Zorro's times: Carlos III, the "Enlightened Despot"

Carlos III of Spain

Carlos III (1716-1788), reigned as the Bourbon King of Spain 1759-1788. He practiced what was known as Enlightenment Despotism (Despotismo Ilustrado), and brought administrative reforms such as restructuring the colonial administration in the Nuevo Mundo (New World) along French lines, which meant more direct Spanish administration of what had previously been more loosely governed colonies. He set up twelve "intendancies" to exercise power in the colonies. T. R. Fehrenbach explains:

The intendants, who under Carlos III were career soldier-statesmen, were directly responsible and responsive to the viceregal chair. They assumed almost all of the civil and financial administration. Again, because of social pressure and the office mania of the [colonial] society, few of the older posts were abolished; they remained as useless ceremonial offices. Power, however, flowed around them. In one thing there was no change: the intendants were always peninsulares [Spaniards]. This further angered the criollos [Spaniards born in the colonies who were limpiado, or racially "pure"] who had been allowed to buy offices as alcaldes and corregidores, for the titles they came to hold were meaningless in terms of power.

But, as with England's North American colonies, the increased taxes that came with this new arrangement were annoying. To most everybody, according to Fehrenbach, with specific reference to Mexico (Nueva España/New Spain):

By European standards of the time, this taxation was not devastating - but all of it was money that left New Spain; it was a drain. The Bourbons [including Carlos III] spent much on local defense, but the vast majority of the monies they extracted went to support Spaniards and Spanish administration. Nothing was used for capital investment in Mexico. Therefore, increased revenues hurt rather than helped the economy and the poorer classes, while the criollo establishment, accustomed to a century of successful tax avoidance, was outraged.

One of the key issues for the liberals was limiting the power of the Church, which included not only considerable political influence but large landholdings and the personal wealth they generated. This was an interest that Carlos III's government embraced, moving in various ways to limit the power of the Church. This situation was significantly different that those pertaining in the North American British colonies and even in England itself. As Fehrenbach remarks, "societies which have not experienced clericalism cannot easily understand anticlericalism."

But not all restrictions of Church power were liberal or enlightened in their actual effect. For instance, the powerful Jesuit order, which had been the clerical shock troops of the Papacy in the Counter-Reformation, was expelled from Mexico in 1767 under Carlos III.

But in Mexico, the Jesuits not only had the best schools in Nueva España. Their relationship was different in Spain than it was in the New World toward one of the core Enlightenment projects, the promotion of scientific thought and education. Allied with the most conservative feudalists in Spain, the Jesuit order was undoubtedly a competing political and social force to the Enlightenment reformers there, including the King. Carlos III banned them by order to the Spanish Inquisition, an office that still existed at the time:

Prohibido expresamente que nadie pueda escribir, declarar o conmover, con pretexto de estas providencias en pro ni en contra de ellas, antes impongo silencio en esta materia a todos mis vallos y mando que a los contraventores se les castigue como a reos de Lesa Majestad.

[I expressly forbid anyone from writing, speaking or acting with the pretext of these rulings either in favor or against them, before I have effectively established the ban of this material on all my subject and I mandate that violations of this order be punished as if they had were acts of lèse majesté {violation of the sovereignty of the throne, something like treason under absolutist monarchies}.]

(I wanted to quote the language to give a sense of how despotic even an "enlightened" despot could sound. If anyone has suggestions for improving the translation, though, please let me know. Royal decrees of two centuries ago in bureacratic legalese can be tricky to translate into modern terms. The real point, though, is that he imposed a really sweeping and drastic sanction by means of the Inquisition against the Jesuits and anyone who might be inclined to defend them.)

The virrey (viceroy) of Mexico expelled the Jesuits and publicly complied with the royal position against them. Privately, however, he wrote of the expelled order, "Eran dueños absolutes de los corazones y las conciencias de todos los habitantes de este vasto imperio". (They possessed all our hearts and the consciences of all the inhabitants of this vast empire.)

As Fehrenbach writes:

The expulsion of the Jesuits from Mexico in 1767 destroyed the only element in the Mexican Church that was free of medievalism. The Bourbon officials meant to erase a competing institution, but the true effect was the destruction of all educational standards in New Spain.

This role of the Jesuits as bearers of modern ideas and men of the Church beloved by the people does provide some actual historical background for the role played by Padre Tomás and the nuns in the Zorro telenovela.

Padre Tomás (Jorge Cao) from the telenovela Zorro: la espada y la rosa (2007)

Carlos III seemed to have been a genuine visionary in some ways. He supported the development of an agricultural law based on the principles of Jovellanos, the leading Enlightenment intellectual in Spain, though the law was not enacted until 1894. Jovellanos best-known book was Informe en el expediente de la Ley Agraria (1795), explaining the law.

The changes Carlos III instituted in the colonies laid the basis for a more concrete notion of nationalism and national independence in the colonies. As Fehrenbach explains:

In the same way, the new laws that made indios [Indians] citizens and opened the ports of Spanish America to the world at last opened immense opportunities. The commerce of New Spain quadrupled in a few years, though citizenship of indios meant less since the debt peonage laws were retained. The reforms were unsettling for two reasons. They raised expectations, as reforms always do, and they also reminded the criollos and mestizos of the inequities that remained. And, enacted arbitrarily and in an authoritarian manner, they made the colonials acutely aware of the fact of Spanish tyranny over their lives.

Carlos III certainly intended to go farther. Before his death he approved a grand design for an Hispanic Commonwealth, in which the viceroyalties would be ruled as virtually independent countries. This could only have been implemented over violent protests by various interests in Spain, and the idea died with the ablest of the Bourbons.

Here we see the contradictory effects that can emerge from historical developments, sometimes only dimly perceived by the immediate participants. The reforms of Carlos III especially opened up new opportunities for business in the Nuevo Mundo and empowered the criollo and mestizo capitalists and their supporters by providing them new wealth, prominence, prestige and opportunity. But the imposition of such reforms by absolutist-monarchist methods also engendered resentment, including among those in the colonies who most directly benefited from the reforms so imposed.

Statue of Carlos III (Photo: Luis García/Wiki Commons)

Liberal though the regime of Carlos III may have been, it did not look favorably on the Túpac Amaru rebellion of 1780-1781 in Alto Perú and part of Bajo Perú, named for the indigenous leader of the rebellion, who had taken on the name of the last Inca Emperor, decapitated by the Spanish in 1572. The new Túpac Amaru's real name was José Gabriel Condorcanqui (1738-1781); he was a local Indian cacique (local warlord, in today's terms).

Carlos Fuentes writes, "Fue un rebelion inmersa en la violencia y en el simbolismo." (It was a rebellion immersed in violence and in symbolism.) The rebellion was triggered in response to the reforms of Carlos III, such as the administrative separation of Alto Perú and Bajo Perú which disrupted traditional relationships in that region and the intensification of the system of impressed labor that the Spanish maintained there.

Many blacks and mulatos joined in the revolt, and the rebels proclaimed emancipation for slaves. To a signficant extent, the Túpac Amaru rebellión represented a revolt of the lower classes. Their famous slogan was, "Viva el rey y muera el mal gobierno!" (Long live the King and death to the bad government!") His Enlightened Majesty was not impressed with the rebels' good wishes, nor were his colonial administrators. I don't want to get all Mel Gibson here, so let's just say the rebel leader was publicly executed in Cuzco by Spanish officials in a gruesome manner. His wife and two of his sons were also put to death by the forces of the Enlightened Despot.

This rebellion, and perhaps even more so a revolt of blacks and Indians in Venzuela in 1795 which openly proclaimed the radical democratic ideas of the French Revolution, pushed the reluctant and conservative crillo elite in the Nuevo Mundo into taking the idea of independence more seriously.

Sources:

T.R. Fehrenbach, Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico (1973)

Carlos Fuentes, El Espejo Enterrado (1992)