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14 1 Militancy In order to understand the long-term causes of the civil war and revolution, it is helpful to return briefly to Spain’s distant past. Spain did not follow the same pattern of development as northwestern Europe. The long Reconquest from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries helped to ensure the domination of a numerically large aristocracy linked to a church that maintained for hundreds of years a crusading mentality characteristic of the early middle ages. It was therefore hardly surprising that Spanish monarchs became the policemen of Rome and its Counter-Reformation. Militant intolerance was one of the foundations of modern Spain. The expulsion of the Moors and, perhaps even more importantly, the Jews were good lessons (if never learned) on how to destroy a potential middle class. The Spanish monarchy compounded problems. Unlike other western European monarchs, the Spanish kings did not form an alliance with the middle classes but rather with the nobility. The suppression of the Castilian Cortes (parliament) after the revolt of the comuneros in the early sixteenth century and the discouragement of a nascent Castilian textile industry hampered the rise of a bourgeoisie in the center of the peninsula. The great movements of early modern history—the Reformation and absolutism—were aborted or adopted in less vigorous form than in other western European nations. In contrast to its British and French imperial rivals, Spain lacked the same kind of modernizing state that encouraged dynamic urban and rural sectors. The eighteenth century accentuated the differences between Spain and the rest of western Europe. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Enlightenment was largely unoriginal and derivative. Its Spanish advocates were less influential than in the other major Catholic nations of the west, France, and Italy. The Enlightenment agenda of rationalism, productivism, rationalism, and meritocracy was harder to implement in Iberia. The rejection of the Enlightenment’s antinoble and anticlerical agenda was most spectacular during the Napoleonic period when large numbers of Spaniards fought a bloody guerrilla war against the French invaders and their revolutionary principles. The afrancesados, partisans of Enlightened Despotism, were identified with the foreign enemy and forced to flee. Their defeat dealt a severe blow to Spanish economic development and liberalism. Given the large degree of illiteracy and the relatively stagnant economy , native liberalism remained weak. The First Carlist War (1833–40) showed the strength of traditionalism in the peninsula (Payne 1993:5). This war of attrition between a hesitant progressivism and bold reaction led to the death of 1 percent of the total population. The sale of most church and common lands in the nineteenth century did not lead to an impressive increase of agricultural productivity. Demands propelled by the growing Spanish population and international markets were met by using traditional methods to extend the area of cultivated land.1 Even though Spanish elites continued to invest in real estate, not industry, they made few improvements in agricultural productivity. The nobility usually failed to become improving landlords. Nationwide, Spanish agriculture between 1700 and 1900 was able to feed a population that nearly doubled, but this was accomplished largely by using existing technology to increase land under plow. The large sale of ecclesiastical and common property in the nineteenth century did not create an independent peasantry, as had occurred in France. It also failed to stimulate a rural outmigration, which enclosures had done in England. On the eve of the civil war, labor productivity was only 58 percent of that achieved in many central and northern European countries. The subdivision of property in northern Spain, which was characterized by scattered holdings throughout a village, increased travel time and discouraged purchases of machinery, and the use of artificial fertilizers was limited. The abundance of cheap labor contributed to the slow pace of mechanization. Spain imported technology, but the lack of skilled mechanics and spare parts restricted its diffusion . Thus, the delay of mechanization was due not only to agrarian backwardness but also to a weak industrial infrastructure. Given the limited urban and industrial opportunities in the country, labor was understandably reluctant to leave the peninsula. Even after the era of the Atlantic revolutions, traditionalist Spanish landlords , backed by the army and the clergy, maintained their economic and Militancy 15 social dominance over large areas of the peninsula. In certain regions, such as Andalusia and Estremadura, landlessness was aggravated by the near monopoly of large landowners and rapid demographic growth (Maurice 1975:10). Unlike its northern European neighbors, Spain had a great mass of...

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