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Article Excerpt
[ILUSTRACIÓN OMITIR]
Este trabajo examina el papel de los viajeros europeos en la creación y diseminación del consenso ilustrado sobre España. Este consenso, fue en breve, la creencia en la Europa ilustrada que España había quedado ajena de la Ilustración, que la nueva cultura y descubrimientos nunca había penetrado en España, y cómo consecuencia, fue un país inculto y sin luces. La primera parte del artículo examina el papel de las narraciones del viaje del siglo diecisiete en la creación y fomento de este consenso, que mucho de los ideas negativas sobre España comunes en la Europa ilustrada tienen su fuente en los viajeros del diecisiete, y que aquellos libros de viaje tuvieron un papel importante en su diseminación. Sin embargo con la llegada en España de cada vez más viajeros durante la segunda mitad del siglo dieciocho, ellos dieron cuenta que el retrato de la España del siglo anterior no tenía nada que ver con la España actual, y la segunda parte del trabajo trata de los esfuerzos de los viajeros dieciochescos en cuestionar y corregir la imagen que tenía España en la Europa de entonces, y con ello el consenso ilustrado, ello mismo.
This article examines the role of the European travellers in Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the creation and propagation of the Enlightenment consensus on Spain. This consensus was the belief that Spain had remained apart from and untouched by the European Enlightenment, and that it consequently was a country that was both intellectually and culturally completely backward. The first part of the article examines the role of the travel narratives of the seventeenth century in the creation and spread of this consensus, how some of the negative ideas on Spain common in Enlightenment Europe originated with the travel narratives of the seventeenth century, and how these narratives were influential in spreading these ideas. However, as the eighteenth century progressed and increasing numbers of travellers came to Spain, they found that the picture painted by the earlier travellers no longer corresponded to the reality of the Spain of Charles III, and consequently the second part of the article examines how many of the travellers of the second half of the eighteenth century began to challenge and to correct this negative view, and with it the basis of the Enlightenment consensus itself.
The Enlightenment Consensus on Spain in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Among the conventions which governed the writing of the eighteenth-century travel book was one particular convention which applied only to travel books on Spain. This convention was, in brief, the European belief that Spain had no real contribution to make to the culture of the Enlightenment, that in fact there was no progress or intellectual development in Spain, and consequently she was still sunk in a state of medieval barbarism and superstition. (1) The origins of this belief were based on the eighteenth century's reading of Spanish history, which in simplest terms was as follows: after a period of prosperity and power during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spain was now a country in complete decline, and that one of the major causes of this decline was the discovery of the Americas, the wealth from which had destroyed Spanish industry and depopulated the mother country, owing to the emigration to the New World. (2) That the Spanish church, through the Inquisition, had systematically persecuted and stifled all attempts at intellectual and cultural development, and the consequences of this policy had reduced Spanish learning to the lowest ebb. (3) Finally, were Spain to be governed by an enlightened monarch, this situation might be remedied, and Spain once again be a European power, but eighteenth-century Europe did not feel this was likely to happen, nor did it feel that Charles III was the king to fulfil this role. (4) These opinions were so widely held in eighteenth-century Europe as to be a consensus, a series of idées reçus to which anyone with any pretensions to culture and learning was expected to subscribe, and they were opinions which had their maximum expression and transmission in the travel literature on Spain of the period. (5) A clear proof of the consensual nature of these opinions, and one which gives some idea of their extension was the fact that Europe showed little or no interest in Spanish cultural achievement until well into the eighteenth century. In 1727 Gregorio Mayans i Siscar lamented that Europe either denigrated, or ignored Spanish literature and thought:
Toda Europa desprecia y aún hace burla del extravagante modo de escribir que casi todos los españoles practican hoy. Es casi nada lo que se traduce de nuestra lengua en las otras, argumento claro del poco aprecio que se hace de nuestro modo de pensar. (Mayans i Siscar in Mestre 53).
Note that he states that this tendency was to be found in 'all Europe'. The widespread nature of these opinions can also be adduced from sources other than works of a literary nature (6) or travel books, sources such as diplomatic reports. The exhaustive series of reports sent to Vienna by the various Austrian ambassadors in Madrid between 1759 and 1788, while they pay tribute to the efforts of the Spanish Ilustrados, nonetheless conclude that cultural and scientific life in Spain is still in its infancy (Lope 178-179) (7), nor does Spanish cultural achievement fare any better at the hands of the Danish ambassador, Hermann von Schubart (Gigas 393-439). Ultimately however, it is to the travel books that give us the clearest idea of the nature and extent of this consensus, for it was among the travel writers that this this negative view of Spain became a self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating topic, and although many travellers began to challenge it, especially during the second half of the century, it was a view which proved to be enduring, and perhaps has not yet been fully laid to rest, even today. (8)
The degree to which a traveller subscribed to this convention depended on the social class from which he came; an aristocratic supporter of the Ancien Regime did not have the same outlook as a member of the rising bourgeoisie, as a comparison between the narratives of the Marquis de Marcillac and Jean de Bourgoing illustrates (9), but on the whole there is a remarkable homogenity among the European travellers who visited Spain, especially during the second half of the eighteenth century. The majority were members of the bourgeoisie: they belonged to that class between the nobility and common people, which steadily grew in power and prosperity (and optimism) throughout the century (Herr 6-7). By profession they were clergymen, government officials, army officers, or simply men of private means. The English travellers Edward Clarke and Joseph Townsend were clergymen, as was the Italian Norberto Caimo; William Dalrymple and the Irish traveller Maurice Keatinge were army officers, while travellers such as Alexander Jardine and Jean de Bourgoing can be classed as diplomats. In intellectual outlook and artistic tastes they were broadly similar: they had a firm belief in the value of scientific and intellectual progress, and an equally profound dislike of despotism, whether in the form of absolute monarchy or a too-powerful church, a dislike which was particularly directed against the Church, itself deeply hostile to the more free-thinking aspects of the Enlightenment (Herr 6). (10) Since nowhere in Europe was the Church more powerful than in Spain, it followed, then, that in a country where the Church was all powerful, ignorance and credulity must be widespread among the people, and all real development of learning must be at a stand. Such a country was Spain, or at least that was how Spain appeared to many people in eighteenth-century Europe.
In their criticisms of Spanish culture we find certain national characteristics emerging among the travellers: the dislike of despotism and its harmful consequences for economic progress was especially characteristic...
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