was
nothing of parties, of balls, of receptions, nor of spectacles; no suppers;
the royal family lived hidden and quietly, contenting itself with a private
J. Varela, La muerte del rey. El ceremonial funerario de la monarqua espaola
(Madrid, 1990), p. 159; for the spectacle state; F.R. de la Flor, El canto catrtico: el teatro
msico como utopa de la obra de arte total en la Ilustracin espaola, in R. Kleinertz
(ed.), Teatro y msica en Espaa (siglo xviii). Actas del Simposio Internacional Salamanca,
1994 (Kassel, 1996), p. 17; C. Morales Borrero, Fiestas Reales en el Reinado de Fernando VI
(Madrid, 1972); M. Torrione, La sociedad de Corte en el ritual de la pera, in Un reinado
bajo el signo de la paz. Fernando VI y Brbara de Braganza 17461759 (Madrid, 2002),
pp. 16595; and J. Baretti, A Journey from London to Genoa Through England, Portugal,
Spain and France (Fontwell, 1970), vol. II, pp. 9091.
15
153
and modest existence. Moreover, Charles III ordered severe restrictions on

gambling in the palaces and amongst courtiers and set 10:00pm as the hour
for lights out in the royal household. And he disliked spending the taxpayers
money on typically baroque courtly extravagance. Thus, in 1785, he forbade
the construction, in Madrid, of a series of temporary wooden triumphal arches
to celebrate a double marriage between Spanish and Portuguese infantes. Such
ephemeral works, which brought no permanent benefit to the public, were,
he believed, a waste. As he made clear, the love, fidelity and happiness of his
subjects sufficed for him and his family.16
Charles III, then, helped transform the royal household into a school
of virtue and himself and his family into model masters and students. This
explains why, in part, Campomanes was delighted when his son, Sabino, was
appointed by Charles a gentleman steward in the kings household in 1785.
He advised the 21-year old be always attentive to the Kings actions in order
to serve him well and to learn what you yourself ought to do in dealings
with other men.17 By observing the king Sabino would learn that the court
was enlightened not just because it attracted and protected reformers but
because of its appearance and feel; because of the way Charles III, his family
and servants led their lives of quiet regularity. The court, often magnificent,
was also a model of restraint made so by its governor whose routine was,
according to the traveller and writer, Joseph Baretti, somewhat dull but
certainly laudable.18
There is, perhaps, only one thing about which historians of early modern
courts agree: we will likely never know how to adequately define the institution
we study. The authors of the Diccionario de Autoridades published by the Royal
Spanish Academy (17261739) were braver. They could be, for a number of
E. Armstrong, Elizabeth Farnese The Termagant of Spain, (London, 1892), p. 144;
M. Aviles Fernndez, S. Madrazo Madrazo, et al., Carlos III y Fin del Antiguo Rgimen
(Madrid, 1973), p. 18; R. Cumberland, Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, London, 1806,
ed. H. Flanders (London, 1969), p. 251; J. Tomlinson, Francisco Goya. The Tapestry
Cartoons and Early Career at the Court of Madrid (Cambridge, 1989) pp. 93, 2434;
F. Bourgoing, Modern State of Spain (4 vols, London 1808), vol. I, pp. 1912; Godoy
quoted in E. Martnez Ruz, La sociedad madrilea del siglo xviii, in A. Fernndez
Garca, (ed.), Historia de Madrid (Madrid, 1993), p. 335 and W. Beckford, Italy, Spain
and Portugal with An Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaa and Batalha (London, 1840),
pp. 33031; and M. Garca Felguera, El Madrid de Carlos III y Carlos IV. La ciudad y sus
transformaciones (Madrid, 1980), p. 24 for the final quotation.
17
P. Rodrguez Campomanes, Epistolario (17781802) eds J. Herrera Navarro,
M. Aviles Fernndez and J. Cejudo Lpez (2 vols, Madrid, 2004), letter num. 153.
18
Baretti, vol. II, p. 89.
16
154
the academicians were themselves aristocratic courtiers or court officials. This

is their definition of a court:
The group or body of all the councils, higher tribunals, ministers, servants and officers
of the Royal Household and other persons who attend and serve royal persons, whose
head is the king or sovereign prince.
Thus, for the academicians, the court comprised the higher levels of
government; the royal household, its administration and service of all kinds;
and courtiers and servants of all ranks. This may seem an overly broad
definition. In fact, it reflects well the ways in which Spaniards of the time
used the word corte: royal household, central government, and the capital
city. Here, court includes the royal household with its two or three thousand
officials, courtiers and servants; noblemen and others who often present
themselves for ceremonial or social occasions; and ranking royal employees
civil, ecclesiastical and military who do likewise. It is a mixed bag which
comprises even the illustrious Jovellanos who, as minister of Justice in 1798,
fell, fatally, into disfavour partly because he failed to attend important court
ceremonies and for alienating certain of the queens ladies.19 The occupational
catchment area is wide, including many salaried professionals from physicians
and accountants to silversmiths, violinists, painters, architects, embroiderers
and ceramicists.
The Spanish court, like other early modern European courts, served a
multitude of functions which varied as circumstances and princely personalities
changed. A court could be anything from the historian Geoffrey Eltons point
of contact to the anthropologist Clifford Geertzs exemplary centre, and much
else in between. They were chapels of private and public religiosity; marriage
bureaus for the beautiful, rich, well-connected and talented; classrooms of
virtue and of courtly manners; academies of the good taste which mattered so
much to Capmany or the count of Teba; exchanges where courtiers engaged
in the lucrative pursuit of brokerage; and studios where craftsmen and artists
could realize notable successes. A well-ordered court, rich and elegant, was
thought to both reflect and encourage a disciplined state, its prosperity and
power.20 The Spanish Bourbon court fulfilled these purposes, in various ways
J.M. Caso Gonzlez, Jovellanos (Barcelona, 1998), pp. 1957.
Starting points for any study of early modern courts include: R.G. Asch and A.M.
Birke (eds), Princes, Patronage and the Nobility. The Court at the Beginning of the Modern
Age c. 14501650 (Oxford, 1991); J. Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe 1500
1750 (London, 1999); and the older A.G. Dickens (ed.), The Courts of Europe. Politics,
Patronage and Royalty 14001800 (London, 1977). There are invaluable essays on the
sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish court in all three, by M. Rodrguez Salgado;
19
20
155
at its different locales the old Alczar, new Royal Palace and the Buen Retiro
in Madrid, and the royal residences (reales sitios) at Aranjuez, the Escorial,
etc. and, as we have seen, its character changed as successive monarchs
impressed their personality upon it. But, even in the new unitary monarchy
of the eighteenth century, perhaps its principal aim was to integrate social,
political, clerical and cultural elites under the prince to ensure the loyalty of
provincial notables to his central government. Thus, as elsewhere, the court
existed, ultimately, to reconcile the kings subjects to his policies; to persuade
them of his authority and power; to impress them with his standing across
Europe and the globe; and to enhance his reputation among fellow princes.
The Bourbons, like their Habsburg predecessors, expected to accomplish these
aims above all by their manipulation of patronage; they controlled access to
tens of thousands of commissions, benefices, bureaucratic posts, scholarships
and professorships, grants, pensions, and other jobs as well as rewards like
knighthoods in the military orders, titles of nobility and grandeeships. A close
second in significance was their manipulation of image. For this, they and their
advisers used royal patronage of journalists and writers, musicians, architects,
painters and decorative artists. All the Bourbon monarchs and most of the
various infantes in particular Charles IIIs brother, Luis, and a younger son,
Gabriel with their genuine artistic and musical enthusiasms, combined
their personal pleasure with political duty to help make this century one of
magnificent royal patronage. In this sense, if no other, they made of the court
a most convincing exemplary centre.
Unlike the court of the Spanish Habsburgs, that of the Bourbons has
scarcely begun to be systematically studied by historians.21 It is possible,
however, to make a few basic points about it. Like the Habsburg court, it was
G. Redworth and F. Checa; and J.H. Elliott, respectively. See also J.H. Elliotts suggestive
The Court of the Spanish Habsburgs: A Peculiar Institution?, in his Spain and Its World
15001700. Selected Essays (New Haven, 1989) who cites Geertz. See also the essays in
C. Gmez-Centurin (ed.), Monarqua y Corte en la Espaa Moderna, a special number
(Anejo II, 2003) of Cuadernos de Historia Moderna. Anejos, including the illuminating
essay and bibliography by P. Vazquez Gestal, La corte en la historiografa modernista
espaola. Estado de la cuestin y bibliografa.
21
C. Gmez-Centurin Jimnez and J.A. Snchez Beln are almost alone. See
their La herencia de Borgoa. La hacienda de las Reales Casas durante el reinado de Felipe
V (Madrid, 1998) and especially their fine introduction to the court, La Casa Real en el
siglo xviii: perspectivas para su estudio, in J.L. Castellanos (ed.), Sociedad, administracin
y poder en la Espaa del Antiguo Rgimen (Granada, 1996). See also Gmez-Centurins
introduction to his volume, above, fn. 20 and P. Vazquez Gestal, Non dialettica, non
metafisica la corte y la cultura cortesana en la Espaa del siglo xviii, Reales Sitios,
XLIII: 169 (2006).
156
peripatetic with the attractions of the hunt, the vagaries of royal health and
the demands of the liturgical calendar all crucial in determining the direction
and timing of its movements. It was divided into several households and
departments kings household, queens household; kings chamber, queens
chamber; household of the prince of Asturias, etc, etc, plus the chapel, stables,
works and woods, and so forth. Almost all these were dominated by wellconnected aristocrats, usually grandees. The chief of the entire royal household
was the kings mayordomo mayor or Lord Steward. It was the kings sumiller
de corps or Groom of the Stool, however, who enjoyed unlimited, direct, 24hour access to the monarch whenever he was indoors and this afforded
enviable opportunities to influence royal opinion. Both officers handled large
amounts of patronage in the kings name, and enjoyed all the prestige and
influence that inevitably meant. The court was also surprisingly cosmopolitan,
at least until the 1760s and 1770s brought the chill winds of xenophobia
into court and cultural life. Before then, Italians and Frenchmen had made
an outstanding impression on the culture of the court and monarchy, above
all as musicians, artists and architects.22 The structure and etiquette of the
court were also cosmopolitan, at least historically, defined primarily by the late
medieval Franco-Burgundian system imported by the first Habsburgs. In fact,
the so-called Burgundian etiquette was, by the mid-eighteenth century, an
amalgam of many Iberian and other traditions. Its complex character and long
history did not prevent monarchs from tweaking the etiquette at its edges and
revising or ignoring its sometimes uncongenial requirements. Consequently,
there was little to prevent the court reflecting the personality and political
sense of successive princes. If the court was stiff and overly regimented it
was because the king or those close to him wished it so. But fundamental
structural reform threatening the interests of so many powerful courtiers
was unlikely.23
After 1720, only the marquess of Ensenada Zenn de Somodevilla,
Ferdinand VIs energetic chief minister contemplated serious reform of
the court. But he was sufficiently wise to try and avoid threatening greedy
courtiers, and his reforms of 1749 had a limited impact. Elsewhere, though,
Among important studies of the courts artistic culture are: Y. Bottineau, Lart de
cour dans lEspagne de Philippe V 17001746 (Bordeaux, 1962) and his Lart de cour dans
lEspagne des Lumires 17461808 (Paris, 1986). The last quarter century has seen the
publication of many helpful studies of the arts at court and of royal patronage. See the
bibliographies in, e.g., Un reinado bajo el signo de la paz, above, and El arte en la corte de
Felipe V (Madrid, 2002).
23
C. Gmez-Centurin Jimnez, La reforma de las Casas Reales del Marqus de la
Ensenada, Cuadernos de Historia Moderna, 20 (1998): 5983.
22
157
his reformist programmes were highly significant. While the court continued
its lavish rococo ways, Ensenada implemented imaginative and thoughtful
cultural and educational innovation. His fall after eight years in power,
nevertheless, left royal taste and court culture unreconciled to serious reform.
The latter only began to transform the court in the 1760s when Charles III
and his ministers mobilized enlightened reformers inside the royal household
and out.24
Before explaining the ways in which the court enhanced enlightened
reform, the question must be asked: why did the Spanish court, in contrast
to those of Britain or France, play such a prominent role? In fact, the courts
of the Tudors, Stuarts, Valois and seventeenth-century Bourbons had enjoyed
powerful cultural vitality. In that sense the Spanish court was following along
in the path blazed by its Renaissance and Baroque predecessors. But why did it
still continue to have such authority in the eighteenth century? One reason is
that so many of Spains men of letters lived in Madrid about half during the
later decades of the century, according to one estimate where they and the
court influenced each other, and where intellectuals could find jobs. Compared
to her imperial rivals, Spain, around mid-century, lacked the vitality of their
very numerous coffee houses, assembly rooms, clubs and other similar venues.
Such spaces were needed to support a really vibrant Enlightenment culture;
even when they emerged after the 1750s in Spain, they were relatively few.
Nor did Spaniards have access to the plethora of circulating or commercial
libraries, book clubs and reading rooms which began to thrive in Britain and
France.25 The paucity of such venues threw many thinkers into the hospitable
embrace of Bourbon princes, ministers and cultivated courtiers. Moreover, the
underdeveloped print culture afforded writers almost no opportunity to free
themselves from this private or state patronage. Spains low rates of literacy
revealed by patchy but suggestive studies; her woefully limited network of
booksellers; and her often under-skilled, neglectful and unimaginative printers
and publishers all hindered the growth of a lively commercial market for most
kinds of literature.26 In addition, Spanish writers failed to develop the literary
A. Rodrguez Villa, Don Zenn de Somodevilla, marqus de la Ensenada. Ensayo
biogrfico (Madrid, 1878) remains a starting point; see also the recent Jos Luis Gmez
Urdez, Fernando VI (Madrid, 2001).
25
L. Domergue, Frenos a la difusin de nuevas ideas, in B. Bennassar, et al. (eds),
Orgenes del atraso econmico espaol (Barcelona, 1985), pp. 1689; Brewer, pp. 17683;
D. Roche, France in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 4413.
26
Domergue, Frenos a la difusin de nuevas ideas, p. 172; D. Gonzlez Cruz,
Enseanza y alfabetizacin en el siglo de las reformas, Coloquio Internacional Carlos III y
su siglo. Actas (3 vols, Madrid, 1990), vol. II, pp. 71735; J. Saugnieux, Alphabetisation
24
158
genres which could have created and satisfied a larger readership. Specifically,
the relative scarcity of fashionable novels, compared, for example, with Britain,
held back the emergence of a female market and of women writers.27 For all
these reasons ambitious reformist thinkers who sought venues for discussion
and support, on the one hand, and an adequate living on the other, had to
resort to wealthy patrons. Neither sympathetic prelates nor court aristocrats
proved sufficiently numerous, nor congenial, nor generous at least not for
the large number of the needy.
There were clearly a number of exceptions. Among them were the hosts
and hostesses of some of the most influential salons.28 Most were effectively
extensions of the court, where the urbanity of mid-century court culture
was made available to a slightly wider public. Hosts and many participants,
especially before the last couple of decades of the century, tended to be
courtiers, ministers and royal officials, or the most fortunate intellectuals,
recipients of royal largesse. One of the earliest of these, with any claim to
promote enlightened values, was the well-known Academia del Buen Gusto
(17491751). Hosted by the marchioness of Sarria a lady in the queens
household it included primarily titled noblemen and grandees, both men
and women, as well as more humble men of letters. Especially active were the
count of Torrepalma, mayordomo mayor to Ferdinand VI; the latters future
sumiller de corps, the duke of Bjar; and the ubiquitous Francophile duke of
Medina Sidonia.29 A somewhat different salon was run in the 1750s and 1760s
by Martn Sarmiento in his monastic cell. Sarmiento was close to Ferdinand
VI, an accomplished and privileged royal adviser, outstanding cultural and
educational critic and keen enthusiast of up-to-date natural sciences. He
received guests, including his friend the duke of Medina Sidonia, amidst his
et enseignement lmentaire dans lEspagne du xviiie sicle, in his Les mots et les livres.
Etudes dhistoire culturelle (Lyon, 1986), pp. 113237, esp. pp. 17080, 2236; A. Mestre,
Libreros y difusin de las ideas ilustradas, in Estudios dieciochistas en homenaje al profesor
Jos Miguel Caso Gonzlez (Oviedo, 1995), pp. 14761; F. Lpez, La librairie madrilne
du xvii au xviii sicle, in Livres et libraires en Espagne et au Portugal (xviexxe sicles) (Paris,
1989), pp. 3959; M.L. Lpez Vidriero, La imprenta en el siglo xviii, in H. Escolar
(ed.), Historia ilustrada del libro espaol. De los incunables al siglo xviii (Madrid, 1994),
pp. 20169.
27
A.K. Mellor, British Romanticism, Gender and three Women Artists, in
A. Bermingham and J. Brewer (eds), Consumption of Culture 16001800. Image, Object,
Text (London, 1995), pp. 12142.
28
Tertulia was the word used for an afternoon or evening party, whether purely social
or intellectual and artistic. Here I usually translate tertulia as salon to indicate the latter.
29
M.D. Tortosa Linde, La Academia del Buen Gusto de Madrid (17491751)
(Granada, 1988).
159
large, excellent library, musical and scientific instruments and collection of

paintings. He thought much, wrote some and published very little partly, as
he said, because his forte was conversation. He undoubtedly agreed with his
friend and intellectual partner, Feijoo, who had written better than the best
books is good conversation the tongue writes on the soul.30 Although
similar gatherings multiplied in the 1760s and later in Madrid and other cities,
many aristocrats and courtiers failed to support thinkers as the latter wished
and were often reputed to be snobbish, touchy and overly demanding, treating
intellectuals like servants. Blas Jover, a lawyer at the Chamber of Castile
a body which handled much royal patronage understood this well. In 1746
he wrote to his good friend, the well-known reformer, Gregorio Mayans y
Siscar warning him not to trust his patrons, the XIth duchess of Alba and
her son, the future XIIth duke. He advised Mayans to serve them little, rob
them often, and leave them quickly (servirles poco, robarles mucho y dejarles
presto) for they believe they are due everything and that we have been born
solely to pay them court.31
Instead of such servitude, men of letters preferred the often very generous,
comparatively relaxed, patronage of the court and government. Beginning
under the marquess of Ensenada, the Bourbons began, systematically, to
offer a significant alternative to aristocratic patronage as they expanded, very
rapidly after 1760, royal support of writers, scientists, scholars and artists.
Under the aegis of Campomanes, Manuel de Roda an enlightened reformer
who, as Minister of Justice, handled vast amounts of royal patronage for the
king Aranda, Francisco Prez Bayer and others, Caroline patronage created
space and opportunities for cultivated ilustrados across the court and central
administration. Some, like Prez Bayer himself, preceptor to the younger sons
of Charles III, spent most of their days with the royal household. Others, like
Roda, divided their time between their own offices and the court wherever
it was. Most, however, carried out their duties across Madrid or Spain, only
occasionally having to put in an appearance, for example on gala days, in
court dress. Thus, Leandro Fernndez Moratn, a star of the enlightened
literary world in the 1790s and early 1800s, son of Nicols, and recipient
of very generous support and friendship from Godoy and Charles IV, was
Sarmiento, p. 15 and passim; G. Stiffoni, La Biblioteca de fray Martn Sarmiento.
Apuntes para la historia de la penetracin de las nuevas ideas en la Espaa de Feijoo, in
Homenaje al Profesor Carriazo (3 vols, Sevilla, 1973), vol. III, pp. 46189; Feijoo quoted
in R.P. Sebold, Colonel Don Jos Cadalso (New York, 1971), p. 22.
31
M. Martnez Gomis, Don Gregorio Mayans y la biografa del duque de Alba, in
A. Mestre Sanchis (ed.), Actas del Congreso Internacional sobre Gregorio Mayans (Valencia,
1999), p. 384.
30
160
made Secretary for the Interpretation of Languages in 1796. From then on

he was careful to present himself to kiss Charles hand at the besamanos handkissing ceremony when the court was in Madrid or Aranjuez.32 A considerable
number of men of letters were able to survive, like Leandro Moratn, for many
years or for decades, on royal generosity. Many were neither as enlightened
nor as talented as he.
There were several projects in particular which reflect the range and
methods of royal patronage. They suggest the extent to which the court and
ministries and the world of reform-minded men of letters interacted with
each other. One, according to the eminent historian, J.M. Caso Gonzlez,
was the secret sponsorship by Charles III of the influential, El Censor, a
jewel amongst Enlightenment periodicals. Published weekly, with a couple
of brief interruptions, from 1781 to 1787 by Luis Mara Cauelo and Luis
Pereira, it was a daring exercise in serious criticism of many institutions and
customs especially religious and came dangerously close to denouncing
absolutism. Several prominent ilustrados, including Jovellanos, wrote for it
pseudonymously. Many clerics and grandees resented it and the Council of
Castile, led by a cautious Campomanes, occasionally condemned particular
articles. But Charles and Floridablanca defended it and its attacks on
superstition and ignorance. Indeed, Charles enthusiastically supported the
entire project with his protection and money, including a yearly payment to
Cauelo and his backing for its true initiators, the countess of Montijo and
her reformist friends. It is perhaps in this more than any other act that Charles
justified Martn Sarmientos praise. Soon after Charless accession in 1759, the
Benedictine had written to his brother, a priest, that the new king expects to
imitate the king of Prussia [Frederick II] in all good things, and if he succeeds
we can expect much that is good.33
Charles III demonstrated his firm support for reform within the royal
household, too, in the education of his three younger sons. As their preceptor,
he chose, in 1767, Prez Bayer, a Valencian friend of Mayans and Roda,
determined anti-Jesuit and university reformer, classicist and former professor
of Hebrew at Salamanca University an institution he denounced as a swamp,
a place of barbarians because of what he saw as its continued scholastic
loyalties. Bayer assembled a remarkable team of educational reformers, well
paid and pampered, to be the infantes classroom teachers. They were a new
L.F. Vivanco, Moratn y la ilustracin mgica (Madrid, 1972), pp. 1578.
J.M. Caso Gonzlez, El Censor: peridico de Carlos III?, in J.M. Caso Gonzlez
(ed.), El Censor. Obra peridica (Oviedo, 1989), pp. 77599; M. Sarmiento, Epistolario
do P. Sarmiento, ed. X. Filgueira Valverde and M.X. Fortes Aln (Santiago de Compostela,
1995), p. 181.
32
33
161
sort of royal tutor, unlike the usual cautious worthies. Among them were
Vicente Blasco, later rector and reformer of Valencia University and Jos
de Yeregui, a friend and supporter of the countess of Montijo. Another was
Antonio Zacagnini, a Frenchman who taught modern experimental physics.
Together, they brought an up-to-date, international curriculum into the
royal household in which Lockean methods and Newtonian science were
fundamental, pillars of a secularized, enlightened education. Bayer and his
team probably achieved their most notable success in their star pupil, infante
Gabriel, Charles favourite son. Gabriel, a fine classicist, displayed his skills in
a famous oral examination attended by many courtiers and scholars and his
Castilian translation of Sallusts two monographs, Conspiracin de Catilina y la
Guerra de Yugurta was published in 1772. Charles had this volume printed by
Joaqun Ibarra, Spains foremost printer, and it was soon well known in Europe
for its exquisite beauty. Its superb physical qualities paper, ink, type fonts
and engravings guaranteed it a place in the firmament of fine collections.
It was an outstanding achievement of the eighteenth-century European
printing industry and proof that the Spanish governments encouragement of
printing had begun to reap its harvest. It symbolized precisely that admiration
of scholarship combined with beauty and useful skills that characterized the
Enlightenment.34
The publication of the infantes book embedded the reformist palace
classroom in the wider cultivated public, a rare achievement of its kind. More
enduring was another, created by the advisers of Philip V in 1712 the public
Royal Library (Real Biblioteca). The Library was a pioneer most capitals had
no court library open to the general public until at least mid-century. Housed
in a huge, many-galleried annex of the Madrid palace, its staff officially
members of the royal household from 1761, its mainly high salaries attracted
prominent men of letters. By the 1730s and 1740s its librarians and habitus
including Mayans and influential reformist writers such as Juan de Iriarte,
Ignacio Luzn and Sarmiento were so impressive that the latter proposed it
be made the centre of a kind of literary union, a carefully protected republic
of letters whose members work disinterestedly for the public benefit. Its
golden age arrived with the accession of Charles III, his reform of its statutes,
enlargement and updating of its holdings and the directorship, from the 1760s
Gregorio Mayans y Siscar, Epistolario. VI: Mayans y Prez Bayer, ed. A. Mestre
(Valencia, 1977), p. 110 for the quote. Much information regarding Bayers career may
be found in Mestres introduction. See also, M.L. Lpez Vidrieros outstanding Speculum
principum. Nuevas lecturas curriculares, nuevos usos de la librera del Prncipe en el setecientos
(Madrid, 2002), pp. 35100; D.B. Updike, Printing Types. Their History, Forms, and Use.
A Study in Survivals (2 vols, Cambridge, MA, 1937), vol. II, pp. 4986.
34
162
to 1790s, of particularly successful chief librarians, including Prez Bayer. For

most of the century, the Royal Library provided a venue for ambitious scholars
and writers, often seeking patronage, nourished by the court.35
But many other such venues emerged in the second half of the century, and
the Bourbons, ministers and courtiers often played key roles. Under Aranda,
encouraged by Pablo de Olavide, Nicols Moratn and others, a war was
launched to reform the theatre; its first battlefields were the theatres Aranda
set up at the royal residences outside Madrid (teatros de los Reales Sitios). In
them and at the reformers homes, modern plays, often French, sometimes
translated from Voltaire, were performed. The failure of these first efforts did
not dissuade their successors from renewing the struggle and in the 1790s
and early 1800s the reformers, protected and financed by Godoy, achieved
greater success. The elegant, satirical comedies of the neo-classicist, Leandro
Moratn, examining issues ilustrados were debating, triumphed critically and
commercially. Other important reformist bodies were the royal academies
which began being founded in the reign of Philip V. In the capital, they were
usually funded by the crown and supervised by its appointees ministers or
reliable, cultivated courtiers. The best of them, in Madrid, the Royal Academy
of History (founded 1736) and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (established
17441751), and others in Valencia, Seville and Barcelona, promoted
critical thinking and improved skills, a professional ethos, a stronger national
identity and the ideal of scholarship and artistic practice to improve culture
and society. The Madrid Royal Academy of Fine Arts became the foremost
Spanish vehicle for neo-classical values. It marshalled them to defeat baroque,
Habsburg obscurities; to challenge the foreign painters and architects who had
championed the baroque and rococo and dominated the heights of Spanish
artistic life for two generations. By the 1770s Frenchmen and Italians had been
nearly banished from the national artistic (not musical) scene. Ministers also
supported educational modernization in elite schools. The Royal Seminary
of Nobles (1725) was designed to improve the skills of young noblemen.
Its curriculum reform of 1770, with its emphasis on modern languages and
up-to-date science and engineering, imparted a secularized training. It better
prepared its students often from relatively modest, provincial hidalgo
Melton, pp. 1036; J. Harris, Earl of Malmesbury, Diaries and Correspondence
(4 vols, London, 1844), I, p. 45; J. Pradells Nadal, Noticias sobre los orgenes de la
Biblioteca Nacional, Revista de Historia Moderna, vol. 4, Libros, Libreros, Lectores. Anales
de la Universidad de Alicante (1984), pp. 14987; J. Alvarez Barrientos, F. Lpez and
I. Urzainqui, La Repblica de las Letras en la Espaa del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1995),
pp. 12, 467; J. Alvarez Barrientos, Gregorio Mayans (16991781), hombre de letras, in
A. Mestre (ed.), Actas del Congreso Internacional sobre Gregorio Mayans, pp. 2412.
35
163
families to serve themselves and Spain in sought-after military, government

and court posts and to fit them for refined, aristocratic society. And finally, the
Reales Estudios de San Isidro (established 17701773) was a successful model
for an up-to-date higher education, taught by professors often intimately tied
to Madrids enlightened circles. One of its outstanding teachers was Estanislao
de Lugo, morganatic second husband of our old friend, the countess of
Montijo.36
Two final sites of cultural change were outside Madrid. The first was the
real sitio of Aranjuez in the lush Tagus river valley south of Madrid. The palace
there can be best appreciated by comparing it to the better known monasterypalace at the Escorial. In the latter, built by Philip II, we see a gigantic house
of God basilica, monastery, royal pantheon, a modest royal house built for
Philip and elegant but cramped Bourbon apartments. Everything there is
overshadowed by the stupendous domed basilica; even the kings residence
seems an adjunct to its high altar. But at the town and residence of Aranjuez
all appears very different. There the town, rebuilt under ministerial aegis in
the mid- and later eighteenth century, is a testament to new precepts of order,
harmony and good taste. Facing the central block of the palace, separated
from us by the cour dhonneur, we see the hollow square of the original but
much-modified palace, also of Philip II; to the left and right, the two long
wings added by Charles III in the 1770s. But where is the house of God?
Here at Aranjuez, Philips chapel was in one of the two, large domed towers
which separate the original block from the two eighteenth-century wings. But
Charles made new arrangements. His architect, Francisco Sabatini, relocated
the chapel to his new right-hand wing. He made it almost entirely invisible
from any point of view accessible at the time. Its small lantern mocks the
basilica dome of the Escorial. It demonstrates clearly how secular space has
J. Campos, Teatro y sociedad en Espaa (17801820) (Madrid, 1969);

I.L. McClelland, Spanish Drama of Pathos 17501808) (2 vols, Toronto, 1970), I,
pp. 778, 12989; J. Prez Magalln, El teatro neoclsico (Madrid, 2001); L. Snchez
Agesta, Moratn y el pensamiento poltico del despotismo ilustrado, Revista de la
Universidad de Madrid, IX:35, (1960): 56789; C. Bedat, La Real Academia de Bellas
Artes de San Fernando (17441808) (Madrid, 1989); F. Andjar Castillo, El Seminario
de Nobles de Madrid en el siglo xviii. Un estudio social, in T. Nava Rodrguez, (ed.),
Ingenios para el mundo:sociedad, saber, y educacin en la Edad Moderna. Anejo III (2004)
of Cuadernos de Historia Moderna. Anejos. There are few studies of the Reales Estudios,
but see J. Demerson, Ibiza y su primer obispo: D. Manuel Abad y la Sierra (Madrid, 1980),
pp. 110, 1267 and C. Snchez Gimnez, Las reformas educativas en el Madrid del siglo
xviii, Anales del Instituto de Estudios Madrileos (1982), vol. XIX, pp. 4027.
36
164
overwhelmed the religious; how restrained Bourbon and courtly expressions

of public piety had become by the 1770s.37
The second site was newly built and entirely secular. Eight kilometres east
of Madrid, the duchess of Osuna created one of the most remarkable venues
of enlightened courtly culture. Mara Josefa Alonso Pimentel was a rich,
Francophile courtier, collector of prohibited books, and a founder, with the
countess of Montijo and other reformist women, of the Ladies Committee
of the Madrid Economic Society. Her Alameda (or Capricho) was a large
villa, built, with its gardens, over two decades from the mid-1780s. There,
she ran her salon, among the best known of the day, entertaining friends such
as Leandro Moratn and Jovellanos; displaying her good taste and reformist
enthusiasms; sustaining her reputation as a discerning patron by hiring
Luigi Boccherini to conduct her orchestra and by befriending Goya and
commissioning a series of canvases from him for her villa. Most singular was
her transformation of the grounds of the Alameda into a well-known garden
of ideas. Indeed, she created a series of gardens there, with temples, canals,
a grotto and summer houses. Its plantings and structures were designed to
awaken attitudes and feelings valued by the ilustrados, to reshape the spaces
and vistas into instruments of reform in the realm of ideas. The Apiary was
the clearest expression of her aims. In an elegant neo-classical pavilion guests
watched bees, kept safely behind glass, produce their honey a few metres
from a marble statue of Venus. It offered a lesson in what nature could teach
men the utility and delight of work, the value of harmony. It was a notable
demonstration of how enlightenment could, presumably, be fostered in a
refined space informed by courtly values.38
As this essay has demonstrated, the mid- and late eighteenth century
witnessed the fabrication in Spain of new or reformed cultural venues. Some
were within the royal household, most more distantly connected to it from
aristocratic salons to Royal Academies. Their creation was a mark of the
ilustrados need and enthusiasm for face to face contact. This necessity was one
consequence of Spains relatively underdeveloped print culture and it forced
enlightened men and women into direct relationships for intellectual and
J.J. Fernndez Martn and C. Montes Serrano, La planta centralizada en Francisco
Sabatini, in Francisco Sabatini 17211797 (Madrid, 1993), pp. 2978; A. Rodrguez G.
de Ceballos, Piedad y vida religiosa en la Corte durante el siglo xviii, in El Real Sitio de
Aranjuez y el arte cortesano del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1987), pp. 191202.
38
See the important article by Juan F. Remn Menndez, The Alameda of the
Duchess of Osuna: A Garden of Ideas, Journal of Garden History, 13:4 (1993): 22440
and quote, 231; P. Fernndez Quintanilla, La mujer ilustrada en la Espaa del siglo 18
(Madrid, 1981), pp. 369.
37
165
cultural debate and exchange. Ilustrados also used such contacts to exchange
books and manuscripts, to gather news from the republic of letters, to reinforce
the friendships they valued as part of a largely secularized but worthy, virtuous
existence. They cherished sociability for its own sake, too, and made much
of sharing meals, music, amateur theatricals and other entertainments. But
their gatherings were also occasions for personal and professional rivalries
and displays of intense ambition as anyone studying the careers of Mayans
or Prez Bayer, for example, could show. They competed for the jobs and
commissions doled out by Charles III, Charles IV, their ministers and senior
courtiers. They manifested, publicly, their adherence to a new sort of court
culture. It is at this nexus, where talent and ambition met money and security,
that the court played its key role, offering ilustrados what they needed to survive
and produce. The fact that so many of them accepted court or public office
encouraged an important transformation analyzed by the historian Joaqun
Alvarez Barrientos: the emergence of the Enlightenment man or woman of
letters as a public being.39 Enlightened reformers now acted on a public stage,
so often provided like the literal stages at the theatres of the Reales Sitios
by the king or by courtiers near the royal household. If enlightened cultural
reformers were at all successful and they must have had some successes, or
where did Jos Blanco White, Juan Melndez Valds and other radicals and
liberals of the 1790s and afterward come from it was partly because of the
support and encouragement of the Bourbon court and government and the
personal patronage offered by two or three generations of kings, infantes and,
at least, a few grandees.
J. Alvarez Barrientos, F. Lpez and I. Urzainqui, La Repblica de las Letras, where

Barrientos offers a slightly different take on this process, pp. 268.
39
Chapter 11
Legal Despotism and Enlightened

Reform in the les du Vent:
The Colonial Governments of Chevalier
de Mirabeau and Mercier de la Rivire,
17541764
Pernille Rge
On 27 December 1753, after two months and twenty-one days at sea, the
Chevalier de Mirabeau arrived at Basseterre to take up governorship of
Guadeloupe. Having left Toulon on 6 October, he entered the capital of
Martinique on 1 December to receive instructions from M. de Bompar,
governor general of the les du Vent, before crossing over to Guadeloupe.
Listing these details in a report to the Minister of the Marine, Antoine-Louis
Rouill, Mirabeau concluded by expressing his commitment to serve his
government: I beg you, Monseigneur, to trust that I will not forget to serve
well here and be of good use and that I desire nothing more than to fulfil
my commission, merit your kindness and the grace of the King. Four months
later, Mirabeau penned a letter to his older brother back in Paris, the political
economist and future physiocrat, the Marquis de Mirabeau, in which he sought
to portray his life as governor: here I am bishop, commander-in-chief,
half-intendant, half-president, even fully. On the surface, [I am] honoured
as a God and a half, feared like six provosts, and maybe hated for not taking
mistresses; what a devilish job! The Chevalier had accepted the governorship
of Guadeloupe in the hope that a successful administration in the Americas
would lead him to the highest post in the Ministry of the Marine. A few
Chevalier de Mirabeau to Minister of the Marine, 31 December 1753, Archives
nationals doutre-mer (hereinafter A.N), Aix-en-Provence, Col C7 A17, pice 13. All
translations are my own.
168
months into his governorship this callow optimism was tapering off. In a selfmocking tone, Mirabeau continued his letter: If you find on your way a man
of honour, who knows his duty and wishes to fulfil it, and who wishes to be
Prince, send him here to be governor in this part of the world, and he will cure
himself of his desire for authority.
Mirabeaus earnest admission to his brother and his duty-bound statement
to Rouill provide an interesting picture of the distressing reality with which
an ambitious colonial official was faced during the ancien rgime. Sent
abroad as an extension of royal authority and equipped with an explicit set
of directives, only to be plunged into a world of unfamiliar racial and socioeconomic hierarchies, an aspiring governor or intendant would soon realise
that improvement or reform in the colonies was a Sisyphean challenge and
often a slippery slope to despotic rule.
It is this tension between the pursuit of reform and the difficulty of
implementation I wish to examine in this essay. By studying the colonial
administration of the Chevalier de Mirabeau, functioning governor of
Guadeloupe from December 1753 to June 1755, and the administration of
Mercier de la Rivire, intendant of Martinique from 1759 to 1764, I will
survey possibilities for, and obstacles to, reform in ancien rgime France.
Alongside this study, I will also explore the ways in which the colonial
administrations of Mirabeau and Rivire served as the historical backdrop
for physiocratic theories on despotism and reform. Franois Quesnay, the
Marquis de Mirabeau, and Mercier de la Rivire himself devised the concept
of legal despotism as a legitimate vehicle for reform in the aftermath of the
Chevalier de Mirabeau and Rivires fruitless attempts to improve upon the
colonial system. Yet this is a link that is little explored. While the physiocratic
concept of legal despotism has received scholarly attention with respect to its
theoretical form and its impact on European monarchs, examinations of the
geo-political and socio-economic contexts from which it emerged have scarcely
appeared, other than in the works of L.P. May. Building on Mays efforts,
Chevalier de Mirabeau (CM) to Marquis de Mirabeau (MM), 22 March 1754.
Muse Arbaud, Aix-en-Provence, Fonds Mirabeau (hereinafter F.M), vol. 23.

On the semantic changes of the word despotism see Melvin Richter, The Concept
of Despotism and labus des mots, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 3:1 (2007):
522.

On the physiocratic idea of legal despotism, see Philippe Steiner, La science
nouvelle de lconomie politique (Paris, 1998), pp. 96116. On legal despotism and Europe,
see H.M. Scott, Introduction: The Problem of Enlightened Absolutism, in H.M. Scott
(ed.), Enlightened Absolutism Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe
(London, 1990), pp. 135; and Derek Beales, Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth
Legal Despotism and Enlightened Reform in the les du Vent
169
I seek in this essay to bring into view the colonial context of physiocratic
theories on despotism and reform by teasing out historical and theoretical
implications of Mirabeau and Rivires colonial administrations.
Administrative and Socio-economic Features of the les du Vent
The posts that the Chevalier de Mirabeau and Mercier de la Rivire were to
occupy formed part of an established colonial administration dating back to the
seventeenth century. When Louis XIV acquired Saint-Christophe, Martinique,
Guadeloupe and Tortuga from the Compagnie des Indes occidentales in 1674,
his entrepreneurial minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, clothed the islands in an
administration modelled on the metropolitan provinces, each island coming
under the shared responsibility of a governor and an intendant. Additionally
for the les du Vent, a governor-general was put in charge of the entire cluster
and Martinique made its administrative and commercial centre. The governorgeneral resided at Fort Royal, the capital, together with the Conseil Souverain
(a juridical institution similar to the French Parlements), while St. Pierre, at
the northwestern tip of Martinique, became the commercial centre.
The central role of Martinique placed the remaining islands of the les du
Vent in an undesirable position. Not only did Martinique enjoy a privileged
status at Versailles, it also held a favourable position with French commerce,
receiving the majority of slaves and supplies. After 1715, when Saint-Domingue
obtained commercial priority, Martinique still remained better served than
Guadeloupe and the other islands. In the period 16691864, the French
slave trade supplied Saint-Domingue with 674,145 slaves, while Martinique
received 117,151, Guadeloupe 22,357 and Guyana 14,960. In percentage
terms, this comes to 81.3, 14.1, 2.7 and 1.8 per cent respectively. For the
Century Europe (London, 2005). The works of L.P. May I refer to are Despotisme lgale et
despotisme clair daprs Le Mercier de La Rivire, Bulletin of the International Committee
of Historical Sciences, 9 (1937): 5667; and Le Mercier de la Rivire (17191801) aux
origines de la science conomique (Paris, 1975). See also Florence Gauthier, lorigine
de la thorie physiocratique du capitalisme, la plantation esclavagiste. Lexprience de Le
Mercier de la Rivire, intendant de la Martinique, Actuel Marx, 32 (2002): 5172.

Christian Boyer, Au temps des isles Les Antilles franaises de Louis XIII Napolon
III (Paris, 2005), pp. 457. Michel Verg-Franceschi, La marine franaise au XVIIIe sicle
(Paris, 1996), pp. 367.

David Geggus, The French Slave Trade: An Overview, The William and Mary
Quarterly, 58:1 (2001): 11938, esp. 121, 1267 and Table IV.
170
years 1749, 1750 and 1751, 419 French ships arrived at Saint-Domingue,
338 arrived at Martinique, and only 15 at Guadeloupe.
Such political and economic discrepancies had an impact on Martiniques
and Guadeloupes disparate social and demographic features. By the mideighteenth century, Guadeloupe was in the hands of a few grands colons who
presided over a large population of slaves with only a small population of
petits blancs and free coloured. In contrast, greater economic opportunities
at Martinique had paved the way for a more diversified society. A veritable
aristocratie galitaire emerged amongst the white Creole population. The
island also had a larger population of free coloured, and its slave population
outnumbered by one third that of Guadeloupe.
Another consequence of the political and economic imbalances between
Martinique and Guadeloupe, and these islands and Saint-Domingue, was
the high level of fraud around the les du Vent. France held an exclusive
right to trade with its colonies, yet failed to supply them with any reliability.
Privation led the colons to conclude that, if the metropole did not live up to
its responsibilities, the prerogative of the Exclusif as the French commercial
regime regulating trade between the colonies and the metropole was called
was rendered nugatory. The Exclusif thus created a spirit of autonomy
amongst the Creole population, and made illicit trade a permanent feature of
the colonial system.
An essential part of the commission of colonial officials was to prevent
contraband trade. Nevertheless, many merely turned a blind eye in recognition
of the locals plight. Several became personally implicated in corruption, thus
muddling the intended structure of power. Upon their arrival in the colonies,
Mirabeau and Rivire were, therefore, charged to govern within a culture
where violations of authority were commonplace and where Versailles utterly
failed to comprehend the complex reality it sought to rule.
The Governorship of Chevalier de Mirabeau at Guadeloupe
It was precisely the challenge of good government and the erosion of official
power structures which were at the forefront of Mirabeaus concerns during
his governorship at Guadeloupe. Part of the provincial nobility, the Chevalier
had been raised within a military and disciplinary tradition. At the age of 12,
Lucien Abnon, La Guadeloupe de 1671 1759 tude politique, conomique et
sociale (2 vols, Paris, 1987), vol. 1, p. 107.

Lo Elisabeth, La socit martiniquaise aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sicles 16641789 (Paris,
2003), pp. 50, 310.

Boyer, Au temps des isles, p. 47.
171
he was a member of the Knights of Malta and had enrolled in the Marine.
When appointed governor, he had thus served the Marine for fifteen years,
most recently as Capitaine de Vaisseau.
Despite the many experiences such a life would bring with it, it does not
seem to have prepared Mirabeau for Guadeloupe. The new governor was
stunned to discover the reality of colonial government. As he wrote to his
brother:
Guadeloupe in the hands of a rogue is a Peru; in the hands of an honest man there is
nothing to live by. This is a great evil because one has to be extremely competent in
ones affairs to resist temptation. I know that one returns to France a rich man, that
roguery is equivocal, that it is taken as cunning, that it is even considered to be the
fulfilment of rights; all of France will still take me for an honest man, but God and I
know better, and I recognise as judges only those two.10
The struggle not to succumb to fraudulence would resonate in Mirabeaus

private letters throughout the duration of his governorship. Yet if we are to
trust his words, he never engaged in corrupt activities.11 Nevertheless, the
lack of any honest means of self-enrichment did cause the governor to wish
to be transferred from Guadeloupe to the more lucrative Saint-Domingue.
Mirabeau earned a relatively modest salary of 12,000 livres, which he could
only hope to increase from the fixed bonus he received for each imported slave.
But, as mentioned above, Guadeloupe was disfavoured by French commerce,
and a bonus could only become lucrative at Saint-Domingue.
Given the high level of corruption in the colonies, Mirabeau soon became
sceptical about Frances future in the Americas. In one of his first letters to his
brother, he noted: Unless I am deeply mistaken, America will soon be lost to
us.12 Yet Mirabeaus pessimistic premonitions would not influence his level of
commitment. His correspondence with the colonial administration reflects
his efforts not to watch passively as France dug its own grave in the Americas.
Often he fleshed out the deplorable state of Guadeloupe, enumerating the
multiple aspects he thought in need of reform. He let the Minister know
that two thirds of Guadeloupes export currently went to foreigners, sirops
and taffias being the two principal commodities of such illicit trade. These,
he informed, were sold to the English and Dutch in exchange for slaves and
CM to MM, 4 December 1753, F.M. vol. 23.
One historian of the Mirabeau family noted that the Chevalier was incontestably
the finest moral product coming out of a rather impetuous and often unruly race. Louis
de Lomnie, Les Mirabeau, nouvelles tudes sur la socit franaise au XVIIIe sicle (5 vols,
Paris, 18791891), vol. 1, p. 147.
12
CM to MM, 4 December 1753, F.M. vol. 23.
10
11
172
other goods, each transaction taking place at one of the more secluded parts
of Guadeloupe or on the small surrounding islands.13
In explaining the causes of this problem, Mirabeau refrained from blaming
solely the local population. He acknowledged that contraband trade is the
essential vice of the inhabitants, yet he stressed the difficulty of uprooting an
evil which was grounded in the basic needs of the inhabitants.14 The problem,
he believed, was anchored as much in the metropole as in the colonies: I
begin to notice that French commerce causes the illicit trade, that it furnishes
the means to do so, and that French commerce at St. Pierre will cause the
final loss of these colonies.15 To Mirabeau, French commerce did not provide
an adequate market [dbouch] for the colonial goods. Canada might one day
become un bon dbouch, but currently ships from the islands arming for
Canada only used it as a pretext for trading with the more plentiful New
England.16 The meagreness of export markets was repeated with respect to
import. In July 1754, Mirabeau informed the minister that the colony would
soon lack food: We are close to lacking flour, manioc we have some cod
and other foodstuff for the Negroes, almost all of which has been furnished
by contraband trade.17 Likewise, there was an alarming shortage of slaves
(in 1754, there were 41,140 slaves on Guadeloupe and 65,323 slaves on
Martinique). Mirabeau asserted that an additional thirty thousand Negroes
will find work in my government, and they can triple its value (and augment
Mirabeaus salary).18 Furthermore, Mirabeau informed Versailles, although
French merchants protested against foreign trade, it participated in such
enterprise on a regular basis. At St. Pierre, captains from France would receive
foreign boats at night to get a better price than the one offered by French
colonialists. And after this, Mirabeau said, they cry out against a commerce,
the motivations of which they know better than any.19 To Mirabeau, however,
the most odious cause of contraband trade was the commissionaires residing
at St. Pierre. The historian Kenneth Banks describes these men as a powerful
Mirabeau to Minister, 7 June 1754, A.N. Col C7 A17, pice 58.
Ibid, and Mirabeau to Minister, 30 July 1754, A.N. Col C7 A17, pice 63.
15
16
On the French colonies trade with New England, see Dorothy Burne Goebel,
The New England Trade and the French West Indies, 17631774: A Study in Trade
Policies, The William and Mary Quarterly, 20:3 (1963): 33172.
17
Mirabeau to Minister, 30 July 1754, A.N. Col C7 A17, pice 63.
18
Ibid. For numbers of slaves, see Lucien Abnon, vol. 1, p. 24. In his correspondence
with his brother, Mirabeau criticised the harsh treatment of slaves. The Marquis, in turn,
took a more radical view and wished for its gradual abolition. Lomnie, Les Mirabeau,
vol. I, pp. 2023.
19
13
14
173
group of colonially based commercial agents, who were systematically

vilified by colonial officials.20 Mirabeau confirms that tendency. To him, the
inhabitants of Guadeloupe had fallen subject to a form of credit-bondage
to the commissionaires. The inhabitants went to St. Pierre to purchase
metropolitan goods, slaves, and essentials on credit from the commissionaires.
But the commissionaires requested a commission of five per cent on everything
the inhabitants bought and sold, and charged money for storage, causing a
total loss of up to twenty percent for the inhabitants of Guadeloupe. If the
inhabitants attempted to trade elsewhere, the commissionaires threatened to
cut off future credit.21
While Mirabeau identified the many problems with the colonial system,
he followed his commission and was certain that the island had never seen a
governor as committed to prevent abuse as he. He described himself to his
superior as a ruthless upholder of the law: I know, Monseigneur, that I am
feared, and I detest the fact that I inspire this sentiment. Yet I prefer the good
of the colony and of commerce above my own satisfaction, certain as I am that
you prefer I prevent an evil than punish it.22 To prevent rather than punish
a crime, however, a real effort to improve matters would have to be made.
Mirabeau was therefore as active in this endeavour as in his reinforcement of
the law and sketched several reform programmes to the Minister. According
to Mirabeau, a key requirement would be to transfer the commercial centre of
Guadeloupe from Basseterre to Petit Bourg, where contraband trade could be
kept in check.23 Another would be to ensure that France supplied the colony
sufficiently with slaves and food if the government insisted on maintaining the
Exclusif (unlike his older brother, the governor did not promote free trade).
It was essential, moreover, that goods were shipped directly to Guadeloupe to
avoid the commissionaires at St. Pierre.
Reform, of course, relied on official authorisation from Versailles. And
although Mirabeau avoided insulting his superiors when talking them
through the many abuses of the system, it is certain that he found Versailles
to be the principal obstacle to improvement. To his brother he explained the
Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the sea Communications and the State in
the French Atlantic, 17131763 (Ithaca, 2003), p. 157.
21
22
Mirabeau to Minister, 30 July 1754, A.N. Col C7 A17, pice 63.
23
Guadeloupe was made up of the two islands, Grande-Terre and Basse-Terre. The
town of Petit Bourg was situated on the eastern side of Basse-Terre facing Grand-Terre as
opposed to the city of Basse-Terre situated on the Western side facing towards the island
Dominique, declared neutral with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.
20
174
deplorable state of Guadeloupe as a product of materialistic gluttony and a

failing commercial policy.24 But he also took a more direct shot at Versailles:
I begin to think that the evils of this country have the same origin as those of the
Kingdom. Monarchs will be little flattered to possess entire Kingdoms at a distance
of two thousand lieues if they did not see immediately a considerable profit from
taxation; it is astonishing that we have arrived at a point where we prodigiously neglect
all other forms of grandeur than that which is furnished by gold.25
Avidity and greed had trickled down from the very top and spread out
into every branch of society. As the governor wrote: Versailles, Versailles, the
source of our evils.26
Mirabeau, in fact, conveyed to his brother the abuses of Versailles
as thoroughly as he did the flaws of the colonial system in his official
correspondence. In January 1754, he wrote: remember that it is Versailles
who commands here, it wants to know everything about everything, and for
this reason has spies who spend their time filling their poor little heads with
uncertainties and who influence the Court in every way they want.27 In May
it was the laziness of Versailles Mirabeau attacked: The Court rarely responds
to our dispatches we write ten letters about the same thing, rarely having
even a single response.28 In June, it was the bureaucrats at Versailles the culte
des plumes as he called them who suffered his anger (Mirabeaus loathing
for the Versailles bureaucrats was only rivalled by his antipathies towards the
commissionaires at St. Pierre). These men, Mirabeau claimed, were jealous
creatures who served only their own interests, seeking to disgrace honest
servants of the State who got in their way.29
The lack of communication with Versailles made the governor feel isolated.
His brother, who often visited Versailles, therefore, came to serve not only as
a friendly council, but also as the governors most efficient contact at Court.
The Marquis, in turn, was happy to communicate his brothers memoranda
to the upper echelons of Versailles, for instance, to M. Gaudin, premier
commis and advisor to the Minister of the Marine. Gaudin, however, showed
displeasure with the frank statements contained in the governors memoranda.
He informed the Marquis that the governor of Guadeloupe was too rigorous
and conscientious, neither of which was to his own good. Urging the Marquis
CM to MM, 10 January 1754, F.M. vol. 23.
Ibid.
26
CM to MM, 24 January 1754, F.M. vol. 23.
27
Ibid.
28
CM to MM, 7 May 1754, F.M. vol. 23.
29
CM to MM, 8 June 1754, F.M. vol. 23.
24
25
175
to persuade his brother to stop circulating such controversial writings, Gaudin

concluded: I stick to the principle that there are abuses everywhere, but the
greatest of abuses is seeking to correct them all.30
While Versailles met the governors concerns with silence or contempt,
the Marquis responded differently to his brothers disillusionment. In a letter
dated 5 June 1754, the Marquis ventured into a discussion of Montesquieus
three forms of governments despotism, monarchy and republicanism to
give his brother advice. Judging Montesquieus division of government too
simple, he proceeded to describe what he called a gouvernement parfait, where
men were content with their social position and esteemed in relation to their
merit. Such meritocratic government, he explained to his brother, was un
tre de raison. Human vices, however, made it difficult to reform government
into such a being of reason. He therefore specified: This makes me say that
the Prince alone, and not his ministers can direct the regeneration of a State,
and it engages me to centre regeneration on one single point which knows
the truth in all its branches but which will reduce it to the single object of
redressing our mores.31 The notion of linking reform and regeneration to the
single powers of a Prince who had grasped truth in all its branches is an early
rendition of the Physiocratic concept of legal despotism. The full development
of the concept would have to await Rivires return from Martinique and his
collaboration with the Marquis and Quesnay. At the time of writing the letter,
the Marquis explained to his brother his reasons for dwelling on this issue:
it seems to me that this topic can be of use to you in relation to the post you
currently occupy and that which you should occupy in the future.32 Against
his brothers distresses in Guadeloupe, the Marquis thus suggested that if his
brother were to succeed as a colonial reformer, or as a future Minister of the
Marine, he would either have to act as un tre de raison, or make sure that the
agent of regeneration mastered the truth.
As subsequent events would illustrate, the governors attempts to correct the
many flaws of the system prevented him from succeeding either in Guadeloupe
or at the Ministry of the Marine. Fearing that he was alienating Versailles, that
he was being discredited by bureaucrats, and increasingly suffering from bad
health, Mirabeau returned to France in the summer of 1755. Upon his return
he concluded that a virtuous career in Guadeloupe would be impossible.
Once his health was restored, he chose instead to serve the Marine as second
in command of the vessel lOrphe during the Seven Years War. Wishing still
to be appointed Minster of the Marine but bypassed for the Duc de Choiseul,
MM to CM. 69 August 1754, F.M. vol. 23.
MM to CM, 5 June 1754, F.M. vol. 23.
32
Ibid.
30
31
176
he retired from the Marine in 1761 to serve instead under the Knights of
Malta. Prior to his departure from Guadeloupe, Mirabeau seemed to have
already accepted the impossibility of implementing change. As he told his
brother: Unfortunately I see only too well that everything will remain the
same and we shall always be crushed by the gens de plume.33 To this man of
the sword, who yearned for a bygone world of aristocratic military service and
virtuous conduct, the bulwark against reform and good government was the
ever-growing bureaucracy the Crown employed to serve its centralised and
absolute powers.
The Administration of Mercier de la Rivire, Intendant of Martinique
In his role as intendant of Martinique, Mercier de la Rivire was no less keen
to prove his worth to Versailles than Mirabeau. Born in 1719, in the town
of Saumur in the Loire valley, Rivire had moved to Paris to pursue a career
as a lawyer of the Parlement de Paris. In late 1757, he presented himself as
a candidate to the intendancy of Martinique, after the then intendant, De
Givry, was recalled. At that time, Rivire had already earned himself a fine
reputation at Court. A report to the Minister of the Marine classified Rivire
as very capable of managing this administration because of his character, his
spirit, and his knowledge of commerce, which he has studied while fulfilling
his duties as a magistrate 34
As this quotation implies, the future physiocrat was already interested
in the science of commerce prior to his crossover to Martinique. May,
moreover, has suggested that Rivire was familiar with the ideas of Quesnay
and Mirabeau at this point.35 Christine Thr and Loc Charles have noted
that it was the Chevalier de Mirabeau who paved the way for the Marquis
encounter with Rivire sometime in 1758.36 The correspondence between the
Mirabeau brothers confirms this encounter, though not Rivires familiarity
with Mirabeaus and Quesnays writings. When the Chevalier de Mirabeau
learnt of Rivires appointment, he commissioned his brother to seek Rivires
assistance in completing his unfinished affairs at Guadeloupe. Writing to his
brother from Brest in August 1758, the Chevalier explained how to get in
touch with Rivire: The Monsieur is lodging at the Hotel du Petit St. Antoine
on Rue Traversire. I have passed him a note describing the things I had to
CM to MM, 26 May 1755, F.M. vol. 23.
Report December 1757, Dossier Mercier de la Rivire, A.N. Col E 276, pice 3.
35
May, Le Mercier de la Rivire, p. 20.
36
Christine Thr and Loc Charles, The Writing Workshop of Franois Quesnay
and the Making of Physiocracy, History of Political Economy, 40:1 (2008): 142.
33
34
177
do in the Americas. I would like you to talk to him about that and see with
him what there is to do and what he would like to do 37 The Marquis de
Mirabeau reported back to his brother on 30 August: Mercier de la Rivire
claims that you have to set up a power of attorney from where you are, in
order to allow him to complete your affairs there 38 It is impossible to
know what the governors note to Rivire said as well as the content of the
Marquis and Rivires subsequent conversation. One can only wonder whether
Martiniques new intendant discussed the difficulties of colonial government
with the Marquis (by then famous author of LAmi des hommes) or inquired
into the Marquis recently begun collaboration with Franois Quesnay.
A few months after this encounter, Rivire arrived at Martinique. This was
the year the Seven Years War shifted from its Canadian theatre to the Antilles.
Soon the badly provisioned Guadeloupe surrendered to the British (Spring
1759). To save Martinique from a similar fate, the government temporarily
suspended the Exclusif and permitted provisioning by means of foreign trade.
Nevertheless, Martinique failed to hold out and surrendered in 1762. Rivire,
who had fought to keep the British at bay, returned to France, but the Minister
of the Marine, the Duc de Choiseul, sent Rivire back to Martinique once
peace was declared. Arriving in June 1763, Rivire was recalled eight months
later, on 30 March 1764, charged with abusive use of authority. Rivire left
Martinique in May 1764 due to illness, learning only of his disgrace upon his
return to France. It is these events and the consequences of Rivires second
intendancy of Martinique that are of interest here.
When Rivire returned to Martinique in 1763, the island was in a
deplorable state. The governor of Martinique, M. de Fnlon, explained to his
superiors, in June 1764, the sight with which he and Rivire were met: We
found Martinique in agony, crushed by the English imposition, depopulated
of Negroes and beasts, devastated in all quarters, touched by the fury of
war, lacking everything. It was necessary to reanimate it and prevent it from
perishing.39 To give the colonies a boost after the war, the government had
issued a memorandum on 18 April 1763, which ordered colonial officials,
transferring to the les du Vent, to open admiralty ports to foreign vessels. As
of 1 January 1764, the colonies could import from foreigners items which
French commerce could not yet supply: livestock, lumber of all sorts, bricks
and other requisites for the sugar mills, carriages, chests and bureaus, fruits,
corn, oats, bran, and a limited list of other provisions Not included were
CM to MM, 4 August 1758, F.M. vol. 24.
MM to CM, 30 August 1758, F.M. vol. 24.
39
Mmoire 9 June 1764, Col. F3 159, fo. 22132, pices justificatives. Cited in
May, Le Mercier de la Rivire, pp. 467.
37
38
178
the essential plantation staples salt beef, salt fish, and flour40 The order,
however, was met with strong opposition from French merchants and the
government therefore forwarded a new memorandum on 16 August 1763,
ordering that only Carnage on the island of St. Lucie should be open to
foreign trade.41
Acting in accordance with the memorandum of 18 April 1763, Rivire
opened Martinique to foreign trade but when news of his enterprise reached
merchants back in France, a universal alarm spread in all ports of the
monarchy.42 As a consequence, the King recalled Rivire.43 In the letter carrying
this message to Rivire, the Duc de Choiseul made no attempt to conceal his
distress: I am infuriated to announce that the King has judged it indispensable
to recall you from your Intendancy. The complaints of French commerce have
multiplied against you to such an extent that it has not been in my power to
support you any longer. And what hurts me no less is that these complaints
are only too well founded.44 Fnlon, who had given full backing to Rivires
enterprise, was also reprimanded by the Minister for Rivires transgressions:
His Majesty has painfully observed the tone of authority which has been
applied to execute, without orders, vast operations which go against the good
of the metropole and the colony, such as open and unrestricted liaisons with
foreign merchants45 While French merchants objected to Rivires turn
to foreign trade, complaints about the tone of authority probably stemmed
from the colons of Martinique. In a report written 16 January 1765 on the
Ministers request, the Chambre dagriculture of Martinique presented its views
on Rivire. Dividing Rivires administration into two periods, the Chambre
explained that Rivire had been popular during the first period when he only
attended to needs; and imperious in the second where he felt all-powerful.46
Rivires attempt to keep trade with foreigners under control while aiming
to rebuild the colony thus caused members of the Chambre, who had been
on the receiving end of Rivires commercial activities, to discredit him as an
imperious despot.
Goebel, The New England trade and the French West Indies, p. 336.
Ibid., p. 348.
42
Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des tablissemens et du commerce des
europens dans les deux Indes (6 vols, Amsterdam, 1770), vol. 5, p. 168.
43
King to Rivire, 30 March 1764, A.N. Col F3 28, pice 368.
44
Choiseul to Rivire, 30 March 1764, A.N. Col F3 28, pice 369.
45
Choiseul to M. de Fnlon, 30 March 1764, A.N. Col F3 28, pice 370.
46
Chambre dagriculture en lIsle Martinique, Prcis sur lAdministration de M. de
la Rivire, pendant la guerre, et depuis la paix 16 January 1765, A.N. Col E 276, pice
124.
40
41
179
There is no access to Rivires personal thoughts in as earnest a form as the

Chevalier de Mirabeaus letters to his brother. Yet his efforts to defend himself
upon his disgrace in letters to the Duc de Choiseul provide an indication of
his sentiments. From this, it is clear that his greatest distress was not with the
Creole society, but with Versailles. In a letter to Choiseul dated 19 August
1764, Rivire told the minister that he was shocked to learn of his disgrace and
expressed a strong need to justify himself.47 He stated that it did not surprise
him that the source of complaints was French merchants. What did surprise
him was that these views had prevailed over the ministers good judgement. As
he wrote, these very charges were directed against operations, which the will
of the King, the wisdom of your views, and the cries of humanity obliged me
to undertake.48 In more fully elaborated terms, he emphasised:
[T]his provisional execution which has become a crime in your eyes is nothing but
the execution of the Kings intentions which you know; the verbal instructions and
recommendations which M. de Fnlon and I received from you, M., prior to our
departure, in the last audience you had the kindness to give us, and which had as
their consequence that I did not deny anyone permission to introduce Negroes to
Martinique.49
Rivire thus implicated King and Minister as his partners in whatever

crime they believed him guilty of committing. He stressed that he had acted
in accordance with the Ministers verbal instructions and the memorandum of
18 April 1763, thereby representing his actions as executions of orders.
Nevertheless, there was a strong undertone in his letters, which sought
to justify how he had acted on the basis of what was right, rather than what
was officially legal. In a 10-page attachment, to an 85-page defence Rivire
composed to Choiseul, the disgraced administrator meticulously listed the
complaints against him and responded to each of them.50 The list was a
thorough illustration of the miscalculations of French commerce and proof
that both Martinique and French commerce had benefited from foreign trade.
His transgressions, Rivire believed, had produced a successful outcome and
had saved the colony of Martinique from collapse.
Regardless of any verbal instructions permitting foreign trade, Choiseul did
not accept Rivires explanation. It was only during Turgots administration
Rivire to Choiseul, 10 August 1764, A.N. Col E 276, pice 66.
Ibid.
49
Ibid.
50
Rivire, Prcis des dtails contenus dan le Mmoire que jai remis Monsieur le
Duc de Choiseul. Plaintes des Marchands Franois et mes Rponses, A.N. Col E 276,
pice 118.
47
48
180
that Rivire was completely rehabilitated. A report of 1776, which considered

Rivires personal finances (Rivire had spent his own money in his attempt
to save the colony), spoke much in support of Rivire. Listing the issues for
which Rivire had been reproached, the report indicated that it was only the
importation of blacks and of cod which had gone against official authorisation.
Moreover, Rivires claim that Choiseul had verbally authorised such trade
was highly likely. And to cement the positive verdict, the report stated:
It is noteworthy that all the operations he was reproached for have since been
legalised by the government, with the exception of the admission of blacks,
which he claims was verbally recommended by the minister and which the
circumstances justified in any event.51
Rivire could not have wished for a better support, yet it came at least one
decade too late for him as a colonial reformer. To Rivire, as to Mirabeau, the
road to a good administration had been a dead end. It is ironic, however, that
not only Rivires approach but also several of Mirabeaus proposals would be
realised in subsequent years. With regard to Rivire, as the report cited above
hinted at, France would move towards a more liberal form of the Exclusif
the Exclusif mitig with the law of 29 July 1767 establishing Carnage and
Mle Saint-Nicolas as free ports.52 Mirabeau, in turn, would see some of his
propositions carried out by the British. Once they occupied Guadeloupe
in 1759, they promptly moved the capital of the island from Basseterre to
Pointe--Pitre (close to Petit-Bourg).53 They also made sure to provision the
island with slaves and food. According to Raynals Histoire des deux Indes, the
English furnished Guadeloupe with exactly 30,000 slaves in the four years of
their occupation (although modern historians have reduced this number to
15,215 slaves).54 But, however flatteringly the light of the future refracted on
the administration of Mirabeau and Rivire, the period during which they
served proved unreceptive to their attempts at reform. Versailles sent governors
and intendants abroad with the purpose of having them prevent foreign trade.
If a governor kept to his commission, however, the colonies would perish.
It is important to stress that the Ministry of the Marine showed itself to be
particularly incompetent in the ten years during which Mirabeau and Rivire
served as colonial officials and suffered from an exceptionally high turnover
of executives. From 17541764, the les du Vent had five different governorMemorandum of 23 January 1776, A.N. Col E 276, pice 163.
On the xclusif see Jean Tarrade, Le Commerce colonial de la France la fin de
lancien rgime: lvolution du rgime de lExclusif de 1763 1789 (2 vols, Paris, 1972)
53
Boyer, p. 60.
54
Raynal, vol. 5, p. 75. Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave
Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 17871804 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), p. 36.
51
52
181
generals (Bompar, Beauharnais de Beaumont, Levassor de La Touche, LamotteFnelon, and de Bourlamaque) and three different Intendants (Hurson, Givry
and Rivire). Back in Versailles, the Ministry of the Marine saw no less than six
different heads (Rouill, Machault dArnouville, Peirenc de Moras, Marquis
de Massiac, de Berryer, and Choiseul). In such a climate, where plus a change,
plus cest la mme chose, it is understandable that enlightened colonial officials
felt tempted to avail themselves of the absolute power they temporarily
enjoyed when attempting reform. It was the only way to succeed. In this
volume, John Shovlin argues that during the latter half of the eighteenth
century the Crown had its reformist moment during which it was willing to
tap the dynamic qualities of loyal servants of the Crown and of civil society.
For Mirabeau and Rivire, such willingness happened neither soon enough
nor fast enough. To them, what good would it be if reformist ideas first had
to penetrate several layers of bureaucratic dead weight before reaching the
ear of a reformist minister or monarch? And how certain could they be that a
Ministers willingness to reform would be anything but transient?
For all these reasons, Rivire seems to have drawn the same conclusion
that the Marquis de Mirabeau had advocated to his brother in 1754. In
the aftermath of his disgrace Rivire joined the Marquis de Mirabeau and
Franois Quesnay in developing the doctrine of Physiocracy and the concept
of legal despotism. Rivires highly praised Lordre naturel et essentiel des
socits politiques, published in 1767, presented the concept in the chapter
La Thorie de lOrdre Mise en Pratique in these words: where an evident
and public awareness of the natural and essential order reigns, such a form of
government is the most advantageous to the people because it is established
on a veritable legal despotism55 To repeat what May has suggested with
reference to Rivires preference for an authoritarian regime, it was Rivire
the intendant, not Rivire the jurist, who spoke.56 The lesson of Rivires
experience had been directly incorporated into his political economy.
Between the Marquis de Mirabeaus philosophical advice to his brother in
1754 and Rivires fully elaborated version of legal despotism in 1767 can be
located many hours of intellectual labour in the writing workshop of Franois
Quesnay.57 In this period, Quesnay, the Marquis de Mirabeau, Rivire, and
others endeavoured to perfect and spread the physiocratic doctrine, which its
Le Mercier de la Rivire, Lordre naturel et essentiel des socits politiques (1767), ed.
Edgard Depitre (Paris, 1910), p. 51.
56
May, Despotisme lgale et despotisme clair daprs Le Mercier de La Rivire,
p. 59.
57
Thr and Charles, The Writing Workshop of Franois Quesnay and the Making
of Physiocracy, p. 2.
55
182
promoters so strongly believed could regenerate the French Monarchy. Yet

however important this labour was to Physiocratic political economy, one
must not forget to include, as part of that process, the very real struggles on
the ground which these theoretical ideas grew from.
Conclusion
Through an examination of the colonial administration of the Chevalier
de Mirabeau and Mercier de la Rivire, I have tried to study practical and
theoretical aspects of the relationship between despotism and reform in the
ancien rgime. Working on the fringes of an absolutist, centralised government,
Mirabeau and Rivire sought to bring order, efficiency and rationality to a
colonial society plagued by corruption. Distance, however, and the frequent
breakdown of communication with the metropole, prompted Mirabeau
and Rivire to push for change at a tempo unacceptable to Versailles. On a
local level, both men would govern with an autocratic firmness despicable
to a colonial society dependent on fraud. Mirabeau and Rivires intended
good thus teetered on the edge of an abusive use of authority and both were
increasingly perceived as part of the problem they intended to solve.
Against the backdrop of these failed experiences, Mirabeaus brother, the
Marquis, and Mercier de la Rivire would spend the next decade promoting
legal despotism as a justified and preferred mechanism for reform. They
had come to realise that only if the evidence of truth was united in a single
governing being could reform be successful. In this way, the Physiocratic idea
of legal despotism as a vehicle for reform was deeply connected to the colonial
context within which it developed. The political economy of the Physiocrats is
best known for its preoccupations with domestic reform and French agrarian
developments, but the concept of legal despotism, and perhaps even the wider
theoretical underpinnings of the doctrine, had its umbilical cord attached
to one of the most frustrating places within ancien rgime government, the
colonies of the les du Vent.
Chapter 12
The Coming of Enlightened Reform

in Bourbon Peru: Secularization of the
Doctrinas de indios, 17461773
Kenneth J. Andrien
Following the hard-fought War of Spanish succession in 1713, the Bourbon

monarch, Philip V, faced the daunting task of reviving his exhausted nation.
During the reign of Philip (17001746) and especially under his son and
successor, Ferdinand VI (17461759) a fully fledged reforming impulse
emerged to reverse this dismal state of affairs by revitalizing the metropolis
and by reinvigorating its ties with the empire. These early Bourbon Reforms
merged Enlightenment ideas from Europe with a variety of discourses of reform
from the Indies, complaining about local political, social, and economic ills.
Policy makers in Madrid drew on all this information to fashion pragmatic
imperial reforms using the most up- to-date ideas available to them, but the
process always involved considerable political give and take. As a result, the
Bourbon Reforms resulted from a political process that was never shaped by
any coherent ideological agenda. Enlightened reform emerged in a contested
political arena, which shaped its contours over the course of the eighteenth
century.
One of the least examined, yet most influential, of the early Bourbon
reforms began on 4 October 1749, when the crown issued royal cdulas
ordering that all parishes (doctrinas) administered by the religious orders in
the Archdioceses of Lima, Mexico City, and Santa F de Bogot be transferred
Henry Kamen has argued, forcefully, that Spains economic losses as a result of the
depredations caused by the armies of the Bourbon and Habsburg claimants have been
overestimated by historians. See Henry Kamen, The War of the Succession in Spain, 1700
1715 (Bloomington, IN, 1969).

Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its
Empire, 17591808 (Basingstoke and New York, 2008), pp. 1523.
184
to the secular clergy. This attempt to limit the wealth and social prestige of
the religious orders was prompted by a series of letters written in 1746 by Jos
Manso de Velsco (Viceroy of Peru, 17451761) decrying the overabundance
of regular clergy in Peru and calling for removing the orders from parish
work. After determining that the process was proceeding without any strong
popular protests in support of the orders, the crown issued a further edict
on 1 February 1753 extending the process of secularization to doctrinas in
all dioceses of Spanish America. With these land-mark edicts, the Bourbon
dynasty began the process of stripping the religious orders of parishes that they
had administered, in some cases, since the spiritual conquest in the sixteenth
century. Moreover, these measures limited not only the orders wealth but
also their social prestige in the Viceroyalty of Peru. In the end, removing the
orders from their parishes had immense financial consequences, leading to
the gradual impoverishment of the regular clergy, by the end of the century,
in Peru.
This attack on the power of the regular clergy altered significantly the
traditional partnership between Church and state in the Spanish Atlantic
Empire. Spain and its overseas empire had formed a composite monarchy,
Archivo General de Indias (hereinafter AGI) Lima, 1596, Cdula real to Virrey del
Per, Buen Retiro, 4 Octubre de 1749, and a second edict sent to the Archbishop of Lima,
AGI, Lima, 1596, Cdula real to Arzobispo de Lima, Buen Retiro, 4 October 1749.

AGI, Lima, 415, Manso de Velsco to crown, Lima, 12 October 1746.

The process of secularization in New Spain has been studied by D.A. Brading,
Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacn, 17491818 (Cambridge,
1994), pp. 6281; D.A. Brading, Tridentine Catholicism and Enlightened Despotism in
Bourbon Mexico, Journal of Latin American Studies, 15:1 (1983): 122; William B. Taylor,
Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford,
CA, 1996), pp. 836, 50610; Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, Pueblos de Indios y educacin en
el Mxico colonial, 17501821 (Mxico, 1999), pp. 1619; Brian Belanger, Secularization
and the Laity in Colonial Mexico: Quertaro, 15981821, (Unpublished Ph.D. diss.,
Tulane University, 1990); Francisco Morales, Secularizacin de doctrinas: fin de un
modelo evangelizador en la Nueva Espaa?, Archivo Ibero-Americano: Revista Franciscana
e Estudios Histricos, 52:2058 (1992): 46595; Ernest Snchez Santir, El Nuevo orden
parroquial de la ciudad de Mxico: poblacin, etnia, y territorio (17681777), Estudios de
Historia Novohispana, 30 (2004): 6392; Virve Piho, La secularizacin de las parroquias en
la Nueva Espaa y su repercusin en San Andrs Calpan (Mxico, 1981), passim.

According to Antonine Tibesar, by 1800 most Lima Franciscans were living by
their wits and no longer maintained their convento. Antonine S. Tibesar, The Suppression
of the Religious Orders in Peru, 18261830 or the King Versus the Peruvian Friars: The
King Won, The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History, XXIX:
2 (1982): 217.
The Coming of Enlightened Reform in Bourbon Peru
185
comprised of distinct provinces or kingdoms, united only by a common

monarch. The edicts of 1749 and 1753 signalled important steps in
advancing the power of the renewed Bourbon state over the Catholic Church,
reflecting the advance of regalism over the decentralized monarchy ruled
by the Habsburgs. The edicts of secularization formed part of an emerging
strategy to subject the Church to royal authority, which would lead ultimately
to the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 and the alienation of Church property
(consolidacin de vales reales) in Spain (1798) and the Indies (1804).
Criticism of the Regular Clergy in Early Bourbon Peru
Criticism of the corruption and immorality of the clergy abounded in
eighteenth-century Peru, but one of the most influential and detailed reports
was written in 1749 by two well-connected young naval officers, Jorge Juan
and Antonio de Ulloa. Both men had travelled to the Indies in 1735 to assist an
officially sanctioned French scientific expedition to the viceroyalty, intending
to measure a degree on the equator. After the return of Juan and Ulloa, the
Kings powerful minister, the Marqus de la Ensenada, commissioned them
to write a secret account of problems in the Empire, which became known
as the Noticias secretas de Amrica. The expos was disseminated in governing
circles, and its recommendations and viewpoints mirrored some of the very
ideas presented in the edicts of secularization in 1749 and 1753.
In the Noticias secretas, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa wrote a scathing
indictment of clerical malfeasance, corruption, and licentiousness in the
Andean provinces. Juan and Ulloa mounted their initial attack against the
clergy by condemning their scandalous behaviour in the indigenous doctrinas
of the Andes. As they remarked:
The Indians suffer at the hands of their priests, who should be their spiritual fathers
and defenders against the extortions of the corregidores. The clergy emulate and rival
the corregidores in extracting wealth from the blood and sweat of a people who are so
51.
J.H. Elliott, A Europe of Composite Monarchies, Past & Present, 137 (1992):
Nancy Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 17591781: The Crisis of
Ecclesiastical Privilege (London, 1968), pp. 1067, 170.

The Marqus de la Ensenada held the positions of Secretary of War, Finance,
Marine, and the Indies, and he was, arguably, the most powerful politician in Spain.
See, John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 17001808 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1989),
pp. 15795; Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and
America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD, and London, 2000),
pp. 23159.
186
miserable and so wretched that even though they have no food for sustenance, they
labour for the enrichment of others.10
Although Juan and Ulloa condemned the malfeasance, corruption, and

moral laxity of all churchmen, they heaped particular abuse on all of the religious
orders except the Jesuits. The young officers maintained that throughout the
realm regular clergymen kept concubines publicly, even fathering several
children, whom they often acknowledged, giving the illegitimate offspring
their family names. Apart from the Jesuits, too many among the religious
orders lived outside of their religious houses, where policing their immoral
lifestyles proved difficult.
According to Juan and Ulloa, the Provincial of the Franciscan and
Dominican orders controlled massive annual incomes of 300,000 to 400,000
pesos.11 This great wealth in urban and rural properties, liens and loans,
donations, and parish fees meant that the provincials and their political
allies often fought bitterly with rival factions in their religious houses, even
leading to violent confrontations. Although the secular clergy committed
similar abuses, lack of supervision and training among the regulars made them
even more subject to vice and moral laxity. Only the Jesuits, who lived in
conventos (religious houses) and rigorously policed their members, escaped the
condemnation of the young naval officers.
Juan and Ulloa then turned their attention to the shameful state of frontier
missions run by the regular clergy. The regular orders usually failed to send
adequate numbers of missionaries to the frontier zones. Even when missionaries
did enter these frontier regions, the regular clergy and local Spanish citizens
too often mistreated new converts. These exploited people occasionally rose
up against the missions, making the whole frontier evangelization effort a
risky enterprise. In one notable case, a rebellion led by Juan Santos Atahualpa
broke out in the tropical forestlands east of Jauja and Tarma in 1742, and the
rebels killed or expelled the local Franciscan missionaries, effectively ending
the friars evangelization efforts in the region for decades. Juan and Ulloa
argued that only the Jesuits among the regular orders enjoyed a high level
of success in evangelizing along the frontier, maintaining large, well-funded
missions.12
Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Discourse and Political Reflections on the Kingdoms
of Peru. Their Government, Special Regimen of Their Inhabitants and Abuses Which Have
Been Introduced into One and Another, with Special Information on Why They Grew Up
and Some Means to Avoid Them. Edited and with an introduction by John J. TePaske and
translated by John J. TePaske and Besse A. Clement (Norman, OK, 1978), p. 102.
11
Ibid., p. 300.
12
Ibid., pp. 15488.
10
187
Juan and Ulloa advanced several recommendations for reforming clerical

behaviour, which clearly reflected views expressed in reform policies later
sponsored by the crown. Firstly, they urged the crown to remove the regular
clergy from parish duty, particularly in the indigenous doctrinas, because the
orders were harder to control and more subject to corrupt practices than secular
clergy. Secondly, they urged the crown to limit the number of young men
allowed into the religious orders. This would shrink the size of the religious
orders and encourage more men to live a productive life as laymen, who would
marry and add wealth to the kingdom, instead of becoming lascivious, nonproductive friars. Finally, to promote evangelization in frontier provinces,
they urged the crown to allow only the Jesuits to maintain missions.13
The material presented in the Noticias secretas reflected the complex
political and intellectual crosscurrents of the mid-eighteenth-century Spanish
Atlantic Empire. By the 1740s numerous political tracts by reformers in Spain
and Peru circulated in Madrid from proyectistas, Jansenists, bureaucratic
reformers in America, and the complaints of hispanicized Andean elites and
each presented its own intellectual and political agenda. Juan and Ulloa used
their own observations, other eye-witness accounts, and many accounts of
clerical abuses, particularly those perpetrated by the religious orders, to fashion
their expos. The two young naval lieutenants brought these discourses of
protest together in a powerful expos of Spanish misrule, designed to reform
the colonial regime and reinvigorate the states power.14 Whether or not the
Marqus de la Ensenada and other key officials in Madrid drew directly on the
views presented in the Noticias secretas, these ideas about the renovation of the
Empire were part of a public debate about reform in governing circles.15
Ibid.
Even their strong endorsement of the Jesuits reflected views commonly held in
Madrid. The Society had provided the personal confessors of all the Bourbon monarchs
and the Marqus de la Ensenada, Jos de Crvajal y Lancaster, and Francisco de Rvago (the
Jesuit confessor of Ferdinand VI) were the three most powerful ministers, and collectively,
they were known as the Jesuit Party. Adrian J. Pierce, Early Bourbon Government in the
Viceroyalty of Peru, 17001759 (Ph.D. diss., University of Liverpool, 1998), p. 14.
15
For a discussion of how these diverse groups influenced Juan and Ulloa and their
ideas expressed in the Noticias secretas, see Kenneth J. Andrien, The Noticias Secretas de
Amrica and the Construction of a Governing Ideology for the Spanish American Empire,
Colonial Latin American Review, 7:2 (1998): 17592.
13
14
188
The Earthquake of 1746 and Reform in the Viceroyalty of Peru

The impulse to reform the clergy targeted religious orders for legislative action
from the early eighteenth century. Royal cdulas in 1705 and 1717 established
prohibitions on the foundation of new conventos and hospitals without prior
approval from Madrid. In 1703, an edict ordered that small religious houses
(conventillos) in the rural areas had to contain at least eight permanent friars in
residence or face closure. This measure was aimed at the regular clergys practice
of using these conventillos to control regular clergymen scattered throughout
their parishes (doctrinas), making them legally subject to the head of the order
rather than the local prelate. The orders frequently counted the doctrineros as
members of these small communities, whether or not they actually lived there,
in order to swell the numbers officially listed in the conventillos. The repeated
reissuing of the edict (in 1708, 1727, 1731, and 1739) likely indicates that
it was not well enforced, at least until the crown removed the regular orders
from their rural parishes in 1749 and 1753.16
The severe earthquake that struck Lima at 10:30pm on 28 October 1746,
followed by a tidal wave that inundated and destroyed the port city of Callao,
brought concerns about reforming the religious orders to the point of crisis.
Over 6,000 people perished from a population of approximately 50,000
most of the major buildings of the city were destroyed or damaged (many
beyond repair).17 Virtually all of the main religious houses in the city and the
port suffered serious structural damage, forcing hundreds of nuns and male
religious onto the streets of the city. Although Limas numbers of religious
for its total population were similar to the numbers in most Spanish cities,
the destruction of their chapter houses made the regular clergymen and
nuns more visible than ever. Having large numbers of regular clergy living
in make-shift dwellings or private residences meant that religious discipline
was impossible to monitor. The earthquake also damaged many estates of the
religious orders, and their income, from interest payments on liens and loans
(censos) held against private urban and rural properties, diminished markedly.
This situation worsened when the viceroy, Jos Manso de Velsco, cut the
principal on all censos by fifty per cent and lowered their interest rate from five
per cent to either two or one per cent (depending on the type of censo) and
granted a two-year moratorium on payments.18 The viceroy imposed these
Pierce, Early Bourbon Government, p. 190.

Ibid., p. 60.
18
Pablo Emilio Prez-Mallaina Bueno, Retrato de una ciudad en crisis: La sociedad
limea ante el movimiento ssmico de 1746 (Sevilla, 2001), pp. 30911. The rate was cut to
16
17
189
changes to ease the burdens on property owners and to aid recovery in the city
and its hinterland.
The man entrusted with governing Peru in this time of crisis, Jos Manso
de Velsco, was a self-confident, energetic military man from modest hidalgo
origins in La Rioja, who had served eight successful years as Captain-General
in Chile before his promotion to Viceroy of Peru in 1745. Like his counterparts
in New Spain (the first Count of Revillagigedo) and Santa F (Domingo Ortiz
de Rosas), Manso de Velsco was a protg and close friend of the powerful
Marqus de la Ensenada (a fellow riojano). Ensenada also gave the new
viceroy unprecedented fiscal powers by naming him Superintendente de Real
Hacienda. Although Manso de Velsco ran afoul of Limas upper classes by
trying to promote safer construction methods and modernize the citys street
design, he was chiefly remembered for getting food and water to survivors of
the quake. He also received much credit for rebuilding the city (especially its
cathedral), and for constructing the Real Felipe fortress and the new port city
of Bellavista to replace Callao.19 In fact, the crown rewarded him, in 1748,
with the title, Conde de Superunda (on the crest of the wave), and his portrait
still hangs in Limas cathedral against the backdrop of the city cathedral in the
midst of its reconstruction.20
Viceroy Manso de Velsco used the problem of homeless clergy in Lima
to propose a major reform of the orders in two strong letters to his friend
and patron, the Marqus de la Ensenada. The viceroy called for reducing
the numbers of religious to levels that could be supported from the orders
incomes, and he also recommended secularization of the doctrinas of the
regular clergy. He averred that, without the income from their parishes, the
orders would have to curtail their numbers to a level appropriate to their other
rents.21 The viceroy wanted to curb the power of the Church, particularly the
religious orders, giving them a diminished, less-visible role as he planned the
reconstruction of Lima and its economy.
two per cent on censos that were limited in time (and could be redeemed) and 1 per cent
on permanent liens or loans.
19
Ibid., passim. See also, Charles F. Walker, The Upper Classes and Their Upper
Stories: Architecture and the Aftermath of the Lima Earthquake of 1746, Hispanic
20
A copy of the original portrait (painted by Cristbal Lozano) composed by
Lozanos student, Jos Joaqun Bermejo, shows the Conde de Superunda against the
backdrop of the Bay of Callao. See, Joseph Rishel and Suzanne Straton-Pruitt, The Arts in
Latin America, 14921820 (Philadelphia, 2006), p. 462.
21
Pearce, Early Bourbon Government, p. 196; AGI Lima, 643, Conde de Superunda
to crown, Lima, 18 December 1748.
190
Reform and the Secularization of the doctrinas de indios

The decision in 1749 to move against the religious orders by secularizing
their rural parishes, formed part of a broad, sweeping reform program in the
Spanish Atlantic Empire promulgated by the crowns ministers, particularly
the Marqus de la Ensenada (17431754). In the metropolis, the restless
and energetic Ensenada and his allies used the end of the War of Jenkins
Ear in 1748 to promote a major tax reform. After commissioning a census
(catastro) of the realm in 1750, his government proposed a single tax,
graduated according to income, replacing the burdensome rentas provincials
the alcabalas, cientos, and millones.22 Even before imposing this single tax on
income, Ensenada recommended taking over direct royal administration of
the rentas provinciales, ending tax farming. His government also extended
the intendancy system throughout Spain (1749) and sponsored an ambitious
naval shipbuilding program. For the Indies, Ensenada and his fellow reformers
promoted the use of licensed, registered ships to trade with the all provinces
but New Spain (1740), replacing the increasingly cumbersome convoy
system, and the crown ended the systematic sale of colonial appointments in
1750. One of the crowns greatest successes, however, was the Concordat of
1753, which dramatically increased the Kings patronage power over Church
appointments throughout the Empire.23
To deal with the reforms proposed by Manso de Velsco in his letters, the
Marqus de la Ensenada persuaded King Ferdinand VI to appoint a special ad
hoc committee (Junta Particular de Ministros) in November of 1748, including
Jos de Crvajal y Lancaster (Minister of State), Francisco de Rvago (the
Kings Jesuit confessor), the Archbishops elect of Lima, Mexico City, and
Santa F, four members of the Council of Castile, and three members of
the Council of the Indies.24 After deliberations in Crvajals country estate
outside of Madrid, the Junta Particular issued its recommendations, calling
for limits on the numbers admitted to the regular orders and banning the
orders from establishing any conventos in the newly-constructed port city of
The single tax was ultimately never implemented, but the rentas provinciales were
collected by state officials, not tax farmers from 1750. Lynch, Bourbon Spain, p. 169
23
Ibid., pp. 16095. Negotiating the Concordat was left largely to the Kings
confessor, Francisco de Rvago.
24
Carvajal y Lancaster also held the titles of Governor of the Council of the Indies
and President of the Junta del Comercio. Ibid., p. 190; Prez Mallaina-Bueno, Retrato de
una ciudad en crisis, pp. 32021; Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico, p. 63.
See also, Ismael Snchez Bella, Iglesia y estado en la Amrica Espaola (Pamplona, 1990),
pp. 12439; and Lynch, Bourbon Spain, p. 189.
22
191
Bellavista.25 The most significant recommendation, however, was the removal

of all regular clergy from the doctrinas of the Archbishoprics of Lima, Mexico
City, and Santa F de Bogot, whenever they fell vacant and replacing them
with secular clergy.
In response to this report, the King issued royal cdulas on 4 October
1749 ordering the secularization of rural parishes controlled by regular
orders, in the Archdioceses of Lima, Mexico City, and Santa F de Bogot, as
vacancies arose. The crown argued that numerous reports had complained of
regulars living in doctrinas and private residences, away from their conventos.
Furthermore, too often the regular clergymen apparently left the mundane
duties of administering their parishes to assistants. The crown concluded that
the only way to reform the orders and end abuses in the parishes was to place
the doctrinas in the hands of secular clergy. The King ordered the courts not
to hear complaints about this new policy, leaving it to the viceroys and the
archbishops to enforce the law. The crown commanded that these officials keep
the cdula itself confidential, instead of publishing its contents throughout the
realm.26 The King wanted to avoid the prejudice and endless legal wrangling
that would follow if the laws specific provisions were divulged to the orders.
Manso de Velsco waited to implement the royal edict of secularization
until 1 September 1751, approximately two months after the arrival the new
Archbishop of Lima, Pedro Antonio de Barroeta y ngel. The cdulas had
little effect on the Jesuits, who had only one parish in the archdiocese (the
indigenous district of Lima, Santiago del Cercado) but other regular orders
the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Mercedarians depended heavily on the
tithes (diezmos) and salaries (snodos) from doctrinas to support their conventos
and missions, particularly given the devastation wrought by the earthquake on
their urban and rural holdings in the archdiocese.27 Nonetheless, the viceroy
and the Archbishop commanded that any vacant parishes of the orders pass to
the secular clergy as vacancies arose.28
Alfredo Moreno (ed.), Relacin y documentos de Gobierno del Virrey del Per, Jos
Manso de Velasco, Conde de Superunda (17451761) (Madrid, 1983), p. 270.
26
AGI Lima, 1596, Cdula real to Virrey del Per, Buen Retiro, 4 October 1749,
and AGI, Lima, 1596, Cdula real to Arzobispo de Lima, Buen Retiro, 4 October 1749.
27
AGI Lima, 1596, Conde de Superunda to crown, Lima, 1 November 1751.
28
Archivo de San Francisco de Lima (hereinafter ASF), Registro II, No. 2:24,
f. 236.
25
192
The Mendicant Orders Strike Back, 17511756

The orders reacted to the edict of secularization with a mixture of surprise
and indignation. The heads of the three key orders, Fernando Dvila (Prior of
Santo Domingo), Pedro Mangarino (Provincial of San Francisco), and Joseph
Martnez de Ayala (Provincial of La Merced) wrote a joint memorial to the
crown protesting the edict of secularization on 1 September 1751, the very
same day that they received notice of the cdulas. After defending their long
years of service in evangelizing the Amerindians, the orders leaders demanded
to see the original royal edict, which the viceroy and Archbishop Barroeta
had refused to provide.29 The three leaders responded that they were entitled
to inspect any royal edict, even those marked confidential. They wanted to
ensure that the law gave the viceroy those broad powers that he claimed and
also to see that the edict was issued legally through the Council of the Indies
(as provided in ley 23, ttulo 1, Libro I of the Recopilacin de Indias). The
leaders also demanded an audience with the viceroy to discuss the measure,
arguing that any law harming an innocent third party must be publicized and
discussed openly. Finally, they claimed that whenever the crown issued an
unjust, prejudicial law, the orders had a duty to exercise their arbitrio judicial
to obey without complying.30
On 23 October 1751, the Provincial of the Franciscans wrote a longer
and much fuller defence of his orders continued control of doctrinas.31 He
stated that the Franciscans had possessed parishes from the earliest days of the
conquest, and the mendicants had carried out their duties in the parishes at
the cost of their own sweat and blood. The right to evangelize and care for new
converts derived from a tacit agreement with the Kings of Castile, beginning
with Ferdinand and Isabel. These grants were meant to be permanent, not
temporary or subject to revocation without cause. The Provincial vehemently
denied that the viceroy had any right to end this tacit contract with the King,
particularly without approval from both the head of the order in Rome and
the Pope. The viceroys only legal justification for removing the order from its
parishes was if the friars had managed them carelessly or had abused the laity,
which they denied. In short, the Franciscans demanded that the crown rescind
the order of 1749.32
The memorial then attacked the scandalous and malicious arguments
advanced to justify depriving the Franciscans of their doctrinas. Firstly, the
Ibid., ff. 430430 vuelto.
Ibid, ff. 4413.
31
AGI, Lima 1596, Fr. Juan Gutierrez de la Sal to crown, no date.
32
ASF, Registro II, No. 2:24, ff. 445445 vuelto.
29
30
193
Provincial argued that the Franciscans received these parishes not because of
any shortage of secular priests, but because of the secular clergys defects.
The mendicants simply did a better job of converting and ministering to
the indigenous peoples, and replacing their beloved friars with mere secular
priests would compromise the spiritual welfare of neophytes in the parishes.
Secondly, there were not enough qualified secular clergy to serve in the doctrinas
de indios, since so few priests had adequate language training. Thirdly, the
unexpected edict to replace the orders with secular clergy had caused untold
mischief in Lima, particularly among common folk. Rumours circulated that
friars had robbed poor Indians to enrich themselves, engaged in immoral and
licentious behaviour, and routinely disobeyed crown laws. These scandalous
lies were compounded by the viceroys refusal to publish the royal edict on
secularization and to give the heads of each order a public audience to discuss
the issues.33 This unfortunate situation led to the unjust infamy heaped on
the orders by rumour mongers in Lima, leaving the mendicants isolated and
disgraced throughout the archdiocese.34 Finally, the conflict over the parishes
also had enflamed traditional tensions between regular and secular clergy,
unnecessarily undermining peace in the kingdom.35
The Franciscan Provincial then argued that his order would suffer serious
financial losses by forfeiting its parishes, particularly after the earthquake
and tsunami of 1746. The mendicants all depended on tithes and snodos
from parishes to support a variety of projects hospitals, missions in frontier
provinces, and even food for friars in the conventos. The earthquake had damaged
buildings on their rural estates and rendered the land sterile, while epidemics
had taken the lives of workers and slaves. Income from loans and liens on
rural estates and urban real estate also had plummeted, particularly when the
viceroy cut the principal and interest rates on all censos. Moreover, bequests
for pious works (obras pas), for religious confraternities (cofradas) sponsored
by the friars, and alms had declined markedly. Under these circumstances, the
memorial argued that Provincials would not have the funds to visit conventos
under their jurisdiction, to support missionary activities, or even to transport
friars to and from Spain. In short, the devastation of the 1746 earthquake,
coupled with losing their parishes, had undermined the religious mission of
the mendicant order.36
In truth, the religious orders risked suffering huge financial losses by
forfeiting rural parishes. According to a study commissioned by the Manso
Ibid., ff. 45860.
Ibid.
35
Ibid., ff. 494.
36
Ibid., 48599.
33
34
194
de Velsco in 1748, the viceregal treasury paid out 442,587 pesos annually
in salaries (snodos) to regular clergymen working in parishes throughout the
realm.37 Moreover, members of the orders customarily charged fees (obvenciones)
for performing duties, such as baptisms, marriages, or burials. According to
the viceroy some parish priests made between 4,000 and 8,000 pesos annually
in salaries and fees.38 The religious orders only allowed their members to keep
a portion of these benefits, with the remainder going to the order to support
its various religious houses, missions, and charitable activities. It is no small
wonder that the Provincials of the Franciscan and Mercedarian orders went
to Madrid in a futile effort to convince the King himself to rescind the edict
of secularization.39
The strong opposition of the orders made it difficult for Manso de Velsco
to implement the edict of secularization. In a letter of 1 November 1751
the viceroy lamented that the regulars considered themselves the absolute
owners of the doctrinas, and that they felt free to use snodos and tithes from
these parishes for routine expenses at the conventos or to reinvest the money in
rural estates. The Franciscans proved particularly recalcitrant in handing over
parishes when a vacancy arose. Instead, the Provincial named an interim friar,
calling him a guardian of the parish. By making such interim appointments,
the Franciscans managed to keep control over lucrative parishes, delaying
the time when the order would cede them to secular clergyman.40 Manso de
Velsco also complained of the orders insistence on seeing the text of the edict
of 4 October 1749, which he had denied them in accordance with the Kings
wishes.
Despite opposition from the orders, the viceroy assured the monarch
that he would continue to enforce the law, which represented the longterm best interests of the crown, the Amerindian parishioners, and even
the orders themselves. Losing their parishes would force the orders to trim
their excessive numbers and keep them living in conventos, where it would
be easier for the leadership to enforce the rules of each order.41 The only
regular order exempted from the edict was the Jesuits, who had only one small
AGI, Lima, 1596, Resumen general de las Pensiones consignados en las reales
cajas y provincias Del distrito del tribunal y audiencia rl de quentas de este reyno, con
Separacion de sus repectivas aplicacines, Lima, 30 June1748.
38
AGI, Lima 1596, Marqus de Regalia to Marqus de la Ensenada, Madrid, 20 July
1751; AGI, Lima, 1596, Junta Particular de Ministros, Madrid, 20 July 1751.
39
AGI, Lima 1596, Marqus de Regalia to Marqus de la Ensenada, Madrid,
20 July 1751.
40
AGI, Lima, 1596, Conde de Superunda to crown, Lima, 1 November 1751.
41
Ibid.
37
195
parish in Santiago del Cercado in Lima, where they maintained a school for
the children of indigenous leaders (caciques). The viceroy thought depriving
the Society of this small parish might force them to close an important school
unnecessarily.42
Within a few weeks the Archbishop of Lima wrote his own letter about
the problems resulting from secularization, and he offered some possible
grounds for a compromise to end the political imbroglio in Lima. Archbishop
Barroeta explained that the regulars saw the parishes as a reward for service
in the spiritual conquest of Peru, ceded by the Catholic Kings and verified
by succeeding monarchs. The regular orders viewed the viceroys actions as
illegal and arbitrary. Orders controlled 61 doctrinas in 1751 (while the secular
clergy held 90), and they provided a great deal of wealth to the regular clergy
amidst the economic problems following the earthquake of 1746. To ease
these rising tensions, the Archbishop suggested allowing the orders to keep
a few parishes, to enjoy a temporary exemption from tithes on their rural
properties where the land had been rendered sterile by the earthquake, and
to extend the time that the orders could enjoy the benefits of their parishes.
Nonetheless, Archbishop Barroeta believed that the orders should be removed
from parishes over time. He also argued that they should not reconstruct all
of their conventos, and the prelate suggested an inspection (visita) to determine
how to curb the excessive numbers of regular clergy in the city. In short, the
Archbishop wanted to limit the size of the orders, to curtail their freedom in
the city, and to ensure that they adhered strictly to the disciplinary rules of
their orders over the long term.43
On 17 November 1752, the reforming Pope Benedict XIV dealt a serious
blow to the regular orders in Peru, when he issued a bull supporting Ferdinand
VI and his edicts of 1749 ordering secularization of the parishes. According
to Pope Benedict, his predecessor, Pius V, had granted regulars the right to
administer doctrinas in the Indies on 24 March 1567, but this concession was
a temporary measure to deal with shortages of qualified secular priests. The
Pope made clear that the Real Patronato granted King Ferdinand the power
to reverse this concession, particularly given the numbers of secular clergy
capable of administering parishes. Finally, Pope Benedict stated that in all
pastoral matters (such as administering doctrinas) regular clergymen were
under the jurisdiction of the bishops and archbishops.44
AGI Lima, 1596, Conde de Superunda to crown, Lima, 20 November 1751.

AGI Lima, 1596, Pedro Antonio Arzobispo de Lima to crown, Lima, 26 November
1751.
44
AGI Lima, 1596, Papal Bull of Benedict XIV, Roma, 17 November 1752.
42
43
196
After receiving confirmation of its powers from the papacy, the crown
issued a new cdula on 1 February 1753 extending the policy of replacing
regular clergy with secular priests to every bishopric in the Indies. According
to the crown, the original law of 1749 (which applied only to the large
Archbishoprics of Lima, Mexico City, and Santa F de Bogot) were extremely
successful and universally approved, even by the religious orders themselves.
The crown extended the power of bishops to reform the regulars and to end
unrest and upheavals, which had disrupted conventos in the Indies over many
years.45
Accompanying this new royal edict was a letter from the Marqus de la
Ensenada to his friend and protg, Manso de Velsco, which reiterated the
Kings strong desire to have this new policy rigorously enforced. The Marqus
de la Ensenada did not want to compromise with the orders, which he argued
should not be given: a pension nor a division of the profits from the parishes.46
The long memorial from the Franciscan Provincial had no effect on changing
the royal will, and the crown would not consider extending any benefits to
the regular orders to compensate for losing doctrinas. The Marqus de la
Ensenada reminded the viceroy that his counterpart in Mexico, the Conde
de Revillagigedo admitted no resistance to enforcing the royal order. As he
made clear: the express and absolute resolution of the King is the complete
divestment of the regulars from the parishes.47
Table 12.1 Doctrinas in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 22 June 1754
Bishopric Dominicans Franciscans Augustinians Mercedarians
30
13
0
15
Lima
Chuquisaca
7
0
6
6
0
2
0
0
Misque
7
1
7
9
Cusco
3
2
3
2
La Paz
9
1
0
1
Arequipa
11
0
0
1
Huamanga
3
17
12
9
Trujillo
70
36
28
43
Total
Jesuits
1
0
8
0
4
0
0
0
13
Seculars
102
116
6
107
68
47
68
50
564
Source: Alfredo Moreno (ed.), Relacin y documentos de Gobierno del Virrey del Per, Jos A.
Manso de Velsco, Conde de Superunda (17451761) (Madrid, 1983), pp. 2416.
AGI Lima, 1596, Cdula real, Buen Retiro, 1 February 1753.

AGI Lima, 1596, Marqus de la Ensenada to Conde de Superunda, Madrid,
1 February 1753.
47
Ibid.
45
46
197
When Manso de Velsco conducted a survey of the doctrinas throughout

the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1754, he found that regular clergymen still held
most of their original parishes, even in the Archbishopric of Lima. According
to Table 12.1, the orders controlled 59 parishes in the Archbishopric: the
Dominicans with 30, the Franciscans with 13, the Mercedarians with 15,
and the Jesuits with their lone parish in Santiago del Cercado in Lima. This
was only two fewer than the regular orders had controlled in 1749.48 As the
viceroy and the Archbishop had predicted, the process of secularizing parishes
in the Archdiocese of Lima would be a long, steady process, particularly with
the recalcitrant Franciscans. In the other bishoprics, however, the presence of
the regular orders was much less pronounced, except in the frontier region of
Misque, where Jesuit missionaries outnumbered secular clergymen, and in
Trujillo where the Franciscans, Augustinians, and Mercedarians still held a total
of 38 parishes, compared to 50 by the secular clergy (see Table 12.1). In most
other districts, however, moving towards secular control was less controversial
than in the Archbishopric of Lima. In fact, a survey of the doctrinas of Lima
in 1756 indicated that over the subsequent two-year period, the regular orders
had been reduced from 59 to 45 parishes the Dominicans still held 23
(down from 30), the Franciscans 9 (down from 13), the Mercedarians 13
(down from 15), and the Jesuits 1.49
The War of Attrition Over the Doctrinas, 17571773
Given the ongoing controversy over secularization in Peru, the crown issued
a royal cdula on 23 June 1757, designed to placate the religious orders by
allowing them to retain a few of their richest parishes. The new edict of 1757
provided that each order could retain one or two of the choicest (ms pingues)
parishes in each district where they had conventillos, but these religious
houses had to be officially licensed by the crown and have at least eight friars
in permanent, continual residence.50 Instead of pacifying the orders, however,
this new edict prompted nearly two decades of acrimonious disputes between
viceregal authorities and the orders over what constituted a district. The orders
This was approximately the same number of doctrinas that the regular clergy held
in Lima in the mid-seventeenth century. See Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and its Enemies:
Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 16401750 (Princeton, 1997), p. 9. According
to Mills figures, the regulars held 67 parishes and the secular priests 108.
49
AGI Lima, 1596, Joseph de Barbadillo y Frias to crown, Lima, 21 February
1756.
50
AGI, Lima, 1596, Conde de Superunda to crown, Lima, 12 August 1760; ASF,
registro 2:23, f. 500.
48
198
thought that a district was a civil unit (such as a corregimiento), while the
viceroy and bishops contended that a district meant a province of the orders,
which roughly corresponded to a bishopric. These conflicting interpretations
of the 1757 edict made a considerable difference in the number of parishes in
dispute by both sides.
The viceroy wrote the crown on 12 August 1760 about his slow but
steady progress in transferring parishes to secular control. Manso de Velsco
explained that the 1753 edict of secularization had called for implementing
the order with the utmost gentleness, so he worked to ease tensions in the
viceroyalty. He ordered that parishes be transferred to secular clergymen only
after a vacancy occurred, naming a suitable candidate with language skills to
administer each doctrina. If no qualified secular priest could be found, then
the authorities appointed a suitable member of the religious orders. Moreover,
according to the edict of 1757, Manso de Velsco and Archbishop Barroeta
had designated one or two of the choicest doctrinas in each bishopric for the
regular orders to support missionary activities in the viceroyalty. The viceroy
pointed out, however, that the Dominicans and Mercedarians had no ongoing
missions, the Augustinians maintained only a few remote outposts, and the
Franciscans had been driven from their largest missions along the Tarma-Jauja
frontier over a decade earlier by the rebel, Juan Santos Atahualpa. Although
the orders still resisted losing their parishes, the viceroy assured authorities in
Madrid that secularization continued apace.51
By 1760 each of the prelates in the viceroyalty presented a report to the
crown about the process of secularization, indicating which parishes in their
districts the orders would retain, according to the provisions of the cdula
of 1757. Archbishop Barroeta began his memorial by denying vigorously
rumours spread by the orders that their members had been deprived of parishes
before a vacancy had occurred, leaving groups of unemployed vagabond
friars to roam the countryside. He further argued that no legitimate rural
conventillos existed in the archbishopric, denying Franciscan claims that many
of their parishes were annexed to missions.52 The Bishop of La Paz reported
that regular clergymen still held thirteen parishes, but all would eventually be
secularized, except four Jesuit parishes supporting their missions in Juli.53 The
Bishops of Arequipa and Huamanga reported no parishes tied to missions or
AGI Lima, 1596, Lima, Conde de Superunda to crown, 12 August 1760.

AGI, Lima, 1596, Lima, Pedro Antonio Arzobispo de Lima to crown, 2 January
1760.
53
AGI, Lima, 1596, Diego Antonio Obispo de La Paz to crown, La Paz, 15 April
1759.
51
52
199
to rural conventillos (with at least eight resident friars).54 The Bishop of Trujillo
wrote that he had not been in his district long enough to give a thorough
report, but he listed only seven parishes linked to rural conventillos.55 Finally,
the Bishop of Cusco reported no parishes tied to conventillos, while the Bishop
of La Plata listed seventeen parishes under the control of the orders, but he
acknowledged that none were tied to formal conventillos, making all subject to
secularization as vacancies occurred.56
The process of secularization continued its slow inexorable path as vacant
parishes controlled by regular orders went to secular clergymen. According
to Manso de Velscos successor, Manuel de Amat y Junient, the religious
orders continued to lobby for parishes in each civil district, forcing the crown
to resolve once and for all the ambiguous language in the edict of 1757. In
a royal cdula issued from Aranjuez on 3 July 1766, the crown commanded
that one or two choice parishes be reserved for each religious province of the
orders, not for each corregimiento as the orders had demanded.57 This edict
effectively deprived the religious orders of any legal grounds for resisting the
overall process of secularization in the Viceroyalty of Peru. The final blow
to the orders, however, came with a royal cdula of 10 July 1773 ordering
the corregidor and treasury officials of Conchucos to pay the salary of a local
doctrinero directly to him, instead of sending the money to the Provincial of
his order, La Merced. This new policy caused an uproar, as the orders argued
that only Provincials should receive these snodos. The orders would then pay
only a portion of the salary to the doctrinero, keeping the rest for the needs
of the community. Paying salaries directly treated the few remaining regulars
serving in parishes just like members of the secular clergy, effectively denying
the orders any claim to snodos.58 The edict of 1773 essentially completed the
process of depriving the orders of financial support from rural parishes.
AGI, Lima, 1596, Jacinto Obispo de Arequipa to crown, Arequipa, 13 March

1759; AGI, Lima, 1596, Phelipe Obispo de Guamanga to crown, Guamanga, 14 March
1759.
55
AGI, Lima, 1596, Francisco Xavier Obispo de Trujillo to crown, Trujillo,
5 December 1759.
56
AGI, Lima, 1596, Juan Obispo de Cuzco to crown, Cuzco 16 February 1760;
Cayetano Obispo de La Plata to crown, La Plata, 15 February 1760.
57
Vicente Rodrguez Casado and Florentino Prez Embid (eds), Manuel de Amat y
Junient, Virrey del Per, 17611776: Memoria de Gobierno (Sevilla, 1947), p. 57.
58
ASF, Registro II, 2, 27, ff. 61319.
54
200
Conclusion
Secularization of the rural parishes constituted a forceful, direct attack on
the considerable wealth and power of the regular clergy in the eighteenth
century. By 1754 the orders had controlled 190 parishes and received nearly
450,000 pesos annually in snodos from the Peruvian treasuries. Moreover,
their imposing religious houses dominated the urban landscape in Lima and
played a central role in religious, political, and social life in the capital city. The
secularization policy undermined the entrenched regular orders, particularly
the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Mercedarians, who slowly
lost their lucrative parishes over the course of several decades. These orders
were vulnerable because of reports about their corruption, moral laxity, and
abuse of their Amerindian parishioners in Peru. The devastating earthquake
of 1746 provided the occasion to reform the orders and limit their wealth
and power. The missionary activities of the regular orders, which had been
long used to justify their administration of the doctrinas, had also diminished
considerably by the eighteenth century, particularly after the Franciscans were
expelled from the Tarma-Jauja frontier in 1742. Losing their doctrinas led
to a gradual decline in income for the orders, and their poverty and lack of
political influence made it relatively easy for the new republican government
to expel the regulars from Peru in 1830.59
The edicts of secularization succeeded over time because they had divided
the church, leaving the regular orders exposed on one side, while the secular
clergy gained control over rich parishes formerly held by regular clergymen.
The Jesuits were the one religious order less directly affected by the edicts
of secularization, since they administered few parishes outside of missionary
areas, exempting them from the edicts of 1749 and 1753. Moreover, the
Jesuits were largely protected from these crown policies by the three most
powerful ministers during King Ferdinands rule, Jos de Carvajal y Lancaster,
the Marqus de la Ensenada, and Francisco de Rvago, who were known
collectively as the Jesuit Party because of their well-known support for the
Society.60 The Jesuits would only later fall victim to the advance of regalism,
when King Charles III and a new group of enlightened ministers expelled
them from Spain and the Empire in 1767. The real winner in the struggle
over the doctrinas, however, was the crown, which dramatically extended its
power over the Church by replacing the more independent regular orders
with secular clergy, over whom the crown had considerably more control.
Tibesar, The Suppression of the Religious Orders in Peru, pp. 22034.
Prez Mallaina Bueno, Retrato de una ciudad en crisis, p. 322; Pierce, Early
Bourbon Government, p. 14.
59
60
201
By depriving the regular clergy of their parishes, reformers in Spain and Peru
extended the states power over the orders, altering in fundamental ways the
traditional partnership between Church and state in Spains Atlantic Empire.
As the political struggles over secularization in Bourbon Peru indicate,
enlightened reform emerged after a long, complicated political process in
which the crown, colonial interest groups, and the church competed for
power. The successful edicts of secularization also prove that serious efforts
to reform and renovate the imperial relationship began a generation before
the more well-known policies during the reign of King Charles III (1759
1788). Although the Enlightenment in Southern Europe provided the broad
intellectual context for reform, these ideas fused with a variety of reformist
proposals sent from the Indies by Juan and Ulloa and others, all addressing
the supposed political, social, and economic ills of the empire. Many of these
concerns went back to the Habsburg era, including efforts to remove the regular
orders from parish work, which crown authorities, reformers (arbitristas), and
some churchmen had discussed since the seventeenth century. Bishop Juan
de Palafox y Mendoza, for example, expelled the regulars from parishes in
his diocese in Puebla, Mexico, although the effort ultimately ended when
the crown recalled him in 1649.61 Even though Palafox was a favourite of
King Philip IV and the Conde-Duque de Olivares, the Madrid government
ultimately proved unable to mount a consistent challenge to the entrenched
power of the religious orders in the Indies during this earlier period.62 By
the reign of Ferdinand VI, however, reformers, crown ministers, and the
progressive Pope Benedict XIV, remained committed to removing the regulars
from parish work in the Indies, marking a clear and permanent shift in crown
policy towards the Church.63 Moreover, the astute political manoeuvring of the
viceroy, Jos Manso de Velsco, allowed him to accumulate the political clout
needed to remove the religious orders from their parishes, rebuild city of Lima
after the earthquake, and outwit his political rivals. Although the Marqus de
la Ensenada dominated the political arena in Spain, his policies also always
had powerful opponents, which contributed to his precipitous fall from
power in 1754. With the downfall of Ensenada, followed by the removal of
Rvago from court in 1757 and the mental breakdown of King Ferdinand VI,
enlightened reform lost momentum until the reign of Charles III. These
ebbs and flows of royal policy made the whole process of imperial reform
J.I. Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 16101670 (Oxford, 1975),
pp. 199247.
62
J.H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline (New
Haven, CT, and London, 1986), p. 489.
63
Snchez Bella, Iglesia y estado, pp. 1323.
61
202
and renovation appear a diverse, halting, and even contradictory patchwork

of policies. Enlightened reform emerged from a volatile, changing political
environment in Spains Atlantic Empire over the course of the eighteenth
century.
Chapter 13
The Savoyard State:

Another Enlightened Despotism?
Christopher Storrs*
Introduction
Merely to suggest that the Savoyard state might have exemplified Enlightened
Despotism, in the generation before the French Revolution, might seem
perverse since all previous historians of Enlightened Despotism, including
Gagliardo, Krieger and Hartung have ignored it. This is not to deny the
impressive eighteenth-century reforms which transformed that state, i.e.
the territories ruled by the House of Savoy. These reforms included the
reduction of ecclesiastical and feudal autonomy, an overhaul of central and
local government, radical changes to the fiscal system, codification of the laws,
and a transformation of key cultural, educational and intellectual institutions
including the university of Turin. However, this fundamental reorganisation
of the Savoyard state occurred before the age of Enlightened Despotism,
* I should like to thank Gabriel Paquette and Nicola Cowmeadow for their
comments on an earlier version of this chapter. I should also like to thank Professor Derek
Beales for his great generosity in providing me with a transcript of his notes on a report
of c. 1785 on the kingdom of Sardinia, from the Haus-, Hof und Staatsarchiv, Vienna,
Italien, Diplomatische Correspondenz, 37, Sardinien.

J.G. Gagliardo, Enlightened Despotism (London, 1967).

L. Krieger, An Essay on the Theory of Enlightened Despotism (Chicago and London,
1975).

F. Hartung, Enlightened Despotism (London, 1957).

From 1720 these territories comprised the principality of Piedmont the largest,
most populous and wealthiest component of the state the Duchy of Savoy, the Duchy of
Aosta, the County of Nice, and the small, rather poor island realm of Sardinia which gave
the ruling family its royal status.

In general, cf. G. Quazza, Le riforme in Piemonte nella prima met del Settecento
(2 vols, Modena, 1957); G. Symcox, Victor Amadeus II, Absolutism in the Savoyard State
204
i.e. 1690-1713 and 1748. In addition, those responsible for reform, Victor
Amadeus II (16751730) and his son and successor, Charles Emmanuel III
(17301773), are not generally thought of as enlightened. Indicative of their
attitude was their treatment of the radical Piedmontese thinker, Radicati
di Passerano, who died in exile in 1737, and of the Neapolitan, Pietro
Giannone, who died incarcerated in Turin in 1748. As for the period after
1748, the prevailing view has long been that there was little by way of either
Enlightenment or reform in the Savoyard state. Emblematic here was the
experience of Carlo Denina (17311813), one of the subjects of the king of
Sardinia most likely to be thought an Enlightenment figure. Having published
abroad (at Florence, 1777), in breach of Savoyard law, his DellImpiego delle
Persone, he was dismissed from his post at the university of Turin and briefly
incarcerated. In 1782 he abandoned Piedmont for Berlin, where he was
welcomed (as had been the Piedmontese scientist Luigi Lagrange) by Frederick
the Great. Rejected by the unenlightened Charles Emmanuel III, an event
which shocked Enlightenment Italy, Denina thus found refuge with a true
Enlightened Despot.
Drawing in part on Deninas accounts, nineteenth-century Italian historians,
especially those influenced by the Risorgimento tradition, were critical of the
successors of Victor Amadeus II,10 and above all of Victor Amadeus III (1773
1796), whom they regarded as largely responsible for a decline of the Savoyard
state which culminated in its collapse and incorporation into the French state
between 1800 and 18141815.11 This negative image of the late eighteenth16751730 (London, 1983); C. Storrs, War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy, 16901720
(Cambridge, 1999).

Cf. D. Carpanetto and G. Ricuperati, Italy in the Age of Reason 16851789
(Harlow, 1987), p. 204ff.

Cf. F. Venturi, Alberto Radicati di Passerano (Turin, 1954; reissued, ed. S. Berti,
2005); and Alberto Radicati, conte di Passerano e Cocconato, Discorsi Morali, Istorici e
Politici, ed. G. Ricuperati and D. Canestri (Turin, 2007).

Cf. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, (Rome, 1960) [henceforth DBI] Denina,
L. Braida; Laffermazione della censura di stato in Piemonte dalleditto di 1648 alle
Costituzioni del 1772, Rivista Storica Italiana [henceforth RSI], 3 (1990), p. 781ff.

Pietro Verro observed to his brother, Alessandro, commenting on the Viennese
index of prohibited books and the condemnation of Denina, Here you have the eighteenth
century, the age of philosophy, Braida, LAffermazione, p. 789
10
Cf. G. Ricuperati, Limage de Victor Amde III et de son temps dans
lhistoriographie: attentes, vellits, rformes et crise de lAncien Rgime, in Btir une
ville au sicle des lumires. Carouge: modle et ralits (Turin, 1986), pp. 1533.
11
N. Bianchi, Storia della Monarchia Piemontese dal 1773 sino al 1861 (4 vols,
Turin, 187785), passim; M.; Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy
205
century Savoyard state has proved enduring among Anglophone historians,

from the interpretative essays of Italian eighteenth-century reform of John
Roberts in the 1960s12 to the contribution of the late Matthew Anderson
in H.M. Scotts milestone collection of essays on Enlightened Absolutism
published in 1990.13 The Savoyard state continues to be perceived as offering
a stark contrast with other models of Enlightened Despotism in Italy, notably
the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under Leopold of Austria, the duchy of Milan
under Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, and the kingdom of Naples under
Carlo di Borbone and his successors.14 Any interest in Savoyard reform on the
part of other states after 1763, notably the French survey of the fiscal system
of other states immediately after the conclusion of the Seven Years War, was
concerned above all with the efficacy of measures effected before 1748.15
There is hope, however, for the Savoyard state. The wide-ranging revision
of the notion of Enlightened Despotism in recent decades offers some
states, which have not hitherto been allowed within the fold of Enlightened
Despotism, entry at last into what is becoming an ever less exclusive club.
The concept of Enlightened Despotism, of a generation of reforming rulers
carrying through a programme of reform which was broadly influenced by the
Enlightenment between the end of the Seven Years War and the outbreak of
the French Revolution, was effectively framed c. 1930.16 Called into question
in the 1960s and 1970s, that concept has been given new life, due in large part
to the collection of essays edited by Hamish Scott (which is cited above). But
the revived Enlightened Despotism is not what it was, or what we thought it
was. Enlightened Despotism is no longer enlightened in the sense of being
influenced by French writers such as Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire.
Instead, we are more inclined to acknowledge the influence, particularly
17731821. State Building in Piedmont (Lampeter, 1997), passim.
12
J.M. Roberts, Enlightened Despotism in Italy, in H. Acton et. al. (eds), Art and
Ideas in Eighteenth Century Italy. Lectures given at the Italian Institute 19571958 (Rome,
1969), pp. 2544.
13
M.S. Anderson, The Italian Reformers, in H.M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened
Absolutism. Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke, 1990),
p. 55ff.
14
F. Valsecchi, LAssolutismo illuminato in Austria e in Lombardia (2 vols, Milan,
1934); ibid., LItalia nel Settecento (Milan, 1971); S.J. Woolf, A History of Italy 1700
1860. The Social Constraints of Political Change (London, 1979).
15
A. Alimento, Riforme fiscali e crisi politiche nella Francia di Luigi XV. Dalla taille
tarifee al catasto generale (Florence, 1995), passim.
16
Cf. H.M. Scott, Introduction: The Problem of Enlightened Despotism, in
Enlightened Absolutism, p. 1ff.
206
in central and eastern Europe, of cameralism17 and, in Catholic Southern

Europe, of the Italian cleric, Ludovico Antonio Muratori. In addition, while
acknowledging the importance of an international environment favourable to
reform and the circulation of reforming ideas, historians are far more attuned
to the idea that local economic and social conditions, and traditions, might
inspire, even necessitate, reform. Last, but by no means least, the revision of
Enlightened Despotism means that its exponents were not always recognisably
despotic, although Derek Beales has made a powerful case for this on behalf of
Joseph II,18 that ministers might play as important a part in the reform process
as the monarchs they served, and that a climate of opinion might also be
conducive to reform.19
At the same time as our interpretation of Enlightened Despotism has been
revised, so too has our knowledge and understanding of what was happening
in the Savoyard state in the second half of the eighteenth century. Giuseppe
Ricuperati, not coincidentally a pupil of Franco Venturi, author of the
groundbreaking and, for all its defects, justifiably influential multi-volume
Settecento Riformatore,20 has reinterpreted the so-called Bogino era, i.e. the
years between 1750 and 1773, when Charles Emmanuel IIIs Secretary of
War, count Giovanni Battista Bogino di Migliandolo, was effectively chief
minister.21 According to Ricuperati, king and minister were inspired by
Muratoris rather traditional vision of good government, or pubblica felicita,22
such that the Savoyard state approximated closely, in these decades, to a wellordered police state. For Ricuperati, Bogino and his reforms were alien to
the Enlightenment, conceived rather traditionally as a radical movement,23 in
M. Raeff,The Well-ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Approach,
American Historical Review, 80 (1975): 1221ff. Cf. also T. Munck, The Enlightenment.
A Comparative Social History 17211794 (London, 2000), p. 170.
18
D. Beales, Was Joseph II an Enlightened Despot?, in Beales, Enlightenment and
Reform in Eighteenth Century Europe (London and New York, 2005), p. 262ff.
19
T.J. Reed, Talking to tyrants: dialogues with power in eighteenth century
Germany, Historical Journal, 33 (1990): 70fff
20
F. Venturi, F., Settecento Riformatore (5 vols, Turin, 196990)
21
There is no study of this important figure available in English, There is an excellent
brief account in DBI, Bogino.
22
G. Ricuperati, Il Settecento, in P. Merlin et. al., Il Piemonte Sabaudo. Stato e
Territori in Et Moderna (Turin, 1994), pp. 550, 572, 621, 649; ibid., I volti della pubblica
felicit: Storiografia e politica nel Piemonte settecentesco (Turin, 1989).
23
G. Ricuperati, Gli strumenti dellassolutismo sabaudo: Segreterie di Stato e
Consiglio delle Finanze nel XVIII Secolo, RSI (1990): 796873 (at 8723); Ricuperati,
Il Settecento, p. 562
17
207
contrast with developments after 1773. This brings us to the work of Vincenzo
Ferrone, whose focus is the reign of Victor Amadeus III. Against those who
have dismissed the period as sterile, Ferrone, instead, emphasises that monarchs
credentials as an Enlightened Despot. The Savoyard experiment in Enlightened
Despotism may ultimately have failed, and triggered the emergence of local
Jacobinism,24 but the experiment was a reality, claims Ferrone, and with
important implications for our understanding of subsequent Italian history.
This revisionism has been influential: in her chapter on Enlightenment and
Reform in the Short Oxford History of Italy series devoted to Early Modern
Italy, Anna Maria Rao includes the Savoyard state as a full member of the
band of reforming states and princes of the second half of the eighteenth
century.25
The foregoing means that we have to address a number of questions,
most of which are obvious and have been long familiar to those interested
in the problem of Enlightened Despotism. Was there (an) Enlightenment
in the Savoyard State? If so, what were its essential features, and was it, for
example, narrowly parochial (or national) or more broadly cosmopolitan?
Was there a reform movement? If so, when did it occur, and what moved it?
Was it inspired by a blueprint and was it a coherent, integrated programme
of change? Was it about the good or happiness of the ruled or another stage
of state formation? And do we need to revisit these categories and the implicit
opposition between them? Was reform aimed at shoring up that distinctive
political and social structure we know as the ancien rgime? What do we mean
by reform anyway? As to the men behind the reforms, what was the relative
importance of, on the one hand, the monarch and on the other hand of
ministers, officials and opinion? Was the monarch absolute, even a despot?
Finally, what was the impact of reform? We still need far more research into
the real impact, rather than the mere ordering of reform, in all of the states
under discussion.
What follows seeks to answer some of these questions and to show that there
was reform in the second half of the eighteenth century in the Savoyard state.
It also attempts to demonstrate that, although not necessarily or invariably
inspired by the king, individual reforms were often the brainchild of state
officials and their implementation dependent on the existence of a powerful
state, such that the use of the term Enlightened Despotism is appropriate,
V. Ferrone, Tecnocrati militari e scienziati nel piemonte dellAntico Regime, RSI
(1984): 414509 (at 468); reprinted in La nuova Atlantide. Scienza e politica nel Piemonte
di Vittorio Amedeo III (Turin, 1988).
25
A.M. Rao, Enlightenment and Reform, in J.A. Marino (ed.), Early Modern Italy
15501796 (Oxford, 2002), p. 229ff.
24
208
particularly given our new understanding of that label. As to its origins, reform
did, in part, arise out of a discernible cultural renewal, what we might call
Enlightenment, although this is a complex historical phenomenon, one whose
definition is matter of debate. Some historians have seen the Enlightenment
as, in the words of John Pocock (describing the vision of Franco Venturi),
the presence of philosophes self-appointed secular intellectuals, offering
a criticism of society and putting themselves forward as its guides towards
modernity and reform. Other historians, including Pocock, are less sure
that the Enlightenment hinges on the existence of philosophes, and identify
multiple Enlightenments rather than a single monolith, whose relationship to
projects of reform and modernisation is not always straightforward.26 Having
said that, reform in the Savoyard state was also inspired by practical, and
pressing, contemporary and local concerns, including economic and financial
problems which were in part the legacy of half a century of war (to 1748)
and to perceived weaknesses in the economic structure of the state. We also
need to recognise that while we speak of Enlightened Despotism as a single
phase, there was change over time development. The Savoyard state shows
nothing comparable to the change of pace and scope evident in the Austrian
Habsburg Monarchy following Joseph IIs achievement of sole direction of
affairs in 1780 but in Piedmont and the other Savoyard territories the men
and conditions of 1787 were not those of 1777 or 1767, or those of 1797.
Inevitably there was opposition to reform, but equally there was real change by
1789. Having said that, and while recognising that far more dramatic changes
followed the subjection of the territories of erstwhile ancien rgime states and
sovereigns to revolutionary France, as were Savoy and Nice from 1792 and
Piedmont from 1802, we may underestimate the extent of further change
before incorporation into that expanding polity, triggered above all by the
pressure of war against France. In this sense, in the Savoyard state, and others,
notably Spain,27 the ancien rgime state achieved some of the programme of
a bolder, more radical Enlightened Despotism before the establishment of
francophile Jacobin regimes sometimes thought to be the precondition for
final realisation of the programme of Enlightened Despotism.
J. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Volume 1: The Enlightenments of Edward

Gibbon, 17371764 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 67; F. Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the
Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971).
27
Cf. R. Herr, Rural Change and Royal Finances in Spain at the End of the Old Regime
(Berkeley, CA, 1989), passim.
26
209
Enlightenment in the Savoyard State

Was there a Savoyard Enlightenment? And if so, what were its main features?
This, too, has been a subject of debate. In three volumes published between
1935 and 1943,28 Carlo Calcaterra argued that there was a distinctive cultural
blossoming in Piedmont in the second half of the eighteenth century, a
development which provided the roots for national Unification in the
nineteenth century. However, he also stressed that it owed nothing to foreign
i.e. French Enlightenment influences, and that it was, in fact, hostile to
an enlightened rationalism supposedly imported from France. Calcaterras
interpretation clearly has affinities with that local, or national context of the
Enlightenment suggested by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich,29 but has been
contested by Ferrone and others for whom the Savoyard Enlightenment was
much more cosmopolitan than Calcaterras vision would allow. Our more
sophisticated understanding of the Enlightenment offers some scope for
accommodating both of these visions.
The Savoyard state certainly experienced some features typical of the
Enlightenment as we have come to understand it. Among these was the growth
of the press, of reading, and of opinion. The number of bookshops grew: in
the Duchy of Savoy, the number of bookshops in Chambery trebled from just
two in 1713 to six in 1787.30 As for what was being read, many of the key
Enlightenment authors and texts were banned, but the censorship (which was
reformed as recently as 1745), was not wholly effective, as the censor noted in
1754. In addition Turin was an important staging post for the distribution,
throughout Italy, of the works of the publishers in nearby Geneva, including
that of such iconic Enlightenment texts as the Encyclopedie. The subjects of the
king of Sardinia could, therefore, read and respond to Diderot, Montesquieu,
Voltaire, Rousseau (as well as many of the more pornographic philosophic
texts): in his essay on The Education of Women, which was awarded a prize
by the Academy of Besanon in 1778, the Savoyard comte Henry Costa de
Beauregard cited all of these except Diderot.31 The sizeable diplomatic corps
C. Calcaterra, Il nostro imminente Risorgimento (Turin, 1935); I filopatridi (Turin,
1941); Le adunanze della Patria Societ Letterraria (Turin, 1943). Cf. DBI, Calcaterra.
29
R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge,
1981).
30
J. Nicolas, La Savoie au 18e sicle. Noblesse et bourgeoisie (2 vols, Paris, 1978), vol. 2,
p. 937. There were already 28 bookshops in Turin c. 1700, according to L. Braida, I
mestieri legati al libro, in G. Ricuperati et. al., Storia di Torino (2 vols, Turin, 1998),
2: Dalla Peste alla Rivoluzione Industriale, pp. 1023. Unless otherwise indicated this
paragraph draws on the latter and on Braida, Laffermazione.
31
Nicolas, La Savoie, 2, p. 1010.
28
210
in Turin was another source of these and other Enlightenment texts, at least
for the elite.32 Not all readers responded positively to this reading, including,
for example, count Luigi Malabaila di Canale, the Savoyard minister in
Vienna for many years, who recorded and commented on his reading.33
Nor was France the only foreign source of new ideas: indeed, a strong antiFrench tradition in Piedmont and the years of alliance with England from
1690 underpinned a great interest there in English (or British) culture.34 Also
available to the subjects of the king of Sardinia were the works of the leading
lights of the reform movements in neighbouring Milan and in Naples: Carlo
Amedeo Corte, a member of the Turin Accademia delle Scienze, intendant of
Asti, and the author of an important report on that province in 1786 which
demonstrated his own reforming inclinations, had read Genovesi, Verri,
Beccaria, Filangieri, and Smith.35
Few of the king of Sardinias subjects made significant contributions to
the European Enlightenment, but some wrote on recognisable Enlightenment
themes and with a more than local impact. Count Ugo Vincenzo Botton di
Castellamontes Saggio sopra la politica e la legislazione (Florence, 1772) was
critical of Roman law traditions, echoing Muratoris celebrated and influential
Difetti della Gurisprudenza (1742). The Saggio was widely reviewed and seen as
part of the Lombard Enlightenment with which Botton identified himself; it
was also critical of entails and the way they underpinned an inactive, oppressive,
and useless hereditary nobility.36 There were even plans for a Piedmontese,
or Savoyard Encyclopedia or Dictionary, which however proved abortive.37
The British envoy, Lord Mountstuart, apparently lent books from his library: when
he left Turin in 1783 he still had not recovered from count della Marmora Robertsons
History of America; cf. the instructions given Mountstuarts secretary, Robert Liston, who
remained as charge, 23 Nov. 1782, National Library of Scotland [NLS], MSS 5525 f. 46.
For the diplomatic corps in Turin, cf. C. Storrs, Savoyard Diplomacy in the Eighteenth
Century (16841798), in D. Frigo (ed.), Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy. The
Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 14501800 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 215.
33
A. Ruata, Luigi Malabaila di Canale: riflessi della cultura illuministica in un
diplomatico piemontese (Turin, 1968), pp. 1369.
34
G.P. Romagnani, Prospero Balbo, intellettuale e uomo di Stato (17621837)
(2 vols, Turin, 198890), Vol. 1: Il tramonto dellantico regime in Piemonte (17621800),
pp. 22ff., 79.
35
Ricuperati, Gli Strumenti, pp. 8234.
36
G. Vaccarino, Ugo Vincenzo Botton di Castellamonte. Lesperienza giacobina
di un illuminista piemontese, Bollettino Storico Bibliografico Subalpino [BSBS], (1965),
p. 162ff.
37
G.P. Romagnani, Un secolo di progetti e tentative: il Dizionario StoricoGeografico degli Stati Sardi da Carena a Casalis (17651856), RSI (1983): 451502.
32
211
But the flourishing press included besides almanacs38 a number of homegrown periodicals. Among the first of these was Deninas Parlamento Ottaviano
(1763).39 This type of publication really took off, however, in the 1780s, with
Piemontesi Illustri (17811787),40 the Spettatoreitaliano-piemontese (1786),41
the Biblioteca oltremontana (1787?),42 the Giornale Scientifico, Letterario
e delle Arti (1789)43 and other journals. The contents of these publications
were among the topics considered in a flourishing salon culture in Turin44
and other provincial centres. In the capital, the works of French and other
Enlightenment authors were discussed in private assemblies of this sort in the
palazzo of the marquises Falletti di Barolo from the late 1760s,45 in palazzo San
Germano,46 and in that of Fanny Gerbet in the 1780s.47 Earlier, in 1757, the
Societa Privata was founded in Turin by count Angelo Saluzzo di Monesiglio,
the doctor, Gianfrancesco Cigna, and Luigi Lagrange.
Contrary to prevailing views about the negative cultural and intellectual
consequences of Savoyard reform in the first half of the eighteenth century,
it contributed to this intellectual flowering. The Turin Arsenal (refounded
c. 1735), for example, was an important centre of scientific investigation.
The Societa Privata had the support of the heir to the throne, the future
Victor Amadeus III and the seed continued to grow, particularly in the
later phase, that of the Scientific Enlightenment. Following the accession
of Victor Amadeus III, the Societa Privata became (1783) the Accademia
Reale delle Scienze.48 Other royal bodies followed, including the Accademia
L. Braida, Le guide del tempo. Produzione, contenuti e forme degli almanacchi

piemontesi del Settecento (Turin, 1989).
39
Braida, Laffermazione, p. 782; and extracts in F. Venturi, Riformatori Piemontesi
e Toscani del Settecento (2 vols, Turin, 1979), vol. 1, p. 19ff.
40
Conte Felice Durando di Villa, Piemontesi Illustri (5 vols, Turin, 178187).
41
V. Ferrone, The Accademia Reale delle Scienze: Cultural Sociability and Men
of Letters in Turin of the Enlightenment under Vittorio Amedeo III, Journal of Modern
History, 70 (1998): 551.
42
Ferrone, Tecnocrati Militari, p. 420, Romagnani, Un secolo di progetti, p. 476.
For Vascos declaration of its objective(s) cf. Braida, Il mestiere, pp. 1023.
43
P. Delpiano, Per una storia della Divulgazione Scientifica nel Piemonte del
Settecento: il Giornale Scientifico, Letterario e delle Arti (178990), RSI, 107 (1995):
2967.
44
L. Dutens, Memoirs of a Traveller, Now in Retirement (5 vols, London, 1806).
45
Romagnani, Prospero Balbo, 1, p. 21.
46
Ferrone, Tecnocrati Militari, p. 500.
47
Ibid., p. 37.
48
Ibid., p. 490.
38
212
di Agricoltura (1785).49 Other societies included the Accademia Sampaolina

(founded by count Felice Durando), and the Literari Societas Patria (i.e.
the Societa Filopatria or Filopatridi) which met weekly, from 1782, in the
home of count Felice San Martino della Motta.50 As elsewhere in Enlightened
Europe, improving provincial academies were founded.51 These included the
Chambery Agricultural Society, originally established in 1764 by marquis
Costa, and given official backing (and public subsidy) in 1774.52 Freemasonry,
too, flourished in the Savoyard state.53 Indeed, it has been suggested that Turin
was the capital of Italian Freemasonry in the 1770s.54 These developments
underpinned, and were underpinned by, an emerging public opinion. The
journalist Giuseppe Compagnoni, passing through Turin in 1787, observed
that the latest European news and ideas were discussed at the Accademia delle
Scienze and the Patria Societa.
Foreigner observers, including some British diplomats, continued into the
1780s to regard the Savoyard state, or at least the royal Court, as bigoted.55
The subjects of the king of Sardinia certainly did not contribute, in the way
neighbouring Milan did, to the larger Italian or European Enlightenment.
Nevertheless, it was much more of a participant in, and consumer of, the
Enlightenment, with a more flourishing cultural life, and more of the
institutions we think of as enlightened, than has been acknowledged; and in
some spheres, including the sciences, Turin, was at the heart of contemporary
debates.56 The enlightened elite in the Savoyard state, as elsewhere in Europe
Ibid., p. 420.
Romagnani, Un Secolo di Progetti, p. 467.
51
Ferrone, Tecnocrati Militari, pp. 435, 508; Braida, I mestieri, p. 102.
52
Nicolas, La Savoie, pp. 80810, 10889; F.A. and C. Duboin, Raccolta delle leggi
emanate negli stati di terraferma sino all8 dicembre 1798 dai sovrani della Real Casa di
Savoia, (23 vols, Turin, 181869), XI, p. 27ff.
53
Maruzzi, P., Notizie e documenti sui liberi muratori in Torino nel secolo XVIII,
BSBS, 3032 (192830); Ricuperati, Il Settecento, pp. 57374; Nicolas, La Savoie,
p. 1035ff.; Ferrone, The Accademia Reale, pp. 53031.
54
Ferrone, Tecnocrati Militari, p. 506
55
Mountstuart to Hillsborough, 3 July 1780, National Archives, Kew [NA]/ State
Papers [SP]/92/83/22 (on reaction to the destruction of the chapel of the Sardinian
embassy in London during the Gordon riots); Trevor to Carmarthen, 17 June 1786, NA/
Foreign Office [FO]/67/5/21.
56
Ferrone, Tecnocrati Militari, pp. 476, 4812.
49
50
213
included civil servants,57 soldiers,58 clergy, nobles (many of them in state

service)59 and other professionals (medical men and so on). Indicative, for
what it is worth, was the extent to which official and unofficial bodies, and
individuals used the language of enlightened discourse: in 1781, Joseph de
Maistre spoke in favour of suffering humanity when describing the condition
of prisoners he had seen.60
(Enlightened) Despotism?
Certainly, there was Enlightenment. But to what extent was the Savoyard state
a despotic, and an Enlightened Despotism? The Savoyard political lexicon,
naturally, included the terms despot and despotism. And some (foreign)
states were regarded as despotic: the instructions drawn up, in 1783, for the
marchese di Parella, the first Savoyard minister to St. Petersburg, remarked
the supposed tendency of Russia towards despotism and sudden changes
of political direction, rendering more difficult the formulation in Turin of
policy towards that state.61 As for the Savoyard state itself, in 1763 the British
minister in Turin described it as nearly bordering upon despotism.62 Some, at
least, of the king of Sardinias subjects clearly agreed. Perhaps the most familiar
of these was count Vittorio Alfieri, who preferred to abandon Piedmont (in
1778), and what he viewed as monarchical tyranny, in order to enjoy literary
freedom.63 In some respects Alfieri was right. The king was not restrained
Typical was Ugo Vincenzo Botton di Castellamonte (b. 1754) whose family
provided the Savoyard state with a number of administrators, and whose father (a Generale
delle Finanze) had encouraged the Societa Economica of Chambery, Vaccarino, Ugo Botton
di Castellamonte, Conte Ugo, after graduating in law from the university of Turin, was
appointed to various offices from 1775, including membership of the Senate in Savoy
(178288); Intendente Generale of Sardinia ( 178890), and of Savoy (179092), member
of the Council of Finance in charge of the Ufficio Generale del Soldo, the army pay office
(179293), Intendente of Cuneo (1793) and Contadore Generale (1793), ibid., pp. 178ff.,
1867.
58
Delpiano, Per una storia, pp. 545.
59
For conte Baldassare Perrone di San Martino, of perhaps the most illustrious family
of Ivrea, cf. P. Dagna, Un diplomatico ed economista del Settecento: Carlo Baldassare
Perrone di San Martino, in Figure e gruppi della classe dirigente piemontese del Risorgimento
(Turin, 1968), pp. 946.
60
Nicolas, La Savoie, 2, p. 1029ff; Delpiano, Per una Storia, pp. 52, 54, 65.
61
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, p. 662. In 1790 the Giornale Sientifico commented on
the despotic government of Georgia, Delpiano,Per una Storia, p. 65.
62
Pitt to Egremont, 29 Jan. 1763, NA/SP 92/70.
63
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, p. 664ff, 682; Ferrone, The Accademia Reale, p. 525.
57
214
by any parliamentary institutions. New legislation and fiscal burdens were

registered by the Senate and the Camera dei Conti in Turin, which were rather
like the French parlements, but hardly exercised the, admittedly limited, scope
they had for opposition. Royal authority in the provinces was implemented
by a network of officials, including provincial governors and intendants, who
were backed, ultimately, by a substantial royal army.64 Significantly, the new
cultural institutions, referred to above, were brought under the wing of the
state in the 1780s.
However, the remark of the British minister in 1763, cited above, was
prompted by the fact that there had been opposition from within the
bureaucracy to Charles Emmanuel IIIs wish to create an appanage for a
favourite son at the expense of the royal patrimony. And there were other
restraints, some self-imposed. There was a marked reluctance, for example, to
seriously confront the Church, because this might threaten the Concordats,
and the achievement of substantial lay and royal control over the Church in
the Savoyard territories, achieved by the marquis of Ormea in 1727 and 1741.
As for the realm of Sardinia, the act of cession whereby Victor Amadeus II
acquired the island in 1720 implied leaving things largely as they were, as did
the fact that reform in Sicily between 1714 and 1720 had generated resentment
which contributed to the loss of that island. Sardinia was therefore effectively
neglected for a generation after its acquisition. And despite the elaboration of
what we might call a state structure which might impose change from above,
reform would clearly be easier to effect if monarch and minsters had the cooperation of willing, rather than coerced, subjects when seeking to implement
any major initiative.
For this very reason, some in the Savoyard state idealised something like
Enlightened Despotism, i.e. a monarch powerful enough to effect reform in
the general interest. Count Roberto di Malines, governor of the future Victor
Amadeus III, apparently favoured a political model which approximated to
the legal despotism of the physiocrats.65 For his part, before becoming de facto
chief minister, count Baldassare Perrone di San Martino justified absolutism
on the grounds that it recognised the public good and above all was
able to push it through.66 Others who articulated a similar vision included
Giambattista Vasco who, in a critical review of Alfieris work in the Biblioteca
H. Costamagna, Pour une histoire de lintendenza dans les tats de terre ferme de
la Maison de Savoye lpoque moderne, BSBS, 83 (1985), p. 373ff.
65
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, p. 757.
66
Ibid., p. 622.
64
215
Oltremontana (1787), defended what, in effect, amounted to Enlightened

Despotism.67
But what about Charles Emmanuel III and Victor Amadeus III? Did
their upbringing prepare them for the role of Enlightened Despots? Charles
Emmanuel III, a younger son who only became heir aged 14 on the death of
his older brother, had a traditional education and little time for intellectuals
or philosophy.68 For his part, Charles Emmanuel IV was educated by cardinal
Giacinto Gerdil, one of the chief opponents of the Enlightenment in the
Savoyard state.69 Neither Charles Emmanuel III or Victor Amadeus III
corresponded with the leading lights of the Enlightenment as did some
though by no means all of the Enlightened Despots. By contrast, Victor
Amadeus IIIs education certainly fitted him better for the role of Enlightened
Despot.70 Victor Amadeus III was also more open to newer currents: on his
accession, he did not demand the traditional oath of allegiance.71 However,
any pretensions the king had to play the role of an Enlightened Despot were
undermined by a weakness of character which struck most contemporary
observers.72
The Background to Reform
The preambles to the royal edicts on reform, particularly in the reign of Victor
Amadeus III, were full of what we might think of as typically Enlightenment
references to the public good and happiness, and so on.73 But, can we identify
other, more practical and pressing influences on reform? In some instances
reform after 1748 was as in other states the outcome of earlier initiatives.
Thus, the wide-ranging investigation into the condition of the Savoyard
state, ordered in 1749 following the conclusion of the War of the Austrian
Succession, had in fact been decided on before that conflict which had both
Ibid., p. 682.
Ferrone, The Accademia Reale, p. 525.
69
Vaccarino, Ugo Botton di Castellamonte, p. 164.
70
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, p. 581ff. In 1747, a copy of the plan of Victor Amadeus
IIIs education was sent to Vienna at the request of Maria Theresa,who was planning the
education of Joseph II.
71
Edict, 15 Mar. 1773, Duboin, Raccolta, VI, p. 639.
72
Trevor to Carmarthen, 12 Jan. 1786, chapter 12, NA/FO/67/5, noted the kings
honesty, humanity and affability but also his want of judgement and firmness.
73
Cf. the letters patent in favour of the Agricultural Society of Chambery (1774),
note 44 above.
67
68
216
interrupted its implementation and rendered it more necessary.74 Similarly,

the Constitutions of 1770 were in process long before.75
According to Ricuperati, Savoyard reform c. 1770 was characterised by a
desire for efficiency and stability, and by hostility to the (more liberal) values
of the Enlightenment.76 While the Enlightenment may not have been a crucial
inspiration to this phase of Savoyard reform, there was certainly some drawing
on and copying of foreign models77 derived from contacts which, in the case
of Bogino and Beltrami (in neighbouring Milan), included correspondence.78
The external models were not always French.79 There was great admiration, for
example, for Frederick the Great.80
But these foreign ideas were being adopted and adapted to fit essentially local
concerns. Firstly, there was the need to more fully integrate recently-acquired
territories, many of them detached from neighbouring Milan as rewards for
participation in the Wars of Spanish, Polish and Austrian Succession, but
whose position often remained anomalous; in addition, the loyalty of their
populations to the Casa Savoia during the War of the Austrian Succession had
been less than complete. Secondly, there was the enormous cost of these wars
and above all of the War of the Austrian Succession. Foreign subsidies had eased
the burden but the Savoyard state emerged, in 1748, with a substantial public
debt. In subsequent decades Charles Emmanuel III and Victor Amadeus III
and their ministers were under pressure to maximise their resources to reduce
that charge: in 1751 the former created the Cassa di Redenzione, effectively a
Sinking Fund intended to consolidate and redeem the public debt.81 There
was also a growing recognition of weaknesses in the Piedmontese economy,82
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, p. 530ff.
Lynch to Weymouth, 12 May 1770, NA/SP/92/75.
76
77
Rochford to Bedford, 6 Mar. 1751, NA/SP/92/59, reporting orders issued by the
council of war for the army following an examination of Austrian, French and Prussian
practice ; Ricuperati, Il Settecento, p. 610.
78
79
M. L. Sturani, Inerzia e flessibilit: organizzazione ed evoluzione della rete viaria
sabauda nei territori di qua dai monti (15631761), II: Le trasformazioni del XVIII
secolo, BSBS, (1991), p. 495.
80
Ferrone, Tecnocrati Militari, pp. 42930, 508.
81
The Savoyard debt and its treatment after 1748 are discussed in C. Storrs, The
Savoyard State, in Storrs (ed.), The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe
(Farnham, 2009), pp. 20135. The obituary of Charles Emmanuel III in the Annual
Register of 1774 praised his efforts to reduce the public debt.
82
Cf. L. Bulferetti, Agricoltura, industria e commercio in Piemonte nel secolo XVIII
(Turin, 1963). I should like to thank Dr. Francesca Rocci, for supplying me with a copy
74
75
217
including an over-dependence upon silk production and export.83 Piedmont

largely escaped the famine of 1764, which was so important elsewhere in Italy,
but experienced agrarian crisis in 17831785 and crisis in the silk industry
in 17831785 and again in 17871788:84 the Accademia Reale delle Scienze
ran a prize essay competition precisely in response to this latter.85 Changes
in the economic and social structure of Piedmont in the second half of the
eighteenth century also stretched the institutions of poor relief, which had
been overhauled by Victor Amadeus II earlier in the century, and contributed
to a growing problem of disorder in the provinces.86 Contrapuntally, however,
though monarchs and ministers were aware of and seeking to respond to real
economic and social problems, there is no sense that they were self-consciously
seeking to shore up a decaying social and political order.
In some respects the international situation shaped how kings and ministers
would go about reform. The treaty of Aranjuez, in 1752, and the Diplomatic
Revolution, in 1756, brought political and territorial stability to Italy for the
next fifty years. One consequence was that there were few opportunities, for
the House of Savoy, for further territorial acquisition in Italy. Therefore, the
most had to be made of the territories they possessed, including the hitherto
largely neglected island of Sardinia. Peace also, of course, gave an opportunity
to focus on domestic development. But it did not mean that defence could
be ignored. Joseph II was known to want to recover some of the territories
detached from the Milanese while the disappearance of Poland-Lithuania
horrified king and ministers in Turin; the preservation of the state thus
continued to provided a crucial framework and impetus for reform.
As has already been indicated, and as elsewhere in Europe, reform depended
on the existence of a corps of state officials recognising the need for and ready
to push for improving change. These officials included Bonaventura Nicolis,
count of Brandizzo, intendant of Cuneo whose relazione, or account, of his
province (1753) identified various necessary improvements, including new
roads;87 Vignet des Etoles, who served as intendant in both the Duchy of Aosta
of this work.
83
Romagnani, Un Secolo di Progetti, p. 488.
84
Ibid., p. 476.
85
86
G. Prato, La vita economica del Piemonte a mezzo il secolo XVIII (Turin, 1908);
S. Cavallo, Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy. Benefactors and Their Motives in Turin
15411789 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 225ff.
87
218
and that of Savoy;88 and Giuseppe Amedeo Corte di Bonvicino, intendant of

Asti and author of a report (1786) on the need for reform there (above).89 It
was not only intendants, men who we might think of as emblematic of the
new service nobility who backed and implemented reform. The experience of
count Baldassare Perrone di San Martino, member of a much older and more
distinguished family than most of the men just mentioned, and who was the
king of Sardinias envoy in London for some years, suggests the importance
of the Savoyard states diplomatic network as a route for the introduction
of foreign contacts.90 In his Pensees, San Martino argued for greater efforts
at (English-style) commercial development.91 As de facto prime minister in
Turin between 1779 and 1789 he oversaw many of the reform initiatives of
the 1780s.
Reform
Turning to the enlightened policies and reforms pursued by Charles Emmanuel
III and Victor Amadeus III we immediately have to acknowledge that as
has already been noted they were not inclined to confront the Church or
challenge religious orthodoxy, and sought to limit public religious controversy.92
Equally, there was little religious toleration. The Protestant Vaudois of the
alpine valleys of Piedmont enjoyed a limited toleration, dating from 1694,
which was the price of earlier English friendship and wartime subsidies.93 It
was also recognised that attracting foreign Protestants to developing Nice
(discussed below) might also require some indulgence.94 However, there were
J. Nicolas, Un intendant des Lumires: Vignet des Etoles en Val dAoste, in
R. Ajello et al. (ed.), LEt dei Lumi. Studi Storici sul Settecento Europeo in onore di Franco
Venturi (2 vols, Naples, 1985), vol. 2, p. 693ff.
89
DBI, Corte, Ricuperati, Il Settecento, p. 648ff; B.A. Raviola, (ed.), Il Piu
Acurato Intendente. Giuseppe Amedeo Corte di Bonvicino e la Relazione dello Stato Economico
Politico dellAstigiana del 1786 (Turin, 2004). I should like to thank Dr. Alice Raviola for
gifting me a copy of this volume.
90
Dagna, Un diplomatico, passim; Ricuperati, Il Settecento, p. 625.
91
Dagna, Un diplomatico, p. 24ff.
92
M.L. Silvestrini, Istituzioni ecclesiastiche e vita religiosa ad Asti nel Settecento, in
G. Ricuperati, (ed.), Quando San Secondo divento giacobino (Alessandra, 1999), p. 179ff.
I should like to thank Dr. Paola Bianchi for a copy of this collection of conference
papers.
93
There was also treaty based and de facto toleration of Protestants on territories
ceded by Geneva (1754) and at the new town (1786, below) of Carouge, Nicolas, La
Savoie, p. 1024.
94
88
219
limits, as was demonstrated by the Mearns case (1773), an episode which

elicited from Victor Amadeus III a striking declaration of his commitment to
his Roman Catholic faith.95 Significantly, the suppression of the Jesuits was a
development forced on, rather than sought by, the Court of Turin. Indeed, the
reign of Victor Amadeus III saw a renewal of clerical influence, exemplified
by the conservative cardinal Amedeo delle Lanze, and archbishop (of Turin)
Rorengo di Rora.96 But some clergy, including cardinal Vittorio Costa della
Trinita,97 were more liberal, playing a positive and innovative pastoral role.98
And there were positive developments. In June 1783, on the grounds of the
cost of measures for the public good and that of religion and the Church
and having secured papal approval Victor Amadeus III reduced the tax
exemption enjoyed by most ecclesiastical property.99 Some religious houses
were suppressed;100 and there was a further erosion of independent jurisdictions,
exemplified by the agreement with the Pope and the bishop of Novara, in
1767, regarding the sovereignty of the valley of Orta.101 There was, too, some
reorganisation of dioceses, and creation of new ones, so that ecclesiastical
boundaries were better aligned with those of the state.102 Other reforms had,
not surprisingly, implications for the Church. This was true, for example, of
the order for outside burial decreed for Savoy in 1771,103 for Aosta in 1781,104
and for various towns in Piedmont,105 an excellent example of the way that
reform in the Savoyard state accords with contemporary Enlightenment
Lynch to Rochford, 8 and 11 Sept. 1773, NA/SP/92/77; F. Sclopis, Delle Ralazioni

Politiche tra la Dinastia di Savoia ed il Governo Britanico (12401815) (Turin, 1853),
p. 101.
96
97
Ibid., p. 676ff. Cf. also Trevor to Carmarthen, 9 Aug. 1786, NA/FO/67/5/26, on
the bishop of Nice, conte Valperga.
98
Silvestrini, Istituzioni ecclesiastiche, p.179ff.
99
Cf. manifesto camerale, 18 June 1783, Duboin [reference mislaid].
100
Trevor to Carmarthen, 24 July 1784, FO/67/4/33.
101
Sherdley to Shelburne, 2 Sept. 1767, NA/SP 92/72.
102
Silvestrini, Istituzioni ecclesiastiche, passim.
103
J. Nicolas, La Vie Quotidienne en Savoie aux XVIIeXVIIIe Sicles (Paris, 1979),
p. 148.
104
Duboin, X, p. 736.
105
Cf. royal orders for Moncalieri, 30 June 1784, AST/Editti, m. 43; for Cuneo,
21 Nov. 1788, AST/Editti, m. 43/63/2; for Saluzzo and Carmagnola, 2 Oct. 1789, AST/
Editti, m. 43/66/3; for Serravalle, 2 Oct. 1789, AST/Editti, m. 43/66/4; and for Fossano,
26 Jan. 1790, AST/Editti, m. 43/67/2. Cf. P. Bianchi and A. Merlotti, Cuneo in Et
Moderna. Citt e Stato nel Piemonte dantico regime (Milan, 2002), p. 288ff.
95
220
developments elsewhere in Italy and Europe, and one aspect that has been
largely ignored by historians.106
One very striking area of government intervention in the Savoyard state
was that aimed at stimulating economic development. The coinage was
reformed in 1755, a necessary measure following the manipulations of the
War of the Austrian Succession, and again in 1786.107 Great energy was also
put into the development of Nice as a commercial centre. It was declared
a free port in 1749 and a Consolato created there in 1750.108 Foreign states
were allowed to buy out the duties hitherto imposed on foreign vessels at
Villefranche109 while the so-called droit daubaine was abolished.110 A trade
treaty with Russia was considered c. 1783 although nothing came of it.111
Also abortive was earlier talk of getting into the colonial trade, either directly
by acquisition of the Danish island (St. Croix)112 or indirectly via trade with
Portugal. Efforts to improve the basic infrastructure included enhancing the
road network,113 a Directorate General of Bridges and Roads being created in
1761 (but abolished in 1783 when its responsibilities passed to the Ufficio
Generale delle Finanze).114 Perhaps the most ambitious of these roadbuilding
The study of the trend towards open air cemeteries by G. Tomasi, Per salvare
i viventi. Le origini settecentesche del cimitero extraurbano (Bologna, 2001) omits the
Savoyard state.
107
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, p. 5267; G. Felloni, Il Mercato Monetario in Piemonte
nel Secolo XVIII (Milan, 1968), p. 96ff. and passim.
108
Royal orders of 12 Mar. 1749 and 15 July 1750, Duboin, Raccolta, XV, p. 393
and III, p. 840.
109
Cf. redemption by France (1753) and Great Britain (1754), Dagna, Un
diplomatico, pp. 223, Sclopis, Delle Relazioni, p. 99; and agreements with Denmark
(summer 1785), Solar de la Marguerite, Traits publics de la Maison Royale de Savoye
... depuis la paix de Cateau Cambrsis jusqua nos jours (8 vols, Turin, 183644), vol. 3,
p. 484ff.; Two Sicilies, Mar. 1786, ibid., p. 489ff; Portugal, Sept. 1786, ibid., 496ff.
110
Cf. agreements with Maria Theresa, Aug. 1763, Solar de la Marguerite, Traits
publics, vol. 3, p. 251ff.; Bavaria, Sept. 1772, ibid., p. 279ff; Spain, Nov. 1782, ibid.,
p. 480ffn.
111
Cf. Projet dun Trait de Commerce entre SM le Roy de Sardaigne et SM
lImperatrice de toutes les Russies, sent by Liston in March 1783, copies in BL Add.
36,805 f. 10736, and NLS, MS 5524 f. 6788.
112
Dutens to Halifax, 18 May 1765, NA/SP 92/71.
113
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, pp. 653, 657. Sturani, Inerzia e flessibilit, passim.
For Savoy, cf. Nicolas, La Savoie, p. 661ff.
114
Sturani, Inerzia e flessibilita, p. 492.
106
221
projects was that ordered, in 1780, to link Piedmont with Nice.115 In 1783,
Victor Amadeus III imposed new taxation116 to fund these and other public
works, including a canal for irrigation purposes.117 Other measures which
had as their objective economic development include the development from
1786 of the new town of Carouge, adjacent to Geneva;118 the diffusion of new
agricultural techniques, in part via the new academies and other societies and
their prize essay competitions; the stimulation of domestic production, for
example of porcelain (1765),119 gilded bronze buttons (1783),120 and vitriol
(1786);121 the creation of a silk manufacturing and export company (1752);122
abortive efforts to stimulate the export of Piedmonts celebrated wines one
of the main reasons for the road connecting Piedmont and Nice123 and the
development of Sardinia (which is discussed below). Nobles were allowed to
engage in trade indirectly (for example, as shareholders in the silk company,
above) and even directly without derogating their status.124
In many respects these measures represented state building or consolidation.
The new roads, for example, integrated the new territories and held out
the prospect of enlarged state revenues consequent on economic growth.
Administration and government constituted another important area of reform.
Measures taken in this respect were aimed primarily at the incorporation of
the recent acquisitions (above) and included the revised Constitutions (or legal
Royal patents, 23 May 1780, Duboin, Raccolta, XXIV, p. 1799. The progress of
the road can be charted in the correspondence of successive British ministers in Turin.
116
Royal order, 11 Feb. 1783, NLS, MS 5224 f. 103; Duboin, Raccolta, XXI,
p. 1209.
117
Royal letter, 21 Jan. 1783, Duboin, Raccolta, XXIV, p. 1577; Liston to Grantham,
23 Mar. 1783, NLS MS 5524 f.
118
Cf. the essays in the catalogue of the exhibition celebrating the bicentenary of the
towns creation, Batir une ville au sicle des lumires.
119
Manifesto camerale, 17 Aug. 1765, Duboin, Raccolta, XXVII, p. 556.
120
Manifesto camerale, 1783, Duboin, Raccolta, XVII, p. 161.
121
Trevor to Carmarthen, 12 May 1786, NA/FO/67/5/17.
122
Edict, 3 May 1752, Duboin, Raccolta, XV, p. 215ff; Rochford to Holdernesse, 22
Apr. 1752, NA/SP/92/60.
123
Cf. C. Rosso, Un altro Portogallo? I tentativi settecenteschi di esportare i vini
piemontesi in Inghilterra, in R. Comba, ed., Vigne e Vini nel Piemonte Moderno (Alba
and Cuneo, 1992), pp. 50746; Storrs, Savoyard Diplomacy in the Eighteenth Century,
pp. 2423; Dagna, Un diplomatico, pp. 289. The progress of these efforts, too, can be
followed in the correspondence of successive British ministers in Turin: cf. Sherdley to
Shelburne, 22 Aug. and 14 Oct. 1767, NA/SP/92/72, and Lynch to Weymouth, 23 Sept.
and 2 Dec. 1769, NA/SP 92/74.
124
Dutens to Halifax, 30 Mar. 1765, NA/SP 92/71.
115
222
codification) of 1772125 which encouraged the use of the Italian language.126

More important, however, was the so-called Legge dei Pubblici (1775),127
which was also a means of extending state power at the expense of local elites
and oligarchs throughout Piedmont. A number of treaties concluded with
various neighbouring states and which accepted the existing boundaries were
another aspect of this process: with Austria (1751);128 Geneva (1754);129 France
(1760);130 and Parma (1766).
Not surprisingly, in view of its importance, the Savoyard army experienced
reform under Victor Amadeus III.131 This included the creation (1774) of the
so-called Legione degli Accampamenti, a better trained and better paid select
militia; the adoption of improved weapons; a wide-ranging overhaul of military
organisation in 1775, including both militia and regulars and the formation
(1776) of the Legion of light troops. Further army reforms followed in 1786.
However, what is perhaps striking is that, in comparison with some of the
other examples of Enlightened Despotism, army reform in the Savoyard state
was limited in its scope and impact. This may have been because so much had
been achieved before 1748; indeed, in some respects army reform elsewhere
could be said to represent attempts to achieve what had long been the norm
in this sphere in the Savoyard state.
Most reforms, including for example the improvement of the road network,
affected the entire Savoyard state, but certain territories were a focus of special
attention. These included the Duchy of Savoy. In 1762 Charles Emmanuel
III decreed the abolition there (by redemptive purchase) of personal liability
to the taille, which no longer existed in Piedmont, and in 1771 that of other
feudal obligations;132 these measures drew praise from Voltaire, and in 1789
from Sieyes.133 But perhaps the most striking example of a territory subjected
Cf. M. Viora, Le Costituzioni Piemontesi 1723, 1729, 1772 (Turin, 1928).
127
Ibid., pp. 598ff, 806; A. Merlotti, LEnigma della Nobilt. Stato e Ceti Dirigenti
nel Piemonte del Settecento (Florence, 2000), p.167ff. I should like to thank Dr. Andrea
Merlotti for a copy of his book.
128
S. Loriga, LIstituzione militare nel Piemonte del Settecento (Venice, 1992),
p. 177; Ricuperati, Il Settecento, pp. 5245.
129
Solar de la Marguerite, Traits publics, 3, pp. 15065.
130
Ibid., p. 166ff.
131
Unless otherwise indicated this paragraph largely follows Loriga, LIstituzione
militare, p. 179 and P. Bianchi, Onore e Mestiere. Le riforme militari nel Piemonte del
Settecento (Turin, 2002). I should like to thank Dr. Paola Bianchi for a copy of her book.
132
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, pp. 553, 704; Nicolas, La Savoie, p. 637ff.
133
125
126
223
to reform was Sardinia.134 The island had attracted little attention hitherto
(as mentioned above), but Bogino, as minister with special responsibility for
the territory from 1759, initiated the overhaul of its institutions.135 Feudal
jurisdictions were limited as part of a programme aimed at improving the
system of both local government and justice, steps were taken to improve
the quality of the clergy, and measures introduced to stimulate economic
development. Educational improvement was exemplified by the foundation of
the university of Cagliari (1764).136 The Duchy of Aosta, too, was singled out.
It lost its de facto autonomy137 and, like the new territories, was subjected to
the reform of its tax burden, the so-called perequazione.138 The capital, Turin,
also received attention. More effective police, for example, was aimed at with
the introduction of illumination there (1782)139 while the layout of the citys
streets was improved in accordance with contemporary thinking.
Mention has already been made of some of the cultural aspects of reform,
including the foundation of the Reale Accademia delle Scienze. Other, earlier
measures included the university constitutions (1772)140 and the suppression
(1781) of the (formerly Jesuit) Collegio dei Nobili.141 Efforts were also made
to eradicate what were increasingly regarded as negative aspects of popular
culture and practices, including gambling.142 This and many of the measures
just described represented efforts at social reform, attempts to improve the
lot of the least well off. The attempt to stimulate economic growth would
also, if successful, have benefitted the most vulnerable. In the meantime,
monarchs and ministers implemented measures which were more obviously
about welfare. These included the consolidation of existing and creation of
new charitable foundations to cater for the poor and others.143
The range of measures just identified was not coherent or integrated in the
sense of being part of a blueprint for all-embracing overhaul of the institutions
of Savoyard state and society. Most reforms were self-contained, although
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, pp. 569, 572, 732ff.
DBI, Bogino; Dutens to Halifax, 3 Jul. and same to Conway, 3 Aug. 1765,
NA/SP/92/71.
136
Loriga, LIstituzione militare, p. 179.
137
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, p. 599; M.A. Benedetto, Ricerche sul Conseil des
Commis del ducato dAosta (Turin, 1956), passim.
138
139
Cf. royal order, 19 Mar. 1782, AST/Editti, m. 42/44.
140
M. Roggero, Scuola e riforme nello Stato sabaudo. Listruzione secondaria dalla
Ratio studiorum alle Costituzioni del 1772 (Turin, 1981).
141
Loriga, LIstituzione militare, p. 180.
142
Trevor to Carmarthen, 16 Aug. 1786, NA/FO/67/5/27.
143
Cavallo, Charity and Power, pp. 225ff, 233ff.
134
135
224
some had further implications and some broad patterns are discernible:
economic growth, greater centralisation, increased uniformity and even
Piedmontisation. How did reform in the Savoyard state compare with that
elsewhere in Europe? In many respects, the measures do fit the pattern or
programme of things done or rather attempted by other Enlightened Despots.
Where the Savoyard state differs is in the omissions. Striking, for example,
is the fact that there was no abolition of the use of torture or of the death
penalty.144
The Impact of Reform to 1789
It was one thing to decree reform another to implement it. This is a fairly
banal observation but we still tend to pay more attention, in considering
Enlightened Despotism, to what was attempted rather than what was achieved.
As elsewhere, reform in the Savoyard State faced hostility from various groups.
In Sardinia, the feudal barons opposed measures aimed at reducing their
jurisdictions on the grounds that they breached the terms of cession of 1720
(above).145 In Savoy, affranchisement provoked opposition from seigneurs who
thought it went too far, including the enlightened agrarian improver, Costa
de Beauregard,146 but it was also resented by peasants/communities for whom
it did not go far enough.147 As for the clergy, in 1786 the archbishop of Turin
refused to implement a bull obtained from Rome for the dissolution of certain
religious houses.148 Last, but by no means least, there was opposition to some
of the road-building programme on security grounds: the road to Nice, it was
argued, would make Piedmont more vulnerable to (French) invasion.149
Opposition could have an effect, if only in delaying or modifying reform,
but reform did go ahead. On his accession Victor Amadeus III suspended
the Savoy affranchisement edict but, in 1776, appointed a commission which
decided on implementation.150 More than 3,000 contracts of affranchisement
For continued use of torture, cf. Nicolas, La Savoie, 2, p. 1030, Vaccarino,
Ugo Botton di Castellamonte, p. 191, and R. Codebo, La Tortura nel Piemonte del
Settecento. Immobilismo e riforme nel confronto con gli altri ordinamenti europei, BSBS,
101 (2003), pp. 185215.
145
A. Mattone, La Cessione del Regno di Sardegna dal Trattato di Utrecht alla presa
di possesso sabauda (17131720), RSI, 102 (1990), p. 56ff.
146
147
Nicolas, La Savoie, pp. 2, 64041.
148
Trevor to Carmarthen, 24 July 1784, FO/67/4/33.
149
Sturani, Inerzia e flessibilit p. 516.
150
Vaccarino, Ugo Botton di Castellamonte, pp. 18081.
144
225
were passed between 1754 and 1792, the vast majority between 1772 and
1789. As for the roads, those who sought to transform the Piedmontese
economy won the argument, although the military were bought off with the
development of Saorgio as a new lynchpin of defence.151 As for the Sardinian
barons, Bogino declared their objections groundless and asserted Charles
Emmanuel IIIs full (absolute) sovereignty there.152
By 1789, in consequence, the Savoyard state had undergone considerable
changes. Perhaps inevitably again as elsewhere some felt more could and
should be done. Inevitably, too, some disappointed reformers become radicals
and collaborators with the French after 1789.153 Certainly, the essential
structure of the state remained, in 1789, much as it had been in 1748 or 1763.
It was still a dynastic state: indeed it was, arguably, more of one in the sense
that there was a larger royal family absorbing more of the total budget at the
later than at the former date. It was also still, in many respects, a composite
state: indeed tensions between Savoy and Piedmont may have been growing
over the period as a whole. However, we need to acknowledge the changes still
in process in 1789 and those achieved by that date. The Nice road fits into the
former category; as for the latter, the Savoyard state was, at least superficially
and institutionally more integrated and centralised in 1789 than a generation
earlier. One of the problems in evaluating Enlightened Despotism surely
lies in where to put the emphasis, on achievement, or aspiration or attempt:
according to one study, by 1791 of 206 communities in Savoy only 11 were
completely freed,154 complete emancipation having to wait for the French
invasion of the duchy. Yet the process drawn out and contested as it was
was underway before 1792. The affranchisement episode also reveals another
facet of the complicated consequences of reform: that in a Tocquevillian
manner reform may have created new difficulties, or exacerbated existing
tensions, weakening as well as strengthening the state.155 However, while
recognising these qualifications, we should not lose sight of the real progress
made since 1748, or 1763. This advance was not only measurable in terms of
institutional and infrastructural changes but also in the further development
of the political culture of the Savoyard state.156
Sturani, Inerzia e flessibilit, p. 516.

Mattone, La Cessione, p. 56ff.
153
Ferrone, Tecnocrati Militari, p. 473.
154
155
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, pp. 7045.
156
Ibid., pp. 664, 682.
151
152
226
The Last Phase of Enlightened Despotism (17891797)?

In the Savoyard state, as elsewhere in Italy and Europe, the relationship
between Enlightened Despotism and the French Revolution is problematic.
It is fair to say that, in general, the view is that that the event frightened the
Enlightened Despots (where they were still on the throne or otherwise in
power), prompting a reversal of direction. The Savoyard state certainly provides
some support for such a view. For some historians, the arrest and exile of the
Vasco brothers, in 1791, meant the end of a promising period of reform157
and marked the emergence of Savoyard Jacobinism (and of liberalism among
some noble army officers).158 Some members of the service nobility, who
had been enlightened reformers before 1789, including conte Ugo Botton
di Castellamonte, certainly became radicals, even moderate Jacobins, in the
1790s. In some respects this represented a logical development of some of
the more radical ideas within the broad intellectual programme which was
(Savoyard) Enlightened Despotism.159
But it is also arguable that the 1790s saw the triumph of that Enlightened
Despotism and the culmination of radical reform before the Savoyard state
was integrated into the French state and effected by men who were products
of, and fully committed to that state. Typical was the career of count Francesco
Galeani Napione, who rose from the position of provincial intendant (1779)
to that of Generale delle Finanze (1797).160 In this sense, and without ignoring
the continued need to address local problems, it is arguable that the French
Revolution, and, above all, the military struggle against the revived, expanding
French state from 1792 in fact pushed reform to new and radical heights in
the Savoyard state and elsewhere. In the Savoyard state we can point to Pietro
Giuseppe Graneris reform programme as Secretary for Internal Affairs (1791),
although this proved short-lived and largely abortive,161 the Enquiry of 1793,162
the reform project of Prospero Balbo (Boginos stepson, and one of the leading
lights of a new generation of reformers who came to the fore in this decade),163
and above all, to the reforms of 1797, which included the abolition of feudal
jurisdictions and entail.164 These radical measures may have emerged out of
Ibid., pp. 7023.
Ferrone, Tecnocrati Militari, pp. 5089.
159
Vaccarino, Ugo Botton di Castellamonte, p. 194ff., and passim.
160
Ricuperati, Il Settecento, pp. 7489.
161
Ricuperati, Gli Strumenti, p. 825ff. Graneri had earlier collaborated with
Bogino on reform in Sardinia.
162
163
Ibid., p. 808; Romagnani, Prospero Balbo, 1, passim.
164
157
158
227
the debates of preceding decades,165 but war and growing domestic unrest were
surely decisive in their implementation at this juncture.
Conclusion
In August 1786, after visiting the road being built to link Piedmont with
Nice, the British minister in Turin observed It seems to be the privilege of the
House of Savoy to immortalise its name by great public works of this kind.166
This was not something that could have been said of the reform programme
of Victor Amadeus IIIs grandfather, Victor Amadeus II. Victor Amadeus III
was not entirely effective, nevertheless his reign, like the latter part of that
of Charles Emmanuel III, did witness measures which allow his reign to be
labelled Enlightened Despotism as it has been redefined in recent decades.
If we draw up a checklist of measures all of which must be implemented to
qualify for that status, then the Savoyard state probably fails: the absence of
any significant humanitarian penal reform or of markedly greater religious
freedom is telling here. However, the revision of our understanding of
Enlightened Despotism has emphasised the danger of being too dogmatic and
rigid in our assessment. The case for the Savoyard state could certainly have
been stronger. Nevertheless, state, society and culture were not, in 1789, what
they were in 1748 or 1763, and were, in some respects, more open; and the
changes were, in part, the consequence of government acting to implement
change in response to changing perceptions, inside and outside government
the state of the needs of state and society and the role of government. If the
Savoyard state is not thought fit to include within the looser, revised framework
of Enlightened Despotism achieved in recent decades then, perhaps, that
concept, remarkably flexible and adaptable as it has proved to be, must be
abandoned as having finally outlived its usefulness.
Ibid., p. 810.
Trevor to Carmarthen, 9 Aug. 1786, NA/FO/67/5/26.
165
166
Chapter 14
Derecho Indiano vs. the Bourbon Reforms:

The Legal Philosophy of
Francisco Xavier de Gamboa
Christopher Peter Albi*
For the law to be in essence law, it has to be honest, just, possible, appropriate to
the time and place, necessary, useful, and clear, so as not to induce error for its
obscurity, and made not for private convenience but for the common good of all.
Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae, book V, chapter XXI; seventh century AD)
Introduction
In 1761 the Madrid publisher Joaqun Ibarra printed the Comentarios a las
Ordenanzas de Minas, an analysis of the mining laws of New Spain written
by a 43-year old Mexican lawyer, Francisco Xavier de Gamboa. The author,
* The author would like to express his gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada for funding to undertake archival research in Spain. He would
also like to thank the following readers who made helpful comments on previous versions
of this chapter: John H. Elliott, Jeremy Adelman, Carla Rahn Phillips, Brian Owensby,
Anthony McFarlane, Susan Deans-Smith, Ann Twinam, Jorge Caizares-Esguerra, James
Sidbury and Gabriel Paquette.

Quoted in Victor Tau Anzotegui, La Ley en Amrica Hispana del Descubrimiento
a la Emancipacin (Buenos Aires, 1992), pp. 4345. All quotations translated from the
Spanish by the author of this chapter, unless otherwise noted.

Francisco Xavier de Gamboa, Comentarios a las Ordenanzas de Minas (Madrid,
1761). On Gamboa (171794) see Toribio Esquivel Obregn, Biografa de Don Francisco
Javier Gamboa, Ideario Politco y Jurdico de Nueva Espaa en el Siglo XVIII (Mexico City,
1941); Elas Trabulse, Francisco Xavier Gamboa: un poltico criollo en la Ilustracin mexicana
(17171794) (Mexico City, 1985); Jos Antonio de Alzate y Ramrez, Elogio histrico del
Seor D. Francisco Xavier de Gamboa, Regente que fue de esta Real Audiencia de Mxico,
in Gacetas de literatura de Mxico (Puebla, 1831), pp. 37384; Mariano Otero, Apuntes
230
who represented the consulado [merchants guild] of Mexico City at the royal
court from 1755 to 1764, hoped his study would help reinvigorate the New
Spanish silver mining industry, the anchor of the economy and, after two
hundred years, still indispensable to the health of royal finances. Having spent
almost fifteen years litigating mining cases in the courts of Mexico City in the
1740s and 1750s, Gamboa knew intimately the governing statute, the Mining
Ordinances of 1584. He was certain that if miners, lawyers and judges simply
understood the law better, silver production would increase dramatically.
Included with his learned commentary on the law was a great deal of technical
information, which brought to the attention of Mexican miners and Spanish
government officials recent and little-known studies on metallurgy, mining
engineering, and subterranean surveying. Gamboa also appended a glossary
of Mexican mining terms and a description of all the mining districts of the
country. Finally, he proposed a number of concrete economic measures to
help the industry, from relaxing the crown mercury monopoly to setting up
a mining bank under the auspices of the consulado. The Comentarios a las
Ordenanzas de Minas impressed the councillors of the Indies enough for them
to appoint Gamboa, in 1764, as an alcalde del crimen [criminal division judge]
on the audiencia [high court] of Mexico, an exceptional honour for a creole
in the 1760s.
Jos de Glvez, the visitor-general sent to New Spain in 1765 to inspect
and reform the system of administration, carried Gamboas treatise on mining
law with him. It gave him the information he needed to launch a major
para la biografa de Don Francisco Javier Gamboa, in Jess Reyes Heroles (ed.), Mariano
Otero Obras (Mexico City, 1967), vol. II, pp. 44162.

These ordinances, enacted by Philip II, applied to all Castilian lands, including
America but with the exception of Peru, which had its own 1572 code. The 1584 law
replaced the ordinances of 1563, and came to be known as the Nuevo Cuaderno.

The non-legal information it contained justified its translation into English in
1830 for British miners arriving in newly-independent Mexico. Francisco Xavier Gamboa,
Commentaries on the Mining Ordinances of Spain, trans. Richard Heathfield (2 vols,
London, 1830).

Gamboa served on the audiencia of Mexico from 1764 until his death in 1794,
with the exception of two periods when the crown appointed him to judicial positions
outside of New Spain, first to Spain from 1769 to 1773 and then to Santo Domingo from
1783 to 1788. He was only the second Mexican appointed directly to the audiencia of
Mexico since 1711 and the first since 1751. See Mark A. Burkholder and D.S. Chandler,
From Impotence to Authority: The Spanish Crown and the American Audiencias, 16871808
(Columbia, MO, 1977), pp. 16276.

Abril 20 de 1765, Inventorio de los bienes, crditos y alhajas pertenecientes al
Seor Don Joseph de Glvez Gallardo, in Francisco Rodas de Coss (ed.), Mexico en el Siglo
Derecho Indiano vs. the Bourbon Reforms
231
restructuring of the mining sector. This effort culminated in 1776, after

Glvez had become secretary of state for the Indies, with the creation of the
Mining Tribunal. This guild-like organization of miners controlled a bank
to finance mining projects, an adjudicative apparatus to hear lawsuits, and,
after 1791, the first technical college in Spanish America. The initial directorgeneral of the Tribunal, Joaqun Velzquez de Len, drafted a new legal code
for the industry, replacing the Ordinances of 1584. This code, promulgated by
the crown in 1783, removed from the audiencias of Mexico and Guadalajara
jurisdiction over mining cases, vesting it with the Tribunal.
Far from collaborating with Glvez from his position on the Mexican
bench, Gamboa strenously opposed the ministers reform agenda. He
despised the new Mining Tribunal, believing it was an appalling mistake
to surrender power over adjudication, finance and education to the miners.
Indeed, the audiencia judge emerged as the leading critic in New Spain of
the whole raft of colonial policy changes spearheaded by Glvez, which
historians have termed the Bourbon reforms.10 The common thread in this
ambitious program, intended to make the Indies more productive, profitable
and militarily secure, was the enhancement of royal executive authority.
Historians have attributed Gamboas opposition, manifested in both written
appeals to Madrid and bureaucratic resistance at home, to his close association
with the merchants of the consulado, whose privileges were challenged by
the Bourbon reformers. David Brading, the first historian to underscore
XVIII (Mexico City, 1983), p. 51. On the visita of Glvez, see Herbert Ingram Priestley,
Jos de Glvez, Visitor-General of New Spain (17651771) (Philadelphia, PA, 1916).

See Walter Howe, The Mining Guild of New Spain and its Tribunal General, 1770
1821 (New York, 1949).

See Mara del Refugio Gonzlez, Ordenanzas de la Minera de la Nueva Espaa
formadas y propuestas por su Real Tribunal (Mexico City, 1996).

In 1774 the crown promoted Gamboa to the position of oidor, a judge on the more
prestigious civil division of the audiencia.
10
There is a vast historiography on the Bourbon Reform era in New Spain.
See especially D. A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 17631810
(Cambridge, 1971); Susan Deans-Smith, Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers: The Making
of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico (Austin, 1992); Stanley J. Stein and Barbara
H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 17591789
(Baltimore, 2003); Josefina Zoraida Vzquez, Interpretaciones del siglo XVIII mexicano:
el impacto de las reformas borbnicas (Mxico, D.F., 1992); Agustn Guimer, (ed.),
El reformismo borbnico: Una visin interdisciplinar (Madrid, 1996); Enrique Tandeter
and Jorge Hidalgo Lehued, (eds), Procesos americanos hacia la redefinicin colonial (Paris,
2000); David A. Brading, Government and Elite in Late Colonial Mexico, Hispanic
232
the jurists political significance, noted that, despite the legal and technical
brilliance of his commentaries, Gamboa emerged as the political advocate of
the great import houses and silver banks of Mexico City. Precisely at the time
when the statesmen of the Bourbon dynasty were moving to undercut the
position of the colonial merchant-monopolists, Gamboa wished to subject
the entire Mexican silver mining industry to the control of the consulado and
the mercantile oligarchy.11 Stanley and Barbara Stein recently updated this
picture, suggesting that in the Comentarios, Gamboas hidden agenda (on
instructions from the Mexico City Consulado) was to enhance the image of
Mexico Citys merchant magnates and promote the continued insulation of
their economic space from the flotistas of the comercio de Espaa at Jalapa, both
during and after the ferias.12 The dominant view therefore holds that Gamboa
resisted the Bourbon reforms in order to shield the economic interests of his
clients and friends, the merchants of Mexico City. He opposed the Mining
Tribunal because he wanted to deliver the mining industry to the consulado.
This essay proposes an alternative explanation, based on a close reading
of the Comentarios. It argues that Gamboa believed the Bourbon reform
program threatened the legal system that buttressed Spanish sovereignty in
the Indies. In the same text that promoted Enlightenment ideas of scientific
progress and political economy, the jurist defended the old legal and
institutional architecture of mining in New Spain, which embodied the values
of Derecho Indiano, the traditional legality of the Indies.13 This complex of
Brading, Miners and Merchants, p. 162.
Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, p. 229.
13
There is a large Spanish historiography on Derecho Indiano. See especially
Alfonso Garca Gallo, Estudios de historia del derecho indiano (Madrid, 1972); Miguel
Luque Talavn, Un universo de opiniones: La literatura jurdica indiana (Madrid, 2003);
Ismael Snchez Bella, Alberto de la Hera, and Carlos Daz Rementera, Historia del derecho
indiano (Madrid, 1992); Tau Anzotegui, Ley en Amrica; Victor Tau Anzotegui, Casuismo
y Sistema: Indagacin histrica sobre el espritu del Derecho Indiano (Buenos Aires, 1992);
Vctor Tau Anzotegui, Nuevos Horizontes en el Estudio del Derecho Indiano (Buenos Aires,
1997); Feliciano Barrios Pintado, (ed.), Derecho y administracin pblica en las Indias
hispnicas: Actas del XII Congreso Internacional de Historia de Derecho Indiano (Cuenca,
2002). Of the more limited English-language historiography, see Woodrow Borah, Justice
by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the HalfReal (Berkeley, 1983); Charles R. Cutter, The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700
1810 (Albuquerque, NM, 1995); Tamar Herzog, Upholding Justice: Society, State, and
the Penal System in Quito (16501750) (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004); Matthew Mirow, Latin
American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Austin, TX,
2004); Brian P. Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford,
CA, 2008).
11
12
233
rules, practices and institutions had evolved from Castilian models to adapt to
the diverse and difficult environment of Spanish America. Its main innovation
was to treat written law, the decrees and statutes issued by the crown, as more
exhortatory than absolute. Viceroys and audiencias exercised discretion not to
enforce a law to the letter if it would cause manifest harm or inconvenience
in a particular case or locale. Gamboa believed this system, upheld by the
powerful and autonomous audiencias, fulfilled as well as possible the kings
promise of justice to his American subjects.14 It recognized that lawmakers
in Madrid did not have all the information necessary to legislate wisely for
the Indies. Negotiations with local officials and interest groups were essential.
To uproot the legal structure of the mining industry, the engine of the
novohispano economy, by revoking the established ordinances of 1584 and
removing jurisdiction over mining cases from the audiencias of Mexico and
Guadalajara, would endanger the administration of justice in New Spain and
thus perhaps the Spanish crowns best claim for sovereignty in America.15
The Flexible Legality of Colonial Spanish America
The legal order of Spanish America was rooted in the Roman legal tradition,
embraced formally by Castile through the thirteenth-century law code, the
Siete Partidas.16 As a law student in the 1730s at the University of Mexico,
On how Spanish law and institutions dispensed justice to Indians in seventeenth
century New Spain, see Owensby, Empire of Law.
15
Gamboas opposition to the policies of Glvez was shared by many Spanish-born
officials, notably Toms Ortiz de Landzuri, accountant-general of the Council of the
Indies; Antonio Maria de Bucareli, viceroy of New Spain in the 1770s; Antonio de Ulloa,
naval commander and co-author of the Noticias secretas de Amrica; and Antonio de Porlier,
successor of Glvez as minister of the Indies. Ortiz de Landzuri recorded his doubts in
opinions filed on Council of the Indies matters. See his opinions on mining in Archivo
General de Indias [hereafter AGI], Mexico, 2235. Bucareli and Ulloa, friends from Seville,
criticized Glvez, especially his planned Intendancy system, in their private correspondance
of 1777 when Ulloa visited New Spain. See Francisco de Solano, Antonio de Ulloa y la
Nueva Espaa (Mexico City, 1987). Porlier, responsible for Gamboas appointment to the
regency of the audiencia of Mexico in 1788, voiced strong support for the the traditional
legal order, again in the context of criticizing the Intendancy system. See AGI, Indiferent
General, 886, Dictamen, 2 Dec. 1801.
16
Robert I. Burns, (ed.), Las Siete Partidas (Philadelphia, PA, 2001). One of the
most widely-distributed legal texts in Colonial Spanish America was the 1555 edition of
the Partidas prepared and glossed by Gregorio Lopez. See Mario Gngora, Studies in the
Colonial History of Spanish America, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge, 1975), p. 73;
Luque Talavn, Universo de opiniones, p. 133.
14
234
Gamboa studied Justinians sixth-century Corpus Juris Civilis, the core of

the curriculum for European law students since its rediscovery in medieval
Italy.17 The ius commune, the common law derived from Roman civil law and
the canon law of the medieval papacy, remained the normative foundation
of the legal system, supplying rules in private fields such as contracts, torts
and remedies, and guiding lawyers in the interpretation of statutes.18 This
European common law differed from its English counterpart in making the
legal scholar, rather than the judge, the principal agent of doctrinal change.
The opinions on Roman law by certain renowned jurisconsults, such as
Bartolus de Saxoferrato, gained auctoritas, or binding force, in the same way
that decisions of higher courts set binding precedents in the English-speaking
world. Although Gamboas treatise on mining law probed Spanish rather than
Roman law, it came out of this same venerable tradition.
The legal system of Spanish America also inherited from Castile a complex
jurisdictional matrix.19 The principal fault line separated the ecclesiastical
from the secular, with both spheres governed by their own courts and bodies
of law. Even within church and state, jurisdiction was fractured. Bishops
faced off against Inquisitors. Audiencias jostled for position with other secular
authorities, such as the viceroy and, in eighteenth-century New Spain,
the Acordada, a criminal tribunal created to combat rural banditry.20 The
intermingling of judicial and political functions within the same office further
complicated jurisdictional politics. Viceroys claimed, as representatives of the
king, the inherent right to administer justice. They routinely trespassed in
fields the audiencia considered its own. Audiencia judges mixed their primary
adjudicative role with administrative and political duties. On top of all this,
as Lauren Benton has argued, the cultural and racial hierarchies produced by
colonialism magnified jurisdictional strife.21 In New Spain in the eighteenth
Javier Barrientos Grandn, La Cultura Jurdica en la Nueva Espaa (Mexico City,

1993), pp. 1248; Lucio Mendieta y Nez, Historia de la Facultad de Derecho, 2nd edn
(Mexico City, 1975), pp. 36120.
18
See Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal
Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 85164.
19
Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400
1900 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 3145, 80102.
20
See Colin M. MacLachlan, Criminal Justice in Eighteenth Century Mexico: A Study
of the Tribunal of the Acordada (Berkeley, CA, 1974).
21
Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, pp. 1215. On legal pluralism in British
North America in the eighteenth century see Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann,
(eds), The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001).
17
235
century few legal disputes failed to generate heat between competing

authorities.22
If conditions in the Indies exacerbated jurisdictional tension, they also
accentuated the casuistic nature of Spanish law.23 Following Roman tradition,
the administration of justice in Spain focused more on resolving particular
cases than enforcing general rules.24 Legislators tended to issue decrees
addressed to specific problems rather than laws of general application, a
tendency that became more pronounced for America because of its extreme
diversity. The result over time in the Indies was an agglomeration of often
contradictory directives, overlaid by a smaller body of imperfectly observed
general statutes. Justices therefore needed a large degree of autonomy to
determine the applicable legal rule in a particular situation. Besides statutory
law, they looked to common law, equity and custom in order to tailor a just
resolution for the dispute at hand. They could even invoke Indian custom,
after Charles V in 1555 allowed Spanish courts to take it into account if it did
not offend Christian doctrine or Castilian law.25 The crown occasionally tried
to bring order to this complex legal order by publishing edited collections of
written law, designed to encourage more consistent and uniform enforcement.
Yet the most famous of these compilations, the Recopilacin de las Leyes de los
Reynos de las Indias of 1681, took decades to complete and was swamped by a
flurry of new Bourbon legislation shortly after it entered circulation.26
The wide jurisdiction exercised by the audiencias, the high courts of royal
justice in the Indies, rested as much on custom as written law. The 1528
founding ordinances for the audiencia of Mexico did grant the court ample
powers, needed at the time to establish royal authority in the wake of conquest.
Its judges heard appeals from local justices, exercised primary jurisdiction over
criminal matters in the capital, handled routine and extraordinary commissions,
On the jurisdictional conflicts in seventeenth-century New Spain see Alejandro
Caeque, The Kings Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial
Mexico (New York, 2004), especially pp. 51117.
23
On casuistry in Spanish and Spanish American law, see Tau Anzotegui, Casuismo
y sistema.
24
For the Mexican context, see Cutter, Legal Culture of Northern New Spain.
25
Francisco Toms y Valiente, Manual de Historia del Derecho Espaol, 4th edn
(Madrid, 1983), p. 341. The British likewise recognized Hindu and Muslim law in colonial
India as long as it did not violate justice, equity, or good conscience. See Benton, Law and
Colonial Cultures, p. 139.
26
The Recopilacin was completed in the 1630s by Antonio de Len Pinelo in Peru
and Juan de Solrzano y Pereira in Spain, but remained unpublished until 1681. See C.H.
Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (Gloucester, MA, 1973), pp. 1046; Toms y
Valiente, Derecho Espaol, pp. 3413.
22
236
and served as an advisory council for the viceroy. In the event of the death of
a viceroy, it assumed full governmental powers until a successor arrived.27 But
as the central judicial institution in the viceroyalty, the audiencia also took on
responsibilities not contemplated by royal statutes. For example, the audiencia
nominated police captains in the city of Puebla, despite express wording in
its own constitution limiting such powers to the capital.28 The court also
exercised jurisdiction over mining disputes, overriding a prohibition in the
1584 Ordinances. As Gamboa pointed out when he defended the audiencia in
both cases, there had been no feasible alternative when these practices began
and they had long been embedded into the legal order.
The flexible legality of the Indies ultimately derived from a medieval notion
of kingship. Law was an instrument to fulfil the princes higher moral duty
to protect the welfare of his subjects. If law did not advance this objective, it
could lose its validity.29 This understanding of law, articulated as early as the
seventh century by Isidore of Seville and brought to maturity by the Thomist
theologians of sixteenth-century Salamanca, remained pervasive in eighteenthcentury New Spain.30 In the Comentarios, Gamboa referred to it by quoting a
1727 viceregal report criticizing the mercury monopoly:
The prince is always beholden to what is honest, just, possible, convenient, necessary,
and useful in the welfare of his vassals, which are the constitutive requisites of Law:
although the prince can do everything, he can only do what is just; although much
might be licit to his power, not everything that is licit is honest, decent, or decorous
to his Sovereignty: although he can abrogate Law, he cannot take away rights already
acquired by his vassals, without proven cause, sanctioned by justice, and for no reason
less powerful, necessary, and advantageous than the universal welfare and prosperity of
his subjects, the true object of kingship.31
In America, crown officials and judges assumed the responsibility of

deciding whether the law issued by the king served this higher purpose. If
they found the law would cause manifest injustice or inconvenience in light
Caeque, The Kings Living Image, pp. 5765.
The controversy over the audiencias control over police in Puebla broke out
in 1766. Gamboas opposition to the order to suspend the audiencias police was the
beginning of his troubles with Glvez and the viceroy, the marquis of Croix. AGI, Mexico,
1265, Representation by Sala de Crimen, 24 Nov. 1766.
29
See Gngora, Colonial History of Spanish America, pp. 6872; Brian Z. Tamanaha,
On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, Theory (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 1824; Toms y
Valiente, Derecho Espaol, pp. 2849.
30
See Louisa S. Hoberman, Hispanic American Political Theory as a Distinct
Tradition, Journal of the History of Ideas, 41:2 (1980): 2067.
31
Gamboa, Comentarios, p. 39.
27
28
237
of local circumstances, they could invoke the ancient formula of Obedecer pero
no cumplir [To obey but not to enforce]. Recognized in the Siete Partidas, this
device allowed lower authorities to bypass a particular legal directive, while
still acknowledging the kings right to issue it. The requirement to file with the
king written reasons for the opt-out limited its abuse. Rather than exemplifying
colonial disregard for the law, Obedecer pero no cumplir upheld the ideal of the
king as the defender of the welfare and prosperity of his subjects. It screened
out inappropriate or poorly designed laws that could bring disrepute to the
administration of justice.32
The Bourbon Challenge to Derecho Indiano
In the eighteenth century, assertive regalism threatened the survival of the old
legal order of Spanish America. From his arrival in Spain, the new Bourbon
king Philip V promoted the extension of Castilian royal law as a means to
solidify the new dynastys power and fiscal base.33 He ordered the suppression
of the distinct laws of Valencia, Aragon, Mallorca and Catalonia, the provinces
of the old crown of Aragon that had remained loyal to the Habsburgs in the
war of succession. To make Castilian public law applicable throughout Spain
had been in the minds of Spanish kings since at least the early seventeenth
century, when the Count-Duke of Olivares recommended it to Philip IV.34
The Bourbons finally carried out Olivaress policy, only sparing the Basque
region, in recognition of its support during the succession struggles. The
crown continued to respect Basque fueros, the charters that guaranteed the
provinces legal autonomy vis--vis the rest of Spain.
It did not apply to either judicial rulings or laws of general application, such as the
1584 mining ordinances. See Caeque, The Kings Living Image, p. 56; Gngora, Colonial
History of Spanish America, pp. 748; Vctor Tau Anzotegui, La ley se obedece pero no
se cumple. En torno a la suplicacin de las leyes en el Derecho indiano, in La Ley en
Amrica hispana del Descubrimiento a la Emancipacin (Buenos Aires, 1992), pp. 67143;
Hoberman, Hispanic American Political Theory as a Distinct Tradition, pp. 21214;
John Leddy Phelan, Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy,
Administrative Science Quarterly, 5:1 (1960): 4765.
33
Jos Snchez-Arcilla Bernal, Manual de Historia del Derecho (Madrid, 2004),
pp. 487501.
34
J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 14691716 (London, 1963), p. 329; Ricardo Garca
Crcel, Felipe V y los espaoles: Una visin perifrica del problema de Espaa (Barcelona,
2002), pp. 86119.
32
238
After another disruptive military contest, the Seven Years War, the crown
pushed the fight against legal pluralism to American shores.35 The instructions
given to Jos de Glvez when he set off for New Spain in 1765 included an
order to establish a system of royal intendants, patterned on the Castilian
model. Standardizing regional administration on both sides of the Atlantic had
been on the drawing board since the 1740s, when government minister Jos
del Campillo recommended it in his Nuevo sistema de gobierno econmico para
Amrica.36 Glvez, however, ran up against stiff opposition when he presented
his intendancy plan in 1768. He lambasted unnamed critics who included
Gamboa and Toms Ortiz de Landzuri, the accountant-general of the Council
of the Indies as persons who profited from anarchy and disorderor had
not done the work of examining abuses, which they venerate in the name of
the so-called ancient system.37 Glvez conceived his mandate, first as visitorgeneral to New Spain and then as secretary of state for the Indies, to finish
what Philip V had started in the lands of the old crown of Aragon: the rooting
out of autonomous tendencies and the assertion of the unconditional force of
royal law throughout the empire.38 The intendancy plan was just one of several
measures intended to further this goal.
It was not only the distinct laws and institutions in the composite parts of
the Spanish monarchy that offended the supremacy of the kings law, it was
also competing normative sources, such as the ius commune and custom.39
Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos expressed a common late eighteenth-century
attitude towards the common law in a speech to the Real Academia de Historia
in 1780. He claimed that since the time of the Siete Partidas, the opinions of
the jurisconsults of Bologna began to be respected as law, introducing amongst
us a body of law that was many times different, and even occasionally contrary
to our national laws.40 The main charge against the ius commune was that it
Benton focuses on the challenge to colonial legal pluralism in the nineteenth
century. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, pp. 21016.
36
The manuscript circulated in government offices for decades before finally being
published in 1789. For a recent edition see Jos del Campillo y Cosso, Nuevo sistema de
gobierno econmico para Amrica, ed. Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois (Oviedo, 1993). There
lingers some doubt, however, whether Campillo was the real author. See Luis Navarro
Garcia, Campillo y el Nuevo sistema: Una atribucin dudosa, Temas americanistas,
2 (1983): 229.
37
AGI, Indiferente General, 1713, Plan of Intendancies, 15 Jan. 1768.
38
Snchez-Arcilla Bernal, Manual de Historia del Derecho, pp. 48791.
39
See Luque Talavn, Universo de opiniones, pp. 96101; Toms y Valiente, Derecho
Espaol, pp. 3859.
40
Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Discurso Acadmico en su recepcin a la Real
Academia de la Historia (1780), in Jos Caso Gonzlez (ed.), Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos:
35
239
undermined the respect owing to national laws.41 As early as 1713, the crown
ordered Spanish universities to incorporate the teaching of Castilian law into
the legal curriculum.42 In America, the revival of custom as a source of legal
norms posed another threat to the theoretical supremacy of the directives and
statutes of the king. The Bourbon monarchy was determined to subordinate
both common law and custom to its written legislation.
The larger European movement in the eighteenth century to make law
more rational added impetus to Spanish legal reform. This campaign began
with the flowering in the seventeenth century of natural law philosophy,
which held that there was an orderly normative structure in nature that could
be discerned through human reason. Positive law, the rules made by men,
should conform to this underlying framework. Because Protestant thinkers
such as Hugo de Grotius, Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf developed
the philosophy in the seventeenth century, it received a cool reception at first
in Spain, even though it was originally formulated by Thomist theologians
in Salamanca, notably Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Surez. Yet even
watered down, natural law offered a powerful critique of the messy, casuistic
legality of Spain and Spanish America.43
The ideas of natural law inspired Spanish legal reformers such as
Juan Francisco de Castro and Juan Pablo Forner to call for the rational
codification of Spanish law.44 Written law, they declared, should be consistent,
determinative and easy to understand. A code would also undercut the role
of lawyers and judges, whose interpretations reformers considered hindrances
to the execution of law. The crown in fact began to prohibit the publication
of commentaries on its laws, starting with the new military ordinances of
1772. The king wanted the courts to enforce this statute strictly, according
to its plain meaning, rather than be swayed by the clever interpretations of
jurists. In 1776, when Glvez convened a committee to draft a new, more
rational law code for the Indies, to replace the Recopilacin of 1681, the crown
Obras en Prosa (Madrid, 1987), p. 95.
41
Barrientos Grandn, Cultura Jurdica, p. 241; John Henry Merryman, The Civil
Law Tradition, 2nd edn (Stanford, CA, 1985), pp. 1820.
42
Santos M. Coronas Gonzlez, Manual de Historia del Derecho Espaol (Valencia,
1996), p. 392.
43
Ian McLeod, Legal Theory, 4th ed. (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 4260; Tau Anzotegui,
Casuismo y sistema, pp. 18393; Toms y Valiente, Derecho Espaol, pp. 3224.
44
Tau Anzotegui, Casuismo y sistema, pp. 14856; Victor Tau Anzotegui, El
pensamiento espaol en el proceso de la codificacin hispanoamericana: los Discursos
crticos de Juan Francisco de Castro, Revista de Estudios Histrico-Jurdicos, 5 (1980):
37598.
240
likewise banned further commentaries on the law of the Indies.45 Gamboas

Comentarios of 1761 was, in fact, one of the last commentaries published on
royal legislation in Spanish America.46
The Comentarios as an Enlightenment Text
Gamboa straddled two worlds in the Comentarios, the old legal landscape
of Derecho Indiano and the new horizons of the Enlightenment. To him
and many educated Spaniards and Spanish-Americans of his generation,
there was no contradiction between legal conservatism (or Catholicism) and
enthusiasm for new scientific and economic ideas. Pragmatic and empirical,
he was more concerned with how the law worked in practice than its doctrinal
purity. In uncluttered prose, he explained the history, economic rationale
and interpretative difficulties of the eighty-three Ordinances of 1584. His
methodology betrayed a debt to Benito Jernimo Feijo, the prolific writer,
polemicist and Benedictine monk who urged his countrymen, in dozens of
essays from the 1720s to the 1760s, to reject scholasticism and its reliance on
ancient authorities and embrace the new epistemology of experimentation,
the observation of nature, and the application of individual reason. The
monks intellectual hero was Francis Bacon, the English jurist and philosopher
of the scientific revolution.47 Gamboa hailed Feijo in the Comentarios as
our Spanish Savant, who has so enlightened the Nation with his writings.48
Evoking Feijo placed Gamboa firmly in the mainstream of eighteenthcentury Spanish thinking.
Without claiming to be a scientist himself, Gamboa wrote fluently about
the technical aspects of mining and metallurgy. He conceived the Comentarios
as a vehicle to introduce to his readers, especially Mexican miners, the latest
scientific information. He wove into his legal exegesis copious references
to the European literature on mines and metals, from Agricolas classic De
Re Metallica (1556) to Christophe Andre Schlters metallurgical treatise,
Toms y Valiente, Derecho Espaol, pp. 3434.
For a comprehensive catalogue of juridical literature in the Indies see Luque Talavn,
Universo de opiniones, pp. 259638. See also Bernardino Bravo Lira, La Literatura Jurdica
Indiana en el Barroco, Revista de Estudios Histrico-Jurdicos, 10 (1985): 22768.
47
Feijo wrote two multi-volume collections, the Teatro crtico universal (172640)
and Cartas eruditas (17421760). For an overview of his role in spreading Enlightenment
ideas in Spain, see Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton,
NJ, 1958), pp. 3745. In addition, see Simposio sobre el Padre Feijo y su siglo (2 vols,
Oviedo, 1976).
48
45
46
241
Grndlicher Unterricht von Htte-Werken (1738).49 The jurist from New

Spain highlighted in particular the contributions of Spaniards and SpanishAmericans, including lvaro Alonso Barba, who first wrote about the mercury
amalgamation technique invented in Mexico in the 1550s, and Jos Saenz
de Escobar, an attorney in New Spain who drafted a manuscript in 1706 on
mine surveying.50 Gamboa included two long technical sections explaining,
respectively, subterranean surveying and refining techniques. The lawyer was
in fact the first person to publish a complete description of the so-called patio
method of refining silver ore in New Spain. Pedro Rodrguez Campomanes,
the influential crown attorney of the Council of Castile and the chief ideologue
of the liberal economic reforms of Charles III, was impressed. He praised the
Comentarios, as truthfully very useful and the study employed in it great.51
Any legal commentary in the second half of the eighteenth century raised
suspicions among the Spanish ilustrados. As the enlightened character in Jos
Cadalsos 1774 novel, Cartas Marruecas, put it, Commentaries, interpretations,
glosses, notes, etc. are usually so many tricks of courtroom battle. If it were up
to me, they should prohibit all new work in this vein for this simple fact.52 Less
radically, the Galician judge Juan Francisco de Castro, in his 1765 Discursos
crticos sobre las leyes, urged Spanish jurists at least to confine themselves to
national laws and authorities in their writings.53 Gamboa largely conformed
to this patriotic imperative. His main subject matter was national legislation,
the 1584 Mining Ordinances, and the jurists he cited most frequently were
For a recent reprint of the 1912 translation of Agricola see Georgius Agricola, De
Re Metallica trans. Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (New York, 1986). Gamboa
read the 1750 French translation of Schlter by Jean Hellot, De la Fonte des Mines.
50
lvaro Alonso Barba, Arte de los metales; en que ensea el verdadero beneficio de los
de oro y plata por azogue, el modo de fundirlos todos y como se han de retinar y apartar unos
de otros. (Madrid, 1640). Gamboa lamented that Saenzs Tratado de Medidas de Minas
remained unpublished and unknown, because of the high cost of printing in New Spain.
He incorporated much of Saenzs work in chapter 12 of the Comentarios.
51
Pedro Rodriguez Campomanes, Reflexiones sobre el comercio espaol a Indias
(1762), ed. Vicente Llombart Rosa (Madrid, 1988), p. 435. On Campomanes, see Vicente
Llombart Rosa, Campomanes: economista y poltico de Carlos III (Madrid, 1992).
52
Jos Cadalso, Cartas Marruecas, 24th edn (Madrid, 1999), p. 68.
53
Juan Francisco de Castro, Discursos crticos sobre las leyes, y sus interpretes en que se
demuestra la incertidumbre de stos, y la necesidad de un nuevo, y metdico cuerpo de derecho
para la recta administracin de justicia (Madrid, 176570). On Castro, see Francisco
Snchez-Blanco, El Absolutismo y las Luces en el reinado de Carlos III (Madrid, 2002),
pp. 11617, 21517; Tau Anzotegui, Los Discursos crticos de Juan Francisco de
Castro.
49
242
Spanish or Spanish American, such as Diego de Covarrubias, Francisco

Salgado de Somoza, and Juan Bautista Larrea.54 Gamboas two most important
juridical sources were his fellow commentators on Derecho Indiano, Juan de
Solrzano y Pereira and Gaspar de Escalona y Agero. Solrzano, an audiencia
judge in Peru for two decades before taking a seat on the Council of the
Indies, wrote the multi-volume Poltica Indiana in 1647, the landmark study
of public law in the Indies.55 He also edited what later became the Recopilacin
of 1681. Escalonas Gazophilacium regium perubicum, also printed in 1647,
discussed the fiscal laws in Peru and included material on the Peruvian mining
code of 1572. Gamboas Comentarios therefore was patriotic enough to pass
muster even with those ilustrados antagonistic to the Roman legal heritage.
Finally, Gamboa demonstrated in the Comentarios a typical Enlightenment
concern for political economy.56 He included a comprehensive economic plan
addressing the shortage of capital for mine projects, perhaps the greatest
constraint on increased productivity. Serving at the time as deputy of the
consulado of Mexico in Madrid, Gamboa made four key recommendations.
First, he proposed the crown relax its monopoly over the supply of mercury,
essential in the processing of low-grade silver ore. Secondly, he recommended
tax exemptions for miners engaged in capital-intensive projects to rehabilitate
flooded or damaged mines. Thirdly, he suggested the establishment of a second
mint in Guadalajara to overcome the chronic shortage of legal currency in
northern New Spain. His final and most controversial proposal was to set up
Covarrubias, perhaps Spains greatest humanist legal scholar of the sixteenth
century, wrote Practicarum Questionum Liber unicus (1566), still the basic text on remedies
in the eighteenth century. Salgados Labyrinthus creditorum concurrentiae (1663) remained
the leading text on debtor-creditor issues while Larreas Novae Decisiones Granatenses
(1636) furnished Gamboa with comparable mining cases decided by the chancellery court
of Granada. See Toms y Valiente, Derecho Espaol, pp. 30915.
55
For the most recent edition see Juan Solrzano Pereyra, Poltica Indiana, ed.
Francisco Toms y Valiente and Ana Mara Barrero (3 vols, Madrid, 1996).
56
In the Comentarios, Gamboa cited important Spanish economists of the first half
of the eighteenth century, such as Gernimo de Uztriz, Bernardo de Ulloa, and Theodoro
Ventura de Argumosa. Although not as well-versed on political economy as his Spanish
contemporary and fellow lawyer, Pedro Rodrguez Campomanes, Gamboa too showed
throughout his career an interest in the subject. He was a charter member in New Spain of
the Real Sociedad Bascongada de Amigos del Pais, the pioneering Basque economic society.
On the economic societies see Jess Astigarraga, Los ilustrados vascos: Ideas, instituciones y
reformas econmicas en Espaa (Barcelona, 2003); Robert J. Shafer, The Economic Societies
in the Spanish World (17631821) (Syracuse, NY, 1958); Josefina Mara Cristina Torales
Pacheco, Ilustrados en la Nueva Espaa: los socios de la Real Sociedad Bascongada de los
Amigos del Pas (Mexico City, 2001).
54
243
a mining bank under the control of the merchants of the consulado of Mexico.
Gamboa claimed the consulado was the only entity with the experience,
expertise and capital to manage such an enterprise in New Spain. These
measures, he believed, would energize silver mining and increase the crowns
overall fiscal revenues, without the need for new taxes.
Gamboas Support for the 1584 Ordinances
For the crown, the most important service performed by Gamboa in the
Comentarios was to untangle the extremely complicated body of law pertaining
to the mines of New Spain. The 1584 Ordinances did not even revoke the
earlier ones of 1563, except in cases of direct conflict. Lawyers had to read
both bodies of law together to determine the rule in any given situation.57 Even
then, the letter of the law did not necessarily represent how courts applied
it. Like almost all royal legislation in the Indies, the mining law had been
stretched and pulled to cover the situation on the ground. In fact, Philip III
in 1602 expressly authorized viceroys to consult with local experts about the
applicability of the Ordinances, and if these persons find the laws suited to
such kingdoms, especially in that they do not conflict with particular measures
already taken in these provinces, the viceroys should conserve, practice and
enforce the laws, but if the experts found the laws unsuited, the viceroys had
the discretion not to apply them.58 Gamboas many years as a lawyer practicing
at the Audiencia of Mexico, handling the most bitterly-fought lawsuits over
mines of the main districts of that kingdom, gave him the experience to know
how the courts had interpreted the law.59 He also had access to a collection
of cdulas [royal decrees] saved from the 1692 fire that nearly destroyed the
viceregal palace in Mexico City.60 They set out royal amendments to the law
throughout the seventeenth century. Gamboa was thus uniquely equipped to
bring order and coherence to a confusing legislative field.
Ord. 1. Gamboa, Comentarios, pp. 17. This was the normal situation in Spanish
legislation, with old laws remaining on the books unless expressly revoked.
58
Quoted in ibid., 4. The direction read in full: Que los Virreyes comuniquen
con personas inteligentes, y experimentadas las Leyes de Castilla, tocantes a Minas; y
si se hallaren convenientes, las hagan guardar, practicar, y executar en las Indias, como
no sean contrarias a lo especialmente prevenido para cada Provincia: y hagan la relacion
conveniente de las que se dexan de cumplir, y por qu causa, y las razones que huviere, para
mandar que se guarden las que tuvieren por necessarias.
59
Ibid., Prologue, unpaginated.
60
Ibid., p. 84.
57
244
Gamboa was confident that with his Comentarios at hand both miners
and justices would show greater respect for the estimable purpose of the 1584
Ordinances: the encouragement of private initiative in the discovery and
exploitation of mineral resources. The spirit of these Ordinances, the jurist
remarked, accredits the absolute liberty of vassals, and even foreigners to
look for mines in whatever public or private place, without impediment by
the lands owner.61 He regarded the rules governing property rights in the
statute sound and well drafted. Ownership of subsoil minerals lay with the
crown, which delegated exploitation to private individuals in exchange for the
payment of royalties and other taxes. One could enter anothers land to look
for gold or silver on the principle that the crown, not the surface property
owner, controlled underground metal.62 To protect its property rights, the
crown required all miners to register their claims at a local treasury office.63 To
keep claims valid, miners had to begin operations within ten days, staking out
the mine and digging the main shaft.64 If registered owners failed to keep a
minimum of four workers on site with no more than a four-month interruption,
another person could claim the property.65 The ordinances even contemplated
fiscal exemptions to encourage individuals to undertake expensive mine
restoration projects.66 What was needed to boost silver production, Gamboa
believed, was simply respect for the existing legal framework, not the radical
reworking of mining law and institutions demanded by Glvez.
As a lawyer steeped in Derecho Indiano, Gamboa was untroubled by
discrepancies between what law said and how it was enforced. He recognized
that in many cases strict application of laws drafted in Spain was simply
impossible in the Indies. The Mining Ordinances, for instance, prescribed
measures that required a governmental presence lacking in the distant mining
districts of New Spain. The law set out a complicated royalty system based
on ore grade, which only a corps of crown mine inspectors could enforce.67
Since the crown had failed to earmark funds for these agents, Spanish officials
Ord. 16. Ibid., p. 93.
Ord. 2. Ibid., pp. 1025. While seeming to slight private property owners, the
likely effect of this broad right was to provide incentives to owners to develop their own
lands before an interloper arrived. It conformed with a traditional notion that ownership
entailed the responsibility to use land productively for the good of the community. For a
perceptive analysis of this idea of ownership, see Owensby, Empire of Law, pp. 90129.
63
Ords. 79. Gamboa, Comentarios, pp. 6591.
64
Ord. 22. Ibid., pp. 18292.
65
Ord. 37. Ibid., pp. 32240.
66
Ord. 79. Ibid., pp. 47389.
67
Ords. 315. Ibid., pp. 8390.
61
62
245
on the ground simplified the system by charging uniform rates to all miners.
The Ordinances also foresaw government-managed refining facilities. Instead,
in New Spain private individuals gained the freedom to process their own
ore.68 The weakness of the government was such that private individuals even
operated the royal mint in Mexico City until 1733.69 The crown did devise
one effective way to monitor silver production: it monopolized the supply of
mercury, essential in refining New Spains low-grade ore. Gamboa argued in
the Comentarios that this monopoly contravened the spirit of the Ordinances
since it restricted the individual freedom to mine.70 The crown, however, was
reluctant to surrender this lever over the industry, having failed to put into
practice so many mechanisms authorized by law.
The most significant incongruity between the law as written and as
enforced concerned the adjudication of mining suits. The Ordinances
envisioned a specialized court system. Local mine administrators would hear
cases at the first instance, with appeals made to a general administrator in
Mexico City. These administrators would exercise exclusive jurisdiction over
mining lawsuits, with the king commanding through Ordinance 77 that all
other justices whatsoever in these our kingdoms shall not interfere with the
cognizance of such cases touching or concerning the aforesaid mines.71 In other
words, the law expressly prohibited the ordinary civil courts, headed by the
audiencias, from hearing mining disputes. To which Gamboa dryly remarked,
This Ordinance is not in practice in the Indies.72 Instead, ordinary justices,
the alcaldes mayores, handled lawsuits at the local level and the audiencias of
Mexico City and Guadalajara heard appeals. Again, the reason was that the
crown never established the separate court system for miners.
The possibility remained, however, that the government could set up a
distinct adjudicative mechanism for miners. Gamboa sensed growing support
for the idea amongst miners and tried in the Comentarios to contain it. He
pointed out, first, that the cash-strapped miners themselves would have to
bear the cost of a specialized tribunal. Secondly, he defended the role of the
audiencias, claiming that were the right of appeal to the audiencias abolished,
the remedy for injustice would be cut off, and the parties robbed of a right
Ords. 6075. Ibid., pp. 38494.
See Victor Manuel Soria Murillo, La Casa de Moneda de Mxico bajo la
administracin borbnica 17331821 (Mexico City, 1994).
70
Gamboa, Comentarios, pp. 2543. On the mercury monopoly, see Richard L.
Garner, Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico (Gainesville, FL, 1993),
pp. 1329.
71
Ord. 77. Ibid., p. 465.
72
Ibid., p. 467.
68
69
246
of defence to which they are entitled.73 From his own experience handling
cases before the audiencia of Mexico, Gamboa could vouch for its expertise
and dispatch in administering justice in mining suits. He blamed the miners
themselves for the slow and complicated judicial proceedings that often kept
mines idle. He claimed miners sued too easily and refused to settle intractable
disputes. Long before the crown authorized the Mining Tribunal in 1776,
Gamboa had made clear he considered the audiencias indispensable for the
proper administration of justice for miners. To entrust adjudication to the
miners themselves, Gamboa thought both dangerous and absurd.74
Before the creation of the Tribunal, the viceroy posed the biggest threat
to the audiencias jurisdiction over mining justice. When Gamboa defended
the authority of the audiencias in the Comentarios, he had in mind the recent
intervention by the first count of Revillagigedo, Juan Francisco Gemes
y Horcasitas, who put the bonanza district of Bolaos under his personal
jurisdiction in 1752. Revillagigedo, viceroy from 1746 to 1755, claimed the
camp was too important, as both the gateway to northern New Spain and a
font of government revenue, to be left in the hands of an allegedly corrupt
local magistrate and negligent audiencia of Guadalajara.75 The viceroy had
made a habit of infringing on the turf of other authorities. Part of Gamboas
mission to Madrid on behalf of the consulado was to seek a declaration from
the crown condemning his interference in commercial disputes.76 Gamboa
admonished Revillagigedo in the Comentarios for his rampant jurisdictional
trespassing:
As the supreme head of the kingdom, and representing the majesty of our
sovereign, it is his duty to allow the other members of the body politic, and the
tribunals appointed for the determination of questions of justice, to perform their
functions without restraint. And he must not, by transgressing the proper limits of
his jurisdiction, and assuming authorities which belong to other ministers, disturb
the harmony and subordination which ought to exist in the functions of the different
officers of the state, at the same time, in so doing, violating the laws (which are supreme
above all), and working great injustice to the parties concerned.77
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 46872.
75
Count of Revillagigedo, Decree of 7 Nov. 1754, in Instrucciones y memorias de los
virreyes novohispanos, ed. Ernesto De la Torre Villar (Mexico, 1991), pp. 84751.
76
Archivo General de la Nacin, Archivo Histrico de Hacienda, pp. 6358.
77
73
74
247
This succinctly states Gamboas belief that it was a fundamental duty of the
viceroy, and indeed any executive official, to respect the autonomy of the
courts in order to assure the proper administration of justice.
To be sure, Gamboa had personal interests at stake in the survival of
Derecho Indiano. Before he left for Madrid in 1755 to serve as the deputy
of the consulado, he had risen to the pinnacle of the legal profession in New
Spain. He had represented miners, merchants and religious orders in court
and provided confidential advice to viceroys, the Mexico city council and the
metropolitan cathedral chapter.78 As the Comentarios attest, he could discern
coherence beneath the surface chaos of the law, which gave him an advantage
over less incisive letrados. He also went to Madrid with the hopes of securing
a seat on the audiencia of Mexico, and thus had a strong motive to praise the
judiciary.
To attribute his defence of the old legal order solely to material interests,
however, ignores the depth and consistency of his convictions. As an audiencia
judge from 1764 to 1794, he wrote dozens of submissions to the crown,
applying the ideas he first expressed in the Comentarios to the real events that
came his way, from the abuses of prisoners in the bakeries of Mexico City in
1765, to the riots at the mines of Real del Monte in 1766, to the rise and fall
of the Mining Tribunal from the mid-1770s to 1790. He did not waver in his
advocacy for a strong independent audiencia, the only institution he believed
that could curb the excesses of executive power. He defended the practice of
reading royal statutes in light of local customs and circumstances.
His defence of the ideas and practices of Derecho Indiano cost him dearly on
two occasions. In 1769 the crown recalled him to Spain, acting on allegations
by the viceroy, the marquis of Croix, that Gamboa had impeded the reforms of
Glvez.79 Only after Croix and Glvez had left New Spain at the end of 1771
did the crown allow Gamboa to return, cleared of all charges and restored to
his old position on the bench.80 In 1783, largely due to his opposition to the
Mining Tribunal, Glvez engineered the judges removal from New Spain again,
this time to Santo Domingo, where he took over as regent, or chief justice, of
its audiencia. He had to wait until the death of Glvez in 1787 before he could
return to New Spain, appointed by the crown as the first creole regent of the
audiencia of Mexico. Until his death in 1794, at the age of 76, the old judge
continued to fight against any attempt to limit the jurisdiction and autonomy
of the audiencia. It was his defence of the values, practices and institutions of
AGI, Indiferente General, 159, no. 35, Relacin de servicios, 1759.
See Luis Navarro Garca, Destruccin de la oposicin poltica en Mxico por
Carlos III, Anales de la Universidad Hispalense, XXIV (1964): 1346.
80
AGI, Mexico, 2778, Opinion of Special Council, April 7, 1772.
78
79
248
Derecho Indiano, more than his advocacy of the consulados economic interests,
that explains his resolve in opposing the Bourbon reforms.
Conclusion
This essay has argued that Francisco Xavier de Gamboa, the author of the
Comentarios a las Ordenanzas de Minas and a judge on the audiencia of Mexico,
opposed the so-called Bourbon reforms because he believed they threatened
the legal order that had sustained Spanish sovereignty in the Indies since the
conquest. In particular, he feared that the assertive regalism personified by Jos
de Glvez, first visitor-general to New Spain and then secretary of state for the
Indies, would undermine judicial authority and independence. He expressed
his legal philosophy in his 1761 commentary on the mining law, making clear
then, while he was still a private lawyer working on behalf of the consulado of
Mexico, that he believed the jurisdiction of the audiencias, the high courts of
civil jurisdiction, should be broad and unfettered. His main objection against
Glvezs plan to create a self-governing organization for miners was that it
would strip jurisdiction from the ordinary courts and invest it with the miners
themselves, whom he considered unqualified for the task. It was law more
than economics that mattered to the Mexican jurist.
Scholars are reexamining the culture and institutions of colonial law. They
are clearing the ground of misplaced and anachronistic assumptions about the
rule of law, legal pluralism, the colonial state and even the role of ceremony.81
For example, Alejandro Caeque argues that the fixation on the state as an
analytical category prevents a clear understanding of how viceregal power
was expressed and deployed in colonial Mexico.82 In regard to colonial law, a
large part of the problem in comprehending how it functioned is simply how
strange it now looks to eyes accustomed to the light of state-centered legal
systems. It is easy to caricature, for instance, the notion of Obedecer pero no
cumplir as a symbol of colonial indifference to law. Yet the device had its logic
in a system where the enforcement of royal legislation was always conditioned
by local realities. It is easier now to see the flaws and absurdities of the colonial
I am referring specifically to studies by Lauren Benton on the relationship between

colonial culture and legal pluralism, Alejandro Caeque on viceregal political culture,
Tamar Herzog on criminal justice in colonial Quito, Brian Owensby on Indian litigation
in seventeenth-century Mexico, and Victor Tau Anzotegui on casuistry in Spanish
colonial legal practice.
82
Caeque, The Kings Living Image, pp. 710. See also Herzog, Upholding Justice,
pp. 18.
81
249
legal regime than the qualities that allowed it to mediate power tolerably well
in a difficult social and physical environment.
The argument of this essay raises important questions about how
historians have treated the Bourbon reforms. This ambitious program has
rarely been analysed in the context of the larger pattern of legal change in
the Spanish world in the eighteenth century. Yet to a large extent the reforms
attempted under Charles III represented the transfer to America of a project
to apotheosize the kings written law, which began when Philip V imposed
Castilian public law and institutions on the provinces of the old crown of
Aragon. Although associated with the Bourbons, this project had been in the
works since at least the early seventeenth century. This focus on law suggests
that we should downplay the importance of the Enlightenment as an influence
on the colonial reforms of Charles III. To be sure, the Enlightenment concern
for rationalizing law helped to shape the thinking of officials such as Jos
de Glvez, but the destruction of local legal autonomy and the weakening
of judicial institutions the reforms entailed did not appear particularly
enlightened to many well-informed subjects of the Spanish monarchy.
Equating Bourbon colonial reform with enlightened reform therefore tends
to undercut the validity of the arguments of opponents, who are treated as
reactionaries protecting economic or political privileges. In addition, it betrays
a degree of Eurocentricism, privileging metropolitan over colonial concerns.
Looking at the Bourbon reform process from the perspective of law can help
avoid both of these analytical pitfalls of the conventional view.
PART IV
Political Economy and the Reform of
Society and the State
Chapter 15
The Sultans Republic: Jealousy of Trade

and Oriental Despotism in
Paolo Mattia Doria
Sophus A. Reinert
What follows is an attempt to problematize the relationship between politics

and the economy in early modern Europe, focusing on how certain patterns
of international trade established by the eras great powers delineated the range
of conceived political possibilities in the developing periphery. In particular,
this chapter discusses how the pecuniary bellicosity of England, France, and
Holland created an atmosphere of terror and anxiety in Naples against which
variations of political absolutism came to be considered the only possible
remedy. The emblematic example of this, I will argue, is the lawyer and historian
Paolo Mattia Doria (16671746), an aristocratic Platonist who, having been
The literature on Doria is extensive, but see especially Enrico Vidal, Il pensiero civile
di Paolo Mattia Doria negli scritti inediti (Milan, 1953); Vittorio Conti, Paolo Mattia Doria:
Dalla repubblica dei togati alla repubblica dei notabili (Florence, 1978); Salvatore Rotta,
Nota introduttiva in Raffaele Ajello et al. (eds), Dal Muratori al Cesarotti, vol. V: Politici ed
economisti nel primo Settecento (Milan-Naples, 1978), pp. 835968; Giuseppe Ricuperati, A
proposito di Paolo Mattia Doria, Rivista storica italiana, 91 (1979): 26185; Enrico Nuzzo,
Verso la Vita Civile: Antropologia e politica nelle lezioni accademiche di Gregorio Caloprese
e Paolo Mattia Doria (Naples, 1984); the essays collected in Giovanni Papuli (ed.), Paolo
Mattia Doria fra rinnovamento e tradizione (Lecce, 1985); Giuseppe Galasso, La filosofia in
soccorso de governi: La cultura napoletana del settecento (Naples, 1989), pp. 193265 and
passim, and now John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples,
16801760 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 184200 and passim. Historiography has often not
been kind to Doria, for examples of which see Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical
Biography (Oxford, 1961), p. 114; Fernanda Torcellan Ginolino, Il pensiero politico di
Paolo Mattia Doria ed un interessante profile storico di Vittorio Amedeo II, Bollettino
Storico Bibliografico Subalpino, LIX (1961): 21334, esp. 213; Harold Stone, Vicos Cultural
History: The Production and Transmission of Ideas in Naples, 16851750 (Leiden, 1997),
254
among the first in Europe to identify the problem of Gelosia di commercio

jealousy of trade came to endorse the executive example of the Turkish
Sultan in response to foreign military and economic practices. This, in turn,
adumbrates not only certain qualifications to Dorias ostensibly republican
programme but also the expansive boundaries of the Orientalist discourse of
the time and the ways in which the emulative exigencies of international trade
influenced local political life. Enlightened reforms were clearly required to
remedy Naples place in the European theatre, but the very pressures making
them necessary simultaneously inflected the means of their realization.
For though the city-states of Italy once had been the proud inspiration of
all Europe, by the eighteenth century they had been relegated to the economic
outskirts of the continent. English authors, as Antonio Genovesi noted in his
17571758 translations of John Cary and Thomas Mun, had once emulated
Italian economic theories and practices, but now it was Italys turn to emulate
those of England. Yet few parts of Italy experienced this change from centre
to semi-periphery more strongly than the Kingdom of Naples. Known as
the Garden of Italy, it was the most geographically extensive state of the
peninsula, centrally located in the Mediterranean and endowed with copious
natural resources. But all this, local writers noted, had been a cause of great
p. 170. For an important description of Doria and his world, though emphasising religion
and philosophy rather than political economy, see Francesco Maria Spinelli, Vita, e studj
scritta da lui medesimo in una lettera [1753], ed. Fabrizio Lomonaco (Genoa, 2007). I am
indebted to Antonio Trampus for this reference.

On which see Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the
Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

Sophus A. Reinert, Blaming the Medici: Footnotes, Falsification, and the Fate of
the English Model in Eighteenth-Century Italy, Journal of the History of European Ideas,
32:4 (2006): 43055; idem., Traduzione ed emulazione: La genealogia occulta della Storia
del Commercio, in Bruno Jossa, Rosario Patalano, and Eugenio Zagari (eds), Genovesi
Economista; Nel 250 anniversario dellistituzione della cattedra di Commercio e Meccanica;
Atti del convegno di Studi di Napoli del 5 e 6 maggio 2005 (Naples, 2007), pp. 15592.

On Naples in the period, see Girolamo Imbruglia (ed.), Naples in the Eighteenth
Century: The Birth and Death of a Nation State (Cambridge, 2000); Robertson, The Case
for the Enlightenment; Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, vol. I: Da Muratori a Beccaria
(Turin, 1969) remains a significant point of reference.

Archivio di Stato di Torino, Materie di Commercio, 3 Categoria, Mazzo 2, n23,
Progetto di Gi. Nicola Morena di stabilire un Commercio tra il Regno di Napoli, ed il
Piemonte , 1749, 1r. On this trope generally, as well as for a succinct history of the
region, see Tommaso Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern
Italy (New York, 2005), pp. 242, 250.
The Sultans Republic: Jealousy of Trade and Oriental Despotism
255
grief rather than joy, for whereas their barren and inhospitable lands drove the
Dutch and the Venetians to better their condition, favoured people like the
Neapolitans still suffered from their initial complacency in the face of natural
abundance. And though its enormous Parthenopean capital ranked among
the worlds most populous, the Kingdom had never achieved what thriving
and independent commercial societies like Florence, Genoa, and Milan had
in the preceding centuries. It had, as its astute observer Ferdinando Galiani
wrote, not breathed the air of liberty for two millennia and had changed
dominion more often than any other city on earth; it was a depressed,
sprawling metropolis-kingdom, plagued by resilient feudal structures and
unequal economic relations both with the Northern Italian states and with the
great powers of the time, and it was precisely this material and institutional
backwardness which laid the foundations for the increasingly negative image
of southern Italian life in Europe. The city, as a famous saying went in Europe,
was a paradise inhabited by devils. When Charles of Bourbon routed the
The locus classicus for this opinion is Antonio Serra, Breve trattato delle cause
che possono far abbondare li regni doro & argento dove non sono miniere (Naples, 1613).
The same general argument was later made by Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, eds
Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge, 1989), p. 341 and
David Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1994), p. 161 before it
appeared again in Trojano Spinelli, Riflessioni politiche sopra alcuni punti della scienza della
moneta (Naples, 1759), p. 25 and then Antonio Genovesi, Discorso sopra il vero fine delle
lettere e delle scienze, in ibid. Autobiografia e lettere, ed. Gennaro Savarese (Milan, 1962),
p. 251 and idem., Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna scritta da John Cary ... Tradotta
in nostra volgar lingua da Pietro Genovesi ... con un ragionamento ... di Antonio Genovesi (3
vols, Naples, 17571758), vol. I, p. 228n.

Ferdinando Galiani to Antonio Cocchi, 20 February 1753, in Franco Venturi, Alle
origini dellilluminismo napoletano (dal carteggio di Bartolomeo Intieri), Rivista storica
italiana, 71:2 (1959): 41656, esp. 4524. See, for a historical selection of such writings
on Naples, Jeanne Chenault Porter (ed.), Baroque Naples: A Documentary History, 1600
1800 (New York, 2000). On Spanish economic mismanagement of Naples particularly, see
the essays in Antonio Calabria and John A. Marino (trans. and eds), Good Government in
Spanish Naples (New York, 1990) and Antonio Calabria, The Cost of Empire: The Finances
of the Kingdom of Naples in the Time of Spanish Rule (Cambridge, 1991), and more broadly
Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion 15001700, eds Thomas James Dandelet and
John A. Marino (Leiden, 2007). For the consequences of this for political thought there,
see Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European
and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, 15131830 (New Haven, 1990),
pp. 6589. For the connection between backwardness and its image, see Nelson Moe, The
View from the Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley, 2002), p. 52.

Benedetto Croce, Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia (2 vols, Bari 1927), vol. I,
pp. 6886, discussed in Melissa T. Calaresu, The End of the Grand Tour and the
256
Habsburg rulers of Naples in 1734 to establish an ostensibly independent

realm, the Kingdom, therefore, rejoiced at the prospects of general renewal,
when a much needed economic and cultural rejuvenation could follow on the
heels of political independence.
The economic mismanagement, at the hands of the Spanish authorities
in previous centuries, continued, however, in the wake of liberation as the
new Kingdom was forced to accept debilitating compromises with a legion
of counteracting forces and corporations of varying degrees of coherence,
from the ecclesiastics to the feudal aristocracy and the togati, the powerful
judiciary nobility of the robe, all reducing the space in which the state could
act. As the possibility of significant reforms was curtailed by special interests
and the monarchys fiscal burden increasingly fell on already marginalized
social groups, civil society itself seemed at stake, and the reappearance of
brigandage towards the 1750s often with the support of the feudal barons
only further highlighted the waning viability of the state.10 But beyond its
internal problems, Naples was also under siege by foreign forces and economic
interests, and it was particularly to their influence on the development of
Neapolitan civil society that Doria reacted.11
Doria was a close friend of Giambattista Vico and a disgruntled acquaintance
of the group of political economists gathered around Bartolomeo Intieri, a
scholar and executor of the Medici estates in Naples. Genoese by birth but
Neapolitan by choice, Doria was one of the citys most influential intellectuals
in the early eighteenth century. Though something of a libertine in his youth,
and notorious for squandering his patrimony, he took a conservative turn later
in life to become a staunch critic of the modernist Novatores of his time, and
is best remembered for his conjoined polemics against Epicureanism on the
one hand, as embodied particularly in Lockes hedonist moral philosophy, and
with Machiavellianism on the other.12 Yet, there are important ways in which
Cosmopolitan Ideal: Neapolitan Critiques of French Travel Accounts (17501800), in
J. Elsner and J.P. Rubis (eds), Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel
(London, 1999), pp. 13861, esp. 138 and Moe, View from the Vesuvius, pp. 38, 4652.

See Eluggiero Pii, Antonio Genovesi dalla politica economica alla politica civile
(Florence, 1984), p. 30.
10
For the problem posed by feudalism in Naples and its historiography see John
Robertson, Political Economy and the Feudal System in Enlightenment Naples: Outline
of a Problem, SVEC, 1 (Oxford, 2008): 6586.
11
Apart from the sources cited above, see, for Dorias reaction to Spanish
mismanagement, Galasso, La filosofia in soccorso de governi, pp. 193232.
12
On this debate and its intellectual context in Naples see Vincenzo Ferrone, Scienza
natura religione: Mondo newtoniano e cultura italiana nel primo settecento (Naples, 1984);
Giuseppe Ricuperati, The veteres against the moderni: Paolo Mattia Doria (16621746)
257
he drew on both, and his manuscripts remain a powerful statement of the

tense and often contradictory solutions resulting from the intellectual turmoil
of the period.
Dorias unpublished policy proposal of around 1740, Del commercio del
regno di Napoli, was his most concrete step from the literary realm of the
descriptive to that of the prescriptive, where he seemingly overturned some
of his own innermost metaphysical beliefs, derived from a deep-seated
Platonism, to proclaim that what mattered were things and not words.13 In
fact, Doria engaged critically with precisely this aspect of the Platonic corpus
in his mature manuscripts. His goal was to derive a Stato perfettissimo from
Platonic philosophy which simultaneously was practicable, as opposed to
Platos Republic, which was entirely ideal and not practicable.14 Yet there
is little agreement in the secondary literature regarding the nature of Dorias
political economy and what such an ideal practice would entail. Many have
identified Doria as a Neapolitan exponent of Fnelon, seeing in his proposals
the wish to establish a Christian and cosmopolitan agrarian republic on the
model of the Telemachus, others have ordained him a proto-Physiocrat, a
dottor Quesnay avant la lettre, and his programme has also been compared
to the isolated state theories of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Heinrich
von Thnen.15 Salvatore Rotta claimed, without any caveat, that Doria was
favorable towards freedom of trade and hostile towards any intervention
and Giambattista Vico (16681744), in D. Carpanetto and G. Ricuperati (eds), Italy
in the Age of Reason, 16851789 (London, 1987), pp. 96105; Robertson, The Case for
the Enlightenment; Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and
Transformation of the Language of Politics, 12501600 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 27980 also
presents Doria as the antithesis of reason of state. One of the few exceptions to this in the
literature has been Silvio Suppa, Ragion di Stato, machiavellismo e antimachiavellismo
in Paolo Mattia Doria, in Gianfranco Borrelli (ed.) Prudenza civile, bene comune, guerra
giusta: percorsi della ragion di Stato tra Seicento e Settecento (Naples, 1999), pp. 289312.
13
In Enrico Vidal, Il pensiero civile di Paolo Mattia Doria negli scritti inediti con il
testo del manoscritto Del commercio del regno di Napoli (Milan, 1953), pp. 823.
14
Reproduced in context in Vidal, Il pensiero civile, p. 109 and discussed in Paola
Zambelli, Il rogo postumo di Paolo Mattia Doria, in idem. ed. Ricerche sulla cultura
dellItalia moderna (Bari, 1973), pp. 147213, esp. 173.
15
Salvatore Rotta, P.M. Doria rivisitato, in Paolo Mattia Doria fra rinnovamento
e tradizione, Atti del convegno di studi Lecce, 46 novembre 1982 (Galatina, 1985),
pp. 389431, 4067; see also Raffaele Ajello, Arcana Juris: Diritto e politica nel settecento
italiano (Naples, 1976), pp. 393, 415; Vincenzo Ferrone, Seneca e Cristo: La Respublica
Christiana, di Paolo Mattia Doria, Rivista storica italiana, XCVI (1984): 568; Robertson,
Case for the Enlightenment, p. 337; Koen Stapelbroek, The Idea of Democracy and the
Eighteenth Century, in Victor Bekkers et al. (eds), Governance and the Democratic Deficit:
258
and coercion by the state; more cautiously if opaquely, Paola Zambelli argued
that Doria had a confused, but original and advanced vision of politics and
economics; while Giuseppe Ricuperati and Maria Luisa Pesante have both
detected constrained mercantilist elements in his writings.16 Though all these
analyses have elements going for them, there were intellectual traditions in
Naples at the time through which Dorias later writings become less confusing,
and particularly so in relation to a growing preoccupation with commercial
competition in Europe. For while he wrote volumes against the corruption of
ragion di Stato, which, as he maintained, with virtuous politics in everything
does not well align, and repeatedly emphasized the continuing importance
of faith, classical virtue, and even Hermetic magic in the modern world, he
could, like Giovanni Botero and Trajano Boccalini before him, not wholly
escape the seductive realism of its vision.17
As Doria had written in his 1739 Politico alla moda, the political order
of the modern state system, in which Naples was embedded as a decidedly
junior partner, was a vile aberration, a mercantile, natural, and practical
politics sustained by force of armies. It was natural and practical because
it ignored the transcendent metaphysics of ancient philosophy, it depended
on armies because politicians took to heart the Machiavellian maxim that
rulers should be feared rather than loved, and it was mercantile because
the maxims with which modern politicians govern men are the same as
those with which merchants regulate their commerce.18 This was based on
the Epicurean teachings of Macchiavello and Obbes.19 Yet these two were
not the worst sinners in Dorias eyes; Machiavelli, for example, had at least
realized the importance of virt for the health of individuals and the body
Assessing the Democratic Legitimacy of Governance Practices (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 6177,
esp. 66.
16
Paola Zambelli, La formazione filosofica di Antonio Genovesi (Naples, 1972),
p. 300; Ricuperati, A proposito di Paolo Mattia Doria, p. 284; Maria Luisa Pesante, Il
commercio nella repubblica, Quaderni storici, 35:3 (2000): 65596, esp. 687.
17
Paolo Mattia Doria, Relazione dello stato politico, economico, e civile del Regno
di Napoli, in Manoscritti napoletani di Paolo Mattia Doria (5 vols, Lecce, 19791982),
vol. I, p. 49. On his Hermeticism see Zambelli, Il rogo postumo; Ferrone, Seneca e
Christo. See also Zambellis 176 statement that Doria sta in realt svolgendo una difesa
del realismo politico machiavelliano assai pi spinta di quella di Traiano Boccalini.
18
Paolo Mattia Doria, Il Politico alla moda di mente adequata e prattico,
Lettera nella quale si fanno alcune Considerazioni intorno al Ministerio del Sig.
Cardinale di Fleury, in Manoscritti napoletani di Paolo Mattia Doria, vol. V, pp. 278.
This manuscript was also published as an appendix to Conti, Paolo Mattia Doria,
pp. 129259.
19
Doria, Il Politico alla moda, pp. 3033.
259
politic alike, and Dorias references to the Florentine secretary, both in praise
and in criticism, bordered on the obsessive. The root of all this evil was rather
Cardinal Richelieu, amoral heir of Cyrus and Croesus, first author of this sweet
poison of tyranny, which now is practiced by our modern politicians. It was a
lecherous and luxurious political order, embarked on fully by Cardinal Fleury
and Louis XIV, which undermined the foundations of civil society, defined
elsewhere by Doria as mutual assistance, the same phrase by which he also
described commerce.20 Mistakenly, the acolytes of Richelieu thought money
is the sinew of war against which Doria quoted no less an authority than
Machiavelli, whom he also followed in utterly dismissing the strategic value
of cowardly military innovations like gunpowder and set out to introduce
commerce rather than virtue in France.21 What now awaited Europe, as others
had been forced to follow the examples of the great powers by reorganizing
their policies for the exigencies of commercial warfare, was either a dramatic
turn towards the apogee of virtue or a further descent into apocalypse, for its
furious love of commerce was destroying all law and ultimately civil society
itself.22
But while Dorias Del Commercio del Regno di Napoli, like his earlier
Commercio mercantile, continued to bewail the deviant order of Europe, his
actual proposals for policy are paradoxically difficult to differentiate from
those of reason-of-state authors such as Giovanni Botero and Antonio Serra.
Doria repeatedly quoted the latter, and was the earliest known commentator
of Serras legendary 1613 Breve trattato.23 It was true that sterile lands like
England and Holland presently carried the worlds trade, Doria thought, but
fertile Naples could surpass them by adapting their industries and policies
to its naturally richer soil. Agricultural abundance would be followed by
flourishing manufactures and from this foundation Naples could become a
key player in global commerce, abounding in far more money than their
current competitors.24 He realized, however, that the economic situation of
Doria, Il Politico alla moda, pp. 367; Paolo Mattia Doria, La vita civile e
leducazione del principe (Frankfurt, n.d. [1709]), vol. I, p. 183; Doria, Del commercio,
p. 142.
21
Paolo Mattia Doria, Del commercio del Regno di Napoli, in Manoscritti
napoletani di Paolo Mattia Doria, vol. I, p. 185. On his dismissal of riflery, see Rotta, P.M.
Doria rivisitato, p. 429n.
22
Doria, Il Politico alla moda, pp. 40, 51; Paolo Mattia Doria, Il commercio
mercantile, in Manoscritti napoletani di Paolo Mattia Doria, vol. IV, pp. 2778.
23
Doria, Relazione dello stato politico, pp. 119, 146. On Dorias reliance on Serra
see Rotta, P.M. Doria rivisitato, p. 391; Zambelli, Il rogo postumo, p. 170.
24
Doria, Del commercio, pp. 1467.
20
260
the Kingdom had become even more dire since the time of Serra, for not only
were the Turks now exporting grain freely, but France had industrialized and
even England had come to export its agricultural surplus, rendering this future
outside immediate reach. Worse, even if Naples could somehow manage to
become economically competitive, its place in the sun would never be more
than transitory. Any attempt to steal foreign markets from the maritime
powers of England, France, and Holland would namely rouse their notorious
jealousy, forcing the two Sicilies into a war with countries the power of
which they could never equal. Made jealous [Ingelositi], the foreign powers
would burn Neapolitan ships and forcibly break their commerce.25
As recent history had painfully and abundantly documented, resistance
to the great powers was a futile endeavour. The English were champions of
the new world order, who, conducting cruel wars for what Doria dubbed
gelosia di Commercio, had not only wreaked havoc on Swedish and Danish
economic interests when those nations sought a place in the sun, but also
aggressively laid waste to the once glorious Dutch and Portuguese empires.
Grotius could preach law and order all he wanted, yet it offered nothing but
vain words against the Royal Navy and the patterns of trade they secured and
sustained.26 Were Naples to seek new markets abroad, it would only follow
in the footsteps of Dorias homeland of Genoa, economically castrated by
English prohibitions, or of Algerian and Tunisian freebooters, who, when they
claimed the ship of a foreign power at sea, had their own cities and civilian
populations bombarded into submission. But these were not abstract musings
on Dorias part. He had personally experienced and been changed by the
tremendous 3-day bombardment of Genoa by a fleet of 160 French ships in
1684. An event of uncommon brutality even by the canons of the time, it
was triggered largely by jealousy of the citys salt trade and its refusal to join
France in waging war on Spain. The ensuing blaze, remembered by Doria
simply as horrible, laid waste not only to large parts of the city but also to its
dreams of a prosperous neutrality.27 Since the great powers had prohibited all
other nations the commerce of the sea, he would write nearly sixty years later,

27
Rotta, Nota introduttiva, p. 838. On the bombardment and its historical context
and significance see Thomas Allison Kirk, Genoa and the Sea: Policy and Power in an Early
Modern Maritime Republic 15591684 (Baltimore, 2005), pp. 2012. Naples had of course
been victim of foreign aggression on numerous traumatic occasions. See, for one example
in Dorias lifetime, the accounts in Fra Costanzos chronicle of enemy ships threatening
Naples in 1708, in Galasso, La filosofia in soccorso de governi, p. 200.
25
26
261
active international trade was, in the absence of a military renaissance, simply

not the way in which Naples could become rich and powerful.28
Dorias practical economic response to jealousy of trade is curious given
reigning historiography and his own earlier attacks on reason of state.29 First of
all, Naples would have to attend to the cultivation of the soil. Then it should
introduce into the Kingdom good arts, and good manufacturing industries,
to the end not only of liberating itself from the necessity of foreign cloth
[panni and drappi], but also of being able to supply the foreigners themselves.
Finally, it would have to regulate internal commerce.30 To encourage the
competitiveness of domestic goods abroad the state should also consider
moving manufactures to the countryside where they could fabricate at a lower
price.31 I am not saying, he wrote, that ideal commerce should not partly
be conducted in the Kingdom of Naples, but rather, summoning the title
of Serras treatise, that to make the Kingdom of Naples abound with gold
and silver it is necessary to put ones first faith in the internal, real commerce
of the Kingdom. In this he repeatedly emphasized the need for libert del
Commercio, by which he meant the freedom of citizens to chose their own
vocation in the national economy, and categorically not the freedom to
engage freely with those of others, lest the wrath of the jealous powers would
strike down on Naples.32 In case they did, however, new forts and military
armaments to withstand the inevitable bombardments could not hurt.33 But
English policies, for Doria as for most European political economists of the
time, were not only subjects of fear but also of guarded emulation:
to make the Kingdom abound in money, it would be necessary, as the English do in
their own country, to impose very high tariffs on goods coming from outside, and
alleviate the charge of tariffs and other fees on goods that we send out. But here it
would be necessary to distinguish between those goods that the Kingdom necessarily
has to draw from foreigners and those that satisfy luxury and vanity, and it should also
be necessary to put a medium tariff on the first and a very high tariff on the second.34
It would, in short, be necessary to think more about the sale of goods,

which are born and fabricated in this kingdom, than to ideal external

See particularly Doria, Relazione dello stato politico.
30
Doria, Del commercio, p. 145.
31
32
33
34
Doria, Del commercio, pp. 17071, 1834.
28
29
262
commerce.35 This, he noted elsewhere, was precisely what the absolutist

Vittorio Amedeo II had skilfully managed to achieve in his states.36 So
much for a dottor Quesnay avant la lettre. For all his righteous rage against
Machiavellianism, Doria in the end turned to the safety of Ragion di stato with
little trepidation. Strategic autarky, what today would be known as import
substitution, was a drastic, paradoxical, yet necessary measure to assure
competitiveness in international trade at a time when the great powers had
belligerently perfected the synergy between economic and military might. But
where Fichte and later von Thnen in fact would theorize the economic life
of an ideal isolated state, Doria was by no means interested in perpetual
seclusion and self-sufficiency per se. Rather, the purpose of his plan was to
develop Naples to the point where it would be meaningful for it, as a state, to
engage in widespread international commerce. As he astutely noted, it was at
present not able to compete with England and the Ottomans even in simple
agricultural produce, let alone the more lucrative complex manufactures. Only
a properly developed internal, real trade as opposed to both financial
cabalistic speculation and risky gambits in foreign markets could prepare
a country for such challenges.37 The key, as reason of state had dictated for
centuries, lay in prudently looking inwards to the development of domestic
productive capacity through the careful calibration of tariffs in preparation for
future conflicts.

Published in Ginolino, Il pensiero politico, p. 224.
37
Dorias recurring polemics against the cabalisti and his fundamental division
between real and imaginary commerce can fruitfully be read both in light of Serras
earlier distinction between financial and productive capital and of the contemporary
shadowy and parasitic economy of the Court, on which see Maria Grazia Maiorini, The
Capital and the Provinces, in Imbruglia (ed.), Naples in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 421.
Doria in fact defined it this way in his Vita civile: e questo quello che ci pone ora in
necessit di distinguere la economia naturale dalla astratta; cio che la prima ha per oggetto
il buon ordine, la distribuzione e laumento della roba effettiva; e la seconda ha per oggetto
la conservazione e laumento del denaro, ch immaginario, in Ajello et al. (eds), Dal
Muratori al Cesarotti, pp. 87397, esp. 8856. I thus agree with Pesante, Il commercio
nella repubblica and Raffaele Ajello, Arcana juris, p. 415 that Dorias real economy
referred to domestic productive capacity, but it seems clear from the Commercio del
Regno di Napoli that he had not been led to disinteressarsi del commercio estero. Dorias
theory of economic policy was, quite to the contrary, intimately connected to the state
of the international economy of his time. On the difficulty of interpreting cabalisti, see
Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, p. 195.
35
36
263
But towards what political constellation should Naples look for inspiration
in the execution of such an economic project? Although Doria recognized
the unrivalled capacity for reform offered by absolutist political solutions in
his Vita civile, he consistently distinguished between this and baser forms
of tyranny. Believing, it would seem, that the only difference between an
absolute monarch and a despot lay in his intentions, Doria nonetheless
insisted on the ultimate superiority of hereditary monarchy as late as in
his now lost 1741 Idea di una perfetta repubblica.38 Yet throughout most of
his works he emphasized the need for institutions and social groups able to
demarcate the range of just actions permissible to the sovereign to ensure
that he did not inadvertently slip from enlightened despotism into tyranny.
Doria, therefore, praised the lessons of an idealized ancient Sparta above all,
finding the unlikely modern incarnation of the ephors in the English House of
Commons, and, similarly, admired the Mandarin executors of Confucianism
for rendering Chinese absolutism something less than tyrannical.39 That is to
say that while he often spoke in terms hinting at a division of powers to the
extent that Robert Shackleton pondered a possible influence on Montesquieu40
and indeed was staunchly republican, as the historiography would have
it, his interest never lingered on rigorous constitutionalism or the merits of
Paolo Mattia Doria, Dall Idea di una perfetta repubblica, in Ajello et al. (eds),
Dal Muratori al Cesarotti, pp. 92847; on which see Zambelli, Il rogo postumo. See
also Ferdinando Galianis caustic recollection of the event, Galiani to Lorenzo Mehus,
13 March 1753, in Ferdinando Galiani and Lorenzo Mehus, Carteggio (17531786), ed.
Giuseppe Niccoletti (Naples, 2002), p. 48.
39
Paolo Mattia Doria, Dall Idea di una perfetta repubblica, pp. 9389 and n. See
also p. 940n. For his praise of the Mandarins see Doria, Il politico alla moda, pp. 10715.
On Doria and China see Michele Fatica, Il canto funebre in caratteri cinesi per la morte di
Gaetano Argeno e la sinofilia di Paolo Mattia Doria, in Bernardo Razzotti (ed.) Filosofia,
storiografia, letteratura: Studi in onore di Mario Agrimi (Lanciano, 2001), pp. 71854.
See also Conti, Paolo Mattia Doria, pp. 289 and in passim; Raffaele Ajello, Diritto ed
economia in P.M. Doria, in Papuli (ed.), Paolo Mattia Doria, pp. 93126. Dorias writings
on Sparta are selective, in that he for example never notes there were two kings rather than
one, but his ambivalence regarding the nature of Spartan politics nicely reflects Plato,
Laws, 4.712de. Giuseppe Galasso has in fact called Doria un storico impreciso, Doria:
cultura e filosofia delle riforme, in La filosofia in soccorso, pp. 23356, esp. 233. For a
sketch of the uses of Sparta in eighteenth-century Italy see still Elizabeth Rawson, The
Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1969), pp. 3015.
40
Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu et Doria, Revue de littrature compare, 29
(1955): 17383; on Montesquieus possible influence on Doria see Giulia Belgioioso,
Doria inedito lettore delle Considerazioni?, in idem., Cultura a Napoli e cartesianesimo:
Scritti su G. Gimma, P.M. Doria, C. Cominale (Lecce, 1992), pp. 32352.
38
264
active citizenship and self-rule, the most fundamental principle of modern

republican theory.41 His republics, in short, are not really our republics in any
meaningful sense of the word at all, and our republics are not, and cannot
be, synonymous with his.42 If one accepts Reinhart Kosellecks statement that
whatever constitution might be in force, it was necessary in the long run to
displace the rule of men by men with the rule of men by law; i.e. to realize
the republic,43 Doria was safely on the despotic side of this watershed. What
mattered to Doria was identifying the right institutions such as the Chinese
mandarinate for encouraging the virtuous deployment of arbitrary sovereign
power, not removing it in its entirety.
But, even so, his choice of economic exemplar is striking, for the appropriate
model to emulate was neither Sparta nor Englands mixed monarchy: it was
the great Sultan of the Turks. In the past, Doria had repeatedly defined
Ottoman politics as the quintessential example of tyranny and barbarism,
a corrupt society in which one is master and all the others are servants.44
The history and threat of Arab domination in Southern Italy had imbued the
pervasively instrumental early modern Orientalist discourse with increased
Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998) and Hobbes and
Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom
and Government (Oxford, 1999).
42
See similarly Ludovico Antonio Muratoris statement that republicanism in
practice entailed princedom in Eluggero Pii, Republicanism and Commercial Society
in Eighteenth-Century Italy, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds),
Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. II: The Values of Republicanism in Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 24974, esp. 252. For a most illuminating
discussion of the historical vicissitudes of the term republic, see David Wootton, The True
Origins of Republicanism: The Disciples of Baron and the Counter-Example of Venturi,
in Manuela Albertone (ed.), Il repubblicanesimo moderno: lidea di repubblica nella riflessione
storica di Franco Venturi (Naples, 2006), pp. 271304. On the republican elements in
Dorias thought see particularly Franco Venturi, Utopia e riforma nellilluminismo (Turin,
2001), p. 44n, Ferrone, Seneca e Cristo and La societ giusta ed equa: Repubblicanesimo
e diritto delluomo in Gaetano Filangieri (Rome-Bari, 2003), pp. 13031, Pagden, Spanish
Imperialism, pp. 6589 and Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity,
and the Emancipation of Man (Oxford, 2006), pp. 52052, 610.
43
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated
and with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York, 2004), p. 273.
44
Paolo Mattia Doria, La vita civile, in Raffaele Ajello et al. (eds), Dal Muratori al
Cesarotti, pp. 87397, esp. 875; Doria, Il politico alla moda, 93103. Discussed in Rotta,
Nota introduttiva, pp. 8546.
41
265
saliency in Naples, and, as such, Dorias characterization was representative:45

expansionist and fanatical, the Grand Turk represented a tyrannical empire
that happily was in decline and prone to collapsing under the weight of its
own injustice. So why did it still pose a threat to Europe, and what could
possibly be praiseworthy in its political economy? In his Politico alla moda,
Doria explained that though the combined armies and navies of Europe could
easily put an end to the Ottoman Empire, it was maintained, in spite of all its
defects, by the greed of our Christian powers.46 He repeated a passage from
this manuscript in his later Del commercio, this time going even further:
The great Sultan of the Turks possesses that very vast Monarchy, which everyone knows,
and possesses Realms located in the most appropriate places for doing Commerce ...
and with all this neither he, nor his Subjects, engage in foreign Commerce. They do
not trade either with the East or with the West Indies, and only little elsewhere.47
Why? Because the wise Sultan realized he could not compete with the great
powers directly and thus relegated the carrying trade to the English, Dutch,
and French. This, Doria continued, pledges those Powerful Nations to his
conservation, because, tempted by profits, they would not permit any Prince
to expel the Turk from Europe; and as a consequence of this, the Christian
Powers are becoming, because of vile tributary interest, servants of the Turk.
Having understood the healthy maxim of prudence better than anyone, he
had made his country moderate, wealthy, and selectively isolationist. He had
learned that one must live and let live to assure ones own life and ones own
dominion, and so, an exponent of cultural and religious toleration, he lived
well off the taxes levied on Christians in his lands and on the tariffs he placed
on trade with them. The Sultans politics towards Christians was worthy of
great consideration, for he placed them in servitude by luring them with
profits from Commerce,48 a mechanism Doria might have known to be at
See, for different centuries, Gregory Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 15501800
(Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 18190; Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water, pp. 969;
Charles Verlinden, La prsence turque Otrante (14801481) et lesclavage,Bulletin
de lInstitut historique belge de Rome, 534(19831984):16575; Francesco Morosini to
the Doge and Senate, 8 April 1614, and Domenico Dominici to the Doge and Senate,
11 October 1614, both in Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English
Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice vol. XIII. 16131615, ed. Allen
B. Hinds (London, 1907), pp. 109 and 213 respectively; Adele Cliento and Alessandro
Vanoli, Arabs and Normans in Sicily and the South of Italy (New York, 2008).
46
Doria, Politico alla moda, pp. 1023.
47
Doria, Politico alla moda, p. 103; Doria, Del commercio, p. 175.
48
45
266
work even in his ardently republican homeland. For a 1712 treatise between
republican Genoa and the Ottoman Empire indeed promised not only
commercio but also amicitia, not only trade but also friendship.49 So, though
Ottoman policies were an aberration, they were so in a complex way that
invited not only fear and loathing but also, like those of England, discerning
emulation. Naples too, after all, desperately needed a protective niche in an
otherwise rather unsympathetic world economy.
In the substance of his proposals, as well as the terminology in which he
presented it, Dorias political economy was mercantilist Ragion di stato in all
but name. The essence of successful statecraft, for Dorias political economy as
well as for Serras reason of state, was importing raw materials and exporting
manufactured goods while avoiding untimely confrontations with competitors,
and, unequivocally, neither agrarian cosmopolitanism nor perpetual selfsufficiency.50 His differentiation between real and abstract commerce was
not about domestic or international trade. It was about what kind of domestic
and international trades a country should pursue. Rather than referring
to Botero (though he repeatedly did refer to Serra and Boccalini, perhaps
because their works bore less onerous titles), however, Doria referred to the
examples he had listed in his earlier Vita civile, purportedly the antithesis of
the entire tradition.51 Though he certainly aligned with Fnelon and the later
Physiocrats in his aversion to jealousy of trade, Doria was, nonetheless, one
of their greatest adversaries on the crucial issue of economic policy. But what
does Dorias dual resort to Ragion di stato and to the Grand Turk entail for
our understanding of his political economy in particular and the political
consequences of jealousy of trade in general?
Absolutist, enlightened reforms were, for Doria, an explicit response to
Naples place in the international economy and the jealousy of trade suffered
Archivio di Stato di Genova, Archivio Segreto, Busta 2736, Materie Politiche,
Mazzo 17, n34, 23 September 1712, Trattato di Commercio concluso tra il Sultano Haemet
Han, Imperatore degli Ottomani, e la Serenissima Repubblica di Genova, p. 12.
50
Doria, La vita civile, p. 897. On Dorias aversion to war, in spite of his numerous
writings on the subject and evident awe of it, see Mario Proto, Guerra e politica nel Mezzogiorno
moderno: Doria, Vico, Genovesi (Manduria, 2004), pp. 75188; on the Christian Agrarian
movement with which he often is grouped, see still Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis
XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1965).
51
Doria, Del commercio, p. 183, for Boccalini see p. 191. For another reference to
Boccalini as an authority see Dorias Il commercio mercantile, in Manoscritti napoletani di
Paolo Mattia Doria, vol. IV, p. 292. He would not have disproved of Boccalinis statement
that it was the usual custom of Spaniards to visit people more to injure them, than honour
them, I ragguagli di Parnasso: Or Advertisements from Parnassus Now put into English
(London, 1656), p. 400.
49
267
by the great maritime powers; economic destitution caused political poverty

almost by default. Though he polemicized with the Leviathan throughout his
works, it is difficult not to read the justifications he articulated for absolutism as
variations of the Hobbesian trope that fear led men to relinquish their liberties
in exchange for security. And, as Tasso and many Renaissance humanists had
argued, jealousy was rather a child of fear than of envy.52 In Dorias case, fear
bred envy as well. The Bourbon Prime Minister in Naples, Bernardo Tanucci,
described the situation well in the opening years of the Seven Years War. It
was fear of the more powerful, he noted, which created not only laws and
alliances but also the jealousy which drove them.53
What was novel was that Doria looked Eastwards for inspiration, finding
solace in the political security offered by absolutist solutions, and as such he
is of interest for one of the most timely and polemical brands of modern
historiography. Edward Saids powerful, if controversial Orientalism sought
to explicate the prejudices and romantic idealizations structuring European
engagements with the Arab World in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
As Franco Venturi and others have demonstrated, however, Orientalization
had been a decidedly more protean impulse in the preceding era, when it
informed a spectrum of opinions ranging from Bodins caveats against
seigniorial monarchy to the most chimerical Physiocratic readings of
Mandarin legal despotism.54 Dorias conception of the Grand Turk, similarly,
drew on a confusing and contradictory repertoire of ideas regarding political
life in the exotic east, and it, too, though idealized and instrumental, was
far from a simple attempt at domestication through denigration. One of the
most basic tropes of the Orientalist myth, also repeated by Doria, had been
the category of political and economic serfdom on which Eastern tyranny
supposedly rested. By highlighting the ways in which European economic
interests in the Middle East secured and propagated an ostensibly abhorrent
system, rendering them de facto serfs of their ideological enemies, Doria was
Werner Gundersheimer, The Green-Eyed Monster: Renaissance Conceptions
of Jealousy, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 137:3 (1993): 32131.
53
Tanucci to Montealegre, 10 October 1758, quoted in Anna Vittoria Migliorini,
Diplomazia e cultura nel settecento: Echi italiani della guerra dei sette anni (Pisa, 1984),
p. 144.
54
Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, 1995);
Richard W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA,
1962); Venturi, Oriental Despotism; see now also Asli irakman, From Tyranny to
Despotism: The Enlightenments Unenlightened Image of the Turks, International Journal
of Middle East Studies, 33:1 (2001): 4968 and Joan-Pau Rubis, Oriental Despotism and
European Orientalism: Bodin to Montesquieu, Journal of Early Modern History, 9:12
(2005): 10980.
52
268
arguing that the true despot threatening Western virtues and liberties was not
the Grand Turk after all: it was the Gelosia di commercio of the great powers
themselves. Just as the pecuniary interests of core nations represented an
absolutist imperative in peripheral politics, so the core was in turn enslaved by
the tyrannical system it sustained. Where Montaigne had followed Plutarch
in arguing that the inhabitants of Asia served one single man because they
could not pronounce one single syllable, which is No,55 Doria reversed the
relationship. It was the great Western powers which were enslaved by their
inability to say No, to lucre; to ambition; and, thus, ultimately to injustice.
In his earlier Vita civile, Doria had noted how in our days conquests are
equally hurtful for the conquering kingdoms as for the conquered provinces,
and indeed that a conquering people become equally miserable and perhaps
more so than the conquered provinces.56 Trade, he maintained two decades
before David Humes seminal Jealousy of Trade, had run amok in the modern
world and taken on the very same guise as conquest. Commerce was rather
aigre than doux on the great palate of civilization, a bitter cause of strife rather
than a sweet source of peace, but it was within these parameters that Doria
sought his most pertinent economic lessons.57
All this leads one to wonder whether the Homeric tradition might not
contain more appropriate exemplars for making sense of Dorias political
economy than Telemachus. During one of the Aeneids many fateful storms,
for example, a delegation of weather-beaten Trojans was barred entry to
Carthage. To their grievances, Dido responded Severe conditions and the
kingdoms youth Constrain me to these measures, to protect Our long
frontiers with guards. The moral of Virgils anecdote was simple and of a
perennial quality: extreme tribulations demand extreme measures in less
than consolidated realms. Machiavelli might have been one of Virgils most
ardent acolytes, quoting this very passage favourably when he decreed that
Fortuna put new princes in contexts where they could not escape being called
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M.

Frame (Stanford, 1958), p. 115, following Plutarchs , in Plutarchs Morals,
translated by Arthur Richard Shilleto (London, 1888), p. 260.
56
Doria, La vita civile, p. 881.
57
For the paradigm of sweet commerce in early modern Europe, see Albert O.
Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its
Triumph (Princeton, 1997). For an argument that it brought East and West closer in the
eighteenth century, see Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between
East and West (Oxford, 2008), p. 270.
55
269
cruel.58 The recently reconstituted Kingdom of Naples clearly fulfilled both

of Didos conditions for implementing such extreme measures at the time
of Dorias writing, and he followed Virgil and Machiavelli alike when he
used her example to discuss the unique glory to be had from establishing
a state. Didos insight, Doria wrote, had been that founding a flourishing
state required a long time, mature counsel, and virt rather than the crazy
schemes of moral philosophers and cabalistic merchants.59
Like Machiavelli, Doria hoped until the end that divine providence
would send a Prince, who like Theopompus of Sparta horded true glory
and virt rather than personal dominion. But this was yet another symptom
of his political ambivalence. For though Plutarch recounts that the Spartan
King in question invented the laudable institution of the ephors, Platos Laws
saw them described as marvellously tyrannical, and Tyrtaeus and Pausanias
both considered Theopompus responsible for the Lacedaemonian victory in
the Messenian War; and, thus, for the enslavement of an entire people for
the benefit of the fledgling Spartan state.60 The unlikely models Doria offers
for emulation in his late manuscripts are thus united by their near absolute
political power and by their successful cruelty in the face of distress. What sets
them apart from the great powers of his time is their virtuous ends rather than
the corruption of their means. For if Doria railed against the aims of modern
reason of state, he fully endorsed the measures by which it sought to achieve
them. Such was the tragic origin of the Sultans Republic.
Virgil, Aeneid, 223; Niccol Machiavelli, Il Principe, I, in Tutte le opere, ed.

Mario Martelli (Florence, 1971), p. 282. For this analysis and translation of Virgil, I am
indebted to Robert Fredona, Liberate Diuturna Cura Italiam: Hannibal in the Thought
of Niccol Machiavelli, in David S. Peterson with Daniel E. Bornstein (eds), Florence
and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy: Essays in Honour of John M.
Najemy (Toronto, 2008), pp. 41934.
59
Paolo Mattia Doria, Il Gesuita Tiranno , in Manoscritti napoletani di Paolo
Mattia Doria, vol. I, pp. 4667. It has similarly been argued that Dorias reliance on
prudenza was obsessive, Suppa, Ragion di Stato, p. 298, but it seems, in light of
the above, that Suppas p. 307 statement that Doria was averse to arguments based on
necessit is not tenable in all cases.
60
Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus; Plato, Laws, 4.712de; Pausanias, Description of Greece,
4.6.5. On the ambivalent history of Ephors, see similarly Wilfried Nippel, Ancient and
Modern Republicanism: Mixed Constitutions and Ephors, in Biancamaria Fontana
(ed.), The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 626.
58
Chapter 16
Observing the Neighbours:

Fiscal Reform and Transnational Debates
in France after the Seven Years War
Florian Schui
This essay will be concerned with enlightened reform in a particular

branch of administration which may lay claim to being the quintessential
administration, or, indeed, the queen of administrations: the administration
of taxes. Revenue, as one prominent eighteenth-century observer pointed
out, is the chief occupation of the state. Nay, more it is the state. This
close linking of the development of taxation with state building makes the
study of fiscal administrations uniquely worthwhile but it has also made it
more difficult. The twin relationship between tax state and national state
has contributed to limiting our understanding of the development of fiscal
institutions to the national context. Most research in the history of taxation
has been conducted from a strictly national perspective, working backwards
from todays national fiscal institutions, trying to trace their evolution in
national histories. This perspective of fiscal historians, often reinforced by
institutional links between research in the history of the state and in the
history of taxation, has obscured many of the influences on the development
of tax systems that involved exchanges of ideas or individuals across borders.
Mutual international observation and competition is accepted by many as a
powerful force in the development of fiscal systems of the late twentieth and
early twenty-first century. The often uncritical adoption of an international
perspective on fiscal matters today is, paradoxically in many cases, associated
with a lack of interest for the impact of such exchanges in the long past of
the tax state. Indeed, arguments for the inextricable force of todays fiscal
competition seem, in part, to hinge on a notion of the novelty of border Edmund Burke, cited in Patrick OBrien, Fiscal exceptionalism, Working Paper
65:01, October 2001, Department of Economic History, London School of Economics.
272
crossing influences in fiscal development. Nothing could be farther from the

reality of the fiscal past. Since their earliest beginnings, fiscal institutions in
Europe and beyond have developed, in part, as the result of influences that
reached them from other countries and, indeed, other parts of the world. This
is particularly true of the period with which this volume is concerned.
The eighteenth century was a fertile ground for exchanges of fiscal ideas,
technical knowledge and administrators. This is, in part, due to the fact that
states of the period were not yet the new, hard-edged nation states that they
became in the nineteenth century (in large part thanks to the more powerful
grip of their fiscal administrations on their territory). In addition to the
more porous nature of state borders and administrations, it was also the
simultaneously occurring fiscal crisis across Europe that turned this period
into one of intense international observation and imitation in fiscal matters.
As a result of the costly wars of the period, the major European nations faced
the threat of bankruptcy more or less at the same time. But the financial
crisis did not only occur simultaneously. It was also intimately linked with the
ability of nations to survive and triumph in warfare. That fiscal matters were
a crucial part of the fiercest form of international competition was obvious to
commentators, administrators and tax payers. Reasoning about taxation in a
national context therefore made little sense. Trying to learn and copy the fiscal
innovation of competing nations and trying to avoid their mistakes was also
a way to gain an edge in the next war or at least to solve the financial troubles
of the last one more successfully than the neighbours.
Processes of mutual observation and imitation took on many forms in
the eighteenth century and an increasing body of literature is exploring the
networks created by the Europe-wide migration of fiscal administrators.
This chapter will explore another form of international exchange: mutual
observation or, more specifically, the use of foreign examples in fiscal debates
in France in the wake of the Seven Years War (17561763). In particular I
argue that references to foreign examples were not an accidental feature of the
French debates of the 1760s, 1770s and 1780s. Nor were references to real and
For a fuller discussion of the argument, see the introduction to Holger Nehring
and Florian Schui (eds), Global debates about taxation (Basingstoke, 2007).

C.A. Bayly, The birth of the modern world 17801914 (Oxford, 2004), p. 7.

See, among others, Pernille Rge, La clef de commerce, History of European
Ideas, Special Issue on new perspectives on Atlantic history, 34:1 (2008): 43143; Christine
Lebeau, Aristocrates et grand commis la cour de Vienne (Paris, 1996). Florian Schui,
Learning from French experience? The Prussian Rgie tax administration, 176686, in
Nehring and Schui, Global debates, pp. 3660; Jean-Claude Waquet, Les Fermes Gnrales
dans lEurope des lumires, Mlanges de lcole Franaise de Rome, 89 (1977): 9831027.
Observing the Neighbours
273
imagined foreign tax systems merely rhetorical devices. As we shall see, many of
them were based on careful, and laboriously detailed, study of the conditions
abroad and reflect a genuine and widespread preoccupation with international
comparison, competition and imitation. Transnational arguments became
central in French fiscal debates in this period as a result of three separate
developments. First, the fiscal crisis that had to be solved was largely the result
of international events, namely European warfare, and finding successful fiscal
solutions was the key to supremacy in the international competition for power,
prestige and trade monopolies. Second, the ability to borrow arguments and
evidence from other fiscal contexts hints at the similarities of the challenges
and the fiscal development across Europe. Mutual observation only made
sense because issues such as the cost of warfare, competition between crown
and estates for fiscal revenue, conflicts over the intrusive nature of taxation
and lacking administrative capabilities were, essentially, the same across
Europe. In particular the fact that the lines of conflict between individuals
and states were drawn in very similar manner facilitated the transnational
borrowing of arguments and evidence. A pan-European commentary emerged
in which contemporaries discussed fiscal change as a development that was
seen, in many respects, as a European issue rather than as a national one.
Third, the widespread use of foreign examples and experiences in domestic
fiscal debates was the result of shifting epistemological standards. The almost
obsessive empiricism of the Enlightenment saw commentators struggle to
back their arguments with facts based on observation. With laboratories
unsuitable to test economic hypotheses, foreign lands or the historical past
had to stand in to provide empirical evidence. To this end existing accounts
were plundered, comprehensive surveys commissioned and, occasionally,
fiscal experiences invented. Accounts from fictional lands and their fiscal
systems were not uncommon in eighteenth-century debate. Often this kind
of fictional evidence was simply fabricated evidence but it also took on more
complex functions as rhetorical device and precursor of economic modelling.
Together the different forms of accounts about fiscal experiences were part of
the international commerce of ideas of the Enlightenment.
The public debate about taxation exploded in France in the aftermath of
the War of Austrian Succession (17401748). The number of new publications
about public finance increased more than five fold in the early 1750s. A second
spike in the statistic of fiscal publications coincides with the end of the Seven
Years War. Taxes, one anonymous pamphleteer complained in the 1760s in his
Michael Kwass, Privilege and the politics of taxation in eighteenth-century France

(Cambridge, 2000), p. 219.
274
tract about taxes, had becomes le sujet de toutes les conversations. It was in
this climate, of heightened interest in fiscal matters, that mutual international
observation thrived. The following discussion is organised around three main
foci in the fiscal debates of the time: first, the commissioning and publication
of a large and comprehensive survey of European fiscal practices by the French
ministry of finances in 1763; second, the rise of the Physiocratic school from
the 1750s; third, the conflict surrounding the Parlement de Maupeou in the
early 1770s.
In 1763 the Contrleur Gnral, Bertin, charged his Intendant de Finances,
Moreau de Beaumont, with the compilation of a broad survey of fiscal
systems of all major European states. The result of this ambitious project was
published in 1768 (and reprinted in 1786) under the title Mmoires concernant
les impositions et droits en Europe. The work remains the only comprehensive
comparative study of fiscal systems in eighteenth century Europe. However,
the Mmoires will not be approached here as a source for the fiscal history of
Europe, but rather as one for the French history of political and economic
thought. What were the motives and circumstances that led Bertin to devote
an extraordinary amount of time and effort to introduce knowledge about
foreign fiscal arrangements into the domestic French debate? Bertin decided
to commission the Mmoire in the midst of a political crisis of the kind that
had become a recurring feature of the Bourbon polity in the eighteenth
century. In the course of the Seven Years War the deficit had grown rapidly
and had reached threatening levels. When Bertin had taken office in 1760
he had found that the state was 200 million livres short on a budget of 318
million livres. Bertin sought to resolve the crisis by a mix of new debts and
taxes. Although, in principle, opposed to attacks on the fiscal privileges of the
nobility and the clergy, financial needs forced the minister to increase taxes on
these privileged groups. Enraged, the parlements issued a flood of complaints.
In this conflict with the magistrates the position of the crown was precarious.
On the one hand, Bertin had no choice but to increase revenue. With fiscal
pressure already high on ordinary citizens, the only way to significantly raise
additional revenue was to increase the universality of taxation, i.e. to reduce
fiscal privileges. Tapping into the large untaxed incomes of Frances wealthiest
inhabitants was not only the only viable way to raise the required sums; it was
also what many ordinary tax payers and much of the writing public asked for.
Anonymous, Doutes proposes lauteur de la thorie de limpt (n. p., 1761), p. ii.
The Mmoires and files associated with them have been studied as sources for
European fiscal history among others by Gabriel Ardant, Histore de limpt (2 vols, Paris,
1971) and Peter Claus Hartmann, Das Steuersystem der europischen Staaten am Ende des
Ancien Rgime (Munich, 1979).

275
In 1763, Roussel de la Tour published his De la richesse de ltat, a best-selling

plea for universal taxation. His arguments were echoed by many other writers
including the Physiocrats who, since the 1750s, had been asking for a single
tax without exemptions. We will return to their arguments shortly. On the
other hand, reducing the privileges of nobility and clergy meant antagonising
the very pillars on which the power of the monarchy rested. And, quite apart
from such cool political calculations, the notion of taxing nobles and peasants
in the same way was contrary to the spirit of the Ancien Rgime. It took the
functionalist and reductionist approach of the philosophes to be able to treat
the revenue of an aristocrat and that of a commoner as a mere economic
category devoid of connotations of rank and status.
In this delicate situation Bertin ordered Beaumont to compile a report
which included three parts: a survey of the different forms of taxation that
were in use in France at the time, a history of taxation in France and chapters
about the fiscal systems of other European countries. Instead of relying on
secondary sources, Beaumont wrote to French ambassadors across Europe and
received reports (often after long delays) about the tax systems of England,
Sweden, Denmark, the Hanseatic Cities, Bohemia, Austria, Hungary,
Transylvania, Prussia, Silesia, Saxony, Electoral Hanover, Bavaria, Electoral
Mainz, Switzerland, Lige, the Austrian Netherlands, the United Provinces,
Tyrol, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Milan, Sardinia, Genoa, Tuscany, Parma, the
Papal States, the Kingdom of Naples, Spain and Portugal. No reply came from
Russia. Despite the varying quality of the reports, they left hardly any blanks
on the map of Europe. For the French part of the survey similar requests for
information were sent out to all regional Intendants. The process of collecting,
editing and collating the information took a long time and was only completed
in 1768. Bertin had been forced to resign only weeks after he had commissioned
the survey. But the project survived the end of Bertins ministry. It fitted well
into the political plans of his successor. The new minister Laverdy sought to
calm the buoyant public debate about public finance. The ministers motives
were twofold. In the short term, less public debate about fiscal crisis meant
more confidence in the creditworthiness of the French crown and, therefore,
lower interest rates. As his predecessor, Bertin, had already pointed out during
the war, the public protests of the parlements made it increasingly difficult
and more expensive to borrow money from foreign creditors whose choice
to whom they extended loans was not determined by national loyalties but
Other publications from the period include Baudeaus Ides dun citoyen (Amsterdam,
1763), Darigrands Antifinancier (Amsterdam, 1763), Lefebvre de la Bellandes Trait
gnral des droits daides (Paris, 1760) and Mirabeaus Thorie de limpt (n. p., 1760).
276
by their assessment of risks and interests. Our unfortunate habit of making

remonstrances public, the kind of incredible fermentation in peoples minds,
does more good for our enemies than does their own success Tracts of
many remonstrance or arrts on a lit de justice disseminated in the cafs of
London have been more useful to Mr. Pitt than all the insults and scorn that
their newspapers and rantings level against us.10 Bertin was right in assuming
that his conflicts with the parlements were closely followed in London.
The Annual Register carried a five page article about the violent disputes
between administration and parliaments of France. Siding with the French
parlements, the anonymous author commented that even in the periods of
most violent contest between right and prerogative in Great Britain the voice
of freedom was never raised to a higher pitch. But despite the sympathy with
the French magistrates, only one year after the end of the Seven Years War the
main concern was with the question of how these troubles would affect the
external strength of France. Without liberty, it was predicted, Great Britain
would dwindle into a contemptible state; possessed of freedom, France might
possibly become less formidable.11 Fearing such international observations
and their potential effects on interest rates, Laverdy tried to quell public
debates. Restoring the ability to borrow was his short-term strategy to save
France from bankruptcy while avoiding conflict with the parlements over fiscal
reform. In the long run, however, fiscal reform was inevitable and reducing the
extent of public debate about fiscal matters was equally crucial for this plan.
The aim was to suppress a public debate that was increasingly dominated by
defenders and advocates of fiscal privileges who drowned out the crowns voice
and its ability to conceptualise fiscal reform. The government was increasingly
reduced to reacting to demands from the two factions that dominated the
public debate. In order to bring deliberations about fiscal reform back from
the public sphere to the internal process of the ministerial bureaucracy and
reclaim royal authority over fiscal matters, Laverdy used a stick and carrot
approach. A ban on all publications regarding public finance was his stick.
How successful the ban was remains questionable in the light of the slim
success of other attempts of the Ancien Rgime to censor the print industry.
Larry Neal, The Integration and Efficiency of the London and Amsterdam Stock
Markets in the Eighteenth Century, Journal of Economic History, 47 (1987): 97115.
For a discussion of the relation of credit, interest and political stability see Michael
Sonenscher, Before the deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the
French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2007).
10
Kwass, Privileges, p. 165.
11
Anonymous, Contest between the administration and parliaments of France, The
Annual register for the year 1764, pp. 510.
277
However, a significant drop of the number of fiscal publications occurred in

the period from 1765 to 1769 and Laverdys policies may have contributed to
it.12 The carrot in Laverdys plan was Beaumonts survey. It was not originally
intended to be published. This would have been contrary to Laverdys intention
of calming public debate. Instead the survey was to provide the political and
administrative elite with information and arguments and convince this select
group of the necessity of gradual fiscal reform. Initially, the compiled and
edited reports from Europe and the French provinces were only meant to
be presented to an internal commission to be established by Louis XV. The
commission never met, but the monarch ordered the survey to be printed
anyway. There is little information about the distribution of the work, but it
seems that only 200 copies or so were printed for internal use in the ministry.
While the number is certainly small it should be remembered that even some
of the most influential books of the time did not reach editions of more than
a few thousand copies. The size of the circulation of the 1786 edition is not
known, but it may well have been significantly broader since, by this time,
Necker Compte Rendu of 1781 had begun to end the secrecy of state finance
that still informed the project of the Mmoires. While the circulation of the
Mmoires remained largely internal to the administration there were notable
exceptions to this, suggesting that the Mmoire was also read amongst an elite
of economic commentators in France and beyond.
The text that contains one of the most damning verdicts about the French
fiscal system and turned out to be one of the most influential comments on
fiscal matters of all times, Adam Smiths chapter about taxation in the Wealth
of Nations, is in large part based on Beaumonts Mmoires. In the first footnote,
Smith acknowledges his debt to the work and comments: the accounts of
the French taxes may be regarded as perfectly authentic. Those of other
European nations [are] probably not quite so exact. Nevertheless,
much of his evidence about the fiscal systems outside Britain is taken from
the Mmoires. Just how precious the work was to Smith may be seen from a
curious exchange with John Sinclair who had asked to borrow the book from
Smith. Rejecting the request politely, he wrote that if any accident should
happen to my book, the loss is perfectly irreparable. According to Smith there
were not more than three copies of the work, besides his, in Britain at the
time. It was only by a particular favour of Mr. Turgot that Smith obtained his
copy.13 The journey of a copy of the Mmoires through the hands of Frances
Adam Smith to John Sinclair of Ulster, 24 November 1778, in Ernest Campbell
Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (eds), The Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1987),
pp. 2356.
12
13
278
most prominent political economist and administrator into the hands of

Britains premier writer about economic matters (and the jealousy with which
the latter kept the book) illustrate not only the esteem that contemporary
commentators on fiscal matters had for the work but also the degree to which
a survey that was intended for internal use ended up informing contemporary
public debates. It is difficult to establish to what extent public commentary
was informed by the survey. However, if Turgot sent the book to Scotland he
would certainly also have shared it with others in Paris. So, we can assume
a not necessarily wide circulation but one that included some of the most
acute and influential commentators on fiscal matters of the time. In addition,
Smiths views about taxation, informed by the Mmoires, fed back into French
debates after the publication of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. Even judging
from a very summary analysis of the distribution of Beaumonts survey, it
was clear that it became more than an internal document. If the original
intention was to move the lieu of the debate about fiscal matters back from
an uncontrollable public sphere to the corridors of power, the Mmoires did
not achieve their purpose. Instead, they contributed to fuel an ever increasing
public debate about public finance in France and beyond by offering a range
of information and comparison hereto unavailable to anyone in government
or in the public.
After this brief sketch of the distribution of Beaumonts survey it is now
time to move on to its arguments. Besides promoting a specific reform project,
which shall be discussed below, the Mmoires were, above all, a plea for fiscal
reform in general. The possibility and the urgent need for fiscal change were
perhaps the primary case that it tried to make before the royal commission.
This body would have been composed of administrators and dignitaries
who were not often convinced of the urgency with which the Bourbon state
needed to address its financial problems and who saw fiscal reform as too risky
politically. In the survey two tools were deployed to soften the opposition to
fiscal reform. First, a historical account of the development of taxation in
France since Roman times. Beaumonts history of taxation of France highlights,
above all, the constant evolution of the fiscal system. Simply by exposing the
historical differences and mutations that taxation has undergone in France, the
author tried to show that change was an inherent and permanent feature of
the French fiscal system. The diverging interests of feudal lords and the crown
are, in many instances, identified as the motivations that drove historical
change. While taking a detached stand on such conflicts in the period of the
premiere race de nos rois, Beaumont denounces the usurpation et la violence
des seigneurs vers le declin de la seconde race. In particular, le royaume se
trouva la proie dune multitude de seigneurs, qui tous regardoient comme
faisant partie de leurs seigneuries des droits & des redevances qui autrefois
279
avoient appartenu ltat. While the current dynasty was forced to tolerate
such abuses by the feudal lords, Beaumont leaves no doubt where legitimacy
lay in fiscal matters. Dues and taxes collected by lords, or exemptions from
taxation that they enjoyed, are either rights usurped by the lords or granted by
the king. The thse royale was thus defended and the accusation of despotism
that the parlements frequently levelled against the crown was turned against
them: la seigneurie devint une espce de despotisme.14 The second objective
of the survey was to render the possibility of reform less frightening through
European comparison. By unfolding a European panorama of different forms
of taxes and tax collection, which were all the outcome of specific historical
developments and local conditions, Beaumont proposed to the reader that
there was no natural or immutable way to tax. Europes fiscal systems were
presented as a vast toolkit from which one could choose through examen
and discussion what was plus convenable pour la meilleure administration
des finances & pour le plus grand avantage des peuples.15 Here, Beaumont
combines European comparison with an invitation to let reasonable and
informed decision take precedence over historical development. It is worth
remembering that it is not an enlightened public that he invites to examine and
discuss, but rather an administrative elite. Nevertheless, it is not tradition but
empirically backed reasoning that is to determine the course in fiscal matters
in this view. In this sense, the Mmoires fit into an enlightened tradition of
surveys through which the French monarchy in the eighteenth century tried
to know the present state of the kingdom.16
The Mmoires compiled reliable and comprehensive information about
the reality of Frances system of taxation and placed this information in a
European context thus providing the monarchy and its administrations with
the empirical basis and the tools to solve the fiscal crisis. Beaumont was
preparing an enlightened reform, or, in the words of the editor of the second
edition of the Mmoires: Mr de Beaumont does not limit himself to describe
the formal order of things but he also explains their inner organisation.
Instead of creating a system which is always prone to objections he establishes
the facts and you find yourself convinced of all the truths which he leads you
to discover. The administrator who at first thinks that he is looking at a mere
table or a description is suddenly filled with ideas and insight by this work.17
Jean-Louis Moreau de Beaumont, Mmoires concernant les impositions et droits en
Europe (4 vols, Paris, 1768), vol. 2, p. vi.
15
Ibid., vol. 1, p. viii.
16
Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1998), p. 34.
17
M. de Beaumont ne se contente pas de prsenter la constitution des choses, il
dveloppe encore leur organisation intrieure. Au lieu dtablir un systme, toujours sujet
14
280
Two of the most important verites that Beaumont had in store for his
readers to discover were that France needed a more universal and uniform
system of taxation. The first sentence of the Mmoires set the tone: In order
to uphold and preserve a state it is necessary that all members of whom it is
composed contribute towards it. Indeed, this quality is inherent in the idea of
being a citizen. Further down Beaumont continues: Every individual ought
to contribute to the common cause of the nation by his works, talents and in
proportion of his abilities.18 Although some degree of universality of taxation
seems implied the language used is vague. Contributions made through
travaux and talens do not, a priori, exclude the old justification of fiscal
privilege whereby the aristocracy fought for the nation, the clergy prayed for
it and the rest paid taxes. And yet, the language of proportion, nation and
citoyen suggests at least some intention to limit fiscal privilege and increase
horizontal equality. This position reflects a widespread rejection among
administrators of radical calls for the end of all fiscal privileges in the public.
At the time when the Mmoires were commissioned, Bertin summarised the
compromise position which took into consideration the need for increased
revenue but also the fear of political instability associated with attempts to
reduce privilege: The contribution must be universal because there is no one
who does not have an obligation to support the state but the proportion which
determines the share of this support can very according to the person and the
nature and the object that originally gave rise to the tax.19 The Mmoires,
therefore, remained far more cautious in their attack on fiscal privilege than
many of the public commentators, but confronted the issue nonetheless.
More radical is Beaumonts rhetoric with regard to the uniformity of taxation.
contradiction, il tablit des faits, et vous vous trouvez convaincu de toutes les vrits quil
vous a laiss dcouvrir. LAdministrateur qui croit navoir vu quun tableau ou un rcit,
se sent tout coup rempli dides et de prvoyance. Jean-Louis Moreau de Beaumont,
Mmoires concernant les impositions et droits en Europe. ed. Nicolas-Juste Poullin de Viville
(4 vols, Paris, 1787), vol. 1, pp. ivv.
18
Le mantien & la conservation de tout tat exigent de chacun des Membres qui
le composent des secours que lon peut regarder comme une contribution inhrente
la qualit de citoyen. Chaque individu est tenu de contribuer la cause commune &
nationale par ses travaux, par ses talens & dans la proportion de ses facults. Beaumont,
Mmoires (1768), vol. 1, p. iii.
19
La contribution doit tre universelle parce quil ny a personne qui ne soit oblig
de venir au secours de ltat, mais la proportion qui fixe la quotit de ce secours peut varier
suivant les personnes et la nature des objets contribuables. Cited in Franois Bayard, Jol
Felix et al., Dictionnaire des surintendants et des contrleurs gnraux des finances (Paris,
2000), pp. 15962.
281
Indeed, the lack of uniformit is nothing less, in his view, than the origin of
all crimes and evils that affect French commerce.20
One specific reform project that received great attention in Beaumonts
survey, and one that was discussed by many contemporaries as a way to achieve
greater universality and uniformity, was the cadastre. Beaumont describes the
advantages of such systems which avoided the arbitrariness and privileges
associated with the French taille and which were successfully used in Milan,
Venice, Piedmont, Prussia, Bohemia and also other Habsburg lands. In theory,
the cadastre may have been compatible with fiscal privileges of the nobility
and other groups. But the underlying principle, and the tendency in practice,
was to establish a system under which taxes were levied according to the yield
of landholdings. The fiscal pressure on noble landholders was also likely to
increase because informal privileges, that were mostly the result of collusion
between tax collectors and influential landowners, became easier to prevent.
The firmer grip of the tax administration that was associated with land registers
was, therefore, feared by the French magistrates.21 They were seconded in their
view by a number of political economists, notably Smith, who warned that the
legions of administrators necessary for the implementations of such projects
were too costly and invasive and that taxation according to production would
dissuade owners from improving their land.22 Even Beaumont admitted that
the introduction of cadastres was a long and difficult process. In Bohemia,
he writes, it took almost a hundred years. But he also cites examples of faster
change such as Silesia. The territory had only been acquired by Prussia in
the 1740s but, by the time of the survey, a cadastre had been successfully
established on the orders of Frederick II. The Prussian land registers were,
in general, described in a favourable light by Beaumont who praised their
precision. No doubt his favourable views were also associated with the tax
rates that he could report for Prussia. Noble lands were taxed at 38.5 per cent,
church lands, even, at 50 per cent and the land of non nobles at 35 per cent.
As is specifically pointed out, the rates were set freely by the Prussian king
without consultation. However, Beaumont also goes into great detail about
the process by which the quality of land is assessed, and at regular intervals, by
commissions composed jointly of local nobles and people who are charged to
Tous les crimes & tous les maux. Beaumont, Mmoires (1768), vol. 1, p. v. See
also Lebeau, Regional exchanges and patterns of taxation in eighteenth century Europe:
the case of the Italian cadastres, in Nehring and Schui, Global debates, pp. 2535.
21
22
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Oxford, 1976), p. 869.
20
282
defend the sovereigns interests.23 This may have been a bid to allay the fears
of French magistrates. Laverdy had used a similar approach in his municipal
reform which conferred some powers to the magistrates while affirming royal
authority in other areas.24
As may be seen from these examples, Beaumont used European comparison
to bolster the arguments of the ministry. However, public commentators, too,
used foreign examples to make their case. The quality and originality of their
evidence could not match that compiled by the ministerial machinery in most
cases. But they still felt compelled to include material of this type or make their
own attempts at comparison, most frequently with England.25 This is true of
both sides in the public debate: on one side those close to the parlements, who
defended every inch of the fiscal status quo, and on the other side those who
asked for reforms far more radical than the ministerial bureaucracy could ever
have accepted. Due to restrictions of space, the use of foreign evidence on both
sides can only be discussed here based on a limited number of examples.
Among the proponents of reform the Physiocrats take up a special place
by virtue of their radicalism and the volume of their publications in the
1750s, 1760s and 1770s. As is well known, the principal fiscal demand of
the Physiocracy was the introduction of a single tax on land rents. This tax
was to affect all landowners without regard to their rank and, thus, do away
with all privileges.26 While the project was popular among the public in the
1760s, administrators, like Bertin, had no sympathy for it. According to his
calculations, the introduction of the single tax in 1763 would have burdened
land owners with the equivalent of 18 vingtmes. Given that already the second
and third vingtmes were causing deep political rifts, 18 vingtmes seemed like
a sure way to bring about the collapse of the Bourbon polity. Nevertheless, the
Physiocrats advocated their fiscal reform project in countless publications and
used foreign examples, widely, to convince their readers. Hardly any edition of
the phmrides du Citoyen, the mouthpiece of Quesnays sect, passed without
extensive reporting about foreign lands and fiscal experiences there. The articles
roughly fall into two categories: first, articles about specific countries or regions
in Europe that often stretch over more than one issue. The cases discussed
Gens qui sont chargs des interest du souverain. Beaumont, Mmoires (1768),
vol. 1, p. 83, 115.
24
Maurice Bordes, La rforme municipale du contrleur gnrale Laverdy (Toulouse,
1968); Jol Flix, Finances et politique au sicle des Lumires: Le ministre Laverdy (Paris,
1999).
25
See for example Anonymous, Comparaison de limpot de France avec celui dAngleterre
(London, 1766). Rilliet de Saussure, Lettres sur lemprunt et limpt (n.p., 1779).
26
See among others Mirabeau, Thorie de limpt.
23
283
include Ireland, Poland, Geneva and Tuscany.27 Such articles provided detailed
accounts that support Physiocratic arguments and lauded governments that
followed Physiocratic recommendations. This is most explicit in the rubric
actions louables which begins to appear in 1771 and praises political reform
along Physiocratic lines in France, Spain, Germany and Bohemia. A special
place, in this context, is held for a report about the efforts made by the Margrave
of Baden. This minor German prince had corresponded with some of the
leading Physiocrats and, enthused by their ideas, tried to create model villages
in his realm. This devotion earned him a visit by DuPont de Nemours and a
praising article in the phmrides where he was held up as a model monarch
for princes across Europe to emulate.28 A second group of articles described
countries outside Europe. Here available information is often liberally mixed
with imagination. Most of these articles are concerned with China. The long
piece Despotisme de la Chine which spreads over all editions of 1767, and
many others, describe China as a model of government in the Physiocratic
spirit.29 Together the accounts about taxation and governance in Europe and
the world often made up as much as half of the pages of the phmrides.
The remarkable space and effort that the Physiocrats devoted to prove their
theories with arguments from outside France, derives directly from their
theoretical paradigm. For the Physiocrats the laws governing economics, in
particular the fact that only agriculture produced wealth, were the result of
a god given eternal and immutable ordre naturel. Parallel to this existed the
ordre positif , the man-made rules and institutions. These included, perhaps
most importantly, the fiscal system. Given the immutable nature of the
ordre naturel, the prosperity and economic success of any society ultimately
depended on whether the ordre positif was adapted to the natural order.
The role of government was limited to understanding the natural order and
adjusting its laws accordingly, in particular introducing a single tax and free
trade. Unlike Montesquieus much more subtle notion of a dialogue between
the laws and local natural conditions, the Physiocratic ordre naturel did not
Paradoxe politique adress aux Irlandois, phmrides du Citoyen, I, 1967. Lettre
sur ltat actuel de la Pologne, ibid., IV, 1770 and following editions. De la Republique de
Genve, ibid. and following editions. Libert du commerce des subsistences en Toscane,
ibid., I, 1770 and following editions.
28
Jochen Schlobach, Les physiocrates et une tentative de ralisation de leur doctrine
en Allemagne, SVEC, 216 (Oxford, 1983): 2936.
29
Analyse du gouvernement des Yncas a Prou, phmrides du citoyen, I, 1767. Yu
le Grand & Confucius, ibid., II, 1767. Eloge de la ville de Moukden & de ses environs,
par Kien-Long, Empereur de la Chine actuellement rgnant, ibid., III, 1770 and following
editions. Despotisme de la Chine, ibid., III, 1767 and following editions.
27
284
allow for any regional variations. It was the same in China, Peru and Baden.30
This not only meant that Physiocratic policy advice could travel with great
ease. It also meant that greater economic success was an indicator for greater
congruency of natural and positive order. International comparison was,
therefore, crucial to hold up successful examples and denounce deviations
from the right path. The observation of other countries served a crucial
purpose within the logic of the Physiocratic argument and that of enlightened
scientific universalism in general.
However, not only the ministry of finance and the Physiocrats observed the
neighbours. The parlements, too, in their defence of fiscal privileges and legal
prerogatives made wide use of examples and evidence from outside France.
While the crown had backed down in its conflict with the parlements in 1763,
the chancellor Maupeou dissolved the parlements in 1771 and substituted
them with more docile assemblies. Maupeous coup lasted only until 1774
when the death of Louis XV led to his fall. But, despite its short duration,
the conflict prompted an avalanche of remonstrances by the magistrates.
Embedded in wider political discourses, fiscal matters were at the heart of this
conflict. The magistrates defended their right to prevent any fiscal legislation
prejudicial to their privileges. In pamphlets filled with references to the works
of Montesquieu, the parlements tried to depict Maupeous coup as an act of
tyranny and Louis XV as a monarch in danger of sliding down the slippery
slope to despotism.
While this was a conflict over the distribution of revenue between the
notables and the crown, its language was not that of political economy but
of legal history. The Physiocrats case for reform was presented in economic
terms and much of Beaumonts survey focused more on the present and
future than on the past. In contrast to this, the principal form of evidence
used by the parlements was historical. As mentioned earlier in this essay, the
Mmoires reacted to this by including a history of French taxation which
stressed evolution and royal authority. However, despite the concentration of
the parlements on the past, the magistrates also used international comparison
in this publicity battle. Unlike the administration and the Physiocrats, their
interest focused mainly on the attitudes of foreign monarchs and less on the
specifics of taxation. Perhaps it was feared that a detailed discussion of fiscal
matters could have damaged the parlementss claim to be the defender of the
fiscal interests of the whole nation.31 Rather than taxes the magistrates argued
Most authoritatively in Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, La Physiocratie
(n. p., 1767).
31
Anon., Le parlement justifi par lImperatrice Reine de Hongrie, par le Roi de
Prusse et par le Roi de Sardaigne, in Les efforts de la libert (4 vols, London, 17723),
30
285
politics and compared Louis XV to Frederick II of Prussia and Catherine II

of Russia. The Prussian monarch stood for the dangers of despotism while
Catherine was held up as an example of a monarch who renounced despotic
practices. Frederick stands accused of having done, in his realm, what Maupeou
did in France. However, the acts of the Prussian despot were less repulsive in
the eyes of the magistrates: Frederick did not hide his despotic intentions
and, more importantly, they remained only formal (de droit). He usurped
power but did not use it to crush his people with heavy taxation.32 It should
be noted that many Prussian tax payers would have disagreed. Fredericks
fiscal reforms largely carried out by French administrators did not only
increase the tax burden but also provoked broad resistance from the privileged
and city dwelling artisans and merchants.33 In contrast, Catherine II was
praised for promulgating laws and acknowledging the importance of a dpt
des Loix, which could only consist of the corps politiques qui annoncent
les Loix lorsquelles sont faites, i.e. the parlements.34 These comparisons are
best understood not in the light of the actual fiscal policies of the European
monarchs cited but in the context of contemporary diplomatic relations. In
the Seven Years War less than a decade had passed since the peace treaty
Russia had been an ally and Prussia a particularly hated enemy. Frederick
had inflicted the traumatic defeat in the Battle of Rossbach on the French
army in 1757. By likening Maupeous politics to those of the Prussian enemy
and by contrasting it with the Russian ally, they pursued a similar goal to
the historical accounts of the magistrates: to depict Maupeous actions as
foreign to the traditions and spirit of the French polity and associate them
with enemies of the nation. This tactic was not unique to the side of the
parlements. In the pamphlets of the time, the magistrates felt the need to reject
accusation of Englishness levelled by the side of Maupeou. Pamphlets had
warned of the dangers of a plot hatched by two magistrates ... in order to
introduce in France the English form of government.35 The question of who
represented the true embodiment of French political tradition was crucial in
vol. 4, p. 48.
32
Ibid., p. 52.
33
F. Schui, French figures of authority and state building in Prussia, in Peter Becker
et al. (eds), Figures of authority: contributions towards a cultural history of governance from
17th to 19th century (Frankfurt, Oxford and others, forthcoming 2008).
34
Anonymous, Extrait du journal Encyclopdique in Les efforts de la libert (4 vols,
London, 17723), vol. 1, 102.
35
Complot form par deux Magistrats dintroduire en France le Gouvernement
dAngleterre. Anon., Le parlement justifi par lImperatrice Reine de Hongrie,
pp. 5664.
286
this conflict. Comparison and association of the domestic political opponent

with the enemies of France was, therefore, widely used to discredit the other
sides fiscal positions.
Considering the cases discussed in this essay, there can be little doubt
as to the wide diffusion of international observation and use of foreign
evidence in fiscal debates in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Mutual observation was a part of the development of fiscal systems from early
on and has contributed to shaping the European tax state. However, it is
at the same time very difficult to answer the question to what extent this
type of transnational argument influenced the actual development of fiscal
institutions. This question opens up a much broader field of enquiry about
the relation between fiscal debates and fiscal change. Pre-revolutionary France
is perhaps a good example to illustrate the complexities of this question. In
this period a debate culture, that was fuelled in part by foreign influences,
produced radical proposals for fiscal reform. But the failure of fiscal reform
under the Ancien Rgime was largely due to the domestic balance of power.
This suggests that the transfer of fiscal ideas may be of great importance for
fiscal debates but far less so for institutional change in fiscal matters. And
yet the eighteenth century was not only a period of failed fiscal reforms in
France. The period also saw the most radical fiscal change, perhaps of all time.
The revolution of 1789 achieved many of the fiscal reforms at issue in the
transnational debates discussed in this chapter. At the same time the origins
of the revolution were intimately linked with a culture of public debate which
was fuelled, in large part, by fiscal debates.
Chapter 17
The Proud Epithet of Enlightened:

Ferdinando Galiani and the Neapolitan
Debate on Colonies, Commerce and
Conquest
Koen Stapelbroek
Introduction: Galiani vs Raynal

When, in 1772, after his forced departure from Paris, the Neapolitan
Ferdinando Galiani (17281787) was asked what he thought of the Histoire
des Deux Indes, he responded that it was not his kind of book.
In politics, I only admit pure Machiavellianism, without mixture, crude, outright,
in all its severity. [Raynal] wonders at our trade in Negroes in Africa: but why does
he not wonder at the trade in mules from Guyana in Spain? Isnt there nothing so
horrible as castrating the bulls and cutting off the horses tails, etc.? He reproaches us
for being the bandits of the Indies, but Scipio then could be the bandit of the Barbary
Coasts and Caesar of Gaul. He says that it causes bad things. But all good turns into
bad. When veal from Pontoise turns bad, dont eat it anymore; when dancing causes
tiredness, stop dancing; when love causes pain, stop loving. Thus, my advice is that as
long as they buy our Negroes, we keep selling them, until it arises that they succeed
to let them live in America. My advice is to continue our ravages in the Indies for as
long as we manage, until we are defeated and are forced to withdraw. There would not
be any lucrative commerce left in the world; stop deceiving yourself. The only good is
Between 1759 and 1769 Galiani had been the Neapolitan charg daffaires and
secretary of the Neapolitan ambassador in Paris. For the diplomatic indiscretion used by
Choiseul to remove Galiani, Giuseppe Ferraioli, Un fallo diplomatico dellabate Galiani,
Archivio Storico per le Province Napoletane (1880): 69098.
288
that one pursues the exchange of giving with the whip for the rupees one receives; that
is, the commerce of the strongest. This would be my book.
In this essay I will argue that this deliberately provocative statement,

charging Raynals censure of French colonial politics as misguided moralising,
is consistent with Galianis understanding of the political and economic
constraints that existed for Naples to retain its newly acquired and fragile
independence in eighteenth-century Europe. I will do so by identifying
Galianis position with a line of argument about the contradistinction
between commerce and conquest and offset that tradition with the ideas
of its Neapolitan opponents, Paolo Mattia Doria and Carlantonio Broggia,
on the issue of the economic development of modern monarchies. Thus, the
historiographical topic of Enlightened absolutism is approached through the
eighteenth-century debate on the political economy of reformed civilized
monarchies that lay at the core of discussions about the future of foreign
trade and the interstate system.
Commerce vs. Conquest and Modern Monarchy: Child, Locke, Melon
English Colonial Politics: Child, Locke
Naples became an independent Kingdom in 1734. When news about the
imminent arrival of Carlo Borbone reached the city, the cappelano maggiore
Celestino Galiani and his friend, the Tuscan mathematician-agronomist
Bartolomeo Intieri, rode out to welcome the new king. The same year saw
the publication of Jean-Franois Melons Essai politique sur le commerce. Intieri
(who was a voracious reader of English and French works on political economy)
immediately recognised the book as a guide for better understanding the
conditions under which Naples had to preserve its independence and used
5 September 1772 to Mme. DEpinay, Correspondance avec Mme dEpinay, Mme

Necker, Mme Geoffrin, &c. Diderot, Grimm, dAlembert, De Sartine, dHolbach, &c (2 vols,
eds Lucien Perey & Gaston Maugras, Paris, 1881), vol. 2, pp. 11415.

On Galiani and Neapolitan independence as well as on the provocative nature of
Galianis statements and his image of machiavellino, Koen Stapelbroek, Love, Self-Deceit
and Money (Toronto, 2008), pp. 214, 379.

Stapelbroek, Love, Self-Deceit and Money, pp. 5687 for references and discussion
of Celestino Galianis moral philosophy.

A forthcoming special issue of the journal Frontiera dEuropa will fill the existing
lacuna of studies on Bartolomeo Intieri.
The Proud Epithet of Enlightened
289
the book, in his correspondence with Celestino Galiani, to develop a vision of

Neapolitan political economic state-building.
Melons Essai politique was a bold enunciation of a set of criticisms of earlier
political economic works and was in tune with crystallising new insights into
the complex, non-linear history of modern Europe. Resurfacing in the book
were the same concerns that were central to, for example, Josiah Childs A New
Discourse of Trade (which had several reprints in the middle of the eighteenth
century) and Lockes writings on political economy from the second half
of the seventeenth century. In these English works, a particular argument
was developed that stated that commerce and conquest were incompatible.
Locke insisted that there are but two ways of growing Rich, either Conquest,
or Commerce. Here, securing our Navigation and Trade was more in line
with the Interest of this Kingdom than Wars or Conquest.10 Locke and
Child both cited the opposition of commerce and conquest to frame the true
economic interest of England as a choice between cultivation of new lands or
mere trade and mining. Whereas other nations concentrated on mining gold
and silver (Spain) or engaged in comptoir trade in the East and West Indies
(the Dutch), which were falsely conceived, updated species of conquest,
the English were the only nation operating on an entirely different level by
establishing plantations and clearing, breaking up of ground, and planting.11
Supported by the argument that new modes of commercial conquest created
only imperium, whereas agriculture and cultivation, justified dominium, these
writers attempted to place a firm dividing line between the overseas trade of
These letters are preserved in the library of the Societ Napoletana di Storia Patria
(henceforth BSNSP) , with classmark indication xxx.a.7, ff. 1r43r. See Stapelbroek Love,
Self-Deceit and Money, pp. 625.

For the context of the book as a parallel project to Montesquieus analyses of
monarchical reform politics in the Considrations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains
et de leur dcadence, the Lettres Persanes and the construction of key chapters of LEsprit des
lois, see Istvan Hont, Luxury and Commerce, Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century
Political Thought (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 379418.

The New Discourse of Trade was translated into French by Vincent de Gournay and
influenced Forbonnais, see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality,
and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2007), p. 182.

Locke owned three copies of works by Child and critically engaged with Childs
Brief Observations on Trade and Interest of Money, of 1668, in his Some Considerations. See
William Letwin, Sir Josiah Child: Merchant Economist (Boston, 1959); and John Harrison
and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford, 1971).
10
John Locke, Locke on Money ed. Patrick Kelly (2 vols, Oxford, 1991), vol. 1,
pp. 222, 232.
11
Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (Glasgow, 1751), pp. 1428.
290
other states and the English more natural and supposedly long-term viable
strategy, which combined overseas agricultural commerce with the financial
regime advocated by Child (that was inspired by the Dutch example).12 The
argument served as a response to supporters of the then dominant view that
colonies robbed the mother-country of its population, were expensive and
were a main factor in the demise of empires.13 Instead, the future of the English
Empire would not be threatened, but secured by colonies. The only risk lay
in the success of the strategy: cultivation of new grounds in the colonies
generated new trade, increased population and industry and could become
a platform for setting up new manufacturing industries in the colonies rather
than in the mother-country, as a result of which colonies might be able to
emancipate themselves rather more than was envisaged. Thus the economic
portfolio of colonies had to be closely guarded in order to retain unity within
the Empire.14
France Emulating England: Melon on Colonies
When Melon, in his Essai politique, took up the argument that commerce
and conquest were mutually exclusive within a state,15 his message, to a
French audience, differed from Lockes and Childs. Melon denied that the
English were in a markedly superior position compared with other states.
Melon started his Essai politique by showing how, in the modern world,
self-sufficiency in food was a necessary condition for a state to maintain its
power.16 Here he recognised the emphasis on agriculture in English colonial
policy, as a distinctive and early response to balance the mercantile, trade-led,
system of political economy. Protected imports of colonial agricultural goods
neutralised damaging effects arising from aggressive balance of trade politics.
Because the English had developed colonies relatively quickly and supported
them with the right laws, the English colonies outperformed the French as
suppliers of agricultural goods. The English colonies were older, better formed
and more populated.17
See e.g. Joyce O. Appleby, Ideology and Economic Thought in Seventeenth-Century

England (Princeton, NJ, 1978), pp. 7398.
13
Barbara Arneil, Trade, Plantations, and Property: John Locke and the Economic
Defense of Colonialism, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55:4 (1994): 5935, 607.
14
Arneil, Trade, Plantations, and Property, 600602.
15
Melon, A Political Essay Upon Commerce (Dublin, 1738), p. 136.
16
Ibid., pp. 112.
17
Ibid., p. 72.
12
291
Although Melon believed that agricultural independence in the modern

world was a necessary condition for international power, he devised a different
way to arrive at subsistence autonomy. While Child and Locke agreed that
population growth and the industry of people could only be sustainable in the
long run by first, directly and separately, heeding the primacy of agriculture,
Melons proposals followed a different path. First of all immediately following
the first chapter where he played out different scenarios of trade competition
and concluded that a sufficient local food supply was essential he launched
a plea for the liberalisation of the grain trade.18 It was an inescapable fact of
modern European societies that not agriculture, but manufactures and trade,
that were the main sources of national power and wealth. Still, food remained
fundamental. Melon believed that an increase of high standard modern grain
production would arise quickest if agriculture was included in the equation.
The challenge for modern commercial societies, as Melon saw it, was not to
repair the neglect of agriculture separately, away from the mother country, but
to raise economic productivity in all sectors at the same time and create strong
sectoral interdependencies through which circular monetary flows could be
accelerated. Whether one liked it or not, the needs and desires of humans,
living in modern commercial states, had already become accustomed to this
situation and it was expedient to exploit this state of affairs to the national
advantage by using luxury as an incentive to trigger peoples industry.19 Melon
recommended that European states capitalise on the levelling effects of luxury,
which was in some sort, the Destroyer of Sloth and Idleness. The sumptuous
Man would soon see the End of his Riches, if he did not endeavour to preserve
them, or to acquire more; and he is, by so much the more engaged, to perform
the Duties of Society, as he is exposed to the Eyes of Envy.20 To calibrate and
spur the national spirit to action, colonialism, slavery, devaluations, taxation,
machines, public debts, credit, fixed interest rates, paper money and national
banks all belonged to the arsenal of the new legislative art that was imperative
for European states. It was only natural that, in modern Europe, the basic
connections between land-property-labour-grain-population-power became
an integral part of this fabric of wealth production.
To meet the demand for agricultural goods, it would be advisable [t]o
reclaim barren lands, and make them profitable: [and in that way] to conquer
new Countries, without making any one person miserable. A legislator who
could animate the minds of people, to fill these barren lands, would do more
Service to the State, than he, who by a destructive bloody War, would add the
Ibid., pp. 1324.
Ibid., pp. 173206.
20
Ibid., p. 177.
18
19
292
same quantity of Land to his Country. But the glory of doing so, would not
appear, with so great a Lustre, to vulgar Eyes. It would be acquired, without
Dangers of War, without the Loss of a Citizen, and without attracting the
Jealousy of Neighbours.21 The last aspect was essential. Melon argued in his
chapter on colonies, referring to the Dutch and Portuguese struggles over
territorial possessions in both the Indies, that any state regardless of its form
of government was easily tempted to attack or could, just as easily, be forced
to defend overseas possessions against a rival power: The Republican Spirit
sheweth, with Pleasure, the Faults of the Monarchies; the Monarchical, those
of Republicks: and the Faults, are made pretty equal on both sides.22 Truly
modern government was able to detach itself from previous habits. It could
recognise this disadvantage of colonies and see its true nature as a remnant of
the spirit of conquest, religious prejudice and lust for aggrandisement. Besides,
although relocating Superfluous labour to external territory was in all
Respects useful, the Growth of Colonies was slow.23 Therefore, Melon held,
the English strategy was not the optimal one for boosting economic growth.
By placing the corrective of agricultural neglect in colonial cultivation, the
English were not dissociating themselves entirely from the logic of conquest
and continued to be exposed to its hazards.
The political message of Melons observations was reinforced by its
presentation. The style of Melons observations was not that of a theoretical
exposition inspired by an all-encompassing vision of modern politics, but
was often satirical. Melon pointed to a number of common prejudices that
hampered economic growth in France, and in other states, and ridiculed the
impact that rigid moral notions, of equality for example, had on possibilities for
modernising political reforms. In the chapter on slavery, for example, he took
the line that slavery was a species of inequality. While EQUALITY amongst
men, is a chimera, which can scarce bring forth an ideal Commonwealth []
there are an infinite number of Subordinations, of which Slavery will always
hold the lowest degree.24 It was true that the idea of Barbarity, hath always
been annexed to that of Slavery, because the Slave was originally a Prisoner of
War, over whose life the Conqueror always retained the Right he had acquired
by having preserved it for him.25 However, with the right kind of legal reform,
Ibid., p. 76.
Ibid., p. 68.
23
Ibid., p. 72.
24
Ibid., p. 80.
25
Ibid., p. 83.
21
22
293
like the Code Noir, slavery would become a sort of Servitude, not altogether
dissimilar from regular forms of employment or even matrimony.26
Just as the Irish translator of Melons Essai politique noticed the critical
liberal tone of the work and judged that its provocative messages and
paradoxical inversions27 might be more suitable for England to reconsider
its economic relations with Ireland than they were applicable to absolutist
France,28 so the book was hailed by Intieri in Naples as a blueprint for
Neapolitan commercial politics.
The Neapolitan Debate on Commercial Reform
Melon in Naples: Intieri, Doria
Melons opposition to commerce and conquest, as a rechanneling of earlier
political economic views in Naples, was picked up as a particularly exciting
vision about the enduring errors committed by dominant states in European
history and the problems these witnessed in reforming their own economic
structures. Naples did not have to come such a long way to catch up, Intieri
suggested to Celestino Galiani in his letters. It was also unnecessary to have
overseas territories or colonies, the defense of which would be too great a
challenge to Neapolitan military prowess.29 But Melons Essai politique provided
a new outlook on the future of Neapolitan commerce, mainly, in another way.
Intieri recognised the book as presenting a full-blown perspective on the dual
challenge to Neapolitan politicians to develop a strategy for avoiding threats
to the fragile new state in the European arena of military and commercial
competition and destroy the remnants of the abusive politics of the Spanish
viceroy and Southern-Italian aristocracies. The key to both issues was luxury.
Intieri transcribed the chapter on luxury from Melons book and sent it to
Celestino Galiani.30 Rather than confront all the layers of bad government,
neo-feudal legal and political institutions, unequal land distributions and
ecclesiastical claims, these remnants of the inglorious past would crumble and
collapse once the industrious and creative Neapolitan population started to
Ibid., pp. 835.
Melon provocatively called colonies a species of luxury since that was where
superfluous labour force could be sent to cultivate Sugar, Silk, Coffee, Tobacco, once the
national territory was all used for tilling necessary products; ibid., p. 175.
28
Ibid., ixxxiv.
29
Although Sicily was often considered a colony, at least in terms of economic
relations.
30
30 December 1738, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, ff. 23r4v.
26
27
294
find ways to set up new manufacturing industries, cultivate the fertile lands
and grow wealthy.
Like Melon, Intieri argued for liberalising the grain trade. Following the
first part of chapter II of the Essai politique, he explained to Celestino Galiani
that abundance of grain that could not be sold abroad led to lower prices,
lower production and vulnerability to dearths: Mr. Melon wisely writes that
[...] abundance is more frightening than famine.31 If the grain trade were
to be freed from the many obstacles that it has and the prince facilitated
transportation to the sea by building safe and comfortable roads, Naples
would not only stop importing grain from Poland and England, but be able
to supply the whole of Italy.32 The antiquated grain tax system was the main
disorder that blocked the modernisation of Neapolitan agriculture.33
Intieri rejected development projects initiated by the state and protection
of the domestic economy and made a clear choice about how the Neapolitan
commercial potential, which he believed was huge,34 could be realised. Instead
of opting for protecting the national economy, he arrived at the opposite
conclusion, a result of, consequently, following through the logic of Melons
views, that one could not live comfortably [...] without mixing with the other
nations.35
In all this, Bartolomeo Intieri and Celestino Galiani were in complete
opposition to Paolo Mattia Doria, whose reform proposals, outlined in a
manuscript, Del commercio del regno di Napoli,36 entailed a systematic
closure of the Neapolitan economy from the exterior world. The three main
ports of Taranto, Naples and Brindisi, he recommended, had to become centres
from which foreign trade could be tightly regulated. Agriculture should be
promoted, while domestic trade had to be liberalised. Doria proposed reforms
to limit the growth of inequality, stimulate the regeneration of the countryside,
while luxury consumption in the capital, Naples, was to be thwarted.37
25 January 1739, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 27v.

33
34
11 October 1738, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 5r and 13 January, 1739, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7,
f. 25r.
35
Franco Venturi, Alle origini dellilluminismo napoletano, dal carteggio di
Bartolomeo Intieri, Rivista Storica Italiana, 71:2 (1959): 4334.
36
Il pensiero civile di Paolo Mattia Doria negli scritti inediti, ed. E. Vidal (Milan,
1953), pp. 153229. It was written for Francesco Ventura, one of Naples most influential
lawyer-reformers. For Doria, see the chapter in this volume by Sophus Reinert.
37
Doria, Il pensiero civile, pp. 958.
31
32
295
Dorias plan was a reinvention of Fnelons model for the simultaneous

moral, economic and political reform of Salentum in his Tlmaque.38 The aim
was to restore the natural centrality of agricultural production and equality
among men as the twin bases for the creation of true wealth and population
increase. The direction of these reforms contrasted with the direction of
commercial politics across Europe. There, the primacy of foreign trade and
balance of trade politics had arisen, which Doria called abstract commerce,
in contradistinction to the real commerce, which revolved around need
satisfaction, that it had replaced. Doria described the reality of modern trade as
a disease. European politicians had adopted the behaviour of greedy merchants
and suffered from a furious inclination to mercantile commerce.39 Doria
argued that the false virtues that swayed modern commerce were ineffective
means for the acquisition of true wealth.40 He agreed with Jean-Franois Melon
that conquest and commerce excluded each other in principle. Territorial
ambitions required warfare, which obstructed economic growth. Combining
trade with imperialism was a self-defeating strategy. Doria himself had already
argued in La vita civile that the politics of conquest in modern times had
impoverished Spain and Portugal.41 France, under Louis XIV and Colbert,
had been the first state to attempt to replace the monarchical virtues of real
commerce with greed and luxury and engage in a politics of conquest through
mercantile commerce, which was a confused version of the same backfiring
strategy.
These monarchical states had overlooked that underlying success in
foreign commerce there always had to be a kind of virtue more common in
See Hont, Luxury, pp. 38089.
Paolo Mattia Doria, Il commercio mercantile, quoted by Ajello, Arcana Juris:
diritto e politica nel settecento Italiano (Naples, 1982), pp. 4056.
40
Dorias political economy crucially rested on his moral, philosophical and political
views, as he himself proudly declared, while referring to his La vita civile (Naples, 1709). In
that book Doria discussed a threefold typology of political societies: the purely military one
[la pura militare], when a people unites itself under a captain, [secondly] the civil economic
one [la civile economica], [...] when one unites under the civil law, but with a frugal and
moderate lifestyle, and [thirdly] the civil pompous [la civile pomposa], which is when one
lives in a more cultured [colta] and pompous manner, p. 116. This threefold distinction
between different types of societies mirrored Fnelons in the Tlmaque, between a simple
pre-modern society, a corrupted luxurious society and a well-reformed modern monarchy.
In his moral philosophy Doria identified the regulation of peoples amor proprio, through
stimulation of their intellectual appetite, as the key to good politics.
41
Doria, La vita civile, pp. 35961. Doria repeated himself arguing that Philip II of
Spain, whose malicious politics destroyed virtue for the sake of conquest, also destroyed
the income of country, died bankrupt and ruined the monarchy.
38
39
296
republican regimes. Trade was based on a dedication of those who engaged

in it to suspend their present pleasure and act in the service of the common
good. When war turned into peace, sailors turned to trade and risked their
lives to travel the seas and carry goods from one place to another. It was only
when the commerce of trade republics came under the control of bankers,
Doria argued, that the rot set in. That, and the increase of inequality and
luxury consumption it caused, led to the decay of trading nations like the
Dutch and the English. Machiavelli, Doria stated, was right as the events of
our time confirm that without the foundation of true virtue, no particular
order can remain stable, nor be useful to Republics or other states.42
By the 1740s, Doria concluded, most European states had adopted
the garbled political strategy that Colbert had devised near the end of the
seventeenth century. One of Dorias unpublished manuscripts of the 1740s,
in which he addressed this situation, was called the politics by which the
various republics and monarchies of Europe are governed have made Europe,
in fact, completely barbaric and dressed it up in fake and false civilisation.
The political economy that carried the day made all states poor.43 Rather
than to control markets and protect the virtue and happiness of their subjects,
politicians promoted a universal tyranny that held Europe in its power.44
Doria believed that, even if other states were to refocus on real commerce,
the advantage of Naples, compared in particular with France, was that it had
not developed the same levels of luxury consumption and corruption. In
Naples, the vices of modernity did not have to be corrected so much. The
reform of Naples was not a matter of a painful return to virtue, but rather
of a prudent development of its liberty, acquired through independence,
in the right direction and, thereby, defeat the strategy of other countries.
One simply should not be distracted by the jealousies that kept other states
occupied with each others ill-conceived games of abstract commerce. Naples
could become admired and feared by them in the space of twenty years: the
Kingdom of Naples, by directing its real and effective commerce well, could
be more abundant with money than the English and Dutch attract with their
ideal companies.45 At that stage Naples would become what Doria called a
civil economic society, in which amor proprio, mans natural instinct for self-
Vidal, Il pensiero civile, p. 229.

Vidal, Il pensiero civile, p. 229.
44
Quoted by Ajello, Arcana Juris, p. 406.
45
Doria, Il pensiero civile, p. 165.
42
43
297
preservation,46 was absorbed by a higher level of love that made men extend
the aim of their economic activities to include the care of others in society.
Broggias Anti-Melon: Naples as a Virtuous Commercial Monarchy
Dorias ideas were a major inspiration for Carlantonio Broggia, who published
a book on taxes and money in 1743 and a Memoria on monetary problems
in 1754.47 From the moment Melons Essai politique sur le commerce first
appeared Broggia started working on an anti-luxury treatise.48 Melons work
was also the prime motive and the occasion for Broggia to expose all the
misconceptions and lies about the advantages of luxury in a work entitled
Della vita civil economica49 (the title paraphrased Dorias main work). Broggias
anti-Melon started with a definition of luxury as the abuse of riches.50 The
phrase would recur over and over again in Broggias oeuvre and after handing
over a copy in 1754 of his Memoria to a French abbot, who gave it to his
friend Mirabeau, he was quick to accuse the latter of plagiarising his ideas in
Lami des hommes of 1756, where the same definition of luxury appeared, after
which it spread across Europe.51
In the first pages of his attack on Melon, Broggia wondered how it was
possible that the entire human tradition since antiquity, of managing human
industry and equality by means of sumptuary laws and eternally wise measures,
Dorias amor proprio thus did not have the same analytical status as Rousseaus
amour propre.
47
Carlantonio Broggia, Trattato dei tributi, delle monete e del governo politico della
sanit (Milan 1803, [1743]) and Memoria ad oggetto di varie politiche ed economiche ragioni
e temi di utili raccordi che in causa del monetaggio di Napoli sespongono e propongono (Naples,
1754) [partially republished in: Politici ed economisti del primo settecento, dal Muratori
al Cesarotti, ed. R. Ajello (Naples-Milan, 1978), pp. 9711059]. See Franco Venturi,
Broggia e Vico, in W.H. Barber (ed.), The Age of the Enlightenment: Studies Presented to
Theodore Besterman (Edinburgh, 1967), pp. 298307.
48
Broggia, Il banco e il monte de pegni. Del lusso, ed. Rosario Patalano (Naples,
2004). In 1747 Broggia had prepared a frontispiece and seemed ready to publish the
work, (p. 48).
49
Broggia published an outline of his ideas in his Memoria, pp. 101516,
104159.
50
Broggia, Del lusso, p. 59.
51
Broggia, Del lusso, pp. 5051. See Mirabeau, LAmi des hommes (Avignon, 1756),
p. 269. Broggia was quick to find himself plagiarised. He saw Trojano Spinellis Riflessioni
politiche (Naples, n.d., probably 1748) as copying directly (and often even misinterpreting)
his 1743 Trattato dei tributi. See Venturi, Tre note su Carlantonio Broggia, Rivista Storica
Italiana, 80:4 (1986): 83053.
46
298
had given way so quickly to a feverish pursuit of luxury, such as advocated by

Melon. Before engaging in a detailed criticism of Melons Essai in part two of
his critique, Broggia first provided an outline of his countermodel for Naples,
of an island far removed from any commerce with other countries and very
fertile and abundant in all of lifes necessities.52 On the island there was a right
proportion of artisans. It would seem as though this island had all it needed
and would be perfectly happy: and still it was not, instead the opposite was
the case.53 The reason was that five rich people owned all the islands capital
and bought luxury goods from abroad. They had no incentive, and the other
people no opportunity, to develop agriculture and be industrious. Reforms
were necessary. In the first place the landed property had to be redistributed
equally among the six hundred families on the island. Some of these families
would manage to acquire an annual income of 500 ducats, some 300, and
others only 100, but any income over 500 ducats would be redistributed.
Inheritances were to be divided equally over the heads of the direct family.
There would be no other succession privileges. The Prince of the island would
strongly dedicate himself to the encouragement of industry and make sure that
the virtue of industry would be regarded and honoured as much as military
and civil virtues. As a result, rich and poor lived together in infinitely greater
harmony than before. The nobility would not love useless luxury spending,
but find a new obsession in industry, and merchants would be much better
off for not feeling they had to always show off as well as anxiously protect
their wealth. Due to a few well-observed sumptuary laws the island would
rapidly become entirely commercial and the empire of all wealth. Soon
the burgeoning economy of this island without luxury would be able to
spend millions, rather than the value of 300,000 ducats (the normal level of
the export value of agricultural and minor manufacturing produce) and its
population would grow. People were enriching themselves on the destructive
luxury habits of people in other states and the direct reinvestment of capital in
industry, which happened automatically, since consumption was not socially
valued. Due to the political screening of national consumption and the moral
advantage the island had over other states, it could separately produce loads
of agricultural goods for its own population and manufactured goods to send
abroad.54
Broggia wanted wealth to be well-constructed, equal and, therefore, not
based on luxury. He denied that it was more difficult for a rich man to go
Broggia, Del lusso, pp. 6777, quotation p. 69.

Ibid., pp. 6970.
54
Ibid., pp. 713.
52
53
299
to heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.55 What was
impossible, from Broggias point of view, was to combine national wealth with
luxury spending and inequality. No compromises were possible. Without a
major land property reform, inequality remained and the five landowners
would still only be inclined to spend their income abroad. Precisely the
morally corrective effects of luxury consumption in a weak national economy
meant that inequality always led to poverty. In that case, the only solution
was to completely shut off the borders from commerce with other nations
and accept the impossibility of population increase and national wealth. It
was, thus, crucial that the provinces of the Kingdom were reformed first to
allow the cities to fulfil their natural functions.56 It might be objected, Broggia
pre-empted the obvious critique, by some people that this is perhaps how
republics can work, but not monarchies. To this objection Broggia responded
that monarchies had even more need of virtue than republics.57 The key words
of the title of Broggias later attack on Galianis Della moneta, therefore, were
also Del pubblico interesse, as opposed to private interest, which was an affront
to the unbeatable logic of sustainable economic growth and perfection.58
Neapolitan Commerce in Galianis Della Moneta
In 1751 Ferdinando Galiani published his first work, Della moneta, which was
heavily indebted to French debates of the preceding decades and a response
to Neapolitan economic reform debates. Originally, the work was a spinoff from Galianis overwhelmingly ambitious attempt to develop a cultural
and political overview of the history of modern government through the
development of human commerce since the time of the earliest navigation
and trade in the Mediterranean. Della moneta also started with a chapter on
the history of money and commerce since antiquity in order to show how
international trade, as it existed in the eighteenth century, had come about
historically. Galiani described how Rome once wallowed in deep pools of
gold and silver, which caused such changes of its ancient customs that its
political culture collapsed: born poor [...] and grown by arms, Rome became
oppressed by its own wealth and luxury.59 Galiani described the decline of
Broggia, Memoria, p. 1042.
Broggia, Del lusso, pp. 75, 1956.
57
Ibid., p. 74. Doria had in his Vita civile distinguished the moral principles of
monarchical real commerce from the truer communitarian virtues of republican patriotic
defence of the state and its commerce.
58
Ibid., pp. 72, 189
59
Galiani, Della moneta, pp. 279.
55
56
300
Rome as a political failure to address the contradictions that had arisen in

its customs. Those contradictions were the foundation of the feudal politics
that existed in medieval times when trade had been halted and was all but
extinguished. When in the fifteenth century, Europeans began to live more
in accordance with the laws [of commerce], even before the discovery of the
Indies, [] gold and silver began to appear again in greater quantities.60 The
discovery of America and the development of navigation then fuelled the
industry of subjects and the greed of princes, who all hoped to be able to
enrich themselves.61
They began to employ funds that were previously spent on arms and destroyed in
war for shipbuilding and the establishment of colonies, the construction of ports and
fortresses, and for the creation of roads and warehouses. People who had first cast their
lot with war now turned with unbelievable zeal to the sea, to exploring and to discovery
and conquest. For Europe [...] this meant peace, humanity, improvement in the arts,
luxury and magnificence, increasing her wealth and happiness. But for the innocent
Indians it meant plunder, servitude, slaughter and desolation. [...] Just as Roman
conquests had rendered Italy prosperous, we too enriched ourselves on the misery of
others, although we did not consider ourselves conquerors, like the Romans.62
The separation between modern territorial trade competition and ancient

conquest was not so definite, according to Galiani. In those centuries
of antiquity, wealth was companion to arms and therefore followed the
vicissitudes of war, whereas today, wealth follows the path of peace. Similarly,
whereas at that time the bravest of men were the richest, today the richest are
the most unwarlike and peaceful.63 Echoing Josiah Childs definition of trade
as a different kind of warfare,64 Galiani qualified the underlying principle as
only a different virtue of combat.65 Greed inspired mens minds to turn to
thoughts of peace. Yet the competition between states was as relentless and
aggressive, even though in appearance it had been pacified.
Still, even if modern interstate relations were determined by jealousies
and perennial struggles, this was no reason to turn against inequality, luxury
and modern financial instruments. Instinctive fears of modernity were not
an adequate guide to resolve the various political challenges that existed
Ibid., p. 29.
Ibid., p. 30.
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.
64
Quoted in William Letwin, Origins of Scientific Economics (London, 1963),
p. 44.
65
60
61
301
for different states under these circumstances. Galiani judged that of those
who have dealt with the subject of money, only the author of the Saggio sul
commercio, believed to be signor Melon, a man of great genius and a truly
honest and virtuous mind, has distinguished himself .66 Galiani set out to
show how most of what Melon had argued as a set of observations could be
subsumed under a general theory of the laws of commerce and, thereby, to
disentangle the various dimensions of modern political history that had led to
the present situation.67
Galianis basic argument connected his ideas of human nature and
sociability to the value of money. He defined amor proprio as an innocent
product of human nature: if the feeling of pleasure derived from the reverence
and esteem in which others hold us were to be ridiculed this would constitute
a reproach against our nature, which created this disposition of mind, not us
ourselves.68 According to Galiani the good moral order of the universe was
completely maintained by money and the Author of nature guarded over
it.69 These statements, particularly the association with providence, reflected
Galianis ambition to discern, in the history of humankind, the realisation of
a pre-determined plan of the progress of humankind based on self-interested
human drives. Galiani had developed an intricate moral philosophy, to this
end, that explained human self-seeking and selfless motives as deriving from
the same principles.70
However, history since the fall of Rome had taken a peculiar course at the
end of which European governments found themselves guarding the balance
of trade while their national economies had failed to develop a proper basis for
foreign trade in agricultural productivity. Yet Naples, in this regard, was not
France: the challenge for the backward state of eighteenth-century Naples was
to develop its agriculture while side-by-side interpreting the natural increase
of price levels, the emergence of luxury and inequality due to new commercial
dynamics as signs of a bright future.
Although commerce and agriculture may be linked together in such a manner that
each is an effect together with a cause of the other, agriculture [...] is always found
prior to trade. For flourishing trade arises out of an abundance of superfluous goods.
And this comes from agriculture which is, in turn, made by population. Population
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., p. 55.
68
Ibid., p. 41.
69
Ibid., pp. 7980.
70
See Stapelbroek, Love, Self-Deceit and Money, pp. 12764.
66
67
302
arises from liberty, and liberty, finally, arises from just government. We already have
the last two and, in part, even our population has grown.71
Galiani felt that Naples should protect its freedom in modern Europe
through modernising its agriculture, finding new fishing grounds in the
Mediterranean and exploring the possibility of extending trade by cutting
through the isthmus of Suez. While the most advanced states of Europe failed
to form a clear view and adequate policies for using the opportunities for
boosting their commercial potential and protecting their leading role in the
world, this opened up space for Naples to fill the gaps that were left. Here,
Galiani followed the lead of his teacher, Intieri. It was precisely by mixing
with the other states and riding the waves of luxury and inequality, rather
than by filtering the reality of interstate commercial competition, that Naples
could best protect its own independence.
Conclusion: The Proud Epithet of Enlightened
It was in this context the Neapolitan debate about commercial politics that
absorbed French and English analyses about the long-term prospects and
requirements of monarchical reform that Galiani developed the backbone of
his political theory. Through the moral philosophy and history of commerce
and modern government he simultaneously constructed, Galiani arrived at a
position from which he launched predictions about the future of international
trade and shifts within international relations. In 1770 Galiani criticised
the physiocrats economic reform programme of the 1760s.72 Privately, he
explained to his Parisian friends his opinion that politics based on foresight
[prvoyance] was the cause both of the actual wars in Europe and of the
dysfunctional enlightened moralising about preventing them, which together
suffocated the providential mechanisms of commerce to such an extent that
Galiani predicted that in the future there will be very little trade.73
What the eighteenth century meant for Galiani was the spectacle of an
irreversible transition from a political constellation dominated by the isolated
principle that war is the luxury of the monarchy74 to a configuration in which
economic competition between dominant states had made luxury itself a
necessary source of survival. Galiani, already in Della moneta, did not reject
Ferdinando Galiani, Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds (Paris, 1770).
73
Galiani, Correspondance, to Mme dpinay 1 August 1778 and 4 May 1771.
74
The only phrase to feature both in Galiani, Della moneta, p. 219 and in Galiani,
Dialogues, pp. 107, 113.
71
72
303
luxury, devaluations and public debts, but observed that even Melon still had
not sufficiently thought through their proper political use.75 Likewise, the
English economy had not grown as much as it could have, had its policies been
better developed.76 In 1751, Galiani saw the imperfect transition by France
and England to the age of commercial societies as leaving opportunities for
Naples to establish itself on the international scene. In the aftermath of the
Seven Years War, during his stay in Paris, Galiani witnessed how this transition
process in France became paralysed through the rise of physiocracy (the roots
of which Galiani located in Montesquieu77) and its politics of enlightened
despotism,78 while the English mercantile system failed to evolve and instead
generated its own international tensions. By 1780, amidst the War of the
American Independence, Galiani placed his hopes on Catherine the Greats
scheme of Armed Neutrality as the only feasible way to correct Europes
political economy and restore the possibilities for commercial exchange
between nations. At this stage he sarcastically applied the proud epithet of
Enlightened to disqualify the bulk of political thought of the age as unable to
provide absolute rulers with any helpful perspective on how to solve the most
pressing challenges of the time.79 It may be argued that Galiani was quite an
idiosyncratic thinker. However, if his ideas about foresight are anything to
go by, the question arises whether currently established connotations of the
concept of enlightened absolutism, as developed with the hindsight of the
eighteenth century, can at all be reconciled with how political thinkers at the
time looked at the problems of civilized monarchies.
Galiani, Della moneta, pp. 13, 2412.

Ibid., p. 248
77
Ibid., pp. 3423 (2nd edn 1780).
78
For the central mechanics of the physiocratic theory of Enlightened Despotism, see
Michael Sonenscher, French economists and Bernese agrarians: The marquis de Mirabeau
and the economic society of Berne, History of European Ideas 33:4 (2007): 41126.
79
Ferdinando Galiani, Dei doveri dei principi neutrali (Naples, 1782), pp. 241, 62.
75
76
PART V
The Limits of Enlightened Reform
Chapter 18

Manuel Lucena-Giraldo*
Introduction
On 24 September 1781, the first intendant of Venezuela, Jos de balos, an
experienced bureaucrat from La Mancha who had served in Cuba during the
crucial years after the Seven Years War, sent a representation to the king
Charles III of Spain and the Indies. No doubt affected by the contemporary
Tpac Amaru revolt in Peru, and other similar revolutions that erupted
throughout the Andean World at that time, he proposed to the king what he
described as a prudent and quick division of many of these provinces, erecting
in them particular monarchies divided among the glorious branches of the
august family of His Majesty.
Hardly two years after this bizarre proposal was made, the powerful
count of Aranda wrote a Secret Judgement on the consequences of the
independence of the British colonies in North America for the Spanish
monarchy, and especially for the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Arandas views
had to be taken seriously. An experienced diplomat and military officer
Aranda had been ambassador in Lisbon and Paris he was deeply worried
about the declining opportunities for the Spanish American creoles, rather
paradoxically, in an updated and reformed Spanish Atlantic monarchy. As late
as 1792, Aranda was promoting the creation of a Royal College of American
Nobles in Granada. According to the projected regulations, it would admit
* I would like to express my gratitude to the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
(HUM 200763267/FISO Visiting Grant, 20092010) and the National Research Council
of Canada (Hispanic Baroque Project) for their assistance and financial support.

Jos de balos, Representacin del intendente de Venezuela dirigida a Carlos III en
la que pronostica la independencia de Amrica y sugiere la creacin de varias monarquas
en Amrica y Filipinas, in Manuel Lucena Giraldo (ed.), Premoniciones de la independencia
de Iberoamrica. Las reflexiones de Jos de balos y el conde de Aranda sobre la situacin de la
Amrica espaola a finales del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 2003), p. 59.
308
sons of Spanish Americans, mestizos and descendants of caciques and Indians

of good ancestry, without doubt, at least in his estimation, good vassals ready
to serve the king and the monarchy. The new institution, near the court in
Madrid, could provide them with opportunities to obtain good positions and
employment under royal patronage. It could be a solution to an old problem.
From the seventeenth century, it was believed that distance prevented Spanish
Americans from expressing their loyalty and abilities in the service of the
monarchy.
The Secret Judgement by Aranda, as it is widely known, was a premonition
of the threatening power of the recently-founded United States, though the
main argument was similar to that of balos. In the same mood of the debate
on the need for a sort of federalization of the Spanish monarchy to adapt the
constitution and political structures to the new and menacing times, Aranda
proposed that Charles III get rid of all the possessions of the continent of
America, retaining just the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the North and
some others of interest in the South, just to serve as a stop or a warehouse for
Spanish trade. Three infantes would be appointed kings of Mexico, Peru and
Tierra Firme while his majesty [would take] the title of emperor.
Both baloss Representation and Arandas Secret Judgement proposed
many of the same things, though each mans approach to the matter reflected
their different experiences in government as well as their distinct intellectual
backgrounds. balos was reacting against the not-so-sudden revolutions
erupting in 1779 in the Andes. No doubt he believed the American upheaval
was related to new taxes, distributions of imported products by force repartos
and regulations on tobacco and other crops put into practice by Jos de
Glvez, the all-too-powerful minister of the Indies. On the one hand, as the
first intendant of Venezuela, balos knew well the reformist program and, if
compared with other ministers appointed by Glvez coming directly from
the metropolis, he had a long and productive career in the Americas. On
the other hand, Aranda was seen as the representative of the Aragonese and
aristocratic faction at court, plausibly sensible to the constitutional tradition
coming from Hapsburg times, that of a composite monarchy. Aranda was
the representative of Spain in the negotiations of the Treaty of Paris in
Estatutos del Real Colegio de Nobles Americanos en la ciudad de Granada,
Madrid, 15 January 1792, in Guillermo Cspedes del Castillo (ed.), Textos y documentos
de la Amrica Hispnica (Barcelona, 1986), p. 313.

Dictamen reservado que el Excelentsimo seor Conde de Aranda dio al rey Carlos
III sobre la independencia de las colonias inglesas despus de haber hecho el tratado de paz
ajustado en Pars en 1783, in Lucena-Giraldo (ed.), Premoniciones de la independencia de
Iberoamrica, p. 81.
309
1783. After many humiliations at the hands of the British, he was more
than happy to celebrate the victory of Spain and France and their muchdesired revenge on Britain after what would come to be known as the War
of American Independence. At that time, however, he was clever enough to
be deeply worried about the survival of the Spanish monarchy under intense
international pressure, providing there was a new constitution, centralized and
in many senses authoritarian, if compared with the old traditional liberties of
the kingdoms and cities of the Indies.
balos reacted against a situation which reminded him of the decadence of
empires, as taught by the experiences of Greece and Rome, and so proposed a
wise measure, or so he believed. That is, he sought to delay the inevitable demise
of the Spanish empire for as long as possible. Aranda, far from displaying the
attitude of triumphalism somewhat expected in a minister serving a monarchy
that had just won a war against a much-hated enemy, took lessons from the
international balance of power and reached many of the same conclusions
at which balos had arrived. Ultimately, balos and Aranda shared a great
deal: a reliable knowledge and a personal vision of Spanish America as the
true centre of Spains power, and a position of contemporary criticism of the
worst effects of what is now known in the historiography of the period as the
Bourbon reforms.
Towards a New Chronology
The relationship between the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 and the
beginning of the reforms is commonly accepted. But, in the case of the Spanish
monarchy from 1700 onwards, everything was, by definition, Bourbon
(related to the government of the dynasty) and the reforms were put into
practice, depending on the geographical space in question, in Europe, America
or even the Philippines in Asia, from 1714 until 1792, at least, or perhaps even
until 1808, according to some historians. In fact, within an Atlantic context,
it is possible to relate the political changes in the government of the peninsular
kingdoms to that of the American viceroyalties and territories. Some of the
changes implemented in Spanish America were put into practice earlier in the
peninsula, and the responses to the new measures, rules of government and
administration can be better understood in an Atlantic context as well.
For an outstanding example of the traditional creole point of view at the beginning
of the reforms, Representacin vindicatoria que en el ao de 1771 hizo a su majestad
la ciudad de Mxico, in Salvador Bernabu Albert (ed.), El criollo como voluntad y
representacin (Madrid, 2006), pp. 7992.
310
The famous New Establishment, or Nueva Planta decrees, suppressing the

local laws, jurisdictions and institutions from the territories of the crown in
Aragon, Valencia, Majorca and Catalonia, were put into practice between 1707
and 1716. It was their purpose, on the one hand, to create a body of common
Spanish laws, and, on the other, to establish a whole new organization in the
Audiencias (High Tribunals) and the Councils. The royal officer representing
this new system of unified peninsular government was the intendant. The
first one was appointed in 1711, the royal ordinance regulating his duties was
published in 1718 and by 1749 each peninsular province the concept of a
composite monarchy was being abandoned was related to an intendancy. But
these measures were not implemented at the same time in Spanish America.
Although there was a reorganization to suppress some of the powers of the
Council of the Indies, founded in 1524, in favour of the new Secretaries of
State, there was an atmosphere of prudence and even trepidation towards the
introduction of reforms on the other side of the Atlantic. As the wise marquis
of Piedras Albas pointed out in 1768, the alteration of a prudent and reliable
method of government had to be debated, for experience has shown that
every novelty is received there with violence remedies appropriate to the
head do not always benefit the other parts of the body.
Even more importantly, for a long period, the evolution of the Bourbon
reforms in Spanish America depended heavily on what was being put into
practice in Spain. The changes in the government of the Indies, however
minimal, caused great debate and even fear in some important ministers of
Philip V and Ferdinand VI. Was an excess of prudence the reason for the
delay of the introduction of intendancies in Spanish America until 1762, with
the foundation of the Intendancy of Havana, or the slow implementation of
intendancies until 1786, when the new and general ordinance was approved?
Are there similarities between the Esquilache Mutiny in Madrid in 1766 and
previously mentioned revolutions in the Andes from 1779 to 1781? Does
this prevention explain why some new measures, like the establishment of
intendancies, were never put into practice in some territories, for example in
the greater part of the viceroyalty of New Granada after the comuneros revolt?
If a new chronology on Bourbon reforms in Spanish America can be
established, much of the events and political writings from the 1740s must be
Dictamen del marqus de Piedras Albas, presidente del Consejo de Indias, sobre
el plan de intendencias para Nueva Espaa de Jos de Glvez, Madrid, 24 May 1768,
in Guillermo Cspedes del Castillo (ed.), Textos y documentos de la Amrica Hispnica
(Barcelona, 1986), p. 310.
311
taken into account. In 1741, Jos del Campillo y Cosso, an experienced officer
who served the intendancies of the Navy, Italy and Aragon, was appointed
secretary of War, Navy and the Indies. In the following year, he wrote one
of the most influential books of the century in Spain, even if circulated in
manuscript before 1789, when it was published to provide some income for
his neglected widow. The New System of the Economic Government for America,
with an important subtitle which is not usually quoted (with the evils and pains
caused by the system there are today influencing Spain harshly, and universal
remedies for the advantages of Spain and bigger interest for the Americas),
considered the Spanish to be merely the Indians of other Europeans as a
consequence of the decadence of the American trade. Campillo, imbued with
the spirit of a thinker (or arbitrista), called for the construction of roads and
canals, the increase of population, and free trade. In his magna opera, he
identified some policies for European peasants that could be implemented in
the indigenous communities of the New World. His other works had titles
reflecting a reformist position and the spirit of reform: Spain, wake up, and
an amazing dictionary of Spanish pros and cons, entitled What is for more and
for less in Spain, for Spain to be what must be and not what currently is. Even
more significant, as a new Spanish spirit was slowly emerging from defeat and
criticism, deeply rooted in the idea of restoration of Spain and the Indies to
the ancient happiness and opulence, Campillo planned a great design for
Spanish America. It would be a visita in the same tradition as that ordered
by Philip II in 1570 for the reorganization of the council of the Indies, the
population and fortification of new strategic posts in the navigation routes
and the Eastern shores of the New World, and the search of historical and
scientific information through Geographical Reports.
Campillo died in 1743, but the emerging figures of the period, the
marquis of Ensenada and Jos de Carvajal, sustained much of the reformist
program sketched in the previous years, not only for Spain, but also for the
New World. In 1749, both ministers organized a direct collection of taxes,
tried to impose in Castile a single contribution nica contribucin and
established intendancies in all of the peninsular kingdoms. Ensenada ordered
the famous cadastre, which is known by his name. In 1750, as a minister
of State, Carvajal who had been secretary to Campillo and was one of his
political creatures or hechuras signed, in the name of King Ferdinand VI,
the treaty of Madrid between Spain and Portugal, to settle the boundaries in
the New World and Asia. It was the true beginning of reform on a massive
scale. It necessitated the political intervention of new agents with new agendas.
John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America, 1492
1830 (New Haven, 2006), p. 232.
312
Naval officers, military engineers, botanists and astronomers were sent, in two
expeditions, to the American frontiers with a clear mandate. There would be
no more intermediate powers negotiating with the authorities taking their best
from middle grounds, but a new centralizing, abstract and unified power.
Although the border expeditions from Venezuela to Paraguay failed in
their main objective and did not establish obelisks and marks which would
demarcate the dominions of the Iberian monarchies, it was a regional success
in the sense that, for the first time, there would be a permanent presence of
the authority of the crown in the American frontiers. In Brazil, Francisco de
Mendona Furtado, half brother of the marquis of Pombal, was appointed
captain-general of the recently founded Capitana de San Jos de Ro Negro.
Moreover, the Venezuelan governors had, for the first time, a clear idea of what
the interior of the continent looked like; in Paraguay, the Guaran war marked
the beginning of the end of the presence of the Jesuits in the dominions of
Charles III. To summarize, after the defeat of Spain in the Seven Years War
in 1763, nothing came as a surprise, although for the first time there was a
clamour for reforms in Spanish America. The long reformist tradition already
in motion simply exploded, giving shape to new measures and related to the
demands of the moment. The so-called Glvez era, which lasted until that
ministers death in 1787, had begun.
A Second Empire
During the decade of the 1760s, it became clear to several important ministers
in Spain with experience in American affairs that reform, not only in the
frontiers or provinces but in the viceregal capitals and second-rank cities from
the old kingdoms of the Indies, could not wait any longer. In this sense, if
the Spanish monarchy was trying to return to a glorious past, changes had to
be grounded in tradition in order to be understood by societies completely
unfamiliar with the idea of novelty. But as Campillo had pointed out two
decades earlier, there was presumably an important difference regarding
policies between Spain and the Indies: information about the New World
was scarce, biased and prejudiced. The margin for error and the possibility for
mismanagement was high.
If this was the situation during an enlightened century, what could be
said about the past? Even if the statue of Atahualpa was located at one of
the corners of the new Royal Palace in Madrid, Spanish American realities
constituted a particular challenge for the genealogy of an empire to reform
because it was related to the Atlantic constitution and ideas on justice, virtues
and the rule of law. During the crucial first half of the 1760s, the drive for
313
reforms in Spanish America was not guided by the spirit of the 1750s, about
the restoration of Spain based mainly on historical arguments, but rather by
the realities of an Atlantic empire governed by misguided rules. Due to its
existence, Spain was the envy of other European monarchies, but Spanish
America often proved to be more of a problem than a benefit. As an Irishman
in the service of the Spanish monarchy, Bernardo Ward, put it in 1762, it was
necessary to introduce a new method, so that these rich possessions give us
advantages in some proportion to their size and with the precious value of
their products.
Yet it would not be easy for the reformers of the 1760s to preserve the
precious legacy of the past while, at the same time, also introducing reforms.
It was impossible to criticize the conquerors of the New World. But it was
possible to praise the virtues of educational, scientific and moral advances
of humanity, the values of the age. Campillo left it perfectly explained for
the future. It was necessary to do justice to the illustrious men who founded
the American government without criticism this may be a reference to the
apostle of the Indians, Bartolom de Las Casas, an unpopular figure at that
time because in the old times they did what was necessary with much
knowledge. The fighting spirit dominated in the days of Charles V and they
followed this impulse because being few the Spaniards in America and having
to govern millions of Indians with their caciques, people who defended their
freedom with natural ferocity, it was indispensable to use all the rigor of the
war. The problem was the persistence of the spirit of conquest, to prefer
dominion to the advantages and utility of commerce and friendly relations
with the barbarian nations. That spoiled the conquests already achieved and
served to prevent others not less important.
The impulse for reforms could refer to history because, by the seventeenth
century, the character of the Spaniards of the glorious times of the Catholic
Kings, a prodigy of intrepidity and accuracy in their navigations, value in
its conquests, wisdom in its laws and constitutions, was lost in decadence,
general lethargy and fatal misfortunes. In the final analysis, however, even
if historical arguments and the narration on restoration of the values of the
Spanish monarchy proved important the publication of the History of the
New World by Juan Bautista Muoz in 1793 or the foundation of the Archive
of the Indies in 1785 were key elements of this historical construction
Guillermo Cspedes del Castillo, Ensayos sobre los reinos castellanos de Indias
(Madrid, 1999), p. 205.

Jos del Campillo, Nuevo sistema econmico para Amrica, ed. Manuel Ballesteros
Gaibrois (Oviedo, 1993), p. 68.
314
the theory of misguided rules, as well as functional arguments, would provide

a pragmatic justification of the Glvez era.
The figure of the minister of the Indies, who was the protagonist of the
so-called golden age of reforms in Spanish America, is crucial because he
implemented measures partially related to the Spanish reformist tradition, but
in some important points he took decisions affecting the ancient constitution
of the empire, still mostly untouched in the 1760s. The visitador of New
Spain would be a key figure in the process that John Lynch has called the
deconstruction of the Creole state. Although it is a sort of historiographical
temptation to maintain, during the reforms after 1763, that there was something
of a program conceived by Glvez, the search for a continuity is not exactly a
success. He was, in previous years, far from the business of the administration
of the Indies. Although, in 1751, he was appointed governor of Zamboanga
(Mindanao) in the Philippines, he did not serve in the position. Too far from
home? Glvez had good relations in the court, particularly with Campomanes
and the emerging Floridablanca, the group of the mantestas, and lawyers from
universities, many from noble and provincial bourgeois, even modest, origins.
In 1760 he wrote a scarcely original Discourse on the decadence of our
Spanish Indies on matters of commerce, related to the writings and interests of
Campomanes at that time. In 1762 this great minister finished his Reflections
on the Spanish commerce in the Indies, part of a work in ten volumes on the
History of the navy, commerce and maritime laws from Spain (just one had
been published in 1756, on the navy of Carthage). Glvezs employment as a
legal advisor to the French embassy helped him gain familiarity with matters of
colonial commerce. But after the famous Junta of the Indies of February 1765,
which designed many of the reforms and new measures, including the visita to
New Spain, he was not centre stage.10
At the time of the designation of the visitador to New Spain, he was just
the third of the terna of three candidates. Francisco Carrasco declined the
appointment and Francisco Anselmo Armona died en route to Veracruz.
Glvez arrived in New Spain with a humble profile, instructed merely
to implement the instructions he had received on tax reform, measures to
fight against corruption, the reorganization of the Army as well as mining
and tobacco production. These were very much in the fashion of the reforms
that the Sicilian minister, the marquis of Esquilache, was promoting in the
Jorge Caizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World. History,
Epistemologies and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA, 2001),
pp. 19097.
10
Vctor Peralta Ruiz, Patrones, clientes y amigos: el poder burocrtico indiano en la
Espaa del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 2006), pp. 12445.
315
peninsula to strengthen royal authority. The order Glvez received to establish

good relations with the viceroy, the marquis of Cruillas, was clear. But, again,
it appears that Campomanes interest in American reforms would augur a
different destiny for Glvez and, it must be said, he grasped the opportunities
available to him in a manner typical of an ambitious, aspiring minister.
When he left Cdiz for Veracruz, the debate on the nature of the reforms
in Spanish America was at its peak. In his Discourse, Glvez summarized well
the historical and functional arguments concerning the need for reforms in
two chapters, The examination of Spanish America related to the other powers
that have establishments there and The examination of the Indies related
to Spain. The decadence was the result of inadequate rules for an extended
period, subverting the virtues of ancient and wise institutions. Introduction of
reforms was justified to conserve the nerve of the monarchy. But it was less
clear whether the traditional constitution was compatible with that purpose
due to the nature of several kingdoms so different in customs and manners.
In the end, there was, a political risk to be taken. The correction of abuses
and imbalances, by means of conceived and imposed norms coming from
the peninsula, could cause more harm than good in an Atlantic monarchy, as
many traditionalists would have noted, had they been consulted.
Ministers and officers who were both for and against the reforms used
these arguments after 1763. On the one hand, those who were against reform
resorted to the authority of tradition, what had proved to be wise and useful
through the centuries and could not be altered in any way. In the eyes of
the above-mentioned president of the Council of the Indies, the marquis of
San Juan de Piedras Albas, Glvez was arrogant and the marquis was certain
that his intervention would be a failure. He expressed a point of view related
to the ancient Habsburg constitution, far away from the principles of the
peninsular New Establishment that some mistaken ministers wanted to be
transferred to the New World. On the other hand, these and other arguments
were contradicted by the reformers with the conviction of ministers defending
the only way for public happiness and utility. The marquis of Grimaldi asked
the king, Charles III, not to hesitate in supporting the reforms, since in
matters of great government the lovers of inaction advocate respect for old
times. Miguel de Mzquiz confessed that although the old laws were wise, it
is easier to cut abuses with new rules than with the observance of the old ones.
At that time, the count of Aranda was preoccupied with the poor selection
of those who were to serve in the Indies. He wanted the American vassals to
feel treated fairly in the monarchy, without discrimination and on an equal
footing with the subjects of the peninsula.
Jos de Glvez returned from New Spain in 1771 and soon afterwards
was appointed a member of the Trade Committee. When Julin de Arriaga
316
died, in 1775, his ministry was divided into Marine and Indies. Pedro de
Castejn and Glvez, until his death in 1787, would handle these affairs. It
is obvious that his appointment was recognition of Glvezs work as visitador
in New Spain. In fact, many of his contemporaries realized the government
of the metropolis had changed many traditional ideas about the New World,
although some of the episodes related to the visita explained some of the surge
of Glvezs popularity. First of all, his attitude to the expulsion of the Jesuits
gained him a great reputation as a royal officer hostile to any compromise. On
25 June 1767, Jesuit churches, haciendas and other buildings were assaulted
by troops commanded by Glvez himself. Up to this point he obeyed his
royal orders. But there was nothing comparable in Spanish America to the
so-called punishment expedition he ordered against some local reactions in
San Luis de la Paz, San Luis Potos, Guanajuato, Valladolid, Ptzcuaro and
Uruapan which opposed the expulsion of the Society of Jesus. The tough
application of law 85 persons condemned to death along with 854 receiving
other punishments or exile was, in the very sense of the word, something
new, not only on the frontiers, but in some of the most important cities of
New Spain, an important representation of Creole power.
Glvezs ability to interfere in local networks was out of the question, even
if this organizing talent was for the benefit of the royal property and his own
benefit as well. In the 1780s, due to the top-rank positions and the wealth
amassed by members of his family, there were rumours of corruption. What
matters most, however, is his style in the repression of the riots, scarcely a year
after the great Esquilache mutiny in Madrid. With the support of the Flemish
marquis of Croix, a viceroy as distant to Spanish America as himself, Glvez
introduced an innovation in political language as well. The idea of deserved
punishments, which serves as a public example matched perfectly well with an
aspect of his behaviour and personality not so commonly taken into account.
Glvez was a militant anti-creole. He did not have much interest in utopian,
unpractical traditions. In the debate concerning reform in Spanish America,
he frankly explained that the spirit of disobedience and rebellion resulted from
the misconduct of rules, lack of government and corruption.11 The cruelty in
the repression of the pro-Jesuit revolts seemed to herald a bleak period, but in
the peninsula, after 1766, the reformers were winning the match to build up
a Spanish Second Empire in the Americas. No doubt his lethal effectiveness,
his unwillingness to negotiate, was valued highly: severe examples against the
custom of the revolts were needed.
John R. Fisher, Allan J. Kuethe and Anthony McFarlane (eds), Reform and
Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru (Baton Rouge, LA, 1990), p. 5.
11
317
Although Glvezs lack of trust and interest in Spanish American affairs

appears in such a personal place as his library, in an Atlantic perspective,
no doubt, his original contribution to the reforming policy connected him
to the new ministers like Campomanes or Floridablanca. The careful and
archaic sophistication of the formula I obey but I do not execute, typical
of the ancient constitution, was substituted by I order and lead. Was it a
new imperial architecture? Even more importantly, could a new constitution,
and a desired change in manners and customs, produce within the Spanish
monarchy value, subordination and police?
The evaluation of the Bourbon reforms from 1763 to 1787 show some
important effects that recent historiography has brought to light, including
the different positions toward reforms in territories, social groups and personal
attitudes. From 1765, as the authorization of a free and protected trade
between Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Cuba, Margarita and Trinidad and
nine peninsular ports Cdiz, Seville, Mlaga, Alicante, Cartagena, Barcelona,
Santander, Corunna and Gijn was implemented, much would change,
although, until 1778, the system did not have a royal ordinance and, until
1789, would not be extended to New Spain and Venezuela. That is to say, the
effects were, in many ways, stopped or delayed by slow implementation, not to
mention smuggling and wars with Britain. But the extension of intendancies
and the foundation of a new viceroyalty in Ro de la Plata or a captaincygeneral in Venezuela, the reorganization of the army and the Armada, the
improvement of tax administration, scientific expeditions and population
projects would cause profound changes.
On the other hand, the implementation of Glvezs reformist model in other
American territories was problematic. As is widely known, he sent his hechuras
or loyal ministers, three public attorneys, royal bureaucrats set apart from
local interest, to the New World from 1777. Jos de Areche, public attorney of
the Audiencia of Mexico, was assigned to Peru; Jos Garca de Len Pizarro, of
the Audiencia of Seville, was sent to Quito; Francisco Gutirrez de Pieres, of
Cdiz, was dispatched to New Granada. Areche obtained the deposition of the
viceroy, Guirior he rejected his projects as dangerous for the conservation
of the kingdom put the alcabala or tax on local trade at six per cent, taxed
Peruvian products, sacked incompetent or corrupt officers, replaced the
production system in the Huancavelica mine, established a custom in Arequipa
and registered the customs house; cholos or Indians, forcing them to pay a
gracious tribute to finance the war with Britain. In New Granada, when
the viceroy Flores realized what was happening, he departed for Cartagena in
order to defend the kingdom. Gutirrez de Pieres established a monopoly
on tobacco, imposed taxes on cards and liqueurs, organized the administration
of rents and established customs houses in Santa Fe de Bogot and Cartagena.
318
Garca de Len Pizarro established a monopoly on tobacco, imposed taxes on

cards and liquors, and re-organized customs and administration.
The effect of the reformers actions was surprisingly similar everywhere. In
1780 there were revolts in Arequipa, La Paz and Cochabamba, and attempted
revolts in Cuzco, Ambato and Quizainche in the Audiencia of Quito. On 4
November, the birthday of Charles III, the great revolution of Tpac Amaru
began, which continued for five months. And in 1781 there was the revolt of
the comuneros in New Granada, whose repercussions were felt from El Socorro
to Bogot, as well as in Merida and La Grita in Venezuela. There were rural
and urban movements, in cold and warm lands, racially mixed, but there
was a common element in all cases. This was the use of traditional language,
referring to the ancient constitution and to the traditional laws of the Indies.
Long live the king, down with bad government was a common refrain along
with biblical metaphors to express the sufferings of the people. For example, in
New Granada, a letter from the comunero captains finished with the following
flourish: the captive people must escape the power of the Pharaoh. Long live
our holy Catholic faith, long live our Catholic Spanish king, death to the
Neronian cruelties of our pretended slaveries.12
Counter-reformism?
The year 1787 was an important one for reforms in Spanish America. The
Spanish Atlantic was shaken by a severe financial and commercial crisis related
to what some historians consider to be the culmination of the Bourbon
reforms, followed in any case by what classic Spanish historiography called
ministerial despotism, the government of Manuel Godoy, which lasted, with
some interruptions, from 1792 until 1808.13
A royal order sent in October to the Consulate of Seville by the minister
of the Marine and the Indies, Antonio Valds, inquired into the results of the
application of the decree of free commerce. The reply was astonishing. From
the previous year the volume of trade had fallen, and economic recession,
the saturation of markets, declining operations, and a shortage of silver were
widespread. The conclusions were clear. The speculation after 1783 with the
implementation of the free trade produced a crisis not only in the peninsula,
but also in Spanish America. Complaints, especially from Peru, were appalling:
Letter from Juan Francisco Berbeo and the comunero captains from Mogotes to
Cerinza, April 30, 1781, in Pablo E. Crdenas Acosta, Los comuneros (Bogot, 1945),
p. 125.
13
Jacques Barbier, The Culmination of the Bourbon Reforms, 17871792, Hispanic
12
319
lack of silver, excessive ambition of the new merchants from the periphery
(mostly Catalans and Basques), smuggling, and the saturation of the markets
were destroying the kingdom.
What was important concerning the long-term reforms coming from the
1740s and the acceleration from the 1760s was the response of a new generation
of ministers with Antonio Valds as the most important figure serving during
the first period of Charles IVs reign, that is, until 1792. Far from the excesses of
the Glvez period, the search for a new balance between Spain, the metropolis
(or the matriz), and Spanish America constituted an intelligent adaptation to
the new circumstances and, to a certain extent, it implied a return to the old
and effective mechanisms of the ancient Habsburg constitution.
Some ministers like Valds or Francisco de Saavedra, who had significant
experience in Spanish America, denounced the state of anarchy caused by
nepotism and the excesses of unwise ministers. The worst anti-creole and
anti-American features from the reforms in the previous decade tended to
disappear. In accordance with this reform of the reform, it was necessary to
introduce new features to articulate a feeling of a common Spanish community
throughout the Atlantic. Projects like those of balos and Arandas federal
monarchy expressed more than individual positions, but rather represented
a general effort to improve a deteriorated constitutional relationship. Aranda
firmly believed the problems of the Indies had to be discussed and solved
together with those of the government of Spain. That was the case of the
famous Junta de estado from 1787. The ministries of Navy and Indies were
unified until 1792; Justice was in the same period.
On the other hand, some of the new regulations put into practice in this
period including the extension of free trade, the liberalization of slave trade,
and the foundation of new consulates had been asked for by Spanish America
for some time.14 There is no doubt that the measures implemented during this
period, the foundation of new consulates of commerce in Caracas, Cartagena,
Buenos Aires, Havana, Veracruz and Santiago de Chile, had long lasting effects.
They became not only technocratic institutions, but also platforms for political
action in the hands of landowners and merchants, patriotic bodies of good
citizens, and a laboratory for the political, social and scientific innovation in
Spanish America.
While this new reform of the old reform or, more precisely, this counterreform was put into practice, the most important scientific expedition under
the command of Alejandro Malaspina was travelling, from 1789 to 1794,
around the world, from Cdiz to Buenos Aires, Valparaso, Lima, Panama,
Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its
Empire, 17591808 (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 12742.
14
320
Acapulco, the Northwest (Alaska), the Philippines and even Australia. The
objective was to write an Encyclopaedia of the dominions of the Spanish
monarchy, their natural and human elements, in order to ascertain good
and enlightened principles of government. Ten Political Axioms About the
Americas, written by Malaspina in 1789, were supposedly tested during the
expedition, displaying privately the program of a new and updated reformism,
a new style of government based on simple and immutable principles to fulfil
public happiness, unite morality and economy, and fuse virtue and production.
They were expressed in a different political language. A national community of
interests would replace an empire based on force and conquest. The Axioms
written by Malaspina were clear: The Spanish monarchy cannot be compared
in any way with others from Europe; the conservation of America is more
the effect of the religious system than the military or political; the Spanish
monarchy is composed of Spanish from Europe, Spanish from America and
Indians, and reacting against each other they all weaken themselves; The
system of trade is organized for mutual destruction; Foreigners must have a
part in the trade of America; Our Pacific colonies are at risk.15
An End and a Beginning
In 1795, the same year Malaspina was imprisoned after a poorly-organized,
failed plot against Godoy, Valds resigned and the group of ministers with a
broad imperial vision for the Spanish monarchy was replaced by another cohort
with a more limited vision, whether this is defined as Spanish nationalist or
strictly corrupt. Spanish America was, more than ever, seen as booty or a source
of finance for private businesses owned by Godoy and his friends. The age of
reforms was over. Some of the old constitutional mechanisms were put back
into practice, as seen between the British invasion of Buenos Aires in 1806 and
the implosion of empire, the crisis spread from the centre to the periphery in
1810, when it seemed that Cdiz, the last free port and city in peninsular Spain,
was going to fall in the hands of the French invaders. That is how, it seems,
the real limit of the reforms became visible: without imperial elites, substituted
by private and national Spanish interests during Godoyismo, and even to some
extent before, no reforms were possible. Yet that problem began in, and was
related to, peninsular Spain, not to Spanish America, which remained loyal
until the end to the idea of a Spanish imperial and Atlantic nation.
Manuel Lucena Giraldo and Juan Pimentel, Los Axiomas polticos sobre la
Amrica de Alejandro Malaspina (Aranjuez, 1991), pp. 1535; Juan Pimentel, La fsica de
la monarqua. Ciencia y poltica en el pensamiento colonial de Alejandro Malaspina (1754
1810) (Aranjuez, 1998), pp. 14660.
15
Chapter 19
Pombals Government:
Between Seventeenth-Century Valido and
Enlightened Models
Nuno Gonalo Monteiro
Introduction
The Marquis of Pombal (16991782) has a particular place in the panel
of the greatest reformers of eighteenth-century Europe. Nevertheless,
comprehending his characteristics raises uneasily answered questions. In his
renowned biography of Pombal, Kenneth Maxwell pointed out the difficulty
of a single approach towards the Marquis by adding the subtitle: a Paradox
of Enlightenment. Amongst various aspects, it recalls the violent methods of
repression adopted by Pombal, which seem incongruous in the environment of
tolerance often associated with the European Enlightenment. Up to a certain
point, paradox is an appropriate description if historians expect Pombal to
have acted as an enlightened politician.
The issue depends, partially, on historiographical aprioristic definitions.
Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, European governments
undertook reform policies that have been recognized for a long time as
enlightened despotism or enlightened absolutism. However, the interplay
between Enlightenment and reform should be considered more carefully.
It has been suggested that the relationship between despotic monarchs and
enlightened thinkers, a few of whom were acquainted with and corresponded
with kings, was somewhat cynical since les monarques clairs du XVIIIe
sicle songent () une imitation pratique de Louis XIV. That is,
See Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995).
See Hamish M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism. Reform and Reformers in Later
Eighteenth-Century Europe (London, 1990).

Franois Bluche, Le despotisme clair (1st edn 1969, Paris, 2000), p. 352.
322
enlightened monarchs were above all interested in reinforcing their own

authority and building up the state. It might also be discussed whether there
is anything essential that differentiates the reform policies of the second half
of the eighteenth century from those that characterized the last decades of the
seventeenth and the early years of the following one.
Moreover, the very concept of Enlightenment is still under discussion.
A multi-faceted approach to the period, focused on practices and on
institutions rather than just on ideas, stands out. For instance, the conception
of a Catholic Enlightenment is now fully accepted. After all, in kingdoms like
Spain and Portugal, the French Enlightenment had less impact than Italian
reformers. Furthermore, in Central Europe, German cameralism and the
writings of theoreticians of natural law were much more important. Finally,
it is worth noting that eighteenth-century reformism cannot be dissociated
from the process of state-making, in the sense that it entailed the monopoly
of a legitimate authority. In fact, issues like the enforcement of a formal
institutional framework, the power of the Church and fiscal policies should
be taken into account when appraising state building.
These previous comments dispute the originality of D. Joss reign (1750
1777) as well as that of Pombals policy. Nevertheless, some originality can
be found in this period. One Portuguese intellectual, who supported Pombal
and, later, followed in his tracks, synthesized the paradox referred to above.
He claimed that this minister sought what is politically unbearable: he wished
to civilize the nation as much as he wished to make her a slave; he wanted
to spread the light of philosophical knowledge and lead the royal power
to despotic ends at the same time; he founded the studies in Natural and
Civil law () but he did not realize that he was affording the same light to
the People who learn that the sovereigns legitimate authority was to defend
the nations interests instead of those of the prince, which have limits and
benchmarks. Even considering the narrowest definition of enlightened
Cf. Jeremy Black, Kings, Nobles & Commoners. States & Societies in Early Modern
History. A Revisionist History (London, 2004), p. 134.

H. M. Scott, Introduction: The Problem of Enlightened Absolutism, in Scott
(ed.), Enlightened Absolutism, p. 18

In this text I will revisit some of the arguments already made in Nuno Gonalo
Monteiro, D. Jos. Na sombra de Pombal (Lisbon, 2006).

Quoted by Jos Esteves Pereira, Opensamento poltico em Portugal no sculo
XVIII:Antnio Ribeiro dos Santos (Lisbon, 1983), p. 119.
Pombals Government
323
politics, the mitigation of censorship is still one of its features, and, in fact,
this was missing in Pombals government.
The Portuguese monarchy encompassed a single kingdom in Europe and
large imperial offshoots. In the European context, it was not a composite
monarchy and did not suffer the tensions common to such political
structures. In the administrative core of the monarchy, the traditional,
complex equilibrium of councils remained, though three state secretariats had
already been founded (1736) during the reign of D. Joo V (17061750).
Nonetheless, they lacked centrality in the process of decision-making. When
D. Jos ascended to the throne (1750), Carvalho (as Pombal was known then)
was unexpectedly appointed to a position in one of those secretariats, that of
foreign affairs.
In this essay, the paradox previously referred to is reappraised. The analysis
of Pombals policy and of the political models that would have guided his
government will be overshadowed by considerations of what Pombal had
in common with several seventeenth-century minister-favourites, such as
Richelieu and Mazarin. Comparisons made by his contemporaries, and which
he himself did not reject, add important insights into the characterization of
his policy.
Pombal and Richelieu
The promotion of Pombal to the post of prime minister is often thought of
as having occurred after the 1755 earthquake. Up to a certain point, this
is an accurate observation. But it also dilutes basic aspects of the problem:
in Portugal, as happened in other European monarchies, there was no such
institution as that of a prime minister who was deeply indebted to the figure
of the seventeenth-century valido.
Diplomatic correspondence, the best source for the study of this subject,
is somewhat ambivalent for this purpose. In the first years of D. Joss reign,
the French ambassador claimed, in November 1751, that M. de Carvalho,
Secrtaire dEtat ds Affaires Etrangres et de la Guerre, qui na pas encore
cinquante ans, peut tre regard comme le Ministre Principal () il est parvenu
au suprme degr de la confiance du Roy son Matre. Such an impression
about Pombals position was widespread when he was appointed for a post in
the Secretariat of Internal Affairs in 1756. It was generally acknowledged at
Cf. Derek Beales, Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London,
2005), p. 254.

Quoted by Miguel Maia do Vale, Le Marquis de Pombal vu para la Diplomatie
Franaise (17501777) (Mmoire de matrise, Paris, 20012002), p. 12.
324
that time that he was acting as a prime minister, an impression that remained
unchanged throughout the following two decades. English diplomatic
correspondence is rather precocious on references about Pombals influence
upon the government, but not until 1756 does it offer information on his
role as prime minister, when it was said that Mr. Carvalho is an effective
prime minister, though not declared so, for nothing is done without him.10
This would turn into a common topic in further references, usually associated
with significant comparisons. As a French diplomat recalled in his memoirs
on his years spent in Portugal (17641766), le Portugal tait gouvern par le
marquis de Pombal, sous le rgne de Joseph Ier, avec plus dautorit quaucun
ministre en ait eu dans aucun pays. Richelieu, en son temps, eut lutter contre
beaucoup dobstacles et dintrigues de Cour, et il disait que le petit coucher
de Louis XIII le gnait plus que les affaires de lEurope. Il nen tait pas ainsi
de Pombal () Il faut observer () que quoique Pombal fut bien, de fait,
premier ministre, il nen portait pas le titre et navait que le dpartement de
lIntrieur.11
In January 1759, when members of the aristocracy were imprisoned for
being accused of attempted regicide, the Nuncio, the agent of the Pope in
Lisbon, noted that Carvalho was escorted by a regiment of soldiers given by
the King, as Louis XIII did with the Cardinal Richelieu.12 The comparison
became common thereafter. On the eve of Pombals political defeat, in 1777,
still another French diplomat wrote that Le Marquis de Pombal () aussi
ambitieux, aussi turbulent que ces Maires du Palais qui aspiroient aux trne de
leurs foibles souverains, il ne luy a peut tre manqu pour jouer leur rle que
de natre dans des sicles plus reculs. Mais plac dans celui cy, il sest vu forc,
sur le petit thatre o`yu le sort la fix, de se contenter de suivre la route fraye
par les cardinaux de Richelieu, Mazarin, Alberoni, avec lesquels il y a quelque
ressemblance.13 And a few months after the fall of Pombal, in 1778, an Italian
journal, translating a French author, stated that we have seen him governing
for twenty years () as a most potent monarch. His vigorous but dark and
bloody administration was quite similar to that of our Cardinal Richelieu.14
Charles Boxer (ed.), Descriptive List of the State papers Portugal 16611780 in the
Public Record Office London (3 vols, Lisbon, 1979), vol. II, p. 331.
11
Comte de Saint-Priest, Mmoires, ed. Baron de Barante (Paris, 1929), pp. 8081,
84.
12
Quoted by Samuel J. Miller, Portugal and Rome c. 17481830. An Aspect of the
Catholic Enlightenment (Rome, 1978), p. 68.
13
Quoted by Vale, Le Marquis de Pombal, p. 96.
14
Quoted by Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 17761789.
I: The Great States of the West (Italian edn 1984) (Princeton, 1991) p. 206.
10
Pombals Government
325
Two testimonies after Pombals death should also be recalled. They were
given by remarkable personalities who had contrasting levels of affection for
the minister. In memoirs attributed to the sixth Count of S. Loureno who
had been kept imprisoned by Pombal for quite a long time it is said that
the Marquis had choleric manners and was prone to violence; during his
government he intended to emulate Cardinal Richelieus policy by trying all
means to hide from the Public the real reasons for his fierce methods () The
Marquis of Pombal lived very unhappily, which was due to his affection for
Cardinal Richelieus policy driving his tough genius () On many occasions it
seemed he did not forget to take revenge on his political adversaries, following
the example of his master Richelieu.15 However, an identical view comes from
D. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho who, since his youth, unlike the Count of
S. Lourenco, had been a protg of Pombal, later holding a ministerial position
during the reign of Queen D. Maria, daughter of D. Jos. He expressed his
judgement on Pombals government, considering it an eloquent example of
perfect politics: a well disciplined army, a severe and impartial justice that
safeguards property and protects the very existence of the people, grant strength
to an absolute government; () this is the well being that both Richelieu and
Pombal provided to their kings and nations.16
Pombal wrote about his own career after his fall from power. He sought to
defend himself from the hostile environment made up of multiple accusations
against his actions while a minister. Although in his writings from London he
did refer to Robert Walpole and to his heart of Prime Minister,17 he avoided
possible comparisons to the English minister. He addressed a petition to
Queen D. Maria in March 1777 presenting several arguments in his defence,
later included in his Apologias, and cited in Libello de Leza Enormissina by
Medanha. In the first petition, it is contended that he had no intention to
compare himself to the Duke of Sully on his merits, although he certainly
might be compared to him in his misfortune. To refute the accusation of
having enriched himself through politics, he contended that his Majesty
[D. Jos] considered proper of his decorous royal character that his prime
minister, to whom he trusted the most important political affairs, received
a house similar to the greatest houses of Portugal; following the example of
Manuscript of Arquivo da Casa dos Condes de S. Loureno (Lisbon), Livraria,
A-4-3.
16
Quoted by Andre Mansuy-Diniz Silva, Portrait dun homme dtat: D.Rodrigo de
Sousa Coutinho, Comte de Linhares 17551812, I Les annes de formation (Lisbon and
Paris, 2002), p. 279.
17
Quoted by J. S. da Silva Dias, Pombalismo e projecto poltico, Cultura- Histria
e Filosofia (1983), vol. II, p. 280.
15
326
kings such as Henry IV, Louis XIII and Louis XIV in the way they dealt
with the previously-mentioned Duke of Sully, Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal
Mazarin and many other Great Monarchs regarding similar cases.18
These and many other arguments were cited once again during a judicial
dispute on the fraudulent exchange of estates. The affair provided the occasion
for Pombal to write a Contrariedade to the Libello presented by Francisco J.
Caldeira S. G. Medanha. Aiming to refute every accusation, the Contrariedade
is, above all, Pombals account of D. Joss reign. Thus this work is also a
political autobiography. The common opposition to prime ministers is
an overwhelming theme in Pombals essay. It claims there has been a long
experience of the hate and greed caused by prime ministers, or by every
Minister honoured with Sovereigns trust, who distinguish themselves by the
trustfulness and the care they put into serving.19
The exceeding self-praising tone of the Contrariedade, deserving seven
copies, ended up by justifying the marquis trial in September 1778.20 He
was exiled to Pombal, south of Coimbra, and submitted to a judicial inquiry
there lasting more than one year. He was asked about his intentions of
being entitled Prime Minister. The question was a means of incrimination
for practices during his government. In fact, the insidious question, if ever
answered affirmatively, enabled his accusers to charge him with usurpation of
royal functions and make him responsible for every policy in D. Joss reign.
The marquis denied the accusation, asserting that he had never had either
the idea or the practice of a Prime Minister (considering) the ample meaning
attributed to the position: the prime minister in France or Spain was a post
similar to Escrivo da Puridade in Portugal and these sorts of Prime Ministers
or Escrives da Puridade gave orders according to their own determination
without listening, previously to the kings they were supposed to serve. He, the
defendant, was only a secretary of State, which implies that he received orders
from the king and forwarded them to courts and magistrates, there being no
difference at all with what his two colleagues did. It is further stated that
the defendant (Pombal) considered himself as the first amongst ministers and
secretaries of State, acting as if he were a dean. It was customary to call the
elder secretary of State, or the secretary of Internal Affairs, prime minister.
Finally, he claimed that from everything that was stated it is to conclude
that in the case that such a designation of Prime Minister appears on a paper
Manuscript of Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa (BNL), Pombalina, Cdice n695;
idem, cdice n668
19
Manuscript of BNL, FG, cdice n 8530; idem, FG, cdice n9100; idem., FG,
cdice n2635; idem, Pombalina, cdice n680.
20
Cf. Rocha Martins, O Marqus de Pombal desterrado 17771782 (Lisbon, 1938).
18
Pombals Government
327
signed by him, it was either due to ignorance or attributable to the common

errors of the scribe who wrote the paper.21
In short, Carvalhos contradictory declarations were not only an attempt
to protect his life, but also a genuine expression of the ambiguity involved
with the posts of valido and Prime Minister: they existed, they were often
a necessity, but they were always an illegitimate power, taking fundamental
authority away from the King. Pombal was, to a great extent, a seventeenthcentury valido transferred to the eighteenth century.
Prime Ministers in the Eighteenth Century
The marquis of Pombal is currently called the Prime Minister of D. Jos,
presuming that this was a formal institution in the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, there was no such clearly defined and regulated institution in
any of the monarchies to which Portugal may be reasonably compared.22
Not even in France, where after Louis XIVs disapproval of the designation,
it was scarcely used later in the eighteenth century.23 Nor in Spain was the
institution created, despite D. Jos de Carvajals request to the monarch in
1745 to formalize it,24 in spite of the impressive scope of Spanish validos/
kings favourites/prime ministers of which Alberoni or Godoy were part.25
By contrast, in the Holy Roman Empire, Kaunitz refused the title (1751
1792). Only in England, since it was inserted in a very particular institutional
framework, did the post address a consistent function. The closest monarchies
to Portugal (whether in terms of geographic or institutional proximity) had
ministries, but not the post of prime minister which, contrary to what has
Manuscript of BNL, F 6708.
For a general discussion over this topic, see Jean Berenger, Pour une enqute
europene: Le problme du ministeriat au XVIIe sicle, Annales ESC, n1 (1974),
pp. 16692; H.M. Scott, The Rise of the First Minister in the Eighteenth-Century
Europe, in T.C.W. Blanning and David Cannadine (eds), History and Biography. Essays
in honour of Derek Beales (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 2152; and L. Brokliss, Concluding
Remarks: The Anatomy of the Minister-Favorite, in John H. Elliott and L. Brockliss (eds),
The World of the Favorite (New Haven, CT, 1999), pp. 279309.
23
Cf. Franois Bluche, LAncien Rgime. Institutions et socit (Paris 1993), p. 210;
Bernard Barbiche, Les institutions de la France lpoque moderne (Paris, 1999), pp. 269
73.
24
Jos Miguel Delgado Barrado (ed.), Jos de Carvajal e Lancster. Testamento poltico
o idea de un gobierno catlico (1745) (Crdoba, 1999), p. 69.
25
Cf. Jos Antnio Escudero, La administracin central en el siglo XVIII, in
Administracin y Estado en la Espaa Moderna (Valladolid, 1999), and idem (ed.), Los
validos (Madrid, 2004).
21
22
328
been stated in Portuguese and international literature on the subject, had a

very bad reputation. In this sense, Pombal could not be copying neighbouring
monarchies; rather he could find inspiration in seventeenth-century political
models, notwithstanding the reproof of Louis XIV and of many other
monarchs. In fact, the model of an enlightened despotism of the eighteenth
century applies to kings, not to their ministers. In this sense, the designation of
prime minister, as well as its political functions, was known, used, and prone
to criticism. However, its legitimacy was dubious and remained so until the
advent of the constitutional monarchy in Portugal in the 1820s. The Prime
Ministers were considered validos or royal favourites. This ambivalent feature
of the subject makes it a relevant historical issue.
Despite the notable experience in Portugal of the prime minister/valido
Count of Castelo Melhor (16621667)26 and despite the designation being
applied by commentators to a few political actors of D. Joo Vs reign (1706
1750) (namely, Cardeal da Mota and Father Gaspar da Encarnao), it never
lost its negative connotations. The first dictionary of the Portuguese language,
by Rafael Bluteau, published in the first years of the eighteenth century, does
not consider any entry for prime minister, notwithstanding the fact that the
word minister was largely quoted in a general meaning. The word valido in
particular has an entry: [he] who gets royal favour and can [do] more than
others () The Valido, who does what he wants with the Prince, is in fact the
Prince. This is the greatest disaster of a kingdom, since it reduces the whole
administration of the State to a single person who is not actually her lord.27
The use of the term prime minister in Portugal began just before Sebastio
Joss influence on the government and it was used to criticize a predictable
practice. In letters to her mother, dated from 1742 and 1743, D. Mariana
Vitria, the queen-to-be and wife of D. Jos, assured her mother that her
husband has no such character to let himself be led by a prime minister.28
Other conjectures such as this, widespread at the time, proved to be wrong.
Even D. Lus da Cunha, the man who proposed Sebastio Jos for the post
of Secretary of State, disapproved of the political statute of prime ministers.
He justified his views claiming that God did not give the sceptre to Princes
for them to rest, and since such ministers subtract credibility from the
sovereign to enjoy it themselves, they do not favour the natural people while
disregarding foreigners. He remarked that what I have been saying about
See, among others, ngela Barreto Xavier and Pedro Cardim, D. Afonso VI
(Lisbon, 2006).
27
Rafael Bluteau, Vocabulario portuguez e latino (10 vols, Coimbra, 17121720).
28
Caetano Beiro, Cartas da Rainha D. Marianna Vitria para a sua famlia de
Espanha (17211748) (Lisbon, 1936), pp. 22021.
26
Pombals Government
329
the prime minister is also true for valido, which are synonyms, both harming
the State. And he concluded that in one word, every power that a prime
minister or valido claims for himself is just a mere usurpation, not to mention
an awful robbery to the holy authority of the Prince.29 Immediately after
Carvalhos appointment, the Duke Teles da Silva, a personal friend of Pombal,
also censured the possible rise of a prime minister.30 As it turned out, against
the odds and contrary to the predictions of D. Luis da Cunha, Telles da Silva
and the queen D. Mariana Vitria, Pombal soon would be seen as D. Joss
prime minister.
Pombal as a Valido
According to traditional patterns that guided validos practices, Pombal always
related the government of the kingdom with the increasing opulence of his
own House to a clear association between political authority and social and
economic ascendancy. As happened with all the others who took the dubious
legitimacy reserved for validos, Pombal was accused of growing rich illicitly,
mainly after the earthquake and through his plans to rebuild Lisbon. Like
his seventeenth-century predecessors, Pombal wove his personal network of
clients. As stated above, he indeed found, in politicians of the seventeenth
century, plenty of inspiration for his actions.
Accusations of illicit wealth came as early as 1756. They appear again
in many later writings, when Carvalho came under pressure at the Court.
Insinuations about the destination of money, raised with a tax of four per
cent to rebuild Lisbon, can be read in those writings. It is no wonder that
Carvalho needed to tackle, carefully, the issue in his Apologia, written in 1777,
justifying the means of his patrimony increase. Recent research asserts that,
when he left the government, his aristocratic house was amongst the four most
opulent. Furthermore, he invested large amounts of capital in the rebuilding
of Lisbon. This is one of the reasons for the unique structure of his wealth.
In contrast to what featured in the income of the nobility, Pombals income
was more than half afforded by rent estates in Lisbon.31 He tried to justify all
D. Lus da Cunha, Testamento Poltico ou Carta Escrita ao Senhor Rei D. JosI antes
do Seu Governo [1748] (Lisbon, 1820), pp. 46
30
Cf. Carlos da Silva Tarouca, Correspondncia entre o Duque Manuel Teles da
Silva e Sebastio Jos de Carvalho e Melo, 1 Marqus de Pombal., sep. Anais da Academia
Portuguesa de Histria, 1955, pp. 31213.
31
Cf. Maria Teresa Sena, A casa de Oeiras e Pombal: Estado, senhorio e patrimnio
(mimeo. Lisbon, 1987); Jorge Pedreira, Leclat des affaires. Les ngociants et la rdification
de Lisbonne (17551800), LEspace Marchand (mimeo. IUE., Florence, 1988);
29
330
this in 1777, saying that he did not intend to compare himself to the Duke of
Sully, although he was suffering from a similar misfortune due to accusations
forged by the opposition to the Government of the King his lord and by all
his enemies that envied his wealth.32
However, long before his fall, Carvalho had come to enjoy remarkable
social distinctions. By the decree of June 1759, he was graced with the title of
Count as a payment for his uncles services and for his own, while a diplomat,
both at the Court of Austria and in London, and while a Secretary of State.
Prior to him, other Secretariats of State received commendaries or seigneuries,
but only Pombal garnered the honour and grandeur of the title of Count. This
is the impressive innovation of the decree. For the first time, a Secretary of
State was raised to the highest rank of the nobility in a period when there were
just fifty houses in Portugal with titles of nobility. The act was meant to stress
the political and institutional supremacy of the government (the Secretaries
of State) over the aristocracy and the councils, which, in turn, was being
juxtaposed to an individual, Sebastio Jos, and to his house. A few years later
he would be honoured with the title of Marquis of Pombal, the peak of his
climb through the ranks of social distinction.
Like minister-favourites before him, Pombal sought to build up his own
network of clients, spreading graces among families and individuals supposedly
faithful to him. The network also embraced other secretaries of state, several
families of the nobility whose members were in diplomatic missions and in the
colonial government, a significant group of intellectuals and magistrates, and
a large number of businessmen-financiers, holders of capital of the chartered
Companies. The house of Pombal borrowed significant amounts from these
businessmen. The extent of his circle of clients, however, was less than that
of previous validos. This is because he was a secretary of State, a formal
institution that was at the core of political decision-making. As it is stated in a
manuscript memoir dated from 1803, full of criticism and presumably written
by the sixth count of So Loureno, the sharp increase in the number of
secretaries of State had altered governance, and instead of its improvement, it
had only become more numerous and much less effective. Before the Marquis
of Pombal, secretaries of State were channels through which business reached
the sovereign. At the moment, they are everything, at the point of diplomatic
parlance ignoring a simple form of addressing to the King, always referring
the king and his minister () With such a trench of creatures invested with
authority, everything happens: honours and riches are attained, the courts have
Nuno Gonalo Monteiro, O crepsculo dos Grandes. A casa e o patrimnio da aristocracia em
Portugal (17501832) (Lisboa, 1998).
32
Cf. note (18).
Pombals Government
331
their jurisdiction limited, new laws despise the ancient ones, every formalities
are changed () Then comes the despotic power of the ministries, which is
the major calamity of the People.33 In conclusion, if the prime minister had
never been invested of a formal authority, since the institution of the post
had not been acknowledged, the same did not occur with the secretaries of
state/ ministers who were at the core of political decision making. To a large
extent, one may find here the answer to the question raised earlier in this
essay. Pombal did not need to establish his power mainly on a large and firm
clientele because, during his period as minister-favourite, secretaries of State
had an effective authority over their particular fields of the administration.
Contrary to more traditional aspects of his political performance, this was
perhaps one of the most modern elements of Pombals government. Thus,
Pombal did not depend only on personal ties, inherent in a network of clients,
to make his power effective.
Another field for comparison deserves special attention. Many years
ago, the Portuguese historian Joo Lcio de Azevedo noted that Pombal
searched his models dated from a hundred years earlier. For economic
matters he saw a master in Sully; for political ones he followed Richelieu.34
This statement is an accurate interpretation, although its implications have
not been fully explored. In the first place, the idea of Pombals following a
paradigmatic model, provided by the minister-favourites of the seventeenth
century, should be carefully considered. It leads to a better understanding
of Pombals character, his relationship with the king and the period known
by his title (Pombaline). In fact, French seventeenth-century models inspired
him, more than any other, as he himself stated. Carvalho read and quoted
Sullys memoirs,35 and kept in his library the political testament of Richelieu.36
There is no solid argument to support the thesis that these readings would
have been less important than other works, by more modern authors, also
kept in his library. Moreover, the legislation and the institutional changes
Memorias politicas, Arquivo Distrital de Braga, Fundo Barca Oliveira, pasta
n35, identified by Joaquim Pintassilgo, Diplomacia, Poltica e Economia na transio do
sculo XVIII para o sculo XIX. O pensamento e aco de Antnio de Arajo de Azevedo
(Conde da Barca) (mimeo., Lisbon, UNL, 1987) pp. 1702, 212.
34
Joo Lcio de Azevedo O Marqus de Pombal e a Sua poca, 2nd edn (Oporto,
1990), p. 75.
35
Mmoires de Maximilien de Bethune, Duc de Sully, Principal Ministre de Henri le
Grand (8 vols, London, 1763).
36
J.S. da Silva Dias, Pombalismo e projecto poltico, Cultura- Histria e Filosofia,
vol. III (1984), pp. 2245; Franoise Hildesheimer (ed.), Testament Politique de Richelieu
(Paris, 1995).
33
332
undertaken during his government were actually less innovative and enduring
than it is generally thought, except with regard to the increasing importance of
Secretariats of State within the political core. In fact, in order to face concrete
challenges, later legislation would have counted on the work of magistrates
included in Pombals personal network. However, such ideas were not actually
his. Pombal was born in 1699 and became one of the first reformers of the
middle of the eighteenth century. What is known about his political concepts,
before being appointed to the government in 1750, is focused on mercantilist
postulates rooted in seventeenth-century theoreticians, whether for economic
or political purposes, deserving particularly attention are those concerning
Royal power and the Raison dtat. Apart from foreign affairs, only long
after his pre-eminence in the government did he come under the influence of
Natural Law. On the other hand, the anti-Jesuitism of Pombal, which turned
into an original feature of his policy, was the result of constraints felt in earlier
years of government and not a program previously drawn up. Actually, when
he was appointed secretary of State, Pombal was seen by the opposition as
aligned with the Jesuits.37 Obsessed with putting Portugal on track with the
most polite nations of Europe and living in enlightened Europe, Pombal
would have to comply with such polite nations regarding common enemies.
Jesuit issues, and the intromission of the Church in civil spheres, were under
that category. He might also have found in the most polite nations the
sources of his later legislation. But Pombal was not a creature of enlightened
Europe.
Public Sphere and the Government of Pombal
In recent research on the political and cultural history of eighteenth-century
Europe, the public sphere has merited the increasing attention of historians.
More attention is drawn to flows of ideas and spaces of socialization, or to
consumption of cultural goods distinct from that common in royal courts.
In countries that may be considered the cultural core of Europe, apart from
parliamentary England, such a process of the making a public sphere became
an overwhelming fact throughout the century. Even clashing with the logic of
dynastic states, it could hardly be avoided. Thus enlightened despotism was
somewhat constrained, as well as influenced, by these cultural innovations. The
making of a public sphere, although being a rising socio-cultural phenomenon
in which printing (whether or not legalized) played an important part, also
Cf. Monteiro, D. Jos, pp. 516.
37
Pombals Government
333
benefited, in many respects, from the intervention of a traditional focus of

power such as the Parliaments in France.
Portugal was a small monarchy by European standards, made up of a single
kingdom that had struggled to cut political, cultural and linguistic ties with
Spain since 1640. The Portuguese urban system had a macro-cephalic structure,
Lisbon gathering between six and eight per cent of the whole population of
the kingdom. If there lived a disproportionate share of the social, economic
and political elites, it ought to obtain a decisive part in the making of a public
sphere. However, such a concentration of elites in one single urban centre
made it much easier to submit to royal control and thus was prone to atrophy.
This might have happened in Portugal.
The fundaments of political power triumphing in D. Joss reign, although
having a model in seventeenth-century political concepts of Raison dtat,
opposed to a traditional doctrine, until then dominant in Portugal, mainly
with regards to religion and teaching. Publications and opinions that have
such undesirable traditional messages, mainly pro-Jesuitic, were thus severely
controlled. As far as the making of a public sphere is concerned and according
to these constraints, the controlling devices created by Pombal wreaked
catastrophic results. In contrast to what was happening in other European
kingdoms, where the printing of journals was even more common,38 there
had been no regular periodical publication in Portugal since 1762, when the
printing of the Gazetas de Lisboa was forbidden, a fact only changed in 1777
after the end of D. Joss reign.39
Indeed, the political culture that triumphed in D. Joss reign had far
reaching consequences. It should be stressed that Portugal became a monarchy
in medieval times after her scission from Len. The power of the king was only
restrained by the Fundamental Law, called Leis de Lamego (which referred to
the convening of the Cortes in Lamego in 1139) which basically determined
the line of succession to the throne. This was the only restraint on the kings
power.40 In his Observaes Secretssimas, written in 1775, Pombal quotes these
fundaments and explains how they were put into practice. In his view, in
many European cases, the power of kings was weakened by coalitions and
tensions within the court. On the contrary, all over the Portuguese kingdom,
and her offshoots overseas, there are no arguments other than those emanating
Cf. T.C.W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture. Old Regime
Europe 16601789 (Oxford, 2002).
39
Cf. Ana Cristina Arajo, Modalidades de leitura das Luzes em Portugal no tempo
de Pombal, Revista de Histria, X (1990).
40
Jos Seabra da Silva, Deduo Cronolgica, e Analtica (2 vols, Lisbon, 1768),
vol. II, p. 393.
38
334
from the royal throne, which are heard with veneration because all the vassals
of the King are gathered under the same faith, trusting only that his majesty
knows what is best for them because he loves and cares for all as if they were
his children rather than his subjects.41 This is why any disagreement, publicly
expressed, about any legislation and governmental decisions was denounced
as a crime against his majestys integrity (crime de lse-majest).
Such an attitude, considered by many individuals as despotic, was actually
new and disrupted traditional political practices. An example of this change
may be found in the sixth Count of S. Lourenos arguments dated from 1762,
after his imprisonment. When questioned by the lawyer, he evoked the political
experiences of the reign of D. Joo V, when many royal resolutions were not
fully realized because they did not generate consensus, notwithstanding the
deep love of the vassals for their king. From the Count of S. Lourenos point of
view, there was a new political doctrine in D. Joss reign that would turn into
traitors many noble ancestors who everybody knows disapproved of public
policies but still considered honourable subjects. The judge in charge of the
processing of Count of S. Loureno acted accordingly since he reminded the
defendant that preaching against ministers of state, in what concerned serious
matters, and after legislation being published, was a crime. The defendant
made use of History in his defence. Indeed, while the government had been
supported by a traditional equilibrium among councils, juridical and political
procedures required the public expression of opinions, and, thus, there was an
opportunity for different statements about different subjects. The Count of
S. Loureno recalled this historical experience in his defence.42
So, the executive and expeditious power of ministers, pushed to its limits in
the reign of D. Jos, clashed against traditional forms of government. The king
chose his ministers, who, in turn, made decisions in the privacy of their own
office (as Pombal would say) for the king to sign their dispatches afterwards.
There was no space for expressing opinions, even less for disagreement. This
is the new concept of government that triumphed in D. Joss reign, getting
plenty of practical demonstration.
Testimonies are numerous. It is worth noting a letter of Italian voyager,
Giuseppe Baretti, written around 1760, in the aftermath of one of the most
turbulent events of the reign, when diplomatic relations with the Papacy were
disrupted. Baretti declared that he had made all efforts to have true information
about what was happening, since the event had drawn the attention of all the
Sebastio Jos de Carvalho e Melo, Cartas e outras obras selectas do Marqus de
Pombal, 4th edn (Lisbon, 1861), p. 22.
42
Antnio Ferro, O Marqus de Pombal e os meninos de Palhav (Coimbra, 1923)
p. 89.
41
Pombals Government
335
powers in Europe: my efforts (to search for information) were in vain. The
government has forbidden any talk about these and other matters. Sanctions
for those who do not respect the interdiction are so severe that many have
been imprisoned and these misfortunate creatures get scared before the simple
mention of a few names. It is not easy to make any individual express his
opinion about anything that may remind one of political matters, although
rush in making decisions and the pleasure of talking are two of the major
features of the Portuguese character.43
In Europe it was still common that politicians who fell into disgrace were
sent to the country, fixing residence in one of their estates, as was the case of
Ensenada in Spain. But incarceration or deportation (to Africa in the Portuguese
case), an even worse punishment, was no longer a standard punishment.
Although only fragments of documentation have been preserved, there is
evidence that any criticism, mainly if stated in Lisbon, triggered prosecution
procedures (inconfidencia), immediately precipitating the imprisonment of the
author. Although lacking the efficiency it achieved afterwards in the reign of
D. Maria, the institution of a general department of police (Intendncia Geral
da Polcia), in 1760, afforded to the government a controlling device which
proved to be rather effective in watching political suspects. Notwithstanding
the reinforcement of means of social control in general, and of those over
potential political rivals in particular, nothing could stop either the spreading
of gossip or the dissemination of manuscript newspapers.
Since printed periodicals were banned, the Real Mesa Censria, founded
in 1768, substituted new censorship schemes for traditional Inquisition
procedures and the actions of bishops. The functions of this new institution
were somewhat ambivalent: it suppressed books siding with Jesuits or the Pope
as much as those reputed as being enlightened or libertine; moreover, the
very censorship activity carried on by the institution may be considered also a
device to create a particular kind of culture, something similar to a prescribed
culture to serve the regime. This last effect stems from declared preferences
for works that were aesthetically following the standards of Classicism and
conceptually close to the French culture of Louis XIVs reign. However, it
seems certain, as far as it is known from records of the censorship activity,
that it caused a harsh decrease in the licit importation of foreign books. In
short, if there has been a redefinition of the censorship activity and respective
parameters during D. Joss reign, it is inaccurate to talk about censorship
mitigation. Besides, the Inquisition was not yet extinct; it had been merely
Giuseppe Baretti, Cartas de Portugal, ed. M.E. Ponce de Leo (Coimbra, 1970),
p. 156.
43
336
reformed. It would regain a new impetus, particularly during the reign of

D. Maria I.
The efforts for the creation of a culture endorsed by the regime, which
would replace the previously dominant culture, would also justify the creation
of a royal print office in 1768 (Regia Oficina Tipogrfica). From 1770 onwards,
it printed more than 300 books per year. It printed translations, original
works, legislation and official papers, demonstrating the enormous effort to
define the parameters of a publishing activity and the need to solve the scarcity
caused by reforms in education.
The reforms in education did not have a central part, as happened
elsewhere, but they were also targeted by official cultural policy. If the reform
in lower levels of education were brought up as a consequence of the antiJesuitism, referred to above, the foundation of colleges for nobility (Colgio
dos Nobres) and for businessmen (Aula do Comrcio, in 1759) shaped the effort
to educate (to shape) elites. Results, however, did not match the expectations.
The reform of the University of Coimbra, in 1772, was the final step of this
intervention in education, introducing principles of natural law, as well as
scientific disciplines to the curriculum.44
Theologians and jurists, too, served the regime, as did those writers and
dramatists who received royal patronage. The most remarkable example may
be taken from the foundation of the Arcdia Luzitana, a literary Academy,
founded in 17561757, which gathered renowned individuals such as
Correia Garo. Since its first moments of activity, the Academy developed a
cultural production quite intentionally opposed to baroque inheritance, while
defending the aesthetics of Classicism under French influence. Patronized by
Carvalho, and so, in many respects, the principal source from which public
praise in support of him came, the Academy was, nonetheless, affected by the
policy of terror that characterized the years of 17591760. Correia Garo
would be imprisoned two years later. The Academy remained active without
any remarkable output until 1774.
The fact that the crown made no attempt to create its own Academy is
somewhat surprising and it contrasts sharply with French experience during
the reign of Louis XIV. The Royal Academy of History, though not extinct,
did not convene either. The lack of official royal academies during this period
still needs an explanation. By contrast, theatres, especially the Italian Opera,
were a cultural field where the public sphere might have had an outstanding
role.
See, among others, Ana Cristina Arajo (ed.), O Marqus de Pombal e a Universidade
(Coimbra, 2000).
44
Pombals Government
337
Primarily based on seventeenth-century models, but outfitted with

eighteenth-century resources and exploiting the potential of the small size of
Portugal, the government of Pombal not only enforced censorship but also
enlarged mechanisms of political control. In this sense, it differed from the
reform experiences of other states in the second half of the century.45
Furthermore, the same limits were applied to the colonies, though, given
the circumstances the control over the circulation of books, was considerably
more difficult there. In May 1759, the magistrate Jos de Mascarenhas Pacheco
Pereira, who had arrived in Brazil a year before in charge of implementing a
new policy for the Indians and promoting other reforms in the colony, planned
to launch an academy of history, called Academia Braslica dos Renascidos,
in Bahia. This academy included a wide network of more than a hundred
academics and was expected to gather the libraries of the extinct Jesuit
monasteries. Its inauguration dates from July 1759, on the day of the king
D. Joss anniversary, but it did not last for very long. Five months later, Jos
de Mascarenhas was sent to Rio de Janeiro, where he was imprisoned. From
there, he was transferred to a prison in Santa Catarina where he remained for
many years. The motives behind Mascarenhas imprisonment are not clear;
there were rumors concerning his relations with the French, whom he had
hosted in Bahia, and also about his complicity with the Jesuits. The academy
did not resist, as happened in almost all other cases during the reign of
D. Jos.46
Furthermore, one should recall that nothing structurally changed in Brazil
during Pombals governance, apart from the creation of corporate companies
to operate in the northern regions of the colony under a monopoly regime,
and in spite of the ministers determination to nationalize Portuguese foreign
trade according to mercantilist foundations47 and principals of Raison
dtat. As for the institution of a supreme court in Rio de Janeiro (1751),
it had already been claimed for quite a long time. And the final decision of
transferring the head-quarters of the vice-royalty to Rio de Janeiro, which
can be deemed a consequence of a gradual move of the economy further to
the southern regions, was also a pragmatic response to the effects of the war
which had just been fought. Furthermore, although the governors-general of
See bibliography quoted in Monteiro, D. Jos, pp. 2316.

ris Kantor, Esquecidos e Renascidos. Historiografia Acadmica Luso-Americana
(17241759) (So Paulo, 2004).
47
See Maxwell, Pombal, pp. 5168.
45
46
338
Brazil were entitled to be addressed as viceroys, they did not have any actual
authority over the other captaincies, besides that of Rio de Janeiro.48
Generally speaking, the government of Brazil did not undergo any
remarkable change. It kept its previous features based on several captaincies
jurisdiction in the face of the governors authority (usually a high-ranking
aristocrat), the judicial power and the municipal councils being controlled
by the local elite. All these powers sustained an equilibrium supported by
the general political communication with Lisbon. One cannot find in Brazil
anything comparable to the global reforms prompted by Carlos III in Spanish
America, namely those carried on by Jos de Glvez to target the creoles
(American-born Spaniards) control over local institutions.49
Conclusions
This essay explored the analytical potentials of comparisons made by
contemporaries of Pombal, which he himself reproduced in his writings,
stressing prime ministers resemblances to minister-favourites of the
seventeenth century. In fact, contrary to what happened in the seventeenth
century, European reformers of the second half of the eighteenth century were
mainly kings, not ministers. Pombal was, thus, the most notable exception.
His political and economic postulations were taken from previous times, but
the results of his action were seen to a great extent by European contemporaries
as responses to challenges of his own time. Pombals most important legacy
was, in fact, an enduring intervention of the State in public life and a clear
supremacy of the executive power (represented by the Secretaries of State) over
the nobility and the councils in the administrative core. It is, indeed, Pombal
who started in Portugal the authoritarian, although reformist, intervention of
the state. It is a legacy which continues to be felt today.
Dauril Alden, Royal Governement in Colonial Brazil with Special Reference to the
Administration of Marquis de Lavradio, 17691779 (Berkeley, CA, 1968), pp. 44, 472.
For recent views on Brazilian administration, see Francisco Bethencourt, A Amrica
Portuguesa, in Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chauduri (eds), Histria da Expanso
Portuguesa (Lisbon, 1998), vol. 3, p. 421; J. Fragozo; M.F. Bicalho, and M. Ftima Gouva
(eds), O Antigo Regime nos Trpicos: a dinmica imperial portuguesa (sculos XVXVIII) (Rio
de Janeiro, 2001); Laura de Mello e Souza, O Sol e a Sombra. Poltica e administrao na
Amrica no sculo XVIII (So Paulo, 2006).
49
John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America 1492
1830, (New Haven, CT, and London, 2006), pp. 3045.
48
Chapter 20
Enlightened Reform after Independence:

Simn Bolvars Bolivian Constitution
Matthew Brown*
How enlightened was political reform in the immediate post-Independence

years in Colombia? Did the great liberators and thinkers have a master plan
or was change occasioned through violent conflict and networks forged
through personal loyalty and enmity rather than ideology? To answer these
questions this essay uses the case study of the proposals and policies associated
with Simn Bolvar, between 1825 and 1829, regarding the introduction of
a Life Presidency and a possible re-establishment of monarchy in Colombia.
After a general introduction to the period and the historiography, it briefly
presents the three principal protagonists of the story Bolvar himself, his
Irish assistant Daniel OLeary, and their friend and foe Jos Mara Crdoba.
The essay then explores Bolvars definitive document on the subject,
his 1826 Bolivian Constitution. It then moves from documentation to the
reception of the text in the minds and actions of two of his most trusted
* The essay draws on some material presented previously to the American Historical
Association in Philadelphia in January 2006, and to the Gender, War and Politics: The
Wars of Revolution and Liberation Transatlantic Comparisons, 17751820 conference
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2007. I thank Natasha Carver,
Jo Crow, Catherine Davies, Rebecca Earle, Karen Hagemann, David Hook, Gabriel
Paquette and Karen Racine for their comments on earlier versions. All translations from
Spanish to English are my own unless otherwise stated.

The area referred to as Colombia in this paper corresponds more or less to the
present-day state of Colombia (with the exception of Panama, which seceded in 1903).
The area was known under Spanish colonialism as the Viceroyalty of the Kingdom of New
Granada. From 1819 to 1830 New Granada, Venezuela and Ecuador formed a superrepublic under the leadership of Simn Bolvar. Historians called this super-republic Gran
Colombia in order to distinguish it from Colombia, which was called The Republic of
New Granada from its final independence in 1830 until 1863, when it adopted the name
Colombia.
340
allies, Daniel OLeary and Jos Mara Crdoba. Crdoba had been one of
Bolvars most loyal officers but the rumours that Bolvar and his allies wanted
to reintroduce monarchy to Colombia, either with Bolvar as King or by
installing a European prince, catalysed his political rebellion and led to his
death. The final part of the essay looks at the consequences of the monarchy
project for all three protagonists in summary these were disillusion for
OLeary, death for Crdoba, and both disillusion and death for Bolvar.
This essay argues that the Bolivian Constitution can be usefully understood
within the paradigm of enlightened reform, even if this does result in stretching
the chronological boundaries of the subject beyond what is considered
acceptable by most of its leading practitioners. Bolvars project was inspired
by and drew on the important thinkers and writers of the Enlightenment,
and he proposed and enacted reforms on this basis, in contrast to his more
explicitly liberal and utilitarian enemies and successors. This essay is part of
a wider cultural and social history project which explores the relationships
between Europe and Colombia in the first half century after independence.
Its methodology is a study of the personal and political trajectories of the
protagonists (including Daniel OLeary and Jos Mara Crdoba) of the
more-or-less-randomly chosen battle of El Santuario, which took place on 17
October 1829.
What Place for Enlightened Reform After the Independence of Spanish
America?
In much of the historiography on nineteenth-century Colombia, monarchism
only appears as a force which opposed the patriotism and republicanism of
liberators such as Simn Bolvar. As Mark Van Aken observed, historians have
generally shied away from studying the sin of monarchism in favour of the
As part of this project, research trips to Bogot, Medelln, Rionegro and Caracas
have been funded by JISLAC (Joint Initiative for the Study of Latin America and the
Caribbean), SILAS (Society for Irish Latin American Studies) and the University of Bristol
Research Fund.

In the analysis that follows, I follow the lead of historians such as Clment Thibaud
and Hendrick Kraay who have combined the study of military rebellions and campaigns
with the social and political formations that underpinned them. Clment Thibaud,
Repblicas en armas. Los ejrcitos bolivarianos en la Guerra de Independencia (ColombiaVenezuela, 18101821) (Bogot, 2003); Hendrick Kraay, Race, State, and Armed Force in
Independence-Era Brazil: Bahia, 1790s1840s (Stanford, CA, 2001).
Enlightened Reform after Independence
341
taking the forces of freedom and revolution as their subjects. Recently there
has been much study of the, hitherto neglected, Royalist forces in Spanish
America, most notably the work of Julio Albi, Rebecca Earle and Toms
Straka.
Yet the revival of monarchist sentiment amongst previously devoted
republicans can offer a useful comparative counterpoint, I hope, to the study
of Enlightened Reform in this volume. Bolvar was not the first or the only
Spanish American to glory in the age of reason, tutored by Simn Rodriguez in
the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, references to whom litter
his writings. He was a committed republican inspired by the Enlightenment
thinking he encountered in his schooling and during his travels in Europe in
1800, 18051806, and in 1810. Yet, like other enlightened reformers in the
Hispanic world after 1750, he was not an uncritical disciple of Enlightenment
thinkers who had never seen a colony at first hand. He pragmatically adopted
and adapted Enlightenment thought for Hispanic American realities.
In 1825 with Independence from Spain achieved and assured, Bolvar
retreated to a house on the outskirts of Lima where he drafted a constitution
for the new republic in Upper Peru which would bear his name, Bolivia.
After fifteen years of fighting against King and madre patria, Bolvar realised
that Napoleon Bonapartes decapitation of the Spanish Empire in 1808 (by
replacing Fernando VII on the throne with his own brother Joseph) had
created a vacuum of legitimacy in the Hispanic world. By 1825 Bolvar, trying
to keep himself at the centre of a political maelstrom in the midst of the
claims of indigenous peoples, pardos, and Liberals, had come back to the idea
of monarchy an enlightened monarchy, of course in order to keep the
unrestrained multitudes at bay.
Van Aken was following Richard Morses interpretation that cultural differences
meant that Latin Americans were especially receptive to monarchism. Cited in
Mark J. Van Aken, King of the Night: Juan Jose Flores and Ecuador, 18241864 (Berkeley,
CA, 1989), p. 6.

Julio Albi, Banderas olvidadas: el ejrcito realista en Amrica (Madrid, 1990), Rebecca
Earle, Spain and the Independence of Colombia (Exeter, 2000), and Toms Straka, La voz de
los vencidos. Ideas del partido realista de Caracas 18101821 (Caracas, 2000).

John Lynch, Simn Bolvar: A Life (New Haven and London, 2006), pp. 28,
318.

Lynch, Simn Bolvar, pp. 33, 35. On emulation of Enlightened Reform amongst
Hispanic thinkers in the late eighteenth-century see Gabriel Paquette, Enlightenment,
Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 17591808 (Basingstoke, 2008).

In using this term I am citing from Bolvar to Flores, 9 November 1830, in Bushnell
(ed.), Simn Bolvar: El Libertador: Writings of Simn Bolvar, translated by Frederick
Fornoff (Oxford, 2003), p. 146.
342
The problem that Bolvar faced in 18251826 (he delivered the finished
work after nine months, on 25 May 1826) was this: the destruction of the
prestige of the Spanish Crown by the devastation committed in its name in
the Wars of Independence (atrocities, of course, which were largely publicised
within and outside of the Americas by the pen of Bolvar himself ) meant that
subjection to an absolute monarch was increasingly felt by many in Colombia
to be demeaning, dishonourable, and an offence against masculinity and
national autonomy. The republics legal and political courts, and their ability
to call to account the behaviour of state employees and statesmen, became a
touchstone of nascent national self-definition in the absence of the divinelyanointed authority of the King.10
In addition, the restoration of Fernando VII in 1814, his rejection of the
Constitution of Cdiz, and, ultimately, unsuccessful use of force to regain
control over Spains American colonies tarnished the image of monarchy
in Hispanic America. The contemporary ascendance of Pedro I in Brazil,
and Agustn I (de Iturbide) in Mexico encouraged supporters of monarchy
in Colombia. Iturbides widely publicised fall from grace (he reigned only
from May 1822 to March 1823 and was executed in July 1824) provided the
immediate context for criticisms of Bolvars own alleged intention to crown
himself King or Emperor in Colombia.11 Whilst republicanism spread, the
instability caused by Royalist attempts at reconquest softened anti-monarchical
views, as in Europe after 1814. In this way the examples of Iturbide in Mexico
and Bonaparte in France cast long dark shadows over Colombia in the 1820s.
Beyond the shadows, Bolvars enemies saw real links between el Libertador
and the two self-made emperors. Bolvar had himself witnessed Napoleons
For contemporary documents making this claim, see Matthew Brown, Adventurers,
Foreign Women and Masculinity in the Wars of Independence in Colombia, Feminist
Review, 79 (2005): 3651.
10
On courts, corruption and national identity in Venezuela see Reuben Zahler,
Honor, Corruption, and Legitimacy: Liberal Projects in the Early Venezuelan Republic,
18211850, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2005, and Elas Pino
Iturrieta, Fueros, civilisacin y ciudadana (Caracas, 2000), p. 46. For Colombia see Aline
Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia 17701835 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004)
and Matthew Brown, Not Forging Nations but Foraging for Them: Uncertain Collective
identities in Gran Colombia, Nations and Nationalism, 12:2 (2006): 22340.
11
The British Consul in Caracas reported as much in his diary on 14 December
1826. The newspapers arrive from Bogot they are full of attacks on Bolvar, criticising
his Bolivarian Code and citing the examples of republican ambition in Napoleon and
Iturbide, and insinuating similar intentions in the Liberator. Ker Porter, Diario de un
diplomtico britnicos en Venezuela, translated by Teodosio Leal (and translated back in to
English here, by me), (Caracas, 1997), p. 164.
343
coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in Milan in 1805. Several of Napoleons

former officers were some of Bolvars closest allies, such as the Italian Carlos
Castelli and the Frenchman Louis Per de la Croix.12 Agustn de Iturbides
eldest son (also Agustn) served as Simn Bolvars aide-de-camp in 1829 and
1830.13 These links meant that, for all his denials, the reaction to the rumours
that Bolvar planned to resurrect monarchy were so strong and led to the
rebellion of several of his most senior and hitherto most loyal supporters,
including Jos Mara Crdoba.
Historians have shown that social relations were thrown into flux during the
Wars of Independence across Spanish America, but that afterwards patriarchal
authority and dominant masculinity, of the type epitomised by Bolvar and
Crdoba with their virility, courage and physical strength, were more firmly
entrenched than ever as a result of the foundational character attributed to
the fighting of the struggle against Spain.14 Prolonged warfare cemented the
power of men who had experienced battle as opposed to civilian statesmen
who could only hope to gain legitimacy via the reflected glory of military
victory over Spanish forces. The clash between the reality of caudillismo and
the hierarchical social relations upon which it depended, and the rhetoric
of republican equality espoused by the Liberators, led to many proposals
for political reforms which would assure the region of stability, order and
prosperity.15 In Colombia after Independence, Simn Bolvar, Daniel OLeary
and Jos Mara Crdoba were the protagonists of a debate over whether a
return to monarchy could be a substitute for the Enlightened, reforming
government that all agreed was necessary in Colombia.
The Three Protagonists
The three principal protagonists of the analysis that follows were men formed
by birth, travel, and warfare. Simn Bolvar (17831830) was a Creole, slave
and land-owning Venezuelan who was orphaned and widowed before he
For Castelli see Mximo Mendoza Alemn, Un soldado de Simn Bolvar: Carlos
Castelli (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1991); for Per de la Croix see his
own (contentious) journal of his time with Bolvar, Diario de Bucaramanga: vida pblica y
privada de Bolvar, (Caracas, 1973), first published 1869.
13
See Ker Porter, Diario, 31 January 1829, p. 367, also 12 August 1830, p. 422.
14
Catherine Davies, Hilary Owen and Claire Brewster, South American Independence:
Gender, Politics, Text (Liverpool, 2006), p. 23.
15
Bernardino Rivadavias utilitarian experiment in Buenos Aires in 18241827 was
one such attempt. See Klaus Gallo, The Struggle for an Enlightened Republic: Buenos Aires
and Rivadavia, (London, 2006).
12
344
was twenty-five and who dedicated his life to unshackling Spanish America
from colonial rule, and subsequently to establishing stable political order in
the liberated territories. Daniel Florence OLeary (18001854) was an Irish
Catholic, born in Cork in 1800, who travelled to Venezuela in 1818, serving as
Bolvars aide-de-camp and later as a general, a historian and a diplomat. Jos
Mara Crdoba (17991829) was born in Antioquia in the Viceroyalty of New
Granada, also to a slave and land-owning family, where in his teens he enlisted
in the armies fighting against Spanish colonialism, rising rapidly through the
ranks to distinguish himself as a general at the battle of Ayacucho in 1824,
the encounter which was widely held to have sealed the independence of Peru,
and South America more generally, from Spanish colonial rule.16 OLeary and
Crdoba both owed all of their early career trajectories to Bolvars patronage,
and in most accounts of the period they appear as instruments or accessories
of Bolvars power.
When Daniel OLeary crossed the Atlantic in 1818 he had no military
experience whatsoever and had never before left Ireland.17 In 1819 Simn
Bolvar became the first President of the Republic of [Gran] Colombia, and in
his Angostura Address that year he set out the challenges facing the new state.
Bolvar was the architect of the Colombian military strategy, and OLeary
was at his side for much of the 1820s.18 When the momentum of his military
victories took him south to Peru, one of Bolvars most dynamic generals was
Jos Mara Crdoba, and when victory was assured (in Bolvars absence) by
the battle of Ayacucho in 1824, Crdoba became celebrated because of the
Andrs Lpez Bermdez, Jos Mara Crdoba en la tradicin historiogrfica
colombiana. La imagen del hroe y la invencin del mito, 18581993, Historia y Sociedad,
6 (1999): 179208 provides an excellent account of the development of Crdobas myth
after the mid-nineteenth century. I defer to Lpez Bermdezs account on this later period,
and concentrate my analysis on the three decades immediately after Cordobas death. I
also follow Lpez Bermdez in spelling Crdoba with a b rather than a v, which is still
an issue of contention, but which is consistent with Crdobas own signature and most
scholarship since the mid-nineteenth century, with important exceptions.
17
For the other mercenaries and the history of their encounter with Colombian
society see Matthew Brown, Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies: Simn Bolvar, Foreign
Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations (Liverpool, 2006). The book is accompanied by
a database containing information on over 3,000 of the foreign mercenaries. The database
is available online for consultation at http://www.bris.ac.uk/hispanic/latin/research.html
[last accessed 12 January 2009].
18
There is a considerable historiography on OLeary. Manuel Prez Vila, Vida de
Daniel Florencio OLeary: Primer Edecn del Libertador (Caracas, 1957) is still the standard
text, synthesised in English by Robert F. McNerney, Daniel Florencio OLeary: Soldier,
Diplomat and Historian, The Americas, 22 (1966): 292312.
16
345
patriotic and manly courage he displayed at this key battle. The young general
became known popularly as the lion of Ayacucho.19
In the four years after Ayacucho, the paths of these three protagonists
diverged. Bolvar initially remained in Peru, dedicating nine months to
drafting the Constitution for Upper Peru, the new republic re-named Bolivia
in his honour. This Bolivian Constitution was publicised and promoted
across Hispanic America but had a very mixed reception (which is discussed
below) and was, in fact, only adopted for a very short time by Bolivia itself.
During this period, as Bolvars trusted confidant, Daniel OLeary took on
many important missions and negotiated difficult compromises with Bolvars
enemies. Bolvar retained the Presidency of Colombia throughout the 1820s.
Crdoba remained loyal to Bolvars leadership, and served in various civil and
military positions across Colombia, until 1829 when he launched a rebellion
against what he saw as Bolvars dictatorship. On Bolvars orders, Daniel
OLeary commanded the army that marched to Antioquia and defeated Jos
Mara Crdobas rebellion at the battle of El Santuario on 17 October 1829.
After the battle, Crdoba lay mortally wounded when he was attacked by
Rupert Hand, an Irish mercenary in the service of the Colombian government.20
Crdobas assassination by Hand, apparently on Daniel OLearys explicit
orders, taking place in such close proximity to the battlefield, established
Crdobas image for posterity as a brave and heroic fighter, always ready to
risk his life for his principles, whose great potential for service to the patria
had been tragically thwarted by a cowardly foreign murderer.21 Crdobas
rebellion, although unsuccessful in the short term, dealt a fatal blow to the
Bolivarian regime, and within a year Bolvar had left power, declaring that
he who serves the revolution ploughs the sea, and sick, disenchanted and
disillusioned he prepared to go into exile. Bolvar died before he could leave
Colombia, on 17 December 1830.22
Joaquin Posada Gutierrez, Memorias histricas polticas del General Joaquin Posada
Gutierrez, (Bogot, 1863), quotations taken from the 1929 Bogot edition, vol. 2,
pp. 297301.
20
For the much-debated death of Crdoba see the witness statements collected in
Miguel Aguilera, Clave poltica de un ruidoso proceso; Asesinato del General J. M. Crdoba,
(Bogot, 1965).
21
The Jos Mara Crdoba museum at El Santuario has buttressed this image with new
illustrations and murals depicting Crdobas death see images posted online at http://www.
elsantuario-antioquia.gov.co/sitio.shtml?apc=m-g1--&m=G&cmd%5B161%5D=c-1MUSEOS [last accessed 22 July 2009].
22
The quote comes from Bolvar to Juan Jos Flores, Barranquilla, 9 November
1830, in Bushnell, Simn Bolvar: El Libertador, p. 146. Bolvars legacy and cult continue
to shape Hispanic America; on the roots of the cult of Bolvar see Germn Carrera Damas,
19
346
OLeary outlived Crdoba and Bolvar by over two decades and as such was
able to shape the historical memory of their interwoven lives. When OLeary
received the news of Bolvars death he lamented the loss of a chief, a father, a
guide and a friend.23 Within six months he was forced into exile in Jamaica.
He returned to Caracas (his wifes home) in 1833, and from then until 1840
he represented Venezuela as a diplomat in Europe, shuttling between London,
Paris and Rome. From 1840 to 1845 OLeary worked as a British consular
representative in Venezuela, and from 1845 until his death in 1854 he was
the British consular representative in Bogot. The Memorias de OLeary, upon
which his posthumous reputation is largely based, were published by his eldest
son in Caracas between 18791888. It could be argued that the evidence of
Daniel OLearys editorial scissors are apparent in the lack of any surviving
documents incriminating Bolvar in any potentially unpatriotic activity, and
least of all in the plans to reintroduce monarchy to Colombia.
The Bolivian Constitution of 1826
In the middle section of this essay, I analyse the sections of the published text
of the Bolivian Constitution of 1826 in which Simn Bolvar took on the
charge of monarchism head on. As Toms Polanco Alcntara observed, the
Bolivian Constitution has been converted into a symbol of Bolvars political
life and is a determining factor in almost every interpretation of his political
thought.24
There are three broad strands of opinion in the historiography regarding
this document. The first, most recently elaborated by John Lynch who stresses
that Bolvar was not dictatorial by nature25 sees the Bolivian Constitution as
evidence of the realistic Bolvar his democratic deals tempered by experience
of popular protest, race conflict, and elite factionalism the man who declared
Spanish America to be ungovernable.26 Robert Harvey agrees that the Bolivian
Constitution is a compromise document containing elements of radicalism
El culto a Bolvar: esbozo para un estudio de la historia de las ideas en Venezuela (Caracas,
1973), and on its twenty-first century manifestations see Richard Gott, In the Shadow of
the Liberator: Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution (London, 2005).
23
Prez Vila, Vida de Daniel Florencio OLeary, p. 469.
24
Toms Polanco Alcntara, Simn Bolvar: Ensayo de interpretacin biogrfica a
travs de sus documentos (Caracas, 1994), p. 551
25
Lynch, Simn Bolvar, p. 240.
26
John Lynch, Latin American Revolutions 18081826 (Norman, OK, 1994),
p. 376.
347
as well as the old Bourbon concept of absolute monarchy.27 Jeremy Adelman

sees the Bolivian Constitution as the acme expression of Bolvars career as a
legislator and sees the accent on virtue as a condition for liberty (rather than
the ancien rgime emphasis on property) as fundamental to the impact of the
document.28 Lynch, Harvey and Adelman agree on the pragmatic character of
the Constitution, aimed at reconciling stability with equality.
The second strand interprets the Bolivian Constitution as a utopian,
rather than pragmatic, work. David Brading casts the document as a work
of imagination rather than a form of government, and as such indicative of
a certain imbalance in Bolivars actions during these years of triumph.29 For
Polanco Alcntara it was a utopian project that Bolvar intended to provoke
debate and discussion rather than to be put into action.30 For Ivan Jaksic it is
doubtful whether such a complex and idiosyncratic political and institutional
design could have functioned without Bolvars own direct intervention.31
The third strand sees the Bolivian Constitution as clear evidence for
Bolvars inclination towards a return to enlightened absolutism in the
governance of Hispanic America. Jos Mara Crdobas rebellion (which is
discussed below) is at the root of this interpretations genealogy. This strand
includes Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, who see it as a constitutional
monarchy [disguised] in republican dress,32 as well as Aline Helg in Liberty
and Equality. Helg sees the Bolivian Constitution as semi-monarchical
and part of a medium-term plan to outflank the much-feared pardocracia,
emphasising the many limits on the suffrage and casting the government in
Colombia in the 1820s as a parody of democracy. According to Helg, in
this period Bolvar was implicitly reassuming the position of king of Spain,
making himself the common centre that united all interests, neutralized
Robert Harvey, Liberators: Latin Americas Struggle for Independence, 18101830
(London, 2000), p. 242. Harvey cites a letter from Captain Thomas Maling to Viscount
Melville, of March 1825, in which Bolvar is quoted in favour of the British encouraging
monarchy plans in South America, which I do not take to be a useful source establishing
the matter one way or the other.
28
Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ,
2006), pp. 3667.
29
David Brading, Prophecy and Myth in Mexican History (Cambridge, 1984), p. 48.
30
Polanco Alcntara, Simn Bolvar, p. 550.
31
Ivan Jaksic, La repblica del orden: Simn Bolvar, Andrs Bello y las
transformaciones del pensamiento poltico de la independencia, Historia [Santiago de
Chile], 36 (2003): 20910.
32
Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society
(Oxford, 2002), pp. 119, 121.
27
348
all opposition, and irradiated all virtues.33 Such an interpretation, whilst

persuasive, necessitates reading Bolvars own words against the reaction he
inspired amongst contemporaries and an exploration of the consequences of
that reaction amongst his allies and his enemies. In the second half of this
essay I examine Bolvars own writings, then analyse his correspondence on
the subject with his close friend Daniel OLeary, before concluding with a
discussion of the reception of the rumours about the Bolivian Constitution, in
a case study of the rebellion of Jos Mara Crdoba.
I argue that the Bolivian Constitution of 1826 is best seen as Bolvars
attempt to participate in what Jordana Dym has called the creative adaptation
and evolution of existing structures after Independence.34 Bolvar was not
so nave as to present his plans as a continuation of eighteenth-century
Enlightened Reform, nor as a recipe for the re-introduction of monarchism
into Spanish America. This would have been political suicide. The document
contains only modest claims for its proposals and is explicit in its rejection of
calls for monarchy. Only one year had passed after the forces of Royalism had
been vanquished at Ayacucho. But Bolvar did want to base the stability of
the new regime upon the foundations that he believed had made the previous
system strong and long-lasting. He proposed new political forms a Life
Presidency with the right to nominate his own successor, and a fourth Moral
power that would retain (or re-create) social order and stability but whilst
also introducing the liberty and freedom which Independence had been
fought to win. In this sense he wanted to build a republic of equals upon
the foundations of universal monarchy, a republic of subjects rather than of
citizens.
When he presented the Bolivian Constitution to Congress in 1826,
Bolvar observed that I consider that the wisdom of all the ages is insufficient
to compose a fundamental code of law that is perfect, and that the most
enlightened legislator can be the direct cause of human wretchedness and the
parody, so to speak, of his own divine ministry.35 The ironic tone of parody
of his own divine ministry is consistent with the self-conscious modesty of
many of Bolvars public pronouncements, his constant offers to resign his
posts and his public reluctance at least in print to take praise for his feats
as a leader or as a thinker. In the Bolivian Constitution he took this modesty
to new levels:
Helg, Liberty and Equality, pp. 2024.

Jordana Dym, From Sovereign Villages to National States: City, State, and Federation
in Central America, 17591839 (Albuquerque, NM, 2006), p. xxii.
35
Bolvar, Address, p. 55.
33
34
349
I dont know who will suffer more in this horrible conflict: you, for the harm you
should fear concerning the laws you requested of me, or I, for the opprobrium to
which your trust condemns me.36
In later years he would be even more modest. In 1827 he told Santander

that he should throw it [the Bolivian Constitution] in the fire if you dont want
it. I dont have an authors vanity in matters of human concern.37 Two years
later he told Vergara that it would not last longer than a slice of bread.38 Yet
the proposals that followed this preamble were serious and deeply-considered.
There were two main pillars that shaped elite political debate in the Andes in
the 1820s the Life Presidency, and the fourth, Moral Power. Bolvar believed
that these innovations would help legislators to resist two monstrous foes
tyranny and anarchy. 39
Bolvar acknowledged his debt to the 1816 Haitian Constitution for the
Life Presidency, citing the succession from Presidents Petin to Boyer this
was triumphant proof that a president for life, with the power to choose
his successor, is the most sublime innovation in the republican system. He
continued:
The President of Bolivia will be even less of a threat than the president of Haiti, since
the mode of succession offers surer prospects for the health of the state. Moreover, the
president of Bolivia is denied all influence: he does not appoint magistrates, judges
or ecclesiastical dignitaries at any level It adds restriction after restriction to the
authority of a leader who will find the entire state run by those who exercise the most
important functions in society. The priest will rule in matters of conscience, the judges
in questions of property, honour, and life, and the elected officials in all public acts.40
There followed a lengthy section which I reproduce below in its entirety to

demonstrate Bolvars desire to rebut the charge of monarchism before it was
directed at him:
Legislators! From this day forward, freedom will be indestructible in America.
Consider the wildness of this continent, which by its very nature expels monarchical
rule: the very deserts invite independence. Here there are no grand nobles or prelates.
Bolvar, cited by Santander in Escritos autobiogrficos, p. 69, cited by Lynch, Simn
Bolvar, p. 230.
38
Cited in Lynch, Simn Bolvar, p. 248. This is Lynchs own translation, though my
own feeling is that slices of bread were not as common as bits of bread in this period. The
original is Bolvar to Vergara, 31 August 1829, Memorias de OLeary, vol. 31 p. 495.
39
40
36
37
350
Our wealth was insignificant in the past, even more so in the present. Although
the Church enjoys a certain prestige, it is far from aspiring to domination, content
to maintain the power it has. Without these supports, tyrants cannot survive, and
if certain ambitious men insist on establishing empires, Dessalines, Cristbal and
Iturbide can tell them what awaits them. There is no power more difficult to maintain
than that of a new prince. Bonaparte, vanquisher of every army he encountered,
was unable to transcend this principle, which is stronger than empires. And if the
great Napoleon could not prevail against the combined forces of republicans and
aristocrats, who will ever be able to found a monarchy in America, a land on fire with
the brilliant flames of freedom that devour the planks used to build daises for kings?
No, Legislators, you need not fear pretenders to a crown that will hang over their
heads like the sword of Damocles. The fledgling princes who delude themselves to the
point of erecting thrones over the rubble of freedom will be erecting tombs for their
ashes, which will proclaim to future generations how they preferred vain ambition to
freedom and glory.41
In this section it is clear that Bolvar intended his project to be seen as

a defence of republicanism rather than an attack on it. In support of such
an interpretation Bolvar observed that the constitutional restrictions on the
president of Bolivia are the severest ever known: his meagre powers only allow
him to appoint the ministers of the departments of the treasury, peace, and war,
and to command the army.42 Yet he admitted that when his desire for freedom
came up against what Jeremy Adelman has called the rub of democracy, the
former was always more cherished than the latter: Bolvar wanted to avoid
elections, which produce the scourge of republics, anarchy.43
Bolvars final pitch to convince the Bolivian legislators of the merits of his
Life Presidency was to answer his own rhetorical question:
What if hereditary princes were chosen by merit, and not randomly, and instead of
squandering their lives in idleness and ignorance, they were placed at the head of
the administration? They would without a doubt be more enlightened monarchs and
bring prosperity to their people.44
One of the constitutions final clauses asserted the supremacy of the ideals
that Bolvar had spent his life fighting for: civil liberty, individual security,

43
Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution, p. 370. Bolvar, Address, p. 59. Article 6
of the Constitution notes that the government of Bolivia is a representative democracy.
44
41
42
351
property, and equality before the law are guaranteed to the citizens by the
Constitution.45
In the light of the extracts cited it may seem strange that Bolvars Bolivian
Constitution has been viewed as the beginnings of a project to reintroduce
monarchy into Colombia. But did Bolvar protest too much? In the following
section I trace the contemporary reaction to the document, and argue
that Bolvars private correspondence with Daniel OLeary can allow us to
give more weight to the idea that Bolvar did support the idea of a return
to a monarchical system. Such an interpretation would mean seeing the
Introduction to the Bolivian Constitution, studied above, as a smokescreen
for his true intentions, or as a thinly-veiled attempt to pull the wool over his
contemporaries (or even his own) eyes.
Bolvars political rivals considered any plans for strong central government
or constitutional monarchy as the first step away from reform and towards
absolutism. For this reason they clung to representative republicanism with
passion and portrayed Bolvars plans for a Life Presidency as pure dissimulation
to disguise the installation of a monarchy. The Vice-President of Colombia,
Francisco de Paula Santander, argued that the Bolivian Constitution gave even
more power to the President of Bolivia than that possessed by the monarchs of
England or France.46 Even Bolvars successor as Bolivian President, Antonio
Jos de Sucre, commented after he left office in early 1828 that for my own
part I must confess that I am not a partisan of the Bolivian constitution: it
affords, on paper, stability to the government, whilst in fact it deprives it of
the means of making itself respected.47 Sucres analysis cut to the heart of the
problem the idea of a strong enlightened government based on virtue rather
than on representative government, only undermined its own legitimacy to
provide the stability required by the state.48 Republican principles had been
etched into the heart of the Hispanic American republics through years of
warfare in the Andes, and they had to be respected.
The business community was also guarded in its praise of the Bolivian
Constitution. The Bogot newspaper El Constitucional, which published a
weekly bilingual edition and was generally favourable to Bolvars continued
rule, observed in its editorial that the idea of a President for Life casts to some
Article 144 in Bolvar, Address, p. 84.
Santander, Al respectable pblico, pamphlet 12 February 1828, reproduced in
Escritos autobiogrficos 18201840 (Bogot, 1988), p. 26.
47
Sucre, Resignation Speech, Chuiquisaca, 2 August 1828, from an English
translation by the British Minister in Peru, preserved in TNA FO 97/114/.
48
See also the comments of Francisco Burdett OConnor on the Bolivian
Constitution, in his Independencia american (La Paz, 1915), p. 217.
45
46
352
degree into the shade the Sovereignty of the People and would be protected
by the mantle of irresponsibility. El Constitucional continued what it felt to
be a realistic opposition to Bolvars utopian formulation: Two motives can
actuate a man in this dangerous position [occupying the Life Presidency]:
either an inordinate and unshaken love of country, or the ambition of
supreme command. The first is not to be supposed so frequent as to allow of
its being made a necessary ingredient in the formation of a government; this
must be calculated upon the interests, not upon the sacrifices of mankind. It
warned that the same motives which have influenced the man of ages past will
continue to influence the man of ages to come.49
Bolvars political rivals in the 1820s saw constitutional monarchy as a
harbinger of absolutism and for this reason held tenaciously to representative
republicanism. One example was the Irish journalist Francis Hall, editor of
El Quiteo Libre in Quito, Ecuador, who in 1826 wrote what he claimed was
a dispassionate critique of Bolvars proposals (on the first page he described
it as a triple monster of legislation, so it is nevertheless easy to see where his
sympathies lay).50 Hall accused Bolvar of establishing in the new world the
errors and prejudices of the old, and of imitating the worst practices of
Spanish governance.51 The Bolivian Constitution was cast by contemporaries
like Hall as seeking to continue and emulate the reforms of the former colonial
rulers.
Talking About a Prince the Correspondence of Simn Bolvar and
Daniel OLeary
Daniel OLeary and Simn Bolvar corresponded frequently between 1822
and 1830 many of their letters were safeguarded by OLeary and published
in the 1880s in his Memorias de OLeary. Bolvar was non-committal, in what
survives of his written correspondence from 1828 and 1829, regarding the
potential monarchy project that was being hatched by his supporters in Bogot.
This has meant that his many biographers have been able to get him off the
hook when considering the extent to which he was implicated.52 Previously
unpublished letters from Daniel OLeary to Simn Bolvar, which I located
in Caracas in 2002 and edited and published in Bogot in 2005, demonstrate
El Constitucional, 24 August 1826.
Colombia in 1826, by an Anglo-Colombian, [probably Francis Hall], The
Pamphleteer, 63 (1828): 485506, held in the British Library, reference PP.3557.W,
p. 494.
51
[Hall], Colombia in 1826, by an Anglo-Colombian, p. 496.
52
Most recently see Lynch, Simn Bolvar, p. 266.
49
50
353
that Bolvar was very much up to date with the plans and probably agreed
with them as being in keeping with his own principles.53
It is clear from OLearys comments throughout 1829 that Bolvars ill
health was leading his supporters away from the idea of a Life President and
towards installing a European prince in order to allay the fears of European
investors about instability in Colombia. OLeary was one of the protagonists
attempting to convince Bolvar of their plan. OLeary wrote to Bolvar in May
1829, from Bogot, that:
Vergara and Castillo have decided in favour of a constitutional monarchy. They do
not foresee difficulties. They are thinking of bestowing the throne, although with the
modest but glorious name of Liberator, upon yourself. There is one obstacle, and
they are thinking deeply in order to overcome it. Seeing as in your family there is no
outstandingly merited individual who could succeed you, we still dont know how we
will work this one out. It is felt that you should name your successor yourself. It is
also felt that you should name a foreign prince as your successor. They speak of the
House of Brunswick, [but] the age of the individuals concerned, and their religion,
counts against them. The House of Saxony is Catholic, but if we can judge them by
individuals then this family is distinguished only by its notorious stupidity. Be that
as it may, Monarchy is the main topic of conversation here. My opinion is this:
We should conserve republican forms as far as is possible. We should fight over reality
rather than squabbling over shadows. If we can get a strong and eminently vigorous
government, it doesnt matter in the slightest what it is called. The Executive Power
will pose, of course, a big problem. I believe that we should conserve the name
of President, and that the term should be for ten years, with re-election possible.
These reforms should be made gradually but with substance.54
OLearys letters from this period were omitted from the original publication of the
Memorias de OLeary and as such are absent from subsequent re-editions. They were located
in Caracas by Manuel Prez Vila just before his death, and they are in the Fundacin John
Boulton in Caracas in the Seccin Manuel Antonio Matos and the Seccin Navarro. I have
published extracts from these letters in Matthew Brown and Martn Alonso Roa Celis,
(eds), Militares extranjeros en la independencia de Colombia. Nuevas perspectivas (Bogot,
2005), pp. 14159.
54
OLeary to Bolvar, 7 May 1829, Bogot, in Fundacin John Boulton, Archivo
OLeary, Seccin Manuel Antonio Mattos, M21-A02-E1-C513, reproduced in the original
Spanish in Matthew Brown and Martn Alonso Roa Celis (eds), Militares extranjeros,
pp. 1435. Translation here is my own. I have translated use of espantajo as the big
problem rather than literally its literal meaning as scarecrow I am presuming that
OLeary was referring to the Constitution as making Bolvars critics fly up and flap
around, rather than as a bit of wood dressed up in old clothes.
53
354
It is apparent from OLearys letters that he valued substance over form.

Monarchy was a word that would bring bad press, and was therefore to be
avoided. Nevertheless, even from early in 1829 the reports from elsewhere
in Colombia were not positive. His brother-in-law, Carlos Soublette, told
OLeary that everyone in Caracas, despite their good wishes, is very worried
about the monarchy project.55 This only served to make OLeary more
resolute in his move away from republicanism. OLeary told Bolvar rather
optimistically that the example [of a monarchy in Colombia] will before long
be followed by the other states of South America, and peace and order will
surely ensue.56 OLeary overlooked the opposition reported by Soublette and
other observers and sought reassurance from selective reference to events in
Mexico. He observed that:
Here [in Bogot], at least, I do not observe any opposition to the monarchy project.
The odd person does not believe that the country is ready for it, but I ask myself, and
I really would like to know which system is this country ready for? In America
each and every known system has been tried before Independence, and then several
others which have been recently invented, and none of them have worked. In
Mexico during Iturbides reign there was order, individual security and property was
respected. His territory was larger, and the state prospered. Nevertheless the Mexicans
looked for a revolution to remedy known or supposed problems. Perhaps their Princes
character was partly to blame. Iturbide fell, but it was not the system which brought
him down.57
For OLeary, as for Bolvar, the recourse to an enlightened absolutist

leader in the shape of a Life Presidency was a last resort in the face of the
disillusion of a decade of fighting to establish stability and order in Colombia.
His correspondence with the Liberator reveals the extent to which plans for
monarchy were being discussed at the very highest levels. But the final section
of this essay shows that such speculation had serious consequences.
The 1829 Rebellion of Jos Mara Crdoba
The anxiety and anger that the monarchy project triggered in even the most
loyal Bolivarians is exemplified in the case of Jos Mara Crdoba, who until
OLeary to Bolvar, undated, probably from end August 1829, Bogot, reproduced
in Brown and Roa Celis (eds), Militares extranjeros, p. 147.
56
OLeary to Bolvar, 28 August 1829, Bogot, reproduced in Brown and Roa Celis,
(eds), Militares extranjeros, p. 148.
57
OLeary to Bolvar, 9 September 1829, Bogot, reproduced in Brown and Roa
Celis, (eds), Militares extranjeros, p. 149.
55
355
early 1829 had been one of Simn Bolvars most loyal generals. He accepted
difficult assignments without complaint, and regularly argued for the
importance of Bolvars leadership to maintaining the integrity and honour of
the Colombian nation. Crdobas reputation as a heroic patriot meant that his
voice was listened to, and he became a valuable member of the post-war elite
that attempted to steer Colombia towards peace and prosperity in the second
half of the 1820s.58
In September 1829 Jos Mara Crdoba launched his political rebellion
with the publication of a manifesto that made a forceful attack on Bolvars
centralised tyranny. Historians have not been kind to the ideology behind the
manifesto. Jo Ann Rayfield described it as poorly conceived, badly prepared
and bringing terrible consequences.59 John Lynch called it rambling.60 For
Fernando Botero Herrero it was a mistimed and misjudged attempt to awaken
a regionalist rebellion, an attempt to oppose centralist rule from Bogot.61 In
it, Crdoba demanded to be ruled by laws and not by men.62 Describing
Bolvars conduct since 1826, he asked, is it not time that we shook off the
ignomious yoke with which he binds us? Is it not just that we detain the
progress of absolutism?63
News of Crdobas proclamation reached the capital, Bogot, on 25
September 1829. This was exactly one year after an unsuccessful assassination
attempt on Bolvar that had triggered the moves towards increasingly centralised
power that Crdoba now denounced as dictatorship. The atmosphere in
Bogot that evening as the news spread was strangely sombre and quiet.64
Bolvar was determined to resist the rebellion of one of his best and closest
men; and an army was sent to Antioquia under the command of another of
his young protgs, Daniel OLeary. Just over a month after the proclamation,
the two armies lined up on a plain at El Santuario, near Medelln.
Lynch, Simn Bolvar, pp. 25052, 266.
Jo Ann Rayfield, OLeary y Crdoba: Un resumen historiogrfico y nuevos
documentos, Boletn de historia e antigedades, 57:6635 (1970): 165.
60
Lynch, Simn Bolvar, pp. 2646.
61
Fernando Botero Herrera, Estado, nacin y provincia de Antioquia. Guerras civiles e
invencin de la regin, 18291863 (Medelln, 2003), pp. 445.
62
All quotes are from Jos Mara Crdoba, Manifiesto que el general Crdoba
presenta a los colombianos para informarlos de los motives, y objeto de su pronunciamiento,
16 September 1829, Medelln, reproduced in Daniel OLeary, Memorias de OLeary
Narracin (Caracas, 1952), pp. 4625.
63
Crdoba, Manifiesto, pp. 4625. The Manifesto was a personal pledge to regain
national pride for the people and from an absolutist dictator; this interpretation also
emerges from reading Crdobas private correspondence (cited below).
64
Pilar Moreno de Angel, Jos Mara Crdoba (Bogot, 1977), vol. 2, p. 595.
58
59
356
On the side of the official Colombian army was the 900-strong rapidreaction force which had been sent from Bogot, led by 29-year-old, newlypromoted General Daniel OLeary. On the other side Crdobas rebel army
amounted to just 300 fighters, leaving him vastly outnumbered, but undeterred.
Clear political lines were drawn up between the two sides; but it was clear that
they were also bound closely together by personal ties. As the two sides lined
up, an early morning mist settled over the combatants. Visibility was poor
and chaos and carnage ensued when battle was declared. After a while, as the
two sides were re-forming after a skirmish, Jos Mara Crdoba called out to
Daniel OLeary.65 Carmelo Fernndez, who served under OLeary, described
the exchange thus:
There was a short break in the fire, and during this period, Crdoba whose troops
were already formed as a column, said in a loud voice from his place at the head of
his men General OLeary I invite you to save the Republic, to which OLeary
responded, also in a loud voice so that Crdoba could hear him, General Crdoba,
that is exactly what I am trying to do. Very good, said Crdoba, Long Live
Liberty! And OLeary turned to his own men to respond, and shouted out Long
Live the Liberator!66
For OLeary, the Libertador and the Republic were indivisible. All of his
hopes for the future of Colombia were vested in the figure of one great man
the only solution to the countrys problems was to give as much power as
possible to Bolvar in order to save the republic. For Crdoba, saving the
republic and supporting Bolvars leadership had become incompatible. Battle
therefore recommenced. At some stage in the hostilities, Crdoba shouted
out to OLeary again, declaring that if it is impossible to triumph, it is not
impossible to die.67 Crdoba was then wounded, his forces were routed and
many of his soldiers fled the battlefield. Crdoba retired to a small house
to the side of the battlefield, where witnesses saw him murdered by the
Irish-Colombian officer Rupert Hand, apparently following orders given by
Crdoba and OLeary had been corresponding by letter in affectionate terms only
a couple of months previously. Crdoba wrote to OLeary in July 1829, thanking OLeary
for news of an unnamed woman who was presumably Fanny Henderson. Crdoba to
OLeary, 29 July 1829, Popayn, in Pilar Moreno de Angel, (ed.), Correspondencia y
documentos del general Jos Mara Crdoba (Bogot,1974), vol. 4., p. 216.
66
Carmelo Fernndez, Memorias de Carmelo Fernndez y recuerdos de Santa Marta
1842 (Caracas, 1973), p. 67.
67
Jos Mara Arango, cited in Moreno de Angel, Jos Mara Crdoba, vol. 2,
p. 652.
65
357
OLeary to find Crdoba, and kill him.68 OLeary sent an official report of
his victory to Bolvar.69 Crdobas threat to the central government was no
more, and Bolvars authoritarian regime limped on for another year, but the
monarchy plan was never resurrected.
If the Manifesto is read alongside Crdobas surviving private and public
correspondence from the two years preceding his rebellion, a hypothesis can
be that Crdobas personal honour and morality were closely linked with
his public politics, and his decision to rebel in 1829.70 The two key aspects
of this personal honour are Crdobas relationship with Fanny Henderson,
the daughter of James Henderson, the British Consul-General in Bogot,
and Crdobas attitude towards Simn Bolvars relationship with his lover,
Manuela Senz.71
From Jos Mara Crdobas private correspondence from the period leading
up to his rebellion, his political aspirations can be detected:
I want a strong government, like a monarchy but subjected to laws, linked to the
representative Houses, reasonably similar to that of England, but without nobility,
Lords, Counts, etc. This country can never prosper, will never be truly free under any
other form of government ... Every day I like Fani [Fanny Henderson] more, because
every day she grows up, and she becomes more beautiful: I will never see a more
divine woman. Almost every day I go to the Quinta, to take tea in the evenings. Her
parents never let slip the considerations and appreciation with which they have greeted
me since the first day, although I suspect that she does not love me, despite several
occasions where I have detected acceptance of my glances and my conversations.
See for example the account of Crdobas friend Francisco Giraldo, who witnessed
the attack. His account is reproduced in Eduardo Posadas biography of Crdoba. Aguilera,
Clave politica reproduces many of the testimonies of these events.
69
Daniel OLeary to Simn Bolvar, 17 October 1829, Marinilla, Archivo OLeary,
Seccin Navarro, Fundacin John Boulton, Caracas, f. 14, reproduced in Brown and
Roa Celis (eds), Militares extranjeros, pp. 15051. Much later on, probably in 1832,
Daniel OLeary wrote in his diary that Crdobas death corresponded with the whole
tenor of his life. Fighting like a lion, he fell and expired sternly, proud, and unrepentant.
R.A. Humphreys (ed.), The Detached Recollections of General D.F. OLeary (London, 1969),
p. 26.
70
Matthew Brown, Creating National Heroes in Post-Independence Spanish
America, unpublished paper.
71
In the same paper cited above I set out the hypothesis that James Henderson was
scheming with Crdoba against Bolvar at the same time as the British Ambassador in
Bogot, Patrick Campbell, was involved in the monarchy project negotiating informally
with cabinet ministers such as Vergara, also in Bogot, and liaising with Bolvars
representative, Daniel OLeary. On Campbell see for the moment, Lynch, Simn Bolvar,
pp. 2634.
68
358
There is a mystery about her that I think I can penetrate, but without confidence. Odd
things have occurred, which I will tell you when I have a moment. But in sum I am
anxious, I could not cope if I were to lose her, and for me to successfully possess her
there are so many obstacles; these would not include the will of her parents, but there
are so many more ...!72
Crdoba was careful in his choice of phrase: like a monarchy but subject
to laws. He recognised that monarchy in Colombia had lost all legitimacy
in the eyes of people who had gone from being subjects to citizens. By July
1829 Crdoba had become concerned about the legitimacy of authority in
Colombia, and convinced that Bolvar planned to set the republic on the
path to absolutism. He wrote to his brother from Popayn that I will not
return South for any reason whatsoever, under the despotic and treacherous
government of General Bolvar.73 Bolvars despotism was the outwardly
acknowledged cause of his rebellion but this was underpinned by other
concerns from his public and private lives. In July 1829 Crdoba wrote to a
supporter, Manuel Antonio Jaramillo, that Bolvar
commands us as though we were a rabble of shepherds ... and I have resolved to sacrifice
myself for the freedom of my patria and so that its government can be welcomed by
all, vigorous, just and liberal. ... The Liberator can not be the Emperor of Colombia
because he is a Venezuelan, and biased in favour of his countrymen ... and because
recently he has governed New Granadans as if he were a sultan ... and because he is
dominated by a woman who is worshipped by so many low-lifes including some of
our countrymen, shamefully who already treat her like a princess.74
Crdoba resented people treating Manuela Saenz like a princess just as

much as he hated Bolvars supposedly imperial designs. He felt his nation
undermined because an unrepresentative ruler was dominated by an immoral
woman who associated with foreigners and granted them undeserved favours.
Jos Mara Crdoba to Salvador Crdoba, 27 April 1828, Bogot, reproduced in
Mesa Nicholls, Biografa de Salvador Crdoba, p. 185.
73
Jos Mara Crdoba to Salvador Crdoba, 7 July 1829, Popayn, reproduced in
Mesa Nicholls, Biografa de Salvador Crdoba, pp. 21112. The Spanish original of the last
phrase is atormentado con la incertidumbre de mi Patria, y de mi amada. I thank David
Hook for his assistance with the translation of this complex paragraph: alevoso, translated
in the first line as treacherous, was a serious insult in medieval Spanish; in twenty-firstcentury Colombia it has been watered down to arrogant. I have chosen treacherous in
keeping with Crdobas comments on Bolvars dictatorship in other sources.
74
Crdoba to Manuel Antonio Jaramillo, 29 July 1829, Popayn, in Gabriel
Camargo Prez (ed.), Archivo y otros documentos del coronel Salvador Crdoba (Bogot,
1955), pp. 1368.
72
359
His reaction against the threat of absolutism was shaped by personal antipathy
to monarchism in all its forms. His rebellion against the perceived threat of
monarchy, a threat denied in public by all those involved, cost him his life.
Conclusion
Into the vacuum of legitimacy created by the decapitation of the Spanish
monarchy in continental America after 1808, fell numerous schemes and
proposals for reconstituting and reforming society and its governance. Some
republicans were seduced by the stability that was thought to accompany
a monarchical system. After his military encounter with Crdoba in 1829,
Daniel OLeary was ever more convinced of the need for monarchy. He wrote
to Bolvar that:
The poverty of the country would not detain me for a moment in pronouncing myself
in favour of a monarchical system. If you offer security and stability to Europeans, they
will not hesitate to bring us their capital. All of Europe would be delighted to see the
adoption of this system.75
There were several variations of monarchical forms of government from

which Colombians could have chosen: the constitutional monarchy of
Britain which both Crdoba and Bolvar admired; the national empire of
Iturbides Mexico or Pedro Is Brazil; and the absolutist model epitomised by
Fernando VII in Spain. Yet the political environment had been irrevocably
changed by the conflicts and sacrifices of the Wars of Independence and
there was no going back. Enlightened reform had become untenable as a
political approach in Colombia by the late 1820s, precisely because of the
foundational fighting against Spain which had created many martyrs and a
brand of patriotic republicanism that could not be betrayed. Republicanism
became entrenched because of the scars the violence of its birth-pangs had
left across society in Colombia, in stark contrast to the Brazilian experience,
where a relatively peaceful independence from Portugal led to the survival of
monarchical rule for another half century. In Colombia, republicanism had
triumphed even though in practice many groups in society were crying out
for a return to a reformed brand of monarchical rule. The contemporaneous
emergence of liberalism, proto-nationalisms and the spirited defence of new
national sovereignties were epitomised by the rebellion and death of Jos
Mara Crdoba.
OLeary to Bolvar, 5 November 1829, Medelln, in Brown and Roa Celis (eds),
Militares extranjeros, p. 155.
75
360
Simn Bolvars preamble to the Bolivian Constitution of 1826, Daniel

OLearys manipulation of the ideas contained in it, and Jos Mara Crdobas
rebellion against his own perception of Bolvars intentions, combine to illustrate
the contentious nature of the very idea of monarchy in post- Independence
Colombia. As John H. Elliott noted, Bolvar and his contemporaries were
unable to construct governmental systems capable, as in the United States, of
turning to creative purpose the tension between the centralising and separatist
tendencies inherent in the colonial tradition.76 For Simon Collier, the 1826
Bolivian Constitution was Bolvars solution to the problem of the political
stabilisation of Hispanic America, and the fulcrum of a middle-range supranational union linking what we now refer to as the Bolivarian Republics.77
But it was a solution whether we see it as pragmatic or utopian to a set
of questions whose terms of reference had changed because of the growth of
national sentiment as a result of the wars of independence. The rule of one
strong man handing on power to another strong man was no longer acceptable
politically because it clashed with the ideals of equality, merit and liberty for
which Independence had supposedly been fought.
The irony, as Bolvar himself observed in 1830, was that the rejection of the
strong centralist government and Life Presidency produced a medium-term
consequence that was much worse than that feared by the opposition. During
the course of the nineteenth century South Americans found themselves
increasingly resorting out of desperation to strong-man caudillos ruling on
the frontiers of institutionalised power, and employing their own charisma,
physical force and patronage to govern. Enlightened Reform perished on the
rocks of the diverse and unequal society of post-Independence Colombia,
onto which it had been blown by the winds of the rhetoric of republicanism
and national sovereignty.
Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, p. 398.

Simon Collier, Nationality, Nationalism, and Supranationalism in the Writings
of Simn Bolvar, Hispanic American Historical Review (1983): 55. Interestingly this is
the only mention of the Bolivian Constitution in Colliers seminal article, suggesting that
Collier ascribed the document much less significance than the other authors considered
above.
76
77
Chapter 21
Jos da Silva Lisboa and the

Vicissitudes of Enlightened Reform in
Brazil, 17981824
Gabriel Paquette*
Introduction
Robert Southey asserted that the materials required to write Brazilian history
differ from those of other countries: here there are no tangles of crooked
policy to unravel, no mysteries of state to elucidate, no revolutions to record,
[and] no victories to celebrate. Southey, whose History of Brazil was first
published in 1816, may have noted with some justice, and prescience, the
absence of full-blown political upheaval and major military engagements in
Brazils transition from colony to independent nation. But this essays central
assumption is that Southey equivocated, at least in part. A hefty measure of
crooked policy, and the political and economic ideas which underpinned it,
remains tangled and invites closer examination.
One key figure whose intellectual and policy contributions deserve further
study is Jos da Silva Lisboa (17561835). The activities of this Bahia-born
* The author expresses his gratitude to Trinity College, Cambridge and the British
Academy, both of which generously funded research trips to Brazil and Portugal in 2007
and 2008. A preliminary version of several sections of this essay was delivered as a paper at
the Beyond Slavery in the Iberian Atlantic conference held at the University of Liverpool
in September 2007. An early draft of this essay was awarded the 2008 JISLAC PostDoctoral Essay Prize.

Robert Southey, History of Brazil, 2nd edn ([1816]; London, 1822), vol. I, p. 1;
on Southeys attitudes toward colonialism, see Carol Bolton, Writing the Empire: Robert
Southey and Romantic Colonialism (London, 2007); curiously, the spirit of Southeys
analysis informed the subsequent historiographical tradition until very recently. See the
overview presented in John Charles Chasteen, Rediscovering the Excitement of Political
History in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, Luso-Brazilian Review, 37:2 (2000): 15.
362
political economist, colonial bureaucrat, crown publicist and, ultimately,

senator after the establishment of the Brazilian empire, better known to
posterity by his ennobled title, the Viscount of Cairu, reflect many of the
attributes commonly associated with, on the one hand, enlightened reform and,
on the other, the authoritarian streak of early nineteenth-century Brazilian
liberalism. Some features of Silva Lisboas thought, furthermore, arising
mainly from the peculiarities of his Brazilian context, appear incongruous or
fit clumsily within the ideal categories of enlightened reform.
This essay has two, overlapping objectives: first, to approach Silva Lisboas
obra and political engagement through the lens of enlightened reform; and,
second, to employ Silva Lisboas thought and career in order to interrogate
the concepts versatility and critically appraise its application to Brazil. The
essay argues that Silva Lisboa may be considered an enlightened reformer, but
only if the criteria underpinning this appellation are elastic enough to account
for four features or contexts which are crucial to the interpretation of his
thought: first, the discrepancies arising from periodisation which may frame
Silva Lisboa as anachronistic, derivative, or belated in relation to European
political writers; second, Brazils simultaneous retention and shattering of the
political and economic architecture of the Old Regime; third, Silva Lisboas
defense of the institution of slavery; and, fourth, Silva Lisboas shrill rhetoric
of reaction, instead of reform, in post-independence political debates.
Silva Lisboa may be studied against the backdrop of the persistence of
the Old Regime. In Brazil, as in Europe, old elites excelled at selectively
ingesting, adapting and assimilating new ideas and practices without seriously
endangering their traditional status, temperament and outlook. New currents
of thought were forced to adapt to the pre-existing worldview of the imperious
Old Regime, which excelled at distorting and defusing them.
On the rapidly shifting conceptions and meanings of liberal and liberalism in
this period, see the essays in Antnio Carlos Peixoto et al. (eds), O Liberalismo no Brasil
Imperial: Origens, Conceitos e Prtica (Rio de Janeiro, 2001).

These are, to be sure, far from inflexible categories. For two important recent
works on enlightened reform, see H.M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and
Reformers in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1990); and Derek Beales, Enlightenment and
Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London and New York, 2005). Enlightened reform
will not appear in quotation marks for the remainder of this essay.

Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New
York, 1981), pp. 13, 275; for a trenchant critique of Mayer in relation to metropolitan
Portugal, see Nuno Gonalo Freitas Monteiro, Elites e Poder: Entre o Antigo Regime e o
Liberalismo (Lisbon, 2003), pp. 140, 175; for an overview of Ibero-Atlantic elites, see
Monteiro, Pedro Cardim and Mafalda Soares da Cunha (eds), Optima Pars: Elites IberoAmericanas do Antigo Regime (Lisbon, 2005).
Jos da Silva Lisboa and the Vicissitudes of Enlightened Reform in Brazil
363
But such a view, if grafted on to Silva Lisboas thought and activities,

may prompt the misleading conclusion that he was a clever reactionary, a
postulant craving for social status and advancement, instead of a figure who
envisaged the transformation of Brazil within the framework bequeathed by
its colonial heritage. Brazils vertiginous collapse, he argued, would unleash
political and economic chaos which would abruptly amputate it from the
circuits of international trade which also served as conduits of what Silva
Lisboa consistently referred to as civilization.
Silva Lisboas status as an exemplar of enlightened reform, however,
is ambiguous. In part, this classification dilemma stems from his prolific
output. He penned seventy-seven publications books, extended articles, and
pamphlets between 1798 and 1832. This published work complements the
at least 522 transcribed speeches and miscellaneous interventions attributed
to him during his involvement in the short-lived Assemblia Constituinte
and decade-long tenure in the Senate. On the one hand, Silva Lisboas deep,
sustained engagement with European political economy, particularly his
ardent embrace of Adam Smith and his fervent, yet well-elaborated, disdain
for physiocracy, his successive bureaucratic appointments and lobbying for
crown-directed overhaul of trade, education, and other legislation, combined
with his authorship of a formidable corpus of pamphlets, and his innumerable
and voluble interventions in public debates, reveal that his career trajectory,
posture, and preoccupations are similar to those figures normally associated
with enlightened reform. On the other hand, however, Silva Lisboas work
as royal censor of the Impresso Regia, his numerous, rather hysterical,
screeds decrying the omnipresent spectre of Jacobinism and his vituperative
denunciations of dissident Brazilian regionalists who favoured a federal
model of national political organisation, his crown-commissioned histories
which uncritically lauded the political vision and official policies of Dom
Joo and, subsequently, Dom Pedro, his vocal denunciation of the moderate
constitutionalism of the Cortes of Lisbon (18211822), his threadbare
apology for Dom Pedros fico declaration and Brazils independence, his
spiteful celebration of the dissolution of the Assemblia Constituinte (1823) and
endorsement of the crown-imposed constitution (1824), and his circuitous
Mayer, Persistence of the Old Regime, p. 81.
Though the term civilisation crops up frequently in his obra, Silva Lisboa did not
define it explicitly. His usage, however, corresponds to Michael Sonenschers description
of Mirabeaus conception of it: a softening of manners, of urbanity, politeness, and a
spread of knowledge so that the observation of decencies takes the place of laws; see
Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the
French Revolution (Princeton, 2007), p. 219.

364
justification for the retention and expansion of Brazils slave-based economy

suggest that he was nakedly a reactionary, not an enlightened reformer.
Silva Lisboas rather uneasy connection to enlightened reform suggests that
its scope should be enlarged and its contours adjusted in order to accommodate
atypical and unfamiliar conditions and factors. Just as historians recently have
reframed the erstwhile Age of Revolutions in order to incorporate previously
underutilised evidence from the Southern Atlantic, this essay suggests that
the category of enlightened reform, too, should undergo similar renovation.
Such an enterprise would lay the groundwork for a more global conception of
enlightened reform and one which makes overseas empire integral to it.
Much of the analytical difficulty in the specific case of Silva Lisboa,
however, does not arise from his innate originality or idiosyncratic brilliance as
a political-economic thinker. Indeed, though contemporary historians rightly
repudiate all insinuations of Iberian-Atlantic intellectual life as second-rate or
meekly derivative of foreign models, it is hard to escape the conclusion that
Silva Lisboa was a massively erudite and energetic epigone. The trouble arises,
instead, because of periodisation. Silva Lisboas long career straddles three
historical epochs of European history crudely put, the late Ancien Rgime,
the French Revolutionary wars, and the Restoration and three overlapping,
but distinct, periods of Brazilian History the late colonial period (to 1808),
the Tropical Versailles era following the arrival of the Portuguese Court
(18081822), and the decade immediately following independence (1822
1831).10 Silva Lisboa fits uneasily, then, in the traditional periodisation of
For a valiant attempt in this direction, see Miguel Angel Centenos and Fernando
Lpez-Alvess Introduction to their edited volume The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through
the Lens of Latin America (Princeton and Oxford, 2001).

For two notable recent examples, see Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution
in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, 2006); and J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World:
Britain and Spain in America 14921830 (New Haven and London, 2006).

Perhaps as much of a problem is the contention that there was a paucity of ideas
of any sort percolating in the official policy-making circles of the Iberian empires. Peggy
K. Liss, for example, argued that power and ideological predominance remained with
the partisans of tradition, and the new, broadly European ideas and the new government
programmes were but two aspects of a limited and largely superficial renovation. See
Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 17131826 (London and
Baltimore, 1983), p. 74.
10
Given its narrow scope, this essay engages with and draws on, but does not
respond directly to, major studies of this period. These works include: Kenneth Maxwell,
Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal 17501808 (Cambridge, 1973); Fernando
Novais, Portugal e Brasil na Crise do Antigo Sistema Colonial (17771808) 7th edn
([1979]; So Paulo, 2001); Roderick Barman, Brazil: the Forging of a Nation, 17981852
365
enlightened reform because of the survival, indeed renaissance and expansion,

of the Old Regime in Brazil.11
Furthermore, due to the peculiar circumstances of Brazilian independence,
Silva Lisboa can be portrayed as the champion of a radical, as opposed to
a reformist, solution to the problem of reconfiguring the Luso-Atlantic
world.12 Such a characterisation, admittedly, may be somewhat misleading.
He supported the dismemberment of the Portuguese empire to avert the
social and political turmoil augured by the turbulent politics of the metropole
after 1822. Silva Lisboa was an apologist for the triumph of the oligarchy
over democracy, of reaction over liberalism in Brazil.13 Independence may
be interpreted as reform from above, a step taken to forestall a political
fragmentation similar to that experienced by neighbouring Spanish America,
let alone the social revolution which had engulfed and transformed Saint
Domingue, and to secure steady, slave-dependent, export-led growth for those
mercantile and agrarian elites who profited most from such an arrangement.
Many structural and institutional features of the Old Regime were purposefully
left untouched.14
(Stanford, 1988); Maria de Lourdes Viana Lyra, A Utopia do Poderoso Imprio: Portugal
e Brasil, Bastidores da Poltica 17981822 (Rio de Janeiro, 1994); Iara Lis Carvalho
Souza, Ptria Coroada: O Brasil como Corpo Poltico Autnomo 17801831 (So Paulo,
1999); Jurandir Malerba, A Corte no Exlio: Civilizao e Poder no Brasil s Vsperas da
Independncia (18081821) (So Paulo, 2000); and Kirsten Schultz, Tropical Versailles:
Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro, 18081821 (New York,
2001).
11
As Jeremy Adelman has argued persuasively, in relation to Ibero-America as a
whole, in the prolonged improvisation from 1807 to 1822, old systems were giving way
before there was a clear sense of finding new ones, forcing historians to dispense with
discrete stages, or smooth passages, so often invoked to account for macro-social change.
See Adelman, An Age of Imperial Revolutions, American Historical Review, 113:2 (2008):
332.
12
Though it should be noted that Silva Lisboa, in his capacity as editor of a shortlived, Rio-based periodical, was an advocate for reconciliation between Portugal and Brazil
in the immediate wake of the Porto revolution of 1820. See, for example, his editorial of
24 March 1821 in O Conciliador do Reino Unido no. 3, p. 22.
13
Kenneth Maxwell, Why was Brazil Different? The Contexts of Independence, in
his Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues (New York and London, 2003), p. 147.
For a suggestive comparative analysis of Brazilian and Spanish American independence,
see Brian R. Hamnett, Process and Pattern: A Re-examination of the Ibero-American
Independence Movements, 18081826, Journal of Latin American Studies, 29:2 (1997):
279328.
14
Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Political Emancipation of Brazil, in A.J.R. RussellWood (ed.), From Colony to Nation: Essays on the Independence of Brazil (Baltimore and
366
Yet if historians can appreciate the applicability to Brazil of Almeida

Garretts cynical judgment of the 1820 Portuguese revolution, which left
everything as it had been, changing nothing except the men in charge,15
Silva Lisboa might have disagreed. He might have contended instead that the
preservation of the existing political and social structures, with only superficial
changes, was the indispensable precondition of a more sweeping, if gradual,
transformation of Brazilian society.
Silva Lisboa, then, enjoys a rather ambiguous relation with the Old Regime.
On the one hand, he favoured the enhancement and unimpeded exercise of
monarchical power, an authority overtly challenged both by the demands
of the Lisbon Cortes in 18211822 and the aspirations of republicans and
radical federalists in northeast of Brazil. On the other hand, he opted for, and
rallied support behind, the radical solution of imperial disaggregation to the
problem of the internal conflicts that racked the Portuguese empire.
Silva Lisboas Career: The Trajectory of an Enlightened Reformer?16
Born in Salvador in 1756, of modest socio-economic origins, Silva Lisboa
went to the University of Coimbra in 1774 and obtained a bachelarado in
Canon Law and philosophy in 1778. He displayed sufficient aptitude in
Hebrew and Greek to remain as a substitute instructor for a year in those
subjects. He returned to Bahia to teach and hold a chair of Moral Philosophy
until his voluntary early retirement from pedagogical duties in 1797. He then
became Deputado e Secretrio da Mesa da Inspeo da Agricultura e Comrcio of
Bahia. He also began to publish, first the Direito Mercantil e Leis da Marinha
London, 1975), pp. 578.

15
Almeida Garrett, Portugal na Balana da Europa, 3rd edn (Porto, 1884), p. 62.
16
This biographical sketch draws heavily on those offered in works by Antnio Paim,
Cairu e o Liberalismo Econmico (Rio de Janeiro, 1968); Darcy Carvalho, Desenvolvimento
e Livre Comercio. As Idias Econmicas e Sociais do Visconde de Cairu. Um Estudo de Historia
do Pensamento Econmico Brasileiro (So Paulo, 1985); Antnio Almodovars introduction
to Jos da Silva Lisboa: Escritos Econmicos Escolhidos (180420) (Lisboa, 1993); Antnio
Penalves Rocha, Introduo to Jos da Silva Lisboa, Visconde de Cairu (So Paulo, 2001);
and Pedro Meira Monteiro, Um Moralista nos Trpicos: O Visconde de Cairu e o Duque de
la Rochefoucauld (So Paulo, 2004).
367
(1798, revised and expanded in 1801)17 and then the much-acclaimed

Princpios de Economia Poltica (1804).18
His state service and widely disseminated books, complemented by his
active correspondence with leading figures in Portugal, including Dom
Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho and Domingos Vandelli, assured Silva Lisboa a
cordial reception when the court arrived in Bahia en route to Rio de Janeiro
in 1808. In one of his initial acts, Dom Joo, then acting as regent for the
infirm Queen Maria I, decreed the creation of a chair in political economy
and appointed Silva Lisboa to it, though it never was established in fact.19
Nevertheless, Silva Lisboa was destined for a range of other official posts. He
was named desembargador da mesa do desembargo do Pao e da Conscincia e
Ordens, which, in effect, made him royal censor for the newly-established
press. He also was nominated deputado da Real Junta de Comrcio, Agricultura,
Fbricas e Navegao in 1808, where he exerted great influence over commercial
policy.20
Though he assumed positions of increasing responsibility within the
Rio de Janeiro bureaucracy during the subsequent decade, Silva Lisboa also
published some of his best-known books, most of which defended or sought
Though it should be noted that this book was the subject of at least one savage
review. See Reflexes Criticas sobre a Obra de Jos da Silva Lisboa, Intitulada, Principios de
Direito Mercantil, Feitas por hum Homem da Mesma Profisso (Lisbon, 1803).
18
Both works were published, of course, in Portugal. Brazil would not have a
printing press until the transfer of the court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. On
reading practices in colonial Brazil, see Luiz Carlos Villalta, O que se fala e o que se l:
lngua, instruo e leitura, in Laura de Mello e Souza (ed.), Cotidiano e Vida Privada na
Amrica Portuguesa (So Paulo, 1997).
19
In analysing the failure to establish the chair, Jos Lus Cardoso noted that the
intentions of enlightened reformers so often did not lead to a concrete result in the short
term. See Cardoso, O liberalismo econmico na obra da Jos da Silva Lisboa, Histria
Econmica e Histria de Empresas, [So Paulo] 1 (2002): 155; the failure to establish a
chair, it must be stressed, was not a reflection of any prejudice against the study of political
economy in the Luso-Atlantic world. On the contrary, Joo Rodrigues de Brito would
argue that without the study of political economy, a person should not be admitted to
university or appointed to public [state] service of any kind. See his Cartas EconomicoPoliticas sobre a Agricultura e Commercio da Bahia (Lisbon, 1821), p. 66.
20
Silva Lisboa was hardly a unique case: on the integration of ilustrados brasileiros
into the Rio-based bureaucracy after 1808 and their impact on Brazils subsequent political
trajectory, see Odila Silva Dias, A Interiorizao da Metrpole (18081853), in Carlos
Guilherme Mota (ed.), 1822: Dimenses (So Paulo, 1972), pp. 18084.
17
368
to generate support for crown policy.21 A polemic-laced apology for the

opening of Brazils ports to foreign, mainly British, ships in 1808 was followed
by a tract justifying the controversial 1810 commercial treaty with Britain,
and a torrent of pamphlets excoriating the 1817 uprising in Pernambuco and
endorsing its swift, severe suppression. In 1818, Silva Lisboa penned a history
which enumerated and eulogised the Courts achievements since its transfer
to the New World. In 1821, his strenuous efforts were rewarded with a new
post, that of Inspetor Geral of literary establishments in Brazil, which endowed
him with responsibility for censoring publications arriving in Brazil. In 1822,
Silva Lisboa authored a series of pamphlets and edited a bevy of ephemeral
periodicals justifying Brazils separation from Portugal. These promoted the
diplomatic recognition of independence by European powers and assailed
proponents of a more radical, particularly republican, political future than
that promised by the retention of the Braganza monarchy, even with its
accoutrements of constitutional government after 1824.
In 1823, Silva Lisboa became a delegate to the Assemblia Constituinte
and, subsequently, a vocal defender of Dom Pedros provocative decision to
prematurely dissolve that body and impose a constitution which he framed
and promulgated in 1824. For these services, Silva Lisboa was ennobled as
the Baron of Cairu in 1825, elevated to Viscount the following year, and
installed in the Senate from 1826 until his death in 1835. During this latter
period, he published at a staggering rate, writing a series of textbooks of
moral philosophy, political economy, and social conduct, as well as various
pamphlets lauding the policies and aspirations of Dom Pedro, including his
claims, made on behalf of his daughter, the future Maria II, against his brother
Dom Miguel for the right to succeed to the Portuguese throne.
Commentators and historians have arrived at widely-divergent conclusions
about Silva Lisboa. In his History of Brazil, John Armitage described him as a
magistrate, nearly 80 years of age, of unsullied integrity; poor when he might have
been rich had he only acted like many of his fraternity, amiable in private life and of
great erudition; but with ideas on religion and government at least a century behind
Such flexibility, of course, was common in Europe in the same period. As H.M.
Scott has observed, state administrations were still primarily a reservoir of people and
ideas, rather than a collection of formalised administrative structures. Personal initiatives
and private connections oiled the wheels of the state machine, which were not yet driven
by the bureaucratic routines of a later age; see Scott, The Rise of the First Minister in
Eighteenth-Century Europe, in T.C.W. Blanning and David Cannadine (eds), History
and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales (Cambridge, 1996), p. 51.
21
369
the prevailing ones of the present period, and, at the same time, he was but too often
violent and fanatical in expression of these ideas.22
This dual image of Cairu as formidable intellectual yet unrepentant

reactionary percolated well into the twentieth century. Recent opinions have
been variations on this theme: he did little more than legitimate the decisions
of the monarchs he served or, at least, there was a symbiotic relationship
between his writings and state power. Noting that little more than a fifth of
his work concerned economics, one historian recently described him as a not
really an economist, but merely a publicist.23 A scholar working on his late
career acknowledged his vast erudition, but focused on the authoritarian,
traditionalist discourse permeating his writings.24 His relative silence on
slavery, yet embrace of other facets of liberalism, has been attacked as indicative
of his archaic mentality or the unsystematic quality of his thought.25 There
was an unmistakable connection between his royal service and character of
his writings, but, in my view, their range and complexity obviates any simple
instrumental link between intellectual production and office-, sinecure-, or
prestige-motivated behaviour.
Silva Lisboas Political Economy and the Opening of the Ports (18081810)
Silva Lisboa played a pivotal role in two of the most contentious policy
decisions taken by the Portuguese crown after its transfer to the New World.
These were the opening of Brazils ports to foreign ships in 1808 and the
1810 commercial treaty, both of which were especially favourable to British
John Armitage, The History of Brazil: from the Period of the Arrival of the Braganza
Family in 1808 to the Abdication of D. Pedro the First in 1831 (London, 1836), vol. II,
pp. 4950.
23
Views summarized and cited by Antnio Penalves Rocha, Introduo, pp. 20,
35; elaborated at greater length in Rocha, A Economia Poltica na Sociedade Escravista (Um
Estudo dos Textos Econmicos de Cairu) (So Paulo, 1996), pp. 529 passim.
24
Joo Alfredo de Sousa Montenegro, O Discurso Autoritrio de Cairu, 2nd edn
(Braslia, 2000), pp. 2645.
25
See, for example, Malerbas A Corte no Exlio, pp. 21112; for an analysis which
asserts the homogeneous character of the Brazilian bureaucratic elite, see Jos Murilo de
Carvalho, Political Elites and State Building: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Brazil,
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24:3 (1982): 37899; for an important
analysis of Rios merchants, emphasising their conservatism and relative socio-economic
homogeneity, see Joo Fragoso and Manolo Florentino, O Arcasmo como Projeto: Mercado
Atlntico, Sociedade Agrria e Elite Mercantile em uma Economia Colonial Tardia, 4th edn
(Rio de Janeiro, 2001).
22
370
interests. The immediate and dramatic impact of this new legislation, which
completed the dismantlement of the economic nationalist framework devised
and implemented by Pombal,26 is well known: Bahia sent eight-ninths
of its cotton to Liverpool whereas three-quarters of the cotton and half of
the sugar produced in Pernambuco found their way to British ports.27 By
1812, Portuguese America took half as much English merchandise as either
the USA or the British West Indies. For Portugal, the metropole, this policy
shift produced much-lamented consequences. By 1812, for example, the
value of English exports to Brazil exceeded those of the Portuguese; of these
British exports, almost ninety per cent were wool and cotton manufactures.28
While these shifts were accepted as unavoidable expedients during the French
occupation, the restoration of the peace neither led to the resumption of
Portugals previous share of Brazils commerce nor the return of the seat of
empire to the Old World.29 The normalisation of what had been justified as
war-time exigencies had major repercussions in the next decade, culminating
On Pombaline political economy, see Maxwell, Pombal and the Nationalization

of the Luso-Brazilian economy, Hispanic American Historical Review, 48 (1968): 608
31; and Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 5680; on postPombaline political economy, see Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies; and Jos Lus
Cardoso, A Economia Poltica e Os Dilemas do Imprio Luso-Brasileiro (17901822) (Lisbon,
2001); on the place of colonial monopoly in eighteenth-century European thought more
generally, see Emma Rothschild, Global Commerce and the Question of Sovereignty in
the Eighteenth-Century Provinces, Modern Intellectual History, 1:1 (2004): 325.
27
Alan K. Manchester, British Preeminence in Brazil: its Rise and Decline. A Study
in European Expansion (New York, 1972 [1933]), p. 97; of course, this was building on
earlier patterns: already in 1790, 30 per cent of British imports of cotton were of Brazilian
origin. See Stuart Schwartz, De Ouro a Algodo: A Economia Brasileira no Sculo XVIII,
in Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri (eds), Histria da Expanso Portuguesa
(Lisbon, 1998), vol. III, p. 95.
28
Jos Tengarrinha, Relao Triangular: Portugal, Brasil, Inglaterra (Fim do Sculo
XVIII a 1825), in Sandra Maria Lubisco Brancato et al., (eds), III Simpsio Internacional:
Estados Americanos: Relaes Continentais e Intercontinentais500 Anos de Histria (Porto
Alegre, 2000), pp. 2632; the British presence in Brazils markets, however, must not be
overstated. Jorge Pedreira has shown that between 1812 and 1821 Brazilian imports from
Britain remained fairly stagnant and that it was only in 1818 that they matched the value
of imports from Portugal. See Pedreira, From Growth to Collapse: Portugal, Brazil, and
the Breakdown of the Old Colonial System (17601830), Hispanic American Historical
Review, 80:4 (2000): 8589.
29
For an excellent analysis, see Jorge M. Pedreira, O Fim do Imprio Luso-Brasileiro,
in Bethencourt and Chaudhuri, Histria da Expanso Portuguesa, vol. IV, p. 217.
26
371
in vociferous debates in the Cortes of Lisbon in 18211822 amidst Brazilian

protests against Portugals recolonisation ambitions.30
Silva Lisboa gained notoriety as the champion of this 18081810 legislation,
and it has been claimed that he orchestrated the monarchs break with the longestablished trade regime.31 Regardless, Silva Lisboas argument was grounded
in what he asserted were insights drawn from European political economy.
He chastised Davenant (and, indirectly but transparently, Pombal) for having
invented a ruinous mercantile system premised on false principles which not
only turned commercial statutes into labyrinths of restrictions and rendered
impossible the economys efflorescence, but also provoked rancorous political
animosities and bloody wars.32 For inspiration, he turned to Smith, whom
he christened the second father of gente civilisada.33 The Wealth of Nations,
Silva Lisboa contended, established the chief principles which statesmen
should follow who desire to promote the prosperity of their country.34
Valentim Alexandre, Os Sentidos do Imprio: Questo Nacional e Questo Colonial
na Crise do Antigo Regime Portugus (Porto, 1993); for an analysis of 1810 treaty, see
pp. 261338 passim.; on Portuguese debates after 1814, pp. 399401; on Brazilian
complaints, see Mrcia Regina Berbel, A Retrica da Recolonizao, in Istvn Jancs
(ed.), Independncia: Histria e Historiografia (So Paulo, 2005), pp. 791808.
31
For an excellent discussion of the background and impact of the opening of
Brazils ports, see Jos Lus Cardoso, A Abertura dos Portos do Brasil em 1808: dos Factos
Doutrina, Ler Histria, [Lisbon] 54 (2008), pp. 931; Jeremy Adelmans verdict on
these policies is that idealist convictions no doubt helped give these changes a patina of
enlightened inspiration, but it is hard to resist concluding that there was a measure of
spinning a virtue out of a necessity, in Sovereignty and Revolution, p. 255.
32
Jos da Silva Lisboa, Estudos do Bem Comum e Economia Poltica; ou Cincia das
Leis Naturais e Civis de Animar e Dirigir a Geral Industria e Promover a Riqueza Nacional,
e Prosperidade do Estado [Rio de Janeiro, 181920] (Rio de Janeiro, 1975), pp. 11617;
on Pombals economic doctrine with relation to Brazil, see Maxwell, Conflicts and
Conspiracies.
33
Silva Lisboa, Memoria dos Beneficios Politicos do Governo de El-Rey Nosso Senhor D.
Joo VI (Rio de Janeiro, 1818), pt. II, p. 67; the moniker given to Smith is intelligible in
light of Silva Lisboas 1804 pronouncement that political economy might be called the
art of civilising. See his Principios de Economia Politica (Lisbon, 1804), reprinted in Silva
Lisboa, Escritos Economicos, p. 11; by the 1820s, however, Silva Lisboas readings of Say
and Malthus would lead him to believe that even in Smiths work there were imperfections
and errors, even notable incoherent passages; see his Estudos do Bem Comum, p. 120; on
Silva Lisboas gloss on Smith, particularly his conception of political economy as a moral
science, see Antnio Almodovar and Jos Luis Cardoso, A History of Portuguese Economic
Thought (London and New York, 1999), p. 62.
34
Silva Lisboa, Memria Econmica Sobre a Franqueza do Commercio dos Vinhos
do Porto (Rio de Janeiro, 1811), p. 16; it was Silva Lisboas son, Bento, who translated
30
372
He therefore praised D. Joos deregulation of Brazils international commerce as

the action of an enlightened prince who comprehended that the unrestricted
extension of the market is the true motor of all trabalho util.35
Though he remained convinced that Brazils short-term (and even
medium-term) future was as an agrarian, export-orientated economy, Silva
Lisboa pilloried the physiocratic sect of France for its purported failure
to grasp international trades pivotal importance to agrarian prosperity.36
Furthermore, he castigated those who balked at the abolition of the timehonoured practice of colonial monopoly. Silva Lisboa argued that freedom of
commerce will not subordinate the metropole to its ultramarine dominions;
instead, it will stimulate the growth of all parts of the monarchy according to
their natural mode, and not at the expense of the rest.37 By opening the ports,
Brazilian exports would not be destined to follow false channels, forced into
predetermined circuits, and compelled to seek recourse in clandestine trade
which had produced the lamentable stagnation of the colonies.38 He pointed
to the nascent USA, blazing the path which he hoped that Brazil would tread:
without exclusive companies, monopolies, conquest or factories [on the west
coast of Africa], without disturbing the inhabitants of any country, it enjoys
commerce as far as Asia. England knows that it faces a fearful rival.39
extended excerpts of the Wealth of Nations into Portuguese in these same years.
35
Silva Lisboa, Observaes sobre a Prosperidade do Estado pelos Liberaes Principios da
Nova Legislao do Brasil (Bahia, 1811), p. 22.
36
Observaes sobre o Comrcio Franco no Brasil (1808), reproduced in Silva Lisboa,
Visconde de Cairu, p. 71; in his 1804 Principios, he elaborated on his critique of the
physiocrats: if such political economy was universally practiced, it would barbarize and
impoverish all nations, depriving them of the healthy, natural and efficacious means of
voluntary and reciprocal assistance, cooperation and mutual assistance. It would, in a
word, make commerce impossible, p. 52.
37
Ibid., p. 155; also see Donald Winch, Classical Political Economy and Colonies
(London, 1965).
38
Memorias Beneficios, p. 70; here Silva Lisboas understanding of political economy
and reform reflects broader European eighteenth-century trends. As John Robertson
has suggested, political economy was no longer concerned with the aggrandisement of
governments at each others expense; moreover, the purpose of reform should be the
removal of obstacles to the optimal course of development. See Robertson, The Case for
the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 16801760 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 29, 37.
39
Observaes sobre o Comrcio Franco, p. 179; Silva Lisboas praise of the USA should
not be altogether surprising. As Maxwell pointed out, those who saw the North American
model as relevant tended to see it as the conservative option, a solution to the colonial
dilemma that preserved the basic social organization, especially the system of slavery, but
373
At first glance and by his own admission, Silva Lisboa might appear a
disciple of Smith, following his critique of colonies rather closely. But Silva
Lisboas peculiar focus was the manifestation of the long-established link
between commerce and civilisation in his New World context. Silva Lisboa
viewed international trade as a mechanism to prevent not only the sort of
domestic social upheaval which had engulfed other colonies whose economies
were reliant on slave labour, notably Saint Domingue, but also the political
chaos which had succeeded commercial stagnation in Spanish America. Silva
Lisboa argued that Napoleons Continental system prefigured Europes descent
into barbarism:
France is sliding down the ladder of civilisation. It will soon be deprived of innumerable
sciences, ideas, industries, and sources of wealth which maritime commerce and the
celestial art of navigation sustain. It is astonishing that Europe, after reaching the
apex of civilisation, will consent to becoming little more than a second sub-Saharan
Africa.40
For Silva Lisboa, then, as for many of his contemporaries, there existed a
strong correlation between economic growth, social harmony, and cultural
flourishing. His comments reflect a particular preoccupation with the
fragility of the social order and the economic and cultural consequences of
its disturbance.
This concern led him to insist on bolstering absolute monarchy and
favouring the states extensive involvement in many areas of economic and
social life.41 The existence, indeed, the rapid expansion of slavery, which Silva
Lisboa routinely conceded jostled uneasily with the tenets of political economy
he espoused, required a robust state, capable of decisive intervention. Lessregulated trade, then, was not in itself an impediment to the expansion of
brought political emancipation from Europe. See his Hegemonies Old and New, in
Naked Tropics, pp. 867.
40
Silva Lisboa, Refutao das Reclamaes contra o Commercio Inglez (Rio de Janeiro,
1810), p. 107
41
Antnio Penalves Rocha, A Economia Poltica na Sociedade Escravista (um Estudo
dos Textos Econmicos de Cairu) (So Paulo, 1996), pp. 10517 passim, 143; on the range
of slave revolts which coincided with, and in many cases were inspired by, the example of
Saint Domingue (Haiti), see David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution in the
Greater Caribbean, 17891815, in Geggus and David Barry Gaspar (eds), A Turbulent
Time: the French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, IN, 1997); for an
overview of the conspiracies in Brazil which involved slaves or the issue of slavery, see
Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London, 1988), ch. 10.
374
state power in Brazil. On the contrary, an economic system predicated on

slave labour made it inevitable.42
The Contexts of Silva Lisboas Cosmopolitanism and Anglophilia
If the overarching benefit of commerce, in Silva Lisboas view, was the diffusion
of knowledge, not commodities, manufactured products, and capital, then
his avid interest in the practices of, and the resulting benefits enjoyed by,
other states is unsurprising. He asserted that the nations and governments
in possession of the greatest luzes always exercise true supremacy, or decisive
preponderance and influence over the less enlightened states.43 How could
such a deficit be reduced and how could a country accelerate its development
in order to attain this top-tier status?
Emulation was Silva Lisboas main answer. Proximity and good example,
he claimed, are the two greatest spurs to human action. By virtue of contact
with more civilised peoples, it is impossible that our industry will fail to
benefit.44 It is in this context that Silva Lisboas anglophilia and suggestion of
England as a model for Brazils emulation should be addressed.45
Silva Lisboas infatuation with Englands economic and political institutions
must have provoked ridicule for he prefaced allusions to his adulation of Britain
by stating that those derogated with the label anglomaniac merely detest
Gallic idolotary. He confessed surprise that the invocation of Britains example
produced such jealousy, threats, disparagement, and useless rage.46 Such
fascination, of course, was not unusual. The advantages and disadvantages of
England, as one eminent historian has argued, were enumerated, evaluated,
lamented over, [and] compared by European contemporaries.47
This subject is explored in the final section of this essay.

Observaes sobre a Prosperidade, p. 62.
44
Observaes sobre o Comrcio Franco, pp. 834.
45
On the phenomenon of emulation, see, most recently, Istvan Hont, Jealousy of
Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge,
MA, 2005), pp. 11521; since Britain/British and England/English are used
interchangeably in Silva Lisboas work, they are used in a similar way in this essay.
46
Observaes sobre o Comrcio Franco, pp. 75, 80; though one scholar has claimed
that British intellectual influence was greater than has ordinarily been recognized; see
E. Bradford Burns, The Intellectuals as Agents of Change and the Independence of Brazil,
17241822, in Russell-Wood, From Colony to Nation, p. 229.
47
Emma Rothschild, The English Kopf , in D. Winch and P.K. OBrien (eds), The
Political Economy of the British Historical Experience, 16881914 (Oxford, 2002), p. 31.
42
43
375
In the Portuguese Atlantic world, Pombal expressed admiration for Britains

colonial legislation as early as the 1740s. According to Jos Bonifcio, D.
Maria Is advisors encouraged the emulation of Russian, Danish, Prussian,
and English legislation in an effort to alter the mindset, customs, and ideas
of Portugal.48 Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, too, routinely praised English
practices.49
Silva Lisboas own publications are littered with references to books
written by Ferguson, Hume, Davenant, Steuart, and Gibbon, among others.
Aligning Brazil with Britain, Silva Lisboa contended, would not only provide
the advantages of a diplomatic alliance and naval defence, but also would
accelerate the diffusion and adoption of principles needed to elevate Brazil
to the top tier of nations. By learning the science of political economy, the
Brazilian nation can approximate the naces letradas instead of stagnate and
remain indifferent to the progress made by advanced nations.50 In another
context, he would argue that the greater our trade and interaction with the
For Pombals diaries from his embassy in London, see Sebastio Jos de Carvalho
e Melo, Escritos Econmicos de Londres (17411742) ed. Jos Barreto (Lisboa, 1986); Jos
Bonifcio, Elogio Acadmico da Senhora D. Maria I, delivered at the Lisbon Academy
of Sciences, 20 March 1817, in Carvalho (ed.), Desenvolvimento e Livre Comercio (So
Paulo, 1985), p. 80 fn. 1; according to Robert Southey, however averse they may be to
French principles, many of the Portuguese dislike the English influence, and reprobate the
Methuen treaty as the ruin of their commerce. See Southey, Letters Written During a Short
Residence in Spain and Portugal, 2nd edn (Bristol, 1799), p. 402.
49
On D. Rodrigos early political thought, see Pedro Miguel Carvalho Alves da Silva,
O Dispotismo Luminozo: Introduo ao Pensamento de D. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho
(M.A. dissertation, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1997); more generally, see Kenneth
Maxwell, The Generation of the 1790s and the Idea of the Luso-Brazilian Empire, in
Dauril Alden (ed.), The Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil (Berkeley and London, 1973),
pp. 10714; on the place of Britain in his thought, see Gabriel Paquette, Views from the
South: Images of Britain and its Empire in Portuguese and Spanish Political and Economic
Discourse, c.17401810, in Sophus Reinert and Pernille Rge (eds), Political Economy
and Empire (New York and Basingstoke, forthcoming).
50
Silva Lisboa, Leituras de Economia Politica, ou Direito Economico conforme a
Constituio Social e Garantias da Constituio do Imperio do Brasil, Dedicadas a Mocidade
Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1827), p. 7; in this regard, at least, Silva Lisboa shows himself
to be the heir of a previous generation of Luso-Brazilian reformers who had identified
cultural backwardness (atraso cultural) as the main obstacle to overcome. See Ana Rosa
Cloclet da Silva, Inventando a Nao: Intelectuais Ilustrados e Estadistas Luso-Brasileiros na
Crise do Antigo Regime Portugus 17501822 (So Paulo, 2006), pp. 3940.
48
376
English, with trust and constancy of friendship, the more we shall gain access
to the advantages which they enjoy.51
But it was Silva Lisboas perception of the sources of Englands prosperity
that deserves emphasis:
There is no doubt that the English nation is the most industrious and wealthy in
Europe. Its industry and wealth flow from eternal sources (which never run dry) of
knowledge and regularity (sabedoria e regularidade).52
This exemplary sagacity was complemented by incessant application, and

the full use of their natural resources.53 Elsewhere he would adulate the
incomparable activity of the English nation; the extent of its capital; its marvellous
advances in all types of machines and inventions in the arts; the great talent of its people
for the sea-faring life; the actions of its government; the excellence of its domestic
constitution; the wide diffusion of its literature and periodicals; and its individual
character. These characteristics form the first and principal base of the ascent of its
commerce overseas.54
For Silva Lisboa, then, economic prosperity and geopolitical power were
underpinned by habits of mind, cultural predilections, and carefully-cultivated
ingenuity. These underlying preconditions, rather than tangible results, justified
emulation. In Silva Lisboas view, such a strategy could expedite the passage
to opulence. It is sufficient to navigate in [Englands] wake, he remarked, to
follow in the admirable path it has opened such a good example should
enable [Brazil] to move forward with accelerated velocity, since it possesses
innate juvenile energy.55
Observaes sobre o Comrcio Franco, p. 83; certainly, Silva Lisboas optimism
was widely shared. Writing in O Observador Lusitano em Pariz in February 1815, the
distinguished intellectual and sometime diplomat Francisco Solano Constncio would
gush that civilisation in Brazil has made great progress, particularly in the port cities: the
mechanical arts are being perfected and the habits of the people are becoming more like
those of Europe. Today, in Rio and Bahia, there are beautiful theatres, promenades, and
hotels, as well as elegant shops, in no way different from those of Europe. In Jos Lus
Cardoso (ed.), Francisco Solano Constncio. Leituras e Ensaios de Economia Poltica (Lisbon,
1995), p. 42.
52
Ibid., p. 77.
53
Ibid., p. 85
54
Silva Lisboa, Refutao, p. 15.
55
Silva Lisboa, Memoria dos Beneficios, p. 145; Silva Lisboas mention of innate
juvenile energy should not be overemphasised. What Pocock has noted about Hume,
Robertson, and Smith applies equally well to Silva Lisboa: he regarded undifferentiated
51
377
Silva Lisboa was not, it must be stressed, a proponent of uncritical

emulation. In fact, he repeatedly warned that blind copying could yield
pernicious consequences. He therefore rejected proposals to nurture
manufactures in Brazil. If we attempt to introduce them here, solely driven
by the spirit of rivalry, spurred by mere imitation of foreign precedent, he
chided, such action would diminish our agriculture, exports and maritime
trade.56 Similarly, he repudiated the English Navigation Acts, hailed by Pombal
and many of his successors as venerable models, describing the formation of
such companies as a great error.57 He warned that imitation would result in
a sad parody of English policy, which is not a model of liberalidade in every
respect. The Navigation Acts, he contended, only made sense given Britains
geographic position, whereas their implementation would prove ruinous in
other countries operating under different constraints. Such misapplication, he
warned, has caused many injustices, political animosities, and wars.58
Burke of the Tropics: Silva Lisboas Francophobia, his Advocacy of
Independence, and his Tepid Constitutionalism
Besides Smith, the writer with whom Silva Lisboa engaged most deeply was
Edmund Burke. He translated significant excerpts from Burkes Reflections
on the Revolution in France into Portuguese, publishing them together with
an extensive commentary in 1812.59 His embrace of Burke stemmed from
Silva Lisboas anti-French sentiment, which he first articulated in the wake
of General Junots occupation of Lisbon, and his deep-seated aversion to
dramatic political change.
primal energy as barbaric and dangerous. See Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Vol. II
Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 33031.
56
Observaes sobre a franqueza da indstria e estabelecimento de fbricas no Brasil
(Rio de Janeiro, 1810), reproduced in Silva Lisboa, Visconde de Cairu, p. 247. Antnio
Almodovar has noted that manufactures do not play any role whatsoever in Silva Lisboas
thought. See Almodovar, A Institucionalizao da Economia Poltica Clssica em Portugal
(Porto, 1995), p. 55.
57
Silva Lisboa, Memoria da Vida Publica do Lord Wellington (Rio de Janeiro, 1815),
p. 86; on Pombals views on privileged trading companies and less regulated commerce,
see Maxwell, Pombal, pp. 5675.
58
Silva Lisboa, Memria Econmica, p. 53.
59
Silva Lisboa, Extractos das Obras Politicas e Economicas de Edmund Burke (Rio de
Janeiro, 1812); these were republished in Portugal ten years later as Extractos do Grande
Edmund Burke. Por JSL. Segunda edio, mais correcto (Lisbon, 1822).
378
Unlike many counter-revolutionary political writers, Silva Lisboa rarely

resorted to the imagery of the sceptre and the mitre or posited the divine origins
of princely power. Instead, he evinced less of a commitment to monarchy as
a form of government than to the virtues of social stability, political order,
and plodding, yet steady, economic prosperity which it reinforced. Silva
Lisboas deployment of Burkes name, if not his actual ideas, was a constant
feature of his public interventions between 1812 and 1824.60 He invoked
Burke in order to pursue specific political objectives: first, to promote Brazils
independence as a brake on broader, uncontrollable upheaval; and, second, to
advocate the suppression of republican-inspired regional revolts, particularly
in Pernambuco, initially in 1817 and then again in 18231824.61
In order to achieve these closely-connected aims, Silva Lisboa sought to
disseminate and utilise insights he claimed to glean from Burke. His frequent
allusions to Burke, however, raise certain methodological problems: is Silva
Lisboas use of him suggestive of cosmopolitanism or reactionary tendencies?
Does Silva Lisboas advocacy of gradual reform within a monarchy and his
justification of maintenance of the present order for the sake of economic
growth render him a reactionary or an enlightened reformer?
Silva Lisboas idiosyncratic use of Burke, I would argue, stems in part from
a chronological accident. Unlike many other figures commonly associated
with enlightened reform, Silva Lisboa responded to the late eighteenthcentury upheavals in Europe with the benefit of hindsight. He excoriated
their excesses while participating fully in the renovation and entrenchment
of the Braganzas in Brazil, a sequence of events which amounted, in effect, to
a restoration without a revolution. He thus worked to delay, neutralise, and
subdue political change, enabling the pre-Independence dynastys survival and
self-orchestrated reinvention with little more than cosmetic tweaking.
Because Silva Lisboa straddles the eras traditionally associated with
enlightened reform, the French revolutionary wars, and the Restoration, he
invoked eighteenth-century political writers to make arguments in unfamiliar
contexts, giving him the appearance of being well behind the times.
It is worth noting that the most curious thing about Silva Lisboas engagement
with Burke lies in the Brazilians failure to invoke Burkes eloquent pleas for government
reform or his urging of mediation between colony and metropole. Burke certainly could
have been employed in these contexts as well (given that the major landmarks of his
parliamentary career were highly pertinent to Silva Lisboas own concerns), but it was only
Burkes later writings on the situation in France which were cited.
61
On these revolts, see Carlos Guilherme Mota, Nordeste 1817: Estruturas e
Argumentos (So Paulo, 1972); and Evaldo Cabral de Mello, A Outra Independncia: O
Federalismo Pernambucano de 1817 a 1824 (So Paulo, 2004).
60
379
His political discourse is not anachronistic per se, but may appear so when
held up to the mirror of Europes historical trajectory. But this was not due to
any cultural or intellectual lag between the Old World and the New. Instead,
it may be attributed to the seismic political changes which resulted from the
ruptures wrought by the French revolutionary wars. Instead of viewing Silva
Lisboa (and, by extension, Brazil) as an exceptional case, the periodisation
of enlightened reform should be modified in order to encompass the first
decades of nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic.62
Silva Lisboas interest in Burke intensified in response to three political
stimuli: first, the 1817 insurrection in Pernambuco; second, Brazils
independence from Portugal; and, third, Pedro Is dissolution of the Assemblia
Constituinte, in which Silva Lisboa was a cantankerous and garrulous delegate.63
Silva Lisboas positions between 1817 and 1824 were surprisingly consistent,
even taking into account the destabilising forces percolating in the LusoAtlantic world. He was terrified by the prospect of Brazil retracing Spanish
Americas descent into political chaos. He derided the futility and instability
of [constitutional regimes] from Mexico to Chile, none of which has been
able to form stable and regular government or to secure the confidence of
foreign governments.64 Silva Lisboa argued that Brazil was unprepared for
what he disdainfully termed liberal political ideas. He asserted that Brazils
neighbours had been transformed
into fields of blood by the fantasies and passions of presumed liberal principles. They
tried to apply, to peoples of different character and an inferior level of civilisation, false
equality, spurious and far from genuine rights of man, which promise to transform
The difficulty of identifying discrete historical periods which are applicable across
the globe has been analyzed by C.A. Bayly: Any attempt to delineate periods in global
history, whether they are economic or cultural, is fraught with difficulty. The unintended
consequences of earlier political and economic decisions spiralled uncontrollably outwards
from world centres of power, deepening and changing as they were absorbed into
continuing local conflicts over rights, honour and resources; see Bayly, The Birth of the
Modern World 17801914 (Oxford, 2004), p. 168.
63
On broader political debates in this period, see Lcia Maria Bastos Pereira das
Neves, Corcundas e Constitucionais: A Cultura Poltica da Independncia (Rio de Janeiro,
2003); Renato Lopes Leite, Republicanos e Libertrios: Pensadores Radicais no Rio de Janeiro
(1822) (Rio de Janeiro, 2000); and Estilaque Ferreira dos Santos, A Monarquia no Brasil:
o Pensamento Poltico da Independncia (Vitoria, 1999).
64
[Cairu], Appello Honra Brasileira contra a Faco dos Federalistas de Pernambuco
(Rio de Janeiro, 3 August 1824), p. 7.
62
380
society into a terrestrial paradise but all nations do not share equal preparation to
take advantage of the same constitution.65
Instead, Silva Lisboa would argue for what he termed good constitutional
government, as opposed to its specious rival forms. Composed of three
powers, he compared it to sugar, which, in order to acquire and retain its
proper crystallisation, consistency and sweetness, requires that its three
principle constituent elements are in perfect equilibrium any disruption
of the balance will destroy its natural structure and virtues.66 On the basis of
such ratiocination, he distanced himself from Benjamin Constant, whom he
routinely denigrated as not my sort of man, because of his insidious attempt
to covert the monarchy into a mere neutral power without substantial
authority.67
While insisting that he despised despotism in all of its guises,68 Silva Lisboa
argued that while [Brazils] constitution is not the very measure of perfection
(nor would such a thing be possible, given the weakness of human reason),
it is nevertheless better than most of Europes constitutions and provides
more stability and guarantees than any other in America.69 Silva Lisboa, then,
justified the severe repression of federalist revolts in the northeast, Brazils
independence from Portugal, and the emperors imposition of a constitution
by invoking the spectre of instability and its potential to undermine irreversibly
economic prosperity and national consolidation.
Nevertheless, several questions remain: if he was merely a reactionary, why
did Silva Lisboa feel compelled not only to invoke, but actually to translate
and to engage with European writers? Why pay lip-service to constitutional
principles and describe a mixed constitution as optimal? Should his quest
Baro de Cayr, Contestao da Historia e Censura de Mr De Pradt Sobre Successos
do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1825), p. 23.
66
Silva Lisboa, Roteiro Brazilico, ou Colleco de Principios e Documentos de Direito
Politico (Rio de Janeiro, 1822), p. 3
67
Annaes do Parlamento Brazileiro: Assemblia Constituinte 1823 (Rio de Janeiro,
1879), tomo IV, 6 August 1823, p. 37; on the Assemblia Constituinte of 1823, see
Celso Rodrigues, Assemblia Constituinte de 1823: Idias Polticas na Fundaco do Imperio
Brasileiro (Curitiba, 2002); and Jos Honrio Rodrigues, A Assemblia Constituinte de
1823 (Petrpolis, 1974).
68
[Cairu, signed Fiel Naco], Falsidades do Correio e Reverbero Contra o Escriptor
das Reclamaes do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 23 July 1822).
69
Visconde de Cayr, Manual de Politica Orthodoxa (Rio de Janeiro, 1832), p. 43;
It is interesting to note that the 1824 constitution, framed by Dom Pedro, drew heavily
on Benjamin Constants political ideas. I found no disparagement, unsurprisingly, of
Constant in Silva Lisboas writings after 1824.
65
381
for stability as a cornerstone of broader economic and material progress be

regarded as a type of enlightened reform?
Here again his attitude toward England and its institutions may furnish
clues. As described in the previous section, Silva Lisboa contended that England
was an appropriate model for Brazils emulation. In addition to praising its
intellectual habits, work ethic and material prosperity, he lavished praise
on Britains avoidance of the convulsions and anarchy which had hastened
the decline of other states.70 He considered stability to be the prerequisite of
prosperity. Silva Lisboa therefore lauded Britains enjoyment of a constitution
that contains elements of steady progress of all the good that our species is
capable of achieving.71 He argued that experience shows that monarchies,
with fundamental laws and rational civil codes offer the greatest security
to persons and property, and more constant tranquillity and continuity of
government, than all other types of political regimes.72 For Silva Lisboa, then,
monarchy and the benefits which he ascribed to it were a greater priority than
the territorial or legal integrity of the Portuguese empire.
Explicitly citing Burke, he made clear that to execrate revolutions is not
to defend bad government. Silva Lisboa likened revolutions to earthquakes
that ruin everything and solve nothing, resulting only in deleterious social
upheaval. Aspirations for the redistribution of political power would go
unfulfilled. He predicted that civil society, after such political convulsions, will
return to being composed of rich and poor, patricians and plebeians, the good
and the bad, those who rule and those who obey.73 Silva Lisboa thus distilled
the events, both European and American, of the previous decades into a single
lesson: it is better to retain and strengthen long-established institutions than
to experiment with new-fangled ideas in a combustible social laboratory.
For Silva Lisboa, the spectre of instability would preclude major structural
transformation and obviate sound policys effects. France was converted, in
Silva Lisboa, Refutao, p. 16
Silva Lisboa, Extractos Burke (Rio de Janeiro, 1812), p. 39.
72
Silva Lisboa, Memoria dos Beneficios, pt I, vol. I, p. 17; in recognizing the benefits
of monarchy, Silva Lisboa was joined by many Spanish American intellectuals, including
Andrs Bello. In an April 1820 letter to Blanco White, Bello declared that he was
persuaded that [Spanish Americans] will not enjoy any peace if they try to organize under
principles other than those of monarchy. Quoted in Ivn Jaksi, Andrs Bello: Scholarship
and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge, 2001), p. 45. On
monarchism in the 1820s and 1830s in Spanish America, besides Matthew Browns essay
in this volume, see Mark J. Van Aken, King of the Night: Juan Jos Flores and Ecuador,
18241864 (London and Berkeley, 1989).
73
Silva Lisboa, Extractos Burke, pp. xviiixix.
70
71
382
Silva Lisboas bleak survey of world affairs, into an albatross for the perils of
radical change:
In twenty-five years of irregular constitutions, France suffered more bloodshed and
poverty than during the ten centuries that it was under monarchical government
we now observe its government with a constitutional charter, but without stability,
and its people enjoy even less liberty in practice than that enjoyed in other advanced
countries which have pursued a reasonable and moderate reform of their laws.74
It is clear that both Silva Lisboas justification of independence and his

visceral disdain for constitutions that were not gifts from the throne were
underpinned by the priority he allotted to political stability.
Such frequently-aired opinions have led some historians to denounce
the authoritarianism latent in Silva Lisboas thought. What makes this
characterisation misleading is Silva Lisboas own insistence that, in the longterm, such crude absolutism would be undesirable and untenable. Instead,
he urged the implementation of a general program of education to eradicate
ignorance and diminish the likelihood of political disruption. Eschewing any
notion of indoctrination, he speculated that widespread education would
promote docility, not agitation, and an appreciation of the fragile virtues of
the existing order. Silva Lisboa argued that rude peoples are more difficult to
rule and more easily deluded by cabals of ambitious troublemakers, whereas
the best subjects know both their rights and their duties.75 Education, then,
diminishes the tendency to question the existing regimes legitimacy and makes
subjects aware of the perils of hasty perturbation of the established order.
Silva Lisboa remained preoccupied with what he considered the deleterious
long-term political and economic effects of cultural stagnation, which he
associated with political upheaval. In his view, the rudimentary general
level of scholastic attainment precluded the introduction of even the most
elementary civil freedoms, including that of the press. In countries with
backward peoples (povos atrasados), Silva Lisboa warned, ideas and science
may become like firearms in the hands of children, and, instead of extending
public morality, produce the opposite effect, spoiling the honour of even the
best individuals.76
[Cairu], Imprio do Equador na Terra da Santa Cruz. Voto Philanthropico do Robert

Southey (Rio de Janeiro, 1822), p. 123.
75
Silva Lisboa, Memoria dos Beneficios, pt I, vol. I, p. 21.
76
Silva Lisboa, Constituio Moral e Deveres do Cidado com Exposio da Moral
Pblica Conforme o Esprito da Constituio do Imprio [Rio de Janeiro, 1824] (Joo Pessoa,
1998), p. 400.
74
383
It may seem that this reasoning was a ruse to justify the postponement of
long-promised rights, but a closer examination indicates that Silva Lisboa rued
this state of affairs. In the short term, before such grandiose schemes could
be implemented, the sword must be used to combat the hydra of Jacobinism
and the spectre of federalism.77 Silva Lisboa insisted that the level of education
in Brazil was treacherously inadequate, and its internal threats too numerous
and immediate, to allow for flexibility. Nascent and fragile political structures
would only be exposed to manipulation by conspirators and cabals. Such
threats would become atavisms, however, as the progress of knowledge and
expansion of access to education brought not only material wealth, but also
public tranquillity, even political listlessness, to an independent Brazil. For
Silva Lisboa, as for many of his contemporaries, the Brazilian state would
instill civilisation and extirpate barbarism.78
Silva Lisboas Stance on Slavery and its Place in his Political Thought
Between 1790 and 1830, Rio de Janeiro emerged as the largest slave-importing
port in the Americas. Between 1780 and 1810, more African slaves entered the
Brazilian capital than all imports of slaves to the U.S.A. and Spanish America
combined. In 1808 alone, 765 slave trading vessels entered Rio; in 1810,
1,214 dropped anchor in its harbour. Between 1801 and 1839, 570,000 slaves
were brought to Rio.79 In this period, moreover, a transformation occurred in
the southern states. For example, in So Paulo, in 1804, 70 per cent of slaves
were forced to labour on farms that produced for the domestic market. By
1829, however, only 49 per cent of slaves were dedicated to production aimed
at domestic consumption. The changing ratio is explained by export-led,
Silva Lisboa, Appello, 29 July 1824, p. 1; it would be interesting to compare
Silva Lisboas call to crush the rebels in Pernambuco in the 1820s with Burkes defense
of intervention against France. For an astute analysis of Burkes view that the French
Republic presented an unprecedented threat justifying intervention by all European
states, see David Armitage, Edmund Burke and Reason of State, Journal of the History of
Ideas, 61:4 (2000): 61734.
78
For the repercussions of this view in nineteenth-century Brazilian politics, see
Jeffrey Needell, The Domestic Civilizing Mission: The Cultural Role of the State in Brazil,
18081930, Luso-Brazilian Review, 36:1 (1999): 118.
79
Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution, pp. 75, 246; even before this massive influx
of slaves, the 1775 census in Salvador revealed 44 per cent of the population was enslaved
whereas in Rio de Janeiro slaves made up almost 35 per cent of the population; figures
cited in Kirsten Schultz, The Crisis of Empire and the Problem of Slavery: Portugal and
Brazil, c. 17001820, Common Knowledge, 11:2 (2005): 2734.
77
384
plantation-based production which had increased sharply, especially in coffee

(by 40 per cent) and sugar (by 38 per cent), in the intervening decades.80
Slavery is an issue, therefore, with which any treatment of enlightened
reform in Brazil must grapple. Silva Lisboa articulated a vision, hardly
systematic, of a post-chattel slavery future for Brazil. His arguments were
made along strikingly different lines from the more familiar discourse of
humanitarianism or liberal commitment to free labour.81 The absence of
such commentary, it might be argued, is one of the reasons why Silva Lisboa
has been discarded by some historians as an unrepentant reactionary, an
apologist for the Luso-Brazilian absolutist state, and a figure who legitimised
the position of the land and slave-owning elites who sought to consolidate
their power while adopting a liberal veneer.82
Silva Lisboa would have been keenly aware of the rising tide of slave imports
and undoubtedly would have grasped that the merchants reliance on credit to
sustain economic expansion, which caused their chronic indebtedness, meant
that the most productive sectors of the Brazilian economy were the slave-
Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert Klein, African Slavery in the Production
of Subsistence Crops: the Case of So Paulo in the Nineteenth Century, in D. Eltis,
F.D. Lewis, and K.L. Sokoloff (eds), Slavery in the Development of the Americas (Cambridge,
2004), pp. 1267, 149. NB: percentages for coffee and sugar are from 1836.
81
On the function of slavery in liberal thought in late eighteenth and early
nineteenth-century Brazil, see Kenneth Maxwell, Portuguese America, International
History Review, 6:4 (1984); Jurandir Malerba, Os Brancos da Lei: Liberalismo, Escravido
e Mentalidade Patriarcal no Imperio do Brasil (Maring-PR, 1994); and Mrcia Regina
Berbel and Rafael de Bivar Marquese, The Absence of Race: Slavery, Citizenship, and ProSlavery Ideology in the Cortes of Lisbon and the Rio de Janeiro Constituent Assembly,
Social History, 32:4 (2007): 41531; for a comparative examination, see Rafael de Bivar
Marquese, Escravismo e Independncia: A Ideologia da Escravido no Brasil, em Cuba e
nos Estados Unidos nas Dcadas de 18101820, in Jancs, Independncia, pp. 80927;
but in this case, too, we must be wary of viewing Brazilian debates as behind their
European counterparts. As Christopher L. Brown has recently pointed out, it was the loss
of the Britains North American colonies in 17751783 that made British abolitionism
(and its discourses) conceivable and made Britain exceptional. He contends that it helped
antislavery activists seem like moral exemplars rather than utopian fanatics, as idealists
hoping to restore the honour of the British empire rather than driving it to division and
ruin. See Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC,
2006).
82
The most recent exponent of this view is Rocha, A Economia Poltica, p. 152.
80
385
worked plantations and mines.83 Under such circumstances, the imminent

abolition of the slave trade was inconceivable, recognition of moral arguments
against such odious commerce notwithstanding.
But Silva Lisboa did not celebrate a purely synergistic relation between
slave-based, export-oriented economy and British capitalism. On the
contrary, Silva Lisboa conceived that trade with Britain would raise Brazil
to a degree of prosperity which would bring about slaverys demise. Trade
would re-shape Brazils economy. In asserting this link, Silva Lisboa may have
found justification in Smiths contribution, in The Wealth of Nations, to the
rich-country poor-country debate, which had argued for the importance
of attracting capital into agriculture for poor countries aspiring to have new
industries.84 For Silva Lisboa, Brazils agrarian economy required more time to
develop and to become fully enmeshed in international commercial networks
before the abolition of slavery could be contemplated.
Silva Lisboas chief fear was that this export-led development trajectory
could be interrupted by a Saint Domingue-style insurrection. He often
invoked this precedent in his writings.85 The prospect of separation from the
circuits of commerce, with their civilising function, profoundly perturbed
him. Silva Lisboa drew a direct correlation between civilisation and
burgeoning international commerce whose preservation he endorsed by any
means necessary.
He recognised, however, the paradox that such trade depended on
commodities produced by forced labour, necessitating the accelerated import of
slaves. This changed the racial composition of society which, in turn, he argued,
undermined the process of civilisation and raised the spectre of catastrophic
instability. Silva Lisboa therefore urged the whitening (embranquiamento) of
Brazils population through the encouragement of European immigration. In
his view, such voluntary European immigration could mitigate the impact of
Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade
17301830 (London, 1988), pp. 67886 passim.
84
Smith had observed that the capital that is acquired to any country by
commerce is very precarious and uncertain possession, till some part of it has been secured
and realised in the cultivation and improvement of land; quoted in Istvan Hont, The
Rich Country-Poor Country Debate in Scottish Classical Political Economy, in Hont
and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the
Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 3045.
85
Nor was Silva Lisboa a solitary voice crying out on this matter: Francisco Solano
Constncio had argued, in O Observador Lusitano em Pariz in January 1815, that Brazil
needed to phase out slavery, warning that if time is squandered, it is a great danger that
Brazil will be turned into a second theatre of horror, following in the footsteps of Saint
Domingue. See Cardoso, Francisco Solano Constncio, p. 39.
83
386
forced migration from Africa. The state would have to intervene before market
forces created a society whose racial composition, predicated on socio-economic
disparities and political inequalities, would prove unstable. Immigrants would
flock to Brazil when it furnished conditions which resembled those of Europe,
only more salutary, and offered greater prospects for land tenure.
This conjuncture, however, could only come about as the result of rising
levels of wealth which were itself contingent on slaverys expansion. Brazil,
Silva Lisboa asserted, can be a place for immigrants whose overcrowding in
cities is the cause of their poverty, wrongdoing, and wars that afflict Europe.86
The level of voluntary immigration was directly correlated to Brazils economic
fortunes. Whitening and long-term prosperity, therefore, were inextricably
linked in Silva Lisboas thought. It came as no surprise, therefore, when,
in 1818, Dom Joo levied an import tax on slaves and decreed half of this
new revenue stream earmarked to encourage European immigration.87 This
legislation and similar, though sporadic, additional measures were embraced by
such leading political writers and actors as Hiplito da Costa, Jos Bonifcio,
and Jos Carneiro de Campos.88
For Silva Lisboa and his peers, such periodic state intervention
complemented a longer-term shift that would presage the extinction of slavery:
the transformation of the economic and social structure of society through its
Silva Lisboa, Causa do Brasil, p. 21.
Roderick Cavaliero, The Independence of Brazil (London and New York, 1993),
p. 67; It should be noted that these emigration inducement schemes did not work out as
well as many had anticipated. In fact, according to a document entitled Swiss Colonists in
the Brazils, which is the account of a meeting of Swiss residents in London on 20 September
1821, the situation was rather grave: Although every attention has been directed by the
Portuguese government towards preparations that might ensure the comfort of the settlers
on their arrival, many unforeseen difficulties intervened owing to the thick woods, the
very unlevel face of the country but few of the subdivisions of the lands appear yet to
have been made. Document found in the Arquivo Nacional do Torre do Tombo, MNE,
Caixa 745.
88
On Bonifcios views, see Maxwell, Portuguese America, p. 547 and Ana Rosa
Cloclet da Silva, Construo da Nao e Escravido no Pensamento de Jos Bonifcio
17831823 (Campinas, 1999); for Carneiro de Campos, see Documentos para a Historia
da Independencia (Rio de Janeiro, 1923), vol. I, p. 364; on the function of European
immigration scheme in Brazilian thought in the late nineteenth century, see Emilia Viotti
da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago and London, 1985), p. 124;
on link between comrcio livre and European immigration in early nineteenth-century
Brazilian thought, see Maxwell and Maria Beatriz Nizza da Sliva, A Poltica, in Nizza da
Silva (ed.), O Imprio Luso-Brasileiro 17501822. Vol. VIII of Nova Histria da Expanso
Portuguesa. Dir. Joel Serro and A.H. Oliveira Marques (Lisbon, 1986), pp. 37072.
86
87
387
full insertion into intercontinental, maritime trade. This predicted outcome

notwithstanding, the abolition of slavery remains a subject concerning which
Silva Lisboas credentials as an enlightened reformer are decidedly suspect.
It must be conceded that he supported British plans for the abolition of the
Brazilian slave trade, but the grounds on which he made this argument reflect
the exigencies of politics and concern for the bottom-line. The English,
he wrote, recognise that it is in their genuine interest that Brazil advances
with free people (gente livre), of European extraction, because they are more
intelligent, moral and industrious, and productive.89 Silva Lisboas support,
then, reflected more of an awareness of geopolitical realities and fiscal pressures
than humanitarian or other loftier motivations.
In the hierarchy of Silva Lisboas thought, slaverys abolition occupied a lessthan-exalted station. His commitment to the end of the slave trade and slavery
was subordinate to his main priority: Brazils deepening links to European
markets, products, and ideas. Silva Lisboa resigned himself to the existence of
slavery, viewing its persistence as unavoidable so long as Brazils connection
to Europe was premised on its capacity to supply commodities produced by
slaves. Nevertheless, he did envisage slaverys ultimate obsolescence through
the economic transformation that international trade would galvanise.
Whether this meliorist stance bolsters his enlightened reform credentials or
suggests a disturbing moral complacency, however, is well beyond the scope
of this essay.
Conclusion: Silva Lisboa and Enlightened Reform
Silva Lisboas status as an exemplar of enlightened reform is highly ambiguous.
Some of his qualities reflect those associated with the ideal type: first, a deep
engagement with European political and economic writers; and, second, a
bureaucratic career devoted to the gradual reshaping of institutions from
within on the basis of abstract principles, drawn from his wide reading,
concerning geopolitical and social harmonisation through economic growth.
Other aspects of Silva Lisboas thought and career, however, urge the opposite
Silva Lisboa, Imperio do Equador, p. 36; By the end of the 1820s, however, such
enthusiasm had waned: according to an anonymous pamphlet published in Portugal,
instead of dedicating themselves to agriculture, the Irish and Swiss colonists fled the
countryside and can be found begging for alms in the cities [of Brazil]. Dont fool yourself:
the only type of agriculture possible in Brazil is that done on sugar plantations, and this
cannot flourish without slave labour. Anything else is doomed to fail and is an utter waste
of time. See Golpe de Vista sobre o Imperio do Brasil. Escripto por hum Portuguez Curioso que
tem por la viajado (Lisbon, 1829), pp. 1415.
89
388
conclusion. First, there is the problem of Silva Lisboa as a latecomer. This is

mainly attributable to the fact that his career transpired well after the period
traditionally associated with enlightened reform. Second, his justification of
slavery raises questions about the malleability of his economic liberalism. Third,
and particularly toward the latter phases of his career, Silva Lisboa rejected all
representative institutions which constrained the monarch and vociferously
campaigned to crush resistance to the crown-imposed constitution of 1824.
This essays chief aim, however, was not exclusively to highlight the
discrepancy between Silva Lisboas career and that of the ideal type of
enlightened reformer. It was rather to suggest the need to integrate Brazils
history, particularly after 1808, into the broader paradigm. To do so
effectively would entail several historiographical shifts. First, enlightened
reforms chronological scope would need to be extended to account for the
persistence of the Old Regimes institutions, especially in the extra-European
world.90 Second, historians would have to take colonial intellectuals seriously
and recognise the pivotal role they often played in state reform, both in
its formulation and its implementation. Third, there would need to be a
heightened awareness that the invocation of ideas usually associated with
the counter-enlightenment does not disqualify a figure from consideration
within the framework of enlightened reform. A fuller appreciation of the
different contexts in which colonial and metropolitan actors operated would
facilitate the recognition of similarities of enlightened reform on both shores
of the Atlantic.
As Stanley and Barbara Stein rightly noted, almost forty years ago, within the
variety of the nineteenth-century historical experience one detects large outcroppings
of the colonial heritage, symptoms of its survival under favourable conditions () the
historian must therefore question the validity of the wars of independence as an historical
benchmark. See Stein and Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic
Independence in Perspective (New York, 1970), pp. 15960.
90
Index
Abailard, Pierre, Lettres portugaises de
Marianna Alcoforado 130
balos, Jos de 307, 308, 309
Abeille, Louis-Paul 58
absolutism
changing nature of 1314
and enlightened reform 34
see also enlightened absolutism;
enlightened despotism
Academia del Buen Gusto 158
Acadmie franaise 55
academies
Naples 75
provincial, France 55
Spain 162
Adelman, Jeremy 347, 350
Agricola, De Re Metallica 240
Agricola, Manuel 115
agriculture, Naples 294, 3012
Albi, Christopher 15, 34
Albi, Julio 341
Alcedo, Antonio de, Diccionario geogrfica
95, 96, 97
Alfieri, Vittorio 213
Almodvar, Duke of 84, 87, 89, 96
Amadeus II, Victor, King of Savoy 204,
207, 262
Amadeus III, Victor, King of Savoy 204,
211, 215
army reforms 222
new taxation 221
Amat y Junient, Manuel de 199
Amedeo delle Lanze, Carlo Vittorio,
Cardinal 219
America, Jesuit histories 84
American War of Independence
(177583) 5, 303, 309
Anderson, Benedict 100, 106
Anderson, M.S. 910, 205
Andrien, Kenneth 15, 34, 35

Antilles see French Antilles
Aosta, Duchy of 217, 219, 223
Aranda, Count of 151, 162, 307, 308,
309
Aranjuez
Palace 163
Treaty of (1752) 217
Aretino, Pietro, La putain errante 130
Argens, Marquis d, Cabalistic Letters 120
Aristotle, on virtue 723
Armitage, John, History of Brazil 3689
Atlantic history 4
Augustn I (Iturbide), Emperor of Mexico
342
Ayacucho, Battle of (1824) 344, 348
Bacon, Francis 240
Baden, Margrave of, model villages 283
Bahia, cotton exports 370
Baker, Keith 5051, 54
Banks, Kenneth 57, 1723
Barba, lvaro Alonso 241
Barbara of Braganza, Queen of Spain 152
Barbosa, Tom 127
Baretti, Joseph 153, 3345
Barrientos, Joaqun Alvarez 165
Barroeta y ngel, Pedro Antonio,
Archbishop of Lima 191, 195
Basque region, law 237
Battlori, Miguel 84
Bayer, Prez 159, 160, 162, 165
Beales, Derek 5, 206
Beaumont, Moreau de
Mmoires concernante les impositions et
droits en Europe
cadastre reform 2812
circulation 277
commissioning of 274, 275
390
as Enlightenment text 279

influence 2778
justification 280
publication 277
purpose 277, 2789
Beccaria, Cesare, Marquis 26, 30
Trait de dlits et des peines 121
Beckford, William, at Spanish court 146,
147
Beggars Benison sex club 148, 150
Benedict XIV, Pope 195, 201
Benton, Lauren 234
Bergao y Villegas, Simn 105
Bergier, Nicolas Sylvestre, Le Disme refut
121
Berti, Joanne Laurentio 121
Bertin, Henry Lonard, tax increases 274
Beteta, Ignacio 104, 107
bibliothque bleue, France 148
Bielfeld, Jacob Friedrich, Political
Institutions 120
Birn, Raymond 55
Blanning, Tim 14
Blasco, Vicente 161
Boccalini, Trajano 258
Boccherini, Luigi 164
Bogino di Migliandolo, Giovanni Battista
206
Bogot 106
Boisguilbert, Pierre le Pesant 27
Bolvar, Simn 339, 3434
death 345
enlightened reformer 341
monarchical ambitions, alleged 3413,
351, 354
OLeary, correspondence 3524
President of Colombia 344, 345
Bolivia 341
Bolivian Constitution (1826) 339, 345,
34652, 360
as enlightened absolutism 3478
as enlightened reform 340
influences on 349
Life Presidency 349, 3512
monarchism, refutation of 34950

pragmatism 3467
reception 3512
utopianism 347
Bompar, M. de 167
Borbone, Carlo, King of Naples 288
Botero, Giovanni 258, 259
Botero Herrero, Fernando 355
Botton di Castellamonte, Ugo Vincenzo 226
Saggio sopra la politica e la legislazione
210
Bourgoing, Franois 152
Brading, David A. 83, 99, 2312, 347
Brazil 3378
Britain
commercial treaty 368, 36970
imports from 370
independence (1822) 43
Old Regime, persistence of 362, 365,
388
ports, opening of 36970
Portuguese court in (180822) 43,
364
printing press, late arrival 139
readers of Persian Letters 1346
reforms 41
slavery 43, 383
whitening of 386
Britain
Brazil
commercial treaty 368, 36970
exports to 370
Navigation Acts 377
see also England
Broggia, Carlantonio 288
Della vita civil economica 297
economic model for 2989
Melons Essai politique
criticism 2979
influence on 297
Brown, Matthew 19
Buenos Aires 12, 106
British invasion (1806) 320
Burke, Edmund
Index
Reflections on the Revolution in France

377
Silva Lisboa, influence on 377, 378
Butel-Dumont, Georges-Marie 29
Caamao, Joaqun 95
Cadet de Saineville, Jean-Baptiste-Claude 56
Cdiz 7, 315, 317
Constitution of (1812) 342
Caetano de Freitas, Antnio 120, 121,
122
Calaresu, Melissa 15, 3031
Calcaterra, Carlo 209
Caldalso, Jos, Cartas Marruecas 241
Campillo y Cosso, Jos del 111, 114,
115, 311
Nuevo sistema de gobierno econmico de
Amrica 88, 113, 238, 311
Campomanes, Count Pedro Rodrguez de
11, 145, 151, 153, 160, 241
building projects 14950
Campomanes, Sabino 153
Caizares-Esguerra, Jorge 83
Cauelo, Luis Mara 160
Capmany, Antonio de 1467
Capra, Carlo 27
Crvajal y Lancaster, Jos de 190, 311
Cary, John 254
Essay on the State of England,
translations 29
Caso Gonzlez, J.M. 160
Castelli, Carlos 343
Castile, Council of 149, 160, 190
Castro, Juan Francisco de, Discursos crticos
sobre las leyes 241
Castro, Miguel 95
Catherine II (the Great), Queen of Russia
285, 303
Charles III, King of Spain 13, 48, 88, 111,
201
court reforms 152, 153
educational reforms 16061
Naples residency 5, 66
patronage 160
391
portraits 152
Charles IV, King of Spain 93, 152, 159,
319
Charles, Loc 56
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 235
Child, Josiah 300
A New Discourse of Trade 289
China, government 283
Choiseul, Duc de 175, 177, 178, 179
Clark, Henry 60
Clarke, Samuel 121
Clavijero, Francisco Javier 84, 96
Storia Antica del Mexico 889
criticism of 8990
Clavijo y Fajardo, Jos 147
Coimbra University, Persian Letters,
readers 12027
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 17, 169, 295, 296
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 378
Collier, Simon 360
Colombia 339
Bolvars presidency 344, 345
monarchist historiography 34041
post-Independence, and monarchy
360
Colonialism, and enlightened reform 89
Colonies
English 291
Melon on 29093
need for, and commerce 290
commerce
and colonies, need for 290
conquest, incompatibility theory 289,
293, 295
Compagnie des Indes 40, 47, 58, 169
Constant, Benjamin 380
Crdoba, Jos Mara 339, 340, 343,
3445
death 345, 3567
manifesto 355, 357
political aspirations 3578
rebellion 3559
Crdoba, Matas de 105
Corte, Carlo Amedeo, reading 210
392
Costa de Beauregard, Henry, The

Education of Women 209
Costa della Trinita, Vittorio, Cardinal 219
Costa e Souza, Joo da 127
Coyer, Abb, La noblesse commerante
578
Crbillon, Prosper, Xerxes 125
Creole identity 99
and Gazeta de Guatemala 100, 102
and print media 1012
Croce, Benedetto 26
Crown, role in reform 15
see also French Crown; Portuguese
Crown
Cunha, Jos Anastcio da 126
Cuoco, Vincenzo, on Naples 634, 65, 70
Darnton, Robert 148
Dvila, Fernando, Prior of Santo
Domingo 192
Davis, John 32, 64
de Beaumont, Moreau 40
de Gournay, Vincent 29
de la Tour, Roussel, De la richesse de ltat
275
de Lavardy, Clment-Charles-Franois 60
de Nicola, Carlo 789
de Pauw, Cornelius 83
democracy
education for 6970, 8081
Pagano on 6970
Denina, Carlo, DellImpiego delle Persone
204
Derecho Indiano
Bourbon challenge to 23740
evolution 2323
Dominicans, Peru 186
Doria, Paolo Mattia 28, 72, 2534, 288
on commercial jealousy 254, 260, 268
on enlightened despotism 263
on institutions 2634
Naples 25960, 2612
economic plan 2067, 2945
Ottoman Sultanate, praise of 2656
on Richelieu 259
thought 2568
works
Commercio mercantile 259
Del commercio del regno di Napoli
257, 259, 265, 294
Idea de una perfetta repubblica 263
La vita civile 295
Politico alla moda 258, 265
DuPont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel 37,
283
Dupont, Pierre-Samuel 58
Dym, Jordana 15, 35, 348
Earle, Rebecca 341
economic growth, and enlightened reform
16
education, for democracy, Pagano on
6970, 8081
El Censor 160
El Constitucional 3512
El Pensador 147
El Quiteo Libre 352
El Santuario, Battle (1829) 340, 345
elites, enlightened, and Gazeta de
Guatemala 1037
Elliott, John 13, 360
Elton, Geoffrey 154
Emmanuel III, Charles, King of Savoy
204, 206, 214, 215
England
Colonies
naval power 260
Silva Lisboas admiration for 3746,
381
enlightened absolutism 27, 288
Bolivian Constitution (1826) as 3478
enlightened despotism 2, 9, 39
in Dorias thought 263
Italian examples 205
revisionism 2056
Savoy 203, 207, 208, 21315, 225,
226, 227
see also absolutism; legal despotism
Index
enlightened reform 12, 11, 20

and absolutism 34
Bolivian Constitution (1826) as 340
chronological boundaries 1719
and Colonialism 89
and economic growth 16
examples 1213
and exceptionalism 8
France 4761
government
partnerships 1415
role 1516
idea of 5051
Italy 2332
Macao 42
as mental attitude 10
models 237
Naples 27
Noel on 334
and philosophical ideas 5051
Portugal 412
Portuguese Crown 137
research 2830, 31
Savoy 25, 27, 203
and Southern Europe 4
Spanish court 1578
Spanish Empire 335
stylistic periodization 1920
themes 1318
Venturi on 236, 2930
Enlightenment, The
Catholic 322
coherence of 11
and consumption of popular literature
148
cosmopolitanism 234
end date 32
and established order 14
and ideas 51
multiplicities of 1011, 4950, 148,
149, 208, 322
and neo-classicism 14950
and new public culture 51, 52
Noel on 334
393
and popular literature 148

and public sphere 30, 34
and religion 1489
in Savoy 20913
and sex clubs 148
sociological view 512
in Spain 1478, 149
thought, varieties of 10, 28
Ensenada, Marquess of 1567, 159, 185,
187, 189, 196, 311
downfall 201
tax reforms 190
Escobar, Jos Saenz de 241
Escorial Palace 163
Esquilache, Marquis 314
Esquilache mutiny, Madrid 316
Etoles, Vignet des 217
Europe
fiscal systems, study 274
see also Southern Europe
exceptionalism, and enlightened reform 8
Feijo, Padre Benito Jernimo 149, 159,
240
Teatro Crtico 114
Felice, Monsieur de, Code de lhumanit
121
Fnelon, Franois 28
Tlmaque 295
Ferdinand VI, King of Spain 152, 183,
190, 195, 201
Ferdinand VII, King of Spain 35, 342
Fernandes, Vicente Jlio 120
Fernndez, Carmelo 356
Fernndez de Moratn, Nicols, salon
15051
Ferrone, Vincenzo 207, 209
feudalism
Naples 67, 69, 70, 74, 81
Pagano on 678
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 257
Filangieri, Gaetano 26, 30, 74, 81
Scienza della legislazione 70, 73
Flores, Joseph Miguel 89
394
France
agricultural societies 54
bibliothque bleue 148
censorship 556
colonies 67
administration 169
illicit trade 170
decline, Silva Lisboa on 373
economic debate 57
economy, eighteenth-century 38
enlightened reform 37, 4761
encouragement of ideas 578, 61
Genoa, attack on 260
Iberian states, contacts 7
ideas, discussion of 567
Jesuits, expulsion 50
local government reform 60
manufacturing policy 5960
military reform 50
non-noble elites, 1789 54
Parlement de Maupeou 274
pre-Revolution reforms 478, 50, 52,
59, 6061
print censorship 2767
provincial academies 55
provincial assemblies, establishment 60
Silva Lisboa on 382
simulated sales 59
tax
debates 2736, 278, 286
history 278
reforms 47, 276
resistance 53
see also French Atlantic empire; French
Crown; French Revolution
Francis I, King of France 147
Franciscans, Peru 186, 1923
Frederick the Great 204, 216
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor 285
freemasonry, Naples 77
Freitas, Nuno de 120, 121, 122
French Antilles 39
Exclusif trade regime 59
French Atlantic empire 37, 38
features 39
French Crown
and corporate bodies 523
economic stimulation 5960
in the public sphere 52, 54
vingtime tax 53, 282
French Indies Company see Compagnie
des Indes
French Revolution 38, 39
and taxation 40
Gagliardo, J.G. 203
Gaite, Carmen Martn 151
Galanti, Giuseppe Maria 70, 76
Galeani Napione, Francesco 226
Galiani, Celestino 288, 293
Galiani, Ferdinando 29, 255
on decline of Rome 299300
Della moneta 299302
on Histoire des Deux Indes 2878
Physiocrats, criticism of 302
Glvez, Jos de 23031, 238, 308,
31416, 317
popularity 316
Gamboa, Francisco Xavier de
Comentarios a las Ordenanzas de Minas
229, 230, 232, 240
economic plan 2423
as Enlightenment text 24043
juridical sources 2412
mercury monopoly 236
law studies 2334
opposition to Mining Tribunal 231
support for 1584 Ordinances 2438
Garca de Len Pizarro, Jos 317, 318
Garrett, Almeida 366
Gaudin, M. 1745
Gazeta de Guatemala 99
Bourbon, agenda 107, 11215
contributors 104, 105
controversy, avoidance of 110
correspondence 1067
and Creole identity 100, 102
didactic articles 1089
Index
economic information 108

editors 1045
and enlightened elites 1037
essay competitions 108
European news 107
Guatemala, information about 109
Guatemalan identity, promotion of
112, 116
guatemaltecos, identification of 112
Indians, attitude to 113, 11415, 116
literary works, publication 110
official information 107
politics, avoidance 11011
and public sphere 106, 111
publication period 103
Spanish language, promotion 1089
subscribers 1056
Gazeta de Madrid 107
Gazeta de Mexico 100
Geertz, Clifford 154
Genoa 24
French attack on 260
Ottoman Empire, treaty 266
Genovesi, Antonio 26, 28, 29, 30, 70,
745, 121, 1234, 254
Gerbi, Antonello 83
Gershoy, Leo 9
Giannone, Pietro 25, 72, 204
Goa, tribunal, suppression 41
Godoy, Manuel 1523, 159, 162, 318, 320
Goicoechea, Jos Antonio 105
government
aristocratic 69
middle order, Pagano on 712, 73, 74,
78, 7980
moderate, Pagano on 689, 712
representative, Pagano on 71
Goya, Francisco 152, 164
Grab, Alexander 10
grain trade
Intieri on 294
Melon on 291
Graneri, Pietro Giuseppe 226
Grotius, Hugo de 239
395
Guadalajara 233
Guadeloupe 167, 169
British occupation 180
corruption 1712, 173
Mirabeaus governorship 17076
slave trade 169, 170, 172
see also Martinique
Guatemala City
Bourbon elites 103, 113, 117
San Carlos University 105
Sociedad Econmica 104, 108
suppression 110
Guatemala, Kingdom of 35, 99, 110
identity 112, 113, 116
independence 103
Indians 11213, 114
Maya 116
newspaper culture 35
see also Gazeta de Guatemala
as patria 109, 116
public sphere 106
guatemaltecos 112
Guerra, Franois-Xavier 99100, 104
Guyana
freedom of trade 59
slave trade 169
Habermas, Jrgen, public sphere concept
101
Haiti see Saint-Domingue
Haitian Constitution (1816) 349
Hall, Francis 352
Hand, Rupert 345, 356
Hartung, F. 203
Harvey, Robert 3467
Havana 12
Intendancy of 310
Hazard, Paul 26
Helg, Aline, Liberty and Equality 347
Helvetius, Andrien, Le vrai sens du systme
de la nature 121
Henriques de Paiva, Manuel Joaquim 120,
123
Hesse, Carla 3
396
Hobbes, Thomas 239, 258

Leviathan 267
Hochstrasser, Tim 16
Holbach, Baron d, The System of Nature
120, 127
Horn, Jeff 59
Hume, David, Jealousy of Trade 268
Ibarra, Joaqun 161, 229
Iberian states
France, contacts 7
Napoleons invasion 117
ideas, and enlightenment 51
les du Vent 167, 169, 177, 18081
Illuministi, reform agents
Italy 23, 24
Naples 27
Inconfidentes 135, 136
Indians
Gazeta de Guatemala attitude to 113,
11415, 116
Guatemala 11213, 114
Indies, Council of 192, 310
Indies, Junta of (1765) 314
Inquisition, Portuguese 41, 136, 137
censored books 12021
information on reading practices 119,
120, 121
Morais Silva on 124
student attacks on 1223, 124
institutions, Doria on 2634
intendant officer 310
Intieri, Bartolomeo
on the grain trade 294
use of Melons Essai politique 2889, 293
Iriarte, Juan de 161
Isidore of Seville 236
Italy
cosmopolitanism, vs patriotism 234
Diplomatic Revolution (1756) 217
enlightened reform 2332
critique of 267
research 2931
utopianism 24, 26
illuministi 23, 24
Napoleons conquest 32
Risorgimento 24
utopia, vs reform 24
Iturri, Francisco, Carta crtica sobre la
historia de Amrica 95
Jaksic, Ivan 347
Jansenism 50
Jaramillo, Manuel Antonio 358
Jesuits
expulsion from
France 50
Italy 25
Portugal 41, 43
Spain 185, 200
New World historiography 8397
Peru 186, 187, 191, 1945
suppression of 31
Savoy 219
Jos I, King of Portugal 41, 137, 322
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor 13, 206,
208, 217
Jover, Blas 159
Juan, Jorge, and Antonio de Ulloa,
Noticias secretas de Amrica 1857
Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis 234
Koselleck, Reinhart 264
Krieger, L. 203
Lagrange, Luigi 204
Lamoignon de Malesherbes, ChrtienGuillaume 556
Lanning, John Tate 104
Laverdy, Clment-Charles-Franois de 60,
275, 276
Le Blanc, Jean-Bernard 54
legal despotism 39, 168, 175, 1812
Leite, Paulo Gomes 134, 136
Lima 106
Bellavista port 189, 191
Callao port, destruction 188
earthquake (1746) 188, 193
Index
reconstruction 189
tsunami (1746) 35, 188
Lisbon
Cortes 366
earthquake (1755) 41
Lobo, Jernimo Francisco 120, 1246
Locke, John 120, 121, 289
Second Treatise on Government 122
Longano, Francesco 28
Louis IV, King of France 169
Louis XIV, King of France 39, 295, 328
Louis XV, King of France 48, 277, 284,
285
Louis XVI, King of France 48
Lucena-Giraldo, Manuel 17, 34
Lugo, Estanislao de 163
Luther, Martin 126, 127
Luzn, Ignacio 161
Lynch, John 117, 314, 346, 355
Macao, enlightened reform 42
McFarlane, Anthony 100
Machiavelli, Niccol 259, 268, 269
Madrid
Esquilache mutiny 316
masquerades 151
Reales Estudios de San Isidro 163
Royal Academy of Fine Arts 162
Royal Academy of History 85, 87,
889, 94, 96, 162
Royal Seminary of Nobles 1623
Madrid Economic Society, Ladies
Committee 164
Maistre, Joseph de 213
Malabaila di Canale, Luigi 210
Malaspina, Alejandro, scientific
expeditions 945, 31920
Malines, Roberto di, Count 214
Mangarino, Pedro, Provincial of San
Francisco 192
Manso de Velsco, Josef 184, 188, 190,
191, 1934, 196, 198, 201
Lima, reconstruction 189
Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples 26
397
Maria da Fonseca, Jos 120

Martn Gaite, Carmen 151
Martnez de Ayala, Joseph, Provincial of
La Merced 192
Martinique 168
foreign trade 178
Rivires intendancy 17682
slave trade 169, 170
society 170
Maupeou, Rne Nicolas Charles 284, 285
Maxwell, Kenneth 321
May, L.P. 168, 176
Maya, Guatemala 116
Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio 159, 165
Maynon dInvau, Etienne 58
Maza, Sarah 778
Medina Sidonia, Duke of 151, 158
Mhgan, Guillaume Alexandre, Tableau
de lhistoire moderne 121
Melchor de Jovellanos, Gaspar 148, 149,
154, 164, 238
Mello Franco, Francisco de, Medicina
Theologica 130
Melo Franco, Francisco de 120
Melo, Jos Antnio de 120
Melon, Jean-Franois
on Colonies 29093
Essai politique sur le commerce 288, 290
Broggias criticism 2979
influence on Broggia 297
Intieris use of 2889, 293
on the grain trade 291
Mengs, Anton 152
mental attitude, enlightened reform as 10
Mercier, Louis-Sbastien, Lan deux mille
quatre quarante 37
Mercurio Peruano 100
Mexico 109
law 2356
Mexico City 232
Milan 25, 27, 31, 205
Il caff group 26, 30
Miller, Judith 58
398
Millot, Abb, Elmens dhistoire gnrale

121
Minard, Philippe 59
Mining Ordinances (1584), New Spain
230, 236, 240
Mirabeau, Chevalier de 39
at Ministry of the Marine 1756
criticism of Versailles 1734
disillusionment 1678, 171, 176
Guadeloupe
governorship 17076
reforms 1734
Knights of Malta service 176
Mirabeau, Marquis de 167, 168, 174, 175
LAmi des hommes 177, 297
Mirri, Mario 267
Molina, Juan Ignacio 95, 96
Compendio de la historia geogrfica,
natural y civil del reino de Chile 94
Saggio sulla storia civile de Chili 90
publication history 92
Saggio sulla storia naturale de Chili 90
monarchy
and post-Independence Colombia 360
varieties of 359
Moino, Jos 145
Monteiro, Nuno 17, 43
Montesquieu, Baron de
forms of government 175
Persian Letters
Brazilian readers 1346
Coimbra University readers
12022
cultural enlightenment 123
epistolary structure 119
philosophical readings of 138
Portuguese readers 12734
suicide in 1212
Spirit of the Laws 129, 133
Temple of Gnide 136
Morais, Antnio de 122, 135
Morais Calado, Diogo Jos de 120, 121
Morais Silva, Antnio de 121, 1234
on the Portuguese Inquisition 124

Moratn, Leandro Fernndez 15960,
162, 164
Moratn, Nicolas 151, 162
Moreau, Jacob-Nicolas 54
Moreller, Abb 58
Mornet, Daniel 26
Mun, Thomas 254
Muoz, Juan Bautista 8990
Historia del Nuevo Mundo 84, 88,
94, 97
criticism of 956
Muratori, Ludovico Antonio 206
Difetti della Gurisprudenza 210
Naples, Kingdom of 5, 12, 26, 31, 205
academies 75
agriculture 294, 3012
Broggias economic model 2989
Cuoco on 634, 65, 70
decline 2545
Doria on 25960, 2612
establishment 288
feudalism 67, 69, 70, 74, 81
freemasonry 77
French Decennio (180615) 32
illuministi 27
King of 25
print culture 76
public sphere 64
reading public 767
regalisti 72
republic 634, 65, 789, 81, 82
revolution (1799) 77, 82
Napoleon Bonaparte
conquest of Italy 32
Iberian invasion 117
natural law 239
Necker, Jacques 48, 59, 60
neo-classicism, and the Enlightenment
14950
New Granada 109, 317
comuneros revolt 310, 318
Index
New Spain 89, 91, 109, 110, 189, 190

mining industry 230
mining laws 229
Mining Ordinances (1584) 230, 236,
240
Gamboas support for 2438
Mining Tribunal, Gamboas opposition
231
New World controversy
Jesuit historiography on 8397
Spanish counterattack 84, 95, 96
writings 834
newspaper culture
Guatemala 35
see also Gazeta de Guatemala
and public sphere 138fn69
Spanish America 100101
Nicolis, Bonaventura 217
Noel, Charles 15
on The Enlightenment 334
Nuix y Perpia, Juan
Riflessioni imparziali/Reflexiones
imparciales 85, 86
double translation 857, 97
influence 878
Olavide, Pablo de 162
OLeary, Daniel 339, 340, 344, 345, 346,
351
Bolvar, correspondence 3524
Memorias de OLeary 346, 352
on need for monarchy 359
Olivares, Count-Duke of 237
Oporto, Liberal Revolution (1820) 141
Osuma, Duchess of 164
Ottoman Empire, Genoa, treaty 266
Ottoman Sultanate, Dorias praise of
2656
Ovid, The Art of Love 130
Pagano, Francesco Mario 26, 30, 32, 65,
66
on democracy 6970
education for 6970, 8081
399
execution of 81
on feudalism 678
on middle order government 712,
73, 74, 78, 7980
on moderate government 689, 712
on the people 79
on political participation 8081
on representative government 71
on theatre 75
on virtue 73
works
Corradino 756
Progetto di costituzione della
repubblica napoletana 79
Rapporto del Comitato di
Legislazione al Governo
Provvisario 79
Saggi politici 67, 68, 71, 73, 78, 80
Pagden, Anthony 99, 111
Palacios, Marco 347
Palafox y Mendoza, Juan de, Bishop 201
Palmieri, Gioia 29
Paoletti, Ferdinando 29
Paquette, Gabriel 35, 39, 40, 43
Paris, Treaty of (1783) 309
Parlement de Maupeou, France 274
Parma, Duke of 25
Paz, Gustavo 100
Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil 342
Peralta, Vctor 15
Pereira de Caldas, Antnio 120
Pereira, Luis 160
periodization, chronological vs stylistic 19
Pernambuco
sugar exports 370
uprisings (1817/18234) 368, 378,
379
Perrone di San Martino, Baldassare 214,
218
Peru 109
clergy
criticism of 1857
reform attempts 188, 189, 19091
wealth 186
400
doctrinas de indios 1856, 187, 200

numbers 1967
secularization 190, 191
war of attrition over 1979
Dominicans 186
Franciscans 186, 1923
Jesuits 186, 187, 191, 1945
secularization 191, 199, 200201
opposition to 1927
success of 199, 200
Tpac Amaru revolt 307, 318
see also Lima
Per de la Croix, Louis 343
Pesante, Maria Luisa 258
Philip II, King of Spain 163
Philip IV, King of Spain 147, 201, 237
Philip V, King of Spain 152, 161, 162,
183, 237
Physiocracy 28, 29, 39, 274
see also legal despotism
Physiocrats 58
phmrides du Citoyen 2823
Galianis criticism of 302
land rent tax 275, 2823
natural order 2834
Piedmont 208, 209, 210, 213
economy 21617
Piedras Albas, Marquis 310
Pimentel, Mara Josefa Alonson 164
Pieres, Guterrez de 317
Pinto, Jos Lus 128, 129, 13032, 133
Pistoia, Synod of (1786) 25
Pius V, Pope 195
Pocock, John 208
Polanco Alcntara, Toms 346, 347
political economy, study of 16
Pombal, Marquis of 17, 41, 125, 137, 370
corruption, accusations of 3256,
32930
as Prime Minister 3234, 3267
and public sphere 3328
reforms 423, 321
Richelieu, comparison 324, 325
trial of 326
as valido 327, 32932

Porlier de Sopranis, Antonio 90, 93
Porter, Roy 209
Portugal
expulsion of Jesuits 41, 43
French invasion 43
printing press 336
see also Coimbra University;
Inquisition, Portuguese
Portuguese Crown
characteristics 323
Prime Minister
in eighteenth century 3279
Pombal as 3234, 3267
Portugal, use of term 3289
print culture, Naples 76
printing industry, Spain 161
Prussia, taxation 285
public culture, and enlightenment 51, 52
public sphere
concept, Habermas 101
debate in 13941
and the Enlightenment 30, 34
French Crown in 52, 54
and Gazeta de Guatemala 106, 111
Guatemala 106
Kingdom of Naples 64
and Pombals government 3328
role of newspapers 138fn69
Pufendorf, Samuel 239
Introduction lHistoire Gnral 121
Quesnay, Franois 168, 177, 181
Radicati di Passerano, Alberto 25, 204
Ramrez, Alejandro 105
Rao, Anna Maria 27, 77, 82
on Savoy 207
Rvago, Francisco de 190
Rayfield, Jo Ann 355
Raynal, Guillaume Thomas-Franois 83
Index
Histoire des Deux Indes, Galianis view

of 2878
Histoire philosophique 37, 85, 135
Historia poltica 84, 87, 96
reading practices, in Portuguese
Inquisition records 119, 121
regalisti, Naples 72
Reinert, Sophus 16, 28
Ribeiro, Fr Antnio 1345
Ribeiro, Jos 134, 136
Richelieu, Cardinal 17
Doria on 259
Ricuperati, Giuseppe 26, 216, 258
Settecento Riformatore 206
Rio de Janeiro, slave trade 383
Risorgimento, Italy 24
Rivire, Mercier de la 39, 40, 168
criticism of Versailles 179
disgrace 1789
Martinique, intendancy 17682
rehabilitation 180
Roberts, John 205
Robertson, John 11
Robertson, William 83, 85, 148
History of America 84, 86
Roda, Manuel de 159
Rodrguez, Ventura 150
Rge, Pernille 15, 39
Rome, decline, Galiani on 299300
Rorengo di Rora, Archbishop of Turin 219
Rosenblum, Robert 149
Rossbach, Battle of (1757) 285
Rotta, Salvatore 257
Rouill, Antoine-Louis 167
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Emile 120, 122
Social Contract 120, 148
Royal Spanish Academy, Diccionario de
Autoridades 111, 1534
Saavedra, Francisco de 319
Sabatini, Francisco 163
Sabato, Hilda 100
Safford, Frank 347
401
Saio, Fr Joo Lus 134

Said, Edward, Orientalism 267
Saint-Christophe 169
Saint-Domingue (Haiti) 37, 38, 171
slave trade 169, 170, 373
Saint-Lucia, freedom of trade 59
San Carlos University, Guatemala City
105
Santa F 189
Santander, Francisco de Paula 351
Sardinia 210, 214, 217
Cagliari university, foundation 223
reforms 223, 225
Sarmiento, Martn 151, 1589, 160, 161
Sarria, Marchioness of 158
Savoy, Duchy of
academies
provincial 212
see also Milan
army reforms 222
bookshops 209
censorship 209
church reform 21920
decline 204
economic development, stimulation
22021
enlightened despotism 203, 207, 208,
21315, 225, 226, 227
enlightened reform 25, 27
Enlightenment in 20913
Jesuit suppression 219
Legge dei Pubblici 222
periodical press 211
public debt 216
Rao on 207
reform 21824
context 21518
external models 216
impact 2247
opposition to 224
religious toleration 21819
road building 221, 224, 225
salon culture 211
texts, circulation of 20910
402
see also Piedmont; Turin

Schlter, Christophe Andre, Grndlicher
Unterricht von Htte-Werken
24041
Schmid DAvenstein, Georg Ludwig 29
Schui, Florian 16, 40
Scott, H.M. 10, 205
Sempere y Guarinos, Juan 88, 97
Serra, Antonio 259
Seven Years War (175663) 5, 6, 9, 17,
40, 50, 53, 54, 177, 205, 238,
272, 273, 309, 312
sex clubs, and The Enlightenment 148
Shackleton, Robert 263
Shovlin, John 15, 19, 39
Silva Brando, Jos 134, 135
Silva Lisboa, Antnio da 120, 122
Silva Lisboa, Jos da (Baron of Cairu) 43,
361
on Brazilian constitution 380
on Brazilian economy 3723
Burke, influence of 377, 378
career 3669
on cultural stagnation 3823
England, admiration for 3746, 381
as enlightened reformer 362, 3878
on France 382
on French decline 373
instability, fear of 3812
official censor 368
political discourse 37880
Princpios de Economica Poltica 367
publications output 363, 368
as reactionary 3634
slavery, attitude to 3846, 387
thought 3645
views on 3689
Wealth of Nations, influence of 371
Silva, Renn 100, 101, 102
slave trade
French colonies 16970, 172
Saint-Domingue (Haiti) 169, 170,
373
slavery
Brazil 43, 383
Silva Lisboas attitude 3846, 387
Smith, Adam
Wealth of Nations 40, 277, 278, 385
influence on Silva Lisboa 371
Southern Europe
Atlantic empires 2
collaboration of states 56
cultural connections 6
and enlightened reform 4
Southey, Robert, History of Brazil 361
Souza Caldas, Antnio Pereira de 122
Souza Coutinho, Rodrigo de 15
Spain
Castilian public law 237, 239
church property, seizure 185
enlightened values 1467, 15960,
1645
and the Enlightenment 1478, 149
salons 15051, 158
foreign travellers in 145
intendancy system, extension 190
Jesuits, expulsion 185
law, decrees vs general rules 235
legal culture 235
literacy 1578
printing industry 161
reading public 158
royal academies, foundation 162
royal court
cosmopolitanism 156
curbs on excesses 1513
enlightened reform, contribution
1578
functions 1545
organization 156
patronage 159, 160
reform 1567
sociability 1457
Royal Library 1612
secularization edicts 185
tertulias 145, 146, 150
Index
theatre reform 162

Voltaires influence 148
see also Madrid
Spanish America
Bourbon reforms 19, 310, 31215,
31718
counter-reformism 31820
doctrinas secularization 191
decree 184
intendancies, introduction 310
legal culture 34, 2337
monarchy, discrediting of 342
newspaper culture 100101
two republic system 11213
Wars of Independence (180829) 342,
343, 359, 360
see also Guatemala; Mexico; Peru
Spanish Empire
resilience 35
secularization of doctrinas de indios
19091
see also Spanish America
Stapelbroek, Koen 16, 28
Stein, Stanley & Barbara 232
Stevenson, David 148
Storrs, Christopher 15, 27
Straka, Toms 341
Surez, Francisco 239
Sucre, Antonio Jos de 351
suicide, in Persian Letters 1212
Ulloa, Antonio de see Juan, Jorge
Tanucci, Bernardo 5, 26, 267

Tarrade, Jean 59
taxation
and the French Revolution 40
on land rent, Physiocrats proposal
275, 2823
Prussia 285
and state building 271
Teba, Count, Discourse 150
Teich, Mikulas 209
Teixeira, Jos Maria 126
tertulias, Spain 145, 146, 150
Valds, Antonio 318, 319

Valds, Juan Melndez 165
valido
definition 328
Pombal as 327, 32932
Van Aken, Mark J. 340
Vandelli, Domenico 6
Varela y Ulloa, Pedro 856
Vasco, Giambattista 214
Velasco, Juan de 84, 96
La Historia del Reino de Quito
criticism of 94
403
theatre
didactic power of 75
reform, Spain 162
Thr, Christine 176
Thomas, Antoine-Lonard 54
Thnen, Johann Heinrich von 257
Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 6
Tocqueville, Alexis de 39
Torquemada, Juan de 90
Torrepalma, Count of 158
Tortuga 169
Townsend, Joseph, at Spanish court
1456, 147, 148
Trudaine, Daniel 56, 57, 58
Tpac Amaru revolt, Peru 307, 318
Turgot, Jacques 37, 48, 59, 60, 179,
2778
Turin 209, 210
Accademia di Agricoltura 21112
Accademia Reale delle Scienze 211, 217,
223
Accademia Sampaolina 212
Arsenal 211
Camera dei Conti 214
Literari Societas Patria 212
Societa Privata 211
Tuscany 25
Tuscany, Grand Duchy 205
agricultural reform 27
404

Velzquez de Len, Joaqun 231
Venice 24
Venturi, Franco 267
on enlightened reform 236, 2930
Illuministi italiani 23
Settecento riformatore 23
VeraCruz 12
Vron de Forbonnais, Franois 56
Verri, Pietro 26, 30, 32
Vico, Giambattista 256
Vieira, Antnio, Sermons 135
Villalta, Luiz Carlos 15, 43
Villaurutia, Jacobo de 104
Vincent de Gournay, Jacques-ClaudeMarie 56, 57, 58
vingtime tax, French Crown 53, 282
Virgil, Aeneid 268
virtue
Aristotle on 723
Pagano on 73
Vitoria, Francisco de 239
Voltaire 124
influence in Spain 148
La Henriade 130
The Maid of Orleans 120
Walpole, Robert 325
War of Austrian Succession (174048) 53,
58, 215, 216, 273
War of Jenkins Ear (173948) 190
War of Spanish Succession (170114) 183
White, Jos Blanco 165
Yeregui, Jos de 161
Zacagnini, Antonio 161
Zambelli, Paola 258

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, C. 1750-1830

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Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, C. 1750-1830

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Enlightened Reform in Southern

Europe and its Atlantic Colonies,

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe

Empires and the Making of

Enlightened Reform in Southern

Gabriel Paquette and the contributors 2009

Enlightenment, Reform, and Monarchy in Italy

Enlightened Reform in the Spanish Empire: An Overview

Enlightenment and Reform in France and the French Atlantic37

Enlightened Reform in Portugal and Brazil

Rethinking Enlightened Reform in a French Context

Searching for a Middle Class? Francesco Mario Pagano and the

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

The Spanish Monarchy and the Uses of Jesuit Historiography in the

8 Conceiving Central America: A Bourbon Public in the

The Coming of Enlightened Reform in Bourbon Peru:

The Savoyard State: Another Enlightened Despotism?

14 Derecho Indiano vs. the Bourbon Reforms:

The Sultans Republic: Jealousy of Trade and Oriental

16 Observing the Neighbours: Fiscal Reform and Transnational

The Proud Epithet of Enlightened: Ferdinando Galiani and the

The Limits of Reform in Spanish America

19 Pombals Government: Between Seventeenth-Century Valido and

Jos da Silva Lisboa and the Vicissitudes of Enlightened Reform in

This page has been left blank intentionally

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

Melissa Calaresu is the Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History at Gonville and

Nobility and Aristocracy in Ancin Rgime Portugal, in H.M. Scott (ed.),

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

John Robertson teaches history at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow

This page has been left blank intentionally

Series Editors Foreword

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe

Efforts to ascertain the influence of enlightenment thought on state action,

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

reflects long-cherished assumptions about the enlightenment itself. As Carla

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

reinvigorate a long-running scholarly discussion of the connections tenuous

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

The second set of connections linking the kingdoms of Southern Europe in

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

matrices, tendencies, and dynamics which transcend regional, national,

the Americas on the refashioning (and even genesis) of fundamental European

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

It has been argued recently that enlightenment is best understood as a series

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

A more expansive understanding of enlightenment and reform has not

In spite of the prevalence of broader understandings of both enlightenment and

and economic societies sought to adapt new-fangled insights into agronomy,

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

to respond.50 Enlightened reform resulted, to use an anachronism, as part of

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

Government, therefore, was not always a lumbering, blithely inert behemoth,

The Crown and the Promotion of Industry in Eighteenth-Century Spain (PhD

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

mid-1760s.57 The year 1750, therefore, is far from unchallengeable as the

Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies

For a fuller discussion of the advantages of aesthetic periodization in the history

This page has been left blank intentionally

Enlightenment, Reform, and

In the second half of the twentieth century, study of Enlightenment and

Enlightenment, Reform, and Monarchy in Italy

Enlightened Reform in the Spanish Empire: An Overview

Enlightenment and Reform in France and the French Atlantic37

Enlightened Reform in Portugal and Brazil

Rethinking Enlightened Reform in a French Context

The Savoyard State: Another Enlightened Despotism?

The Limits of Reform in Spanish America