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The Catholic Historical Review 92.4 (2006) 680-682

Reviewed by
Mark Lawrence
University of Liverpool
Por la vida y el honor: el Presbítero Félix Varela en las Cortes de España, 1822-1823. By Manuel Pablo Maza Miquel, S.J. (Santo Domingo, Domincan Republic: Instituto Pedro Francisco Bonó. 2000. Pp. 358.)

In Por la Vida y el Honor, Maza Miquel traces the parliamentary career of the Cuban priest and liberal deputy of the 1822-1823 Spanish Cortes, Félix [End Page 680] Varela. This premise highlights Varela's contradictory vocation. He was an ecclesiastic who nevertheless condemned the priest-led, anti-liberal insurrections which ravaged Spain throughout his tenure. He supported the Cortes in its removal of rebellious bishops, yet defended the right of the Papacy to nominate successors. A committed defender of the Constitution of 1812, he nonetheless represented Cuba, a Spanish colony ruled by varying degrees of autocratic special measures throughout the nineteenth century. The author thus recounts the life of a discerning, moderate liberal, for whom there were principles above the dominant ideologies of the age. In so doing he has made a nuanced contribution to a historiography which is still largely dominated by the partisan historians of the field, Alberto Gil Novales (a wholehearted sympathizer with the radical-liberals of the 1820-1823 Triennium), and José Luis Comellas (a conservative critic of radicalism).

Maza Miquel begins by outlining the context of the 1814-1820 period of absolutism. In this analysis he gravitates towards two key points. The first refers to the view that the 1814-1820 Spanish Church was bloated and shedding its moral authority due to its virulent support for absolutism. This conforms to the traditional view (José Manuel Cuenca, 1971) that the Church would never become entirely reconciled with liberalism, with the result that by the mid-nineteenth century the institution was living in a ghetto of its own making. The second point refers to the revisionist view (Leandro Alvarez Rey, 1998) that the radicals who conspired in the Masonic and secret societies had a lesser impact than has traditionally been thought, the revolution of 1820 being enacted by liberal army elites with marginal popular support. From the liberals' point of view, this circle could be squared by instructing priests to tutor their flocks in classes of constitutional catechism, in order to instil them with amor a la Constitución. The dead-hand union of "throne and altar" absolutism would thus be swept aside by the liberal alliance of "Constitution and altar."

Insofar as this debate is concerned, Varela was clearly in the second camp. However, the policy was a demonstrable failure; the clerical-royalist insurrection of 1821-1823 enjoyed an organic popular support which the opposing liberal armies and militia could not muster. Maza Miquel provides clues as to the popular disillusionment with liberalism but fails to develop them. In 1821, the Cortes decreed the halving of tithe payments throughout Spain, a policy mooted to be extended to Cuba the following year. Varela resisted this policy because he deemed such stringency could not adequately fund even the colonial Church. More significant for the Spanish masses, however, was the fact that the half-tithe had to be paid in cash instead of kind, a massive burden for a peasantry unaccustomed to a cash economy at a time of low agricultural prices. In 1823 Varela urged the establishment of representative town-halls in Cuba, despite so few of the island's settlements consisted of the "twenty-five houses forming roads" which the Constitution demanded as a precondition. Varela's concern might have been informed by an analogous geographical quandary in Spain, as the populous and compact settlements of southern Spain lent themselves to close control [End Page 681] by liberal town-halls, whereas the isolated and strung-out villages of the Basque lands and of parts of Navarre and Aragón were the hotbed of reaction.

Nevertheless, these qualifications merely suggest scope for...

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