Chapter One
The Center Cannot Hold Intellectual and Social Roots of Republican Spain
IN SPAIN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY READS LIKE A FRENZIED CATALOGUE of wars, coups d''?tat, and catastrophes. In the space of about one hundred years (1808-1898) Spain experienced foreign occupation; the ban, restoration, and final elimination of the Spanish Inquisition; scores of pronunciamientos (military takeovers); revolutions; three civil wars; a monarchical restoration supported by an intricate political system that institutionalized political corruption; and, finally, the loss of the last vestiges of its overseas empire. The opening decades of the twentieth century seemed no less chaotic. The working classes and rural laborers, long excluded from participating in Spain''s political and economic spheres, registered their disaffection with the system through strikes and terrorist activity. Catalan nationalists clamored for autonomy, and the Spanish military fought tenaciously for control of Spanish Morocco. Even liberals lost faith in a system that purported to be democratic but served the needs of a minuscule elite. By 1923, when General Miguel Primo de Rivera staged a pronunciamiento, many people welcomed his dictatorship as a balm for Spain''s seemingly perpetual social unrest. This period saw many groups scramble to refashion a Spanish nation out of the wreckage of the dissolute Restoration System. To demonstrate the multitude of problems that Spaniards encountered, this chapter will unravel the various social, cultural, and intellectual threads that made up the fabric of Spain between 1875 and 1931.
In retrospect, much of the chaos of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appears to be no different from that of the rest of the continent, especially France and central Europe. Like its counterparts, Spain had to adjust to the residual ideological and political ramifications of the French Revolution and the subsequent Metternichean restoration. Although steeped in a militantly Catholic and absolutist past, Spaniards could not help but be altered by the ideologies that emerged from the revolution to the north. Spain experienced immense dislocations in its attempts to transform itself from an ostensibly feudal society to a liberal, industrial one.
Spain was not alone in its quest for stability-witness, for example, the European-wide revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Many disenfranchised Europeans demanded their individual rights from revanchist monarchs, while the growing working classes agitated for better working conditions, political rights, and, sometimes, revolution. European statesmen did their best to quash rebelliousness by force, but they also tried to lessen their populations'' disaffection with industrialization and other by-products of modernization by encouraging an allegiance to the nation. The communal ties that had been destroyed by industrialization and urbanization could be re-created through nationalism. But some of the people who were most affected by the dislocations wrought by the transition to capitalist economies, namely, the working classes and displaced rural laborers, sought their communal ties not in the nation but in class solidarity.
For the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, Spanish liberals attempted to transform Spain into their vision of a modern state, free from the encumbrances of absolutist monarchs and retrograde Catholics. The more radical liberals sought a constitutional representative government that gave sovereignty to the nation, the end of church authority in state affairs, the disentailment of land, the abolition of seigneurial privileges, and the development of a modern, capitalist economy. By 1840, much of the liberal program had been achieved, especially the creation of private property and, at least on paper, state centralization. But other qualities that scholars have used to judge the strength of the liberal state in Europe-universal primary education and an efficient transportation system to import and export goods and services-were sorely lacking in Spain at this time. The liberal state benefited only a small minority at great cost. For example, the liberals'' disentailment policies transferred one-quarter to one-third of the national land surface to different hands, but the structure of land ownership changed little. The inability of Spanish liberals to spread the benefits of liberalism to the majority of the population also contributed to government instability and the numerous pronunciamientos that characterized nineteenth-century Spain.
The Restoration settlement of 1875, with its infamous turno pac?fico (peaceful rotation), brought a measure of political stability for at least the next twenty years, but Spaniards paid a high economic and social price for this peace. Antonio C?novas del Castillo developed the turno pac?fico as a strategy to prevent the numerous pronunciamientos and civil wars that had threatened the Spanish state''s stability. It allowed for the peaceful rotation of power between two groups, Liberals and Conservatives. When one party was deemed to be losing support, the king would dissolve the cabinet, appoint a new prime minister from the opposition party, and then that party would rule until the next crisis forced another change. This system achieved success through the machine politics known as caciquismo. Once the oligarchs in Madrid drew up their list of candidates, they would contact the local provincial and municipal notables who had ties with the local party bosses-the caciques. The caciques would then tell people in their districts how to vote, usually in exchange for things like exemption from military service or taxes, or employment. This system, most observable in rural areas, may have gotten the "right" people elected, but the government was rarely able to collect enough taxes to create the kinds of public works that might strengthen the state''s infrastructure, and so the gap between rural and urban Spaniards increased.
The Restoration System began breaking down slightly with the Spanish defeat in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898. This colonial loss exacerbated tensions that had been brewing just beneath the surface of C?novas''s political politesse. Catalan nationalists, embarrassed and hurt economically by what they perceived to be the bungling of the centralized government in Madrid, put their nationalist throttle into high gear and began demanding Catalan autonomy and, sometimes, independence. The 1898 "disaster," so called because it ended Spanish colonialism, also spawned a giant wave of criticism from all parties and social classes against the Spanish state. Known collectively as the regenerationist movement, these reformers sought ways to regain the former glory of Spain in the sixteenth century and to bring about Spain''s regeneration.
Between 1898 and 1931, as fragmentation and social dislocation became even more pronounced, these quests for unity intensified. Believing that Spain''s social disintegration had been caused by modernization, various groups harked back to a golden age when people felt connected to a greater community. They sought to re-create this communal sensibility by fostering an allegiance to the nation-however they defined it-or, in the case of the anarchists and sometimes the Socialists, an allegiance to one''s class. Although one might claim that there was no serious nationalist movement on the scale of other European nations between 1808 and 1931, Spain was not devoid of nationalists. Different social and political groups tried to solidify and impose their particular vision for strengthening the nation, or, in the case of the anarchists, their community, but their attempts to attain hegemony became but one of many in a din of competing ideologies. All of the groups concerned with changing the future of Spain believed that education was the key to social change, to forming community bonds, and to fostering Spain''s regeneration.
LIBERAL EDUCATION
By the late nineteenth century, Spain had the trappings of a liberal state-a constitution, universal manhood suffrage, an industrializing economy-but not the infrastructure or the popular support necessary to carry out the grand changes envisioned by the architects of liberalism. Liberals believed that Spain needed to open itself up to the progressive forces of Europeanization that is, to the ideas of the Enlightenment and the technological innovations of industrialization. Because Spain had not kept up with western European trends, liberals believed, it had declined from its position as the world''s greatest empire to become a third-bit player on the stage of international politics. Literacy statistics for this period bear out liberals'' fears. As late as 1887, some 65 percent of the Spanish population was illiterate. Broken down regionally, the statistics become even more grim. For example, in the province of Granada, illiteracy was 80 percent, whereas in the province of Madrid, it was only 38 percent. According to liberals, if Spain were going to compete on the international market, it would need a literate workforce. But the solidly entrenched Catholic Church rebuffed many attempts at modernization, seeing the devil''s work in liberalism and blaming it for Spain''s decline. During the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the liberals struggled incessantly with the Catholic Church to define Spanish identity. They thought Spain would not succeed as an international power until the last vestiges of retrograde Catholicism had been rooted out of politics and until Spaniards could compete in the industrial arena. Coming squarely out of the Enlightenment tradition, Spanish liberals saw education as the only hope for Spanish regeneration.
KRAUSISM
The most influential school of thought on nineteenth-century Spanish Liberals was Krausism. Named after Karl Krause (1781-1832), Krausism was a variant of German idealist philosophy. Brought from Germany to Spain in 1824 by the Spaniard Juli?n Sanz del R?o, Krausism exerted a tremendous influence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the spheres of education, politics, law, and culture. Sanz del R?o''s teachings were seminal in the founding of the Instituci?n Libre de Ense?anza, which, in turn, produced many leaders responsible for the cultural reforms of the Second Republic. These two movements-and the backlash against them-mapped out the course that the cultural and intellectual fields would take in the hands of politicians, church activists, and intellectuals during the Second Republic.
In Spain, Krausism belonged to a cluster of reform movements that swept the universities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Given the wretched state of most Spanish universities (which lacked qualified professors, libraries, and laboratories), educational reformers sought to gut the entire university system and start anew. Based on the alarming state of Spanish education, some pedagogues and politicians began looking to France and Germany as models for reforming the Spanish educational system. Sanz del R?o was the first person to bridge this "education gap." Hired in 1843 to fill the position of interim professor of philosophy at the University of Madrid, Sanz del R?o was required by the Minister of the Interior, Pedro G?mez de la Serna, to spend two years in Germany to learn what he could about the major schools of German philosophy. While in Germany, however, he gravitated toward Krause''s work and dropped any pretensions of studying the most important nineteenth-century German philosophers. He returned to Madrid in 1844, but to the university only in 1854, where he influenced "the first generation of Spanish Krausists."
As interpreted by Sanz del R?o, Krausism melded the concepts of scientific reason, mysticism, positivism, and idealist philosophy into a totalizing theory for political, legal, educational, and economic reform. Krause developed a philosophy of ethics that posited God as a moving force, without denying human action or culpability. Like many of his Enlightenment-minded contemporaries, he believed in human perfectibility, but this perfectibility came from attaining a knowledge of God through reason. He synthesized Enlightenment reason with idealist philosophy, and it is this seemingly harmonic synthesis that begins to explain the Spanish love affair with Krausism.
What attracted Spanish liberal intellectuals to follow Krause rather than Hegel, the philosophical giant? Some credit religion as the characteristic that most distinguished Krausism from other reformist ideologies that developed before or since. People who wrote about the Krausists painted them as descendants of the reformist tradition that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like those religious renegades of the Counter-Reformation, the nineteenth-century Krausists saw the need to overhaul church practices.
Reformers of the nineteenth century perceived the Catholic Church to be too closely allied to the forces of reaction, namely, the monarchy and the landed oligarchy. The church had turned its back on the downtrodden, had neglected their poverty, and chose instead to ingratiate itself with those who were prosperous enough to support its administrative and financial interests. The church controlled the educational system, but the "policy of the religious orders in the early nineteenth century had been to prevent the poor from learning to read"; their fervent antiliberalism isolated middle-class Spaniards from the teachings available in the rest of western Europe. The Spanish church rejected any ideas associated with Enlightenment education and seriously discouraged importing any of the scientific and educational trends that were then emanating from northern and western Europe.
Krausism filled a need for those who had become disillusioned with the traditional Catholic Church. The Krausist God was a harmonious and loving one, whose world functioned best when all members of society cooperated with one another and when all people sought to lead their individual lives as morally as possible. Furthermore, He did not frown on the pursuit of scientific knowledge. People could attain knowledge of God and, consequently, could evolve toward human perfection through reason. This blending of reason and spirit offered an alternative to those who felt themselves intellectually stifled by the Catholic Church. But the Krausist melding of intellect and spirit did not connote any desire to break with the church.
Yet the religious aspects of Krausism do not completely or always convincingly explain its appeal to Spanish intellectuals. Krause''s emphasis on finding harmony even within the most seemingly unresolvable conflicts may have been the balm that Spain longed for when such events as the War of Independence, the Carlist Wars, and waves of pronunciamientos so painfully disrupted society and politics. Therefore, Krausist philosophy suited the cultural, intellectual, and political needs of Spain during the latter half of the nineteenth century more readily than someone like Hegel could, and Krausism coincided most readily with liberal thought.
In fact, while bathed in the language of harmonious rationalism, Sanz del R?os'' political tracts read very much like textbook descriptions of classical liberalism. He sought religious, political, economic, and intellectual liberty through "the gradual transformation of political institutions for the peaceful and lawful development of all institutions." He also called for limited state and clerical intervention to facilitate the "free movement of social forces according to their nature and their relative ends." His desire for gradual reform within the political system bespoke more of Krause''s organic unity than of Hegel''s dialectical clashes of opposing ideas.
Education and "civilization" were seen as the tools for transforming the state. Since every human had the potential to know God through reason, all people could eventually use this reason-acquired through education-to eliminate immoral behavior and attain God''s goodness. As each person reached a higher moral plane, the aggregation of all these educated and "civilized" people would create a state that moved closer to God''s perfection. In the following decades, the theme of education as a civilizing process would appear repeatedly in the calls for educational and cultural reforms. But because it devalued homegrown Spanish thought in favor of European intellectual trends, Krausist education soon proved threatening to both church and state. More precisely, the new intellectuals and educators looked toward the rational Europe of the Enlightenment tradition as their model for cultural, spiritual, and material regeneration.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Creating Spaniardsby SANDIE HOLGU?N Copyright © 2002 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Excerpted by permission.
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