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2. Renovation under Esquilache
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Here he [Esquilache] tried to do what he did at Naples: curb disorder, apply rules, review public accounts long overlooked, correct faults, root out useless state employees who stole from those who worked the land, and maintain useful measures for handling public revenues. “Carta . . . por un caballero de Madrid a otro en Cádiz” (1766) We regret that Spain has more diYculty than other powers in abandoning the path it has followed for two centuries, in order to form a completely new system. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, baron de l’Aulne, “Mémoire” (1779) In the broad spectrum of reforms in the early years of Charles III’s regime, the historian detects the new bureaucratic cadres’ sensitivity to challenge and the possible rewards of loyal state service, as well as their uncommon (and potentially dangerous) disregard of the dangers of a rigorously pursued policy of renovation. Convinced of the accuracy of their diagnoses, trusting the sincerity and commitment of consultants and advisers, conWdent of their sagacity and capacity to act on a broad front, Wrst metropolitan , then colonial, Esquilache and his Spanish collaborators initiated programs whose very intensity and breadth promised success. Although Esquilache’s colleagues shared his commitment to renovating outworn structures and practices, however, many disagreed with his pace and scope. Where he was impatient, subordinates were cautious. They were imbedded in a larger imperial system consisting of many interests that were not readily budged; the recent experience of Ensenada, who had been removed by coup d’état in 1754, was a warning. Buoyed, however, by royal backing and hope of support from newly emergent business groups, mainly in Spain’s peripheral provinces and Madrid, they banked upon their skill in overcoming opposition among supporters of the traditional structures that 2. Renovation under Esquilache • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • they proposed to adapt to changing conditions. Like most would-be innovating public servants in eighteenth-century Spain, they would discover too late that besieged, integrated interest groups, failing in customary paths of resistance, would coalesce, rather than disintegrate, and magnify any controversial government move to the point of distorting it in order to stage a counteroVensive, the motín de Esquilache of 1766, which José Navarro Latorre has described as “a real uprising comparable to a possible coup d’état.”⁄ Overview With good reason, the opposition focused its attack in 1766 on Esquilache , Charles’s most prominent, foreign-born minister for over six years. On arriving in Barcelona, Esquilache had plunged into aVairs of state with representatives of key ministries, and when illness detained the royal family at Zaragoza en route to Madrid, he hurried on to begin making changes in administration.¤ French diplomats, who had agonized over the lack of direction in Fernando VI’s last months, sensed a deep sea change when Esquilache arrived and immediately (9 December 1759) took over the conde de Valdeparaíso’s Hacienda post. They also warmed to the appointment of a protégé, José de Gálvez (a lawyer for the French embassy), as a Wscal of the millones tax, in whose administration he collaborated with a hard-driving regalist of the Consejo de Hacienda, Francisco Carrasco. Carrasco typiWes the bureaucrat drawn to a reform-minded minister like Esquilache, whose readiness for administrative and policy innovation he shared. He made his long career in the Hacienda, a ministry that became widely respected for the quality of its staV in the eighteenth century. Carrasco ’s career had begun under Philip V’s minister José Patiño, who sponsored young public servants of promise and whose lifestyle was spartan, admirably so to Carrasco. Esquilache (and Charles III) quickly recognized Carrasco’s abilities, and in turn Carrasco considered Esquilache his mentor, “amigo y bienhechor.” Like Esquilache (and Campomanes), Carrasco worried about the privileges of the Spanish ecclesiastical establishment; as an oYcer of the Hacienda, he early on recognized the threat to government revenues of accelerating amortization of rural properties by church authorities . With Campomanes, he was commissioned to analyze the situation and probably prepared a substantial share of what ultimately appeared as Campomanes ’s Tratado de la regalía de amortización. More important, in 1764, Carrasco would be appointed by Esquilache to a junta reviewing colonial economic policy and Wnance. (He had a low opinion of colonial oYcers: “I have never seen a bureaucrat return from the Indies poor,” he said.) He 38 • Stalemate in the Metropole [52.205.218.160] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:16 GMT) claimed to have drafted the instructions given to...