1. Charles III died in December 1788 of a cold caught while hunting. His son Charles IV (1788-1808), already forty years old, was heavyset and easygoing. He announced that he would keep the Count of Floridablanca on as his first secretary, thus reassuring the progressive Spaniards who mourned his father. Soon, however, he was to break sharply with the policies of the late king. His wife Maria Luisa of Parma was a wilful, thin, unattractive woman, with a strong hold over him. She had hated the austere life of her father-in-law and frequented the social functions of the more extravagant aristocrats. She rapidly changed the atmosphere of the court. Even more important, Charles IV's accession coincided with the beginning of the French Revolution. For the next quarter century, events abroad would largely determine the course of Spanish history. Gradually the impact of the Revolution and the character of the new monarchs combined to destroy the conditions that made enlightened absolutism possible, bringing in its place modern political conflicts.

In 1789 Europe followed with excitement and anxiety the news of mobs rioting in Paris and a National Assembly at Versailles declaring the people sovereign in France. The National Assembly soon remade the political structure of the country. It proclaimed religious freedom, closed the monasteries, put the properties of the Catholic Church up for sale to pay the royal debt, and provided for popular election of the clergy. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which embodied the legislation on religion, brought a rupture with Rome and was soon to be the cause of civil war in France. In 1791 the assembly forced Louis XVI, [66] virtually a prisoner in Paris, to accept a written constitution which established an elected legislature and reduced the king from divinely appointed lawgiver to executive officer of the nation.

Floridablanca, now in his sixties, grew increasingly alarmed at these developments. For the French assembly to question royal authority horrified him. He tried to suppress all news coming from France and called on the Inquisition to help in collecting any French or Spanish writings that mentioned the revolution. All in vain, for interested Spaniards learned of the French achievements from one source or another, such as French papers smuggled in by merchants and the reports of refugees who crossed the Pyrenees. Almost in a panic, Floridablanca in 1791 stopped publication of Spanish periodicals and suspended the activities of the Amigos del País, the two main agencies of enlightenment in Spain. The Revolution had scared the veteran minister into abandoning the spirit of reform.

Because Floridablanca's attitude was weakening France's traditional friendship with Spain, and perhaps also because Maria Luisa found him too puritanical, Charles IV dismissed him in February 1792. His successor was the Count of Aranda, long famous for taking command of the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. For several months Aranda tried to improve relations with the French government, evidently in the hope of taming the Revolution. But his hope was futile. France went to war with Prussia and Austria, and in August 1792 an uprising in Paris overthrew the monarchy. France elected a new radical legislature, the Convention, which proclaimed a republic. Aranda was discredited, and the king dismissed him in November.

Charles IV appointed to succeed him a far different person from those who had counseled his father. This was a dashing twenty-five-year-old guardsman Manuel Godoy, who was descended from a modest hidalgo family of Extremadura. The king, for unaccountable reasons, had recently made him a grandee with the title of the Duke de la Alcudia. Now he raised him to be his first secretary, above all men of higher rank and more experience in government. Why this sudden favor? Because, rumor said, Godoy was the queen's current lover; Maria Luisa had the reputation of indulging herself with handsome young men of the court. The circumstances of Godoy's advent antagonized most aristocrats and progressive intellectuals. He was to seek to revive Charles Ill's liberal policies but would do little to improve his image. Besides being an upstart, he was vain, tactless, and opinionated. He made an ostentatious display of his wealth, which came from exploiting his new position. Yet he had a certain canny intelligence. Both the king and queen remained devoted to him for the rest of their lives, and trusted his wisdom. Except for a couple of years, he was the directing force in government during the rest of the reign.

From the outset, Godoy had to deal with a war-torn Europe. The [67] French Convention, after guillotining the king, declared war on Spain in March 1793. Spain fought with a coalition of European monarchs against the Republic. In 1794 French Republican troops invaded Catalonia and the Basque Provinces. Knowing his own unpopularity and fearful of the effect of military defeat on public opinion, Godoy made peace in 1795, ceding half the island of Santo Domingo to France. To celebrate the end of the war, Charles IV granted him the sonorous title of Prince of the Peace, placing him officially above all grandees, almost equal to a royal prince, but hardly endearing him to either the aristocracy or common people. A year later Godoy led Spain into an alliance with France against England, convinced with some justice that the real threat to the Spanish monarchy came from British penetration of Spain's colonial markets.

The war against Revolutionary France brought into question the whole concept of domestic reform. Already Floridablanca had curbed the leading agents of progress. Now the conservatives, with clergymen in the forefront, who had been muzzled by Charles III, could voice their opposition to reform. Pointing to the French attack on the crown and church, they preached a crusade "For Religion, for King, and for Country" against the French, whom they called atheists and regicides. They argued that enlightenment and reform would lead to anarchy in Spain as it had in France.

Even though the progressives were also dismayed by much of the Revolution, they fought back. When the French Assembly established the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, many of them hoped Charles IV would take similar action. Enlightened men and Jansenists had smarted before 1789 under the threat of the Inquisition, and many of them wanted to weaken and eventually abolish it. In order to do so, they felt the need to loosen the Spanish church from the Pope's authority, as the French had done. In 1797 Godoy obtained the appointment of Jovellanos, author of the Informe de ley agraria, who was known to be a Jansenist, as minister in charge of religious affairs. Jovellanos encouraged reform in the church and universities and recommended giving to the bishops the power to censor books now held by the Inquisition.

Jovellanos' policies led to a showdown with the conservatives. After 1798, with Godoy temporarily in disfavor, the ultramontane clergy and their allies managed to gain the ear of the monarchs. They convinced Charles IV that reform of the church involved the danger of revolution. In 1800 the king gave his support to the Inquisition to rout out and silence Jansenist clergymen and liberal officials. Jovellanos, their leading figure, was arrested in his house, accused of plotting against the king, and transported like a common criminal to prison in Mallorca. For all Godoy's penchant for progress, he acquiesced in the new policy when he returned to power later in the year. The alliance of enlightened [67] Spaniards with the crown, which had been the glory of Charles Ill's reign, lay in ruins.

On the other hand, the financial needs of the government, arising out of the wars, also led it into conflict with the clergy. The war with Britain after 1796 was especially harmful. The British navy intercepted trade with America, colonial revenues could not reach Spain, and Spanish exporters lost their main market. Suffering from the expenses of war and declining income from taxes, the crown issued redeemable bonds, called vales redes, that circulated as legal tender. They rapidly depreciated and the royal credit was threatened. To raise funds, Godoy recommended taxes on the unproductive classes. The king decreed new levies on landowners and municipal governments. These privileged groups, who already hated Godoy, were not amused, yet these measures were inadequate. As a last resort, the wealth of the church offered a tempting way out of the pressing financial plight. The church held extensive property, both urban and rural. Most of this belonged directly to cathedrals, churches, and monasteries, but a large amount represented endowments to support the church's charitable and educational activities, as well as benefices and masses for the dead. In 1798, while Godoy was momentarily out of favor, Charles IV heeded the advice of his ministers and decided to put up for auction the properties that made up religious endowments. The proceeds were to be used to pay off the vales reales and save the royal credit. The religious institutions which had held the properties would receive 3 percent government bonds equal to their sale price. Although the king maintained that the churches were getting a good bargain, most clergymen disagreed, being justifiably suspicious of the soundness of the government paper they had to accept. They could not fail to observe that the French revolutionaries had found a similar solution to their fiscal crisis. When Godoy returned to power in 1800, he continued the sales, earning the lasting hatred of many clergymen.

The forced disentail of church buildings and lands lasted until 1808. About one sixth of all real property of the church had been sold by then, a vast transfer of land that began to give a new structure to rural society. Men who had free money to invest bought land--merchants and landowners who had profited during the recent inflation, even many priests and canons with lucrative benefices who wanted to enjoy private estates and leave them to their relatives. Along with the wealthy were thousands of small buyers who acquired an irrigated plot or a field of wheat or a house to live in, where previously they had worked the land of others. It was only a beginning, but Charles IV's ministers, under the pressure of war, did what Charles Ill's had failed to do, distribute entailed land to private hands. Like Campomanes, they wanted to create a class of small landowners, but again the large exploiter benefited most from the end of old restrictions.

[67] For different reasons Charles IV and Godoy had managed to alienate both progressives and conservatives. Both groups began to look elsewhere for leadership. Some liberal young Spaniards, excited by the happenings in France, eyed the forceful general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who headed the government of France after 1799. Others looked to the youthful heir to the Spanish throne, Ferdinand, whose heritage Godoy was suspected of coveting. Ferdinand might reestablish the alliance of crown and enlightened subjects. Little was known of his character, and conservatives too saw in him a hope of ridding Spain of Godoy and his policies. Charles IV became ill as he aged, and a sense of expectation gripped the public; the prospect of a new king was exciting, the fear that Godoy and Maria Luisa might somehow eliminate him, anguishing.

2. Outside events brought the tensions to a head. Spain and France signed peace with Britain in 1802. Nevertheless Bonaparte's insatiable quest for power led to renewed hostilities with Britain in 1803, and Spain was soon involved in another war. In 1804 Bonaparte had himself proclaimed Emperor Napoleon. A year later a British fleet under Admiral Nelson destroyed the French and Spanish navies off Cape Trafalgar, near Cadiz. In 1807 Napoleon obtained the consent of Charles IV for a French army to enter Spain and join in an attack on England's ally Portugal. After a brief assault that was hardly more than a parade, Portugal lay prostrate in November 1807. Nevertheless Napoleon continued to send troops across the Pyrenees in the ensuing months, asserting that they were to protect Spain against a British invasion. Suspicion grew among Spaniards that Godoy might be in league with Napoleon to deprive Ferdinand of his right to the throne and take it for himself. French troops arrived in Madrid in March 1808. Godoy, who was loyal to his king and feared Napoleon's motives, took the royal family south, out of reach of the French; but to the public he seemed to be arranging for the monarchs to sail for America, as the Portuguese rulers had done, abandoning the country to the mercy of Napoleon. On March 18 violent riots broke out at Aranjuez, where the royal family had stopped. After two days of shooting and pillaging, Charles IV, thoroughly frightened, dismissed Godoy and abdicated in favor of Ferdinand. The news of the accession of the young Ferdinand VII (1808-33) sent a thrill through the length and breadth of the country: Godoy was in prison, and Spaniards welcomed the end of fifteen years of ministerial despotism. Progressives and conservatives both looked to the new king to support their cause.

But Spain's joy was short-lived. Napoleon refused to recognize Ferdinand, Charles soon regretted his abdication, and both kings [67] accepted the emperor's invitation to Bayonne in France to settle their rival claims. In one of the most treacherous cases of mediation in history, Napoleon pressured both father and son to abdicate in his favor and proceeded to name his brother Joseph Bonaparte to the vacant throne. He convoked to Bayonne a body of pliant Spanish notables-church dignitaries, grandees, and royal councilors--who in June recognized Joseph as their legitimate king and adopted a written constitution for their country drawn up under Napoleon's direction. Although the constitution provided for cortes, it left final power in the hands of the king. In Madrid the royal councils recognized the fait accompli and welcomed Joseph I as king of Spain in July, while Napoleon sent Ferdinand and Charles off to captivity in distant chateaux.

The Spanish people, however, did not accept passively the abduction of their young prince charming. On May 2, 1808 crowds in Madrid attacked the French forces and were crushed savagely. (The day has since been a national holiday.) At the end of the month, when news of Ferdinand's abdication reached the provinces, simultaneous risings occurred in various parts of unoccupied Spain. Mobs drove out or lynched the royal officials who had dared proclaim Ferdinand's renunciation. To get control of the situation, leading citizens set up local governing juntas composed of respected clergymen, aristocrats, and loyal government officials which proclaimed Ferdinand VII legitimate king of Spain. The juntas raised troops and ran local affairs through the summer while they groped for a solution to the problem of a lack of a central governing body. Finally, at the proposal of the juntas of Murcia and Galicia, all the juntas sent representatives to form a Supreme Central Junta that met on September 25 at Aranjuez, in the very palace where all the trouble had started six months earlier. Most prominent among its members were Floridablanca, now eighty years old, who had lived quietly in Murcia since his dismissal in 1792, and Jovellanos, freed from prison by Ferdinand. The junta recognized Ferdinand VII as sovereign of Spain and itself as the depository of his authority until his return, thus legitimizing its own revolutionary origins with the name of the absent king.

The conflict with France that began in this fashion lasted five years and became one of the most bitterly fought wars in history, as Goya's stark etchings of the "Disasters of War" testify. Spanish armies inflicted surprising defeats on the French in the summer of 1808, forcing Joseph and his supporters to flee Madrid, but their victories were short-lived. Napoleon came to Spain in person and easily recaptured the capital in December. The Central Junta fled to Seville; on the way Floridablanca died, worn out by the tensions, the last figure who could command respect throughout the country. Much of 1809 was militarily indecisive. Rather than accept the "intruder king," Spaniards resorted to guerrilla warfare (the name originated here). They enjoyed the [67] support of the British navy, for the common fight against Napoleon had made the two countries uneasy allies, and in Portugal a British army under Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, held back the French. Nevertheless, by January 1810 Napoleon's generals had overwhelmed organized resistance in Spain, and only parts of the periphery and the mountain areas of the center remained free.

Joseph Bonaparte ruled over most of Spain for the next two years, but he could never solidify his hold. The majority of the royal officials and inhabitants of the occupied areas who accepted his rule did so without enthusiasm, and French armies paid only lip service to the king as they lived off the countryside. A few Spaniards, who became known as afrancesados, were wholeheartedly devoted to Joseph, believing in the need to regenerate Spain from above and convinced of the futility of resistance to French armies. Some had been partisans of Godoy. The smallness of their numbers reveals how dead the ideal of an enlightened despot had become since 1789, for this was the role Joseph Bonaparte tried constantly to fulfill. He sold off monastic lands, abolished the Inquisition, and appealed to monetary interests by guaranteeing the vales reales. He set up Masonic lodges in the main cities, where his Spanish partisans could mingle socially with French officers and administrators and tingle to a forbidden freedom from religious superstitions. And he got thanks from hardly anyone.

3. Most Spaniards remained loyal to Ferdinand VII and the governments that defended his cause. Fighting a desperate struggle against Napoleon, these governments took measures that permanently changed the political atmosphere in Spain. The Central Junta, like most local juntas, was conservative in majority. While he lived, Floridablanca was its president. It assured the support of the clergy by ending the sale of ecclesiastical lands and supporting the Inquisition. Nevertheless, in order to justify their revolt, both local and central juntas had to assert that the people had sovereign rights which even their king could not transgress. He could not give his subjects to a stranger like chattel. The Central Junta announced to the king's subjects in America that they were no longer colonists but equal to Spaniards and would share in their government: "Your destinies no longer depend on ministers or viceroys or governors, they are in your hands."⁽¹⁾ Many progressive Spaniards, recalling the Cortes of the Middle Ages, felt the proper solution to the lack of a legitimate king was to convoke national cortes, which would assume sovereignty in his absence and write a constitution that would prevent a repetition of ministerial despotism [67] and irresponsible transfer of the crown. A minority of the Central Junta urged this action.

Their chance came when military defeats at the end of 1809 discredited the Central Junta. Fleeing from Seville to Cadiz in January 1810, the Junta issued a convocation of cortes representing the entire empire and then dissolved itself in favor of an interim five-man regency. A French army immediately laid siege to Cadiz. The city was filled with refugees, infested by yellow fever, and could communicate with the rest of free Spain only by sea. The war seemed lost. The cause of Ferdinand was at its lowest ebb, yet the Spanish armies and guerrillas fought on.

The regency, headed by the testy old Bishop Pedro Quevedo of Orense, was even more conservative than the Central Junta and hesitated to assemble the Cortes for fear of opening a Pandora's box. It was finally forced to act by news reaching Cadiz in the summer of 1810 that citizens of Caracas and Buenos Aires, after learning of the demise of the Central Junta, had established juntas that assumed local sovereignty in the name of Ferdinand. The regents set a date for the meeting of the Cortes as a desperate means of keeping the empire together.

The Central Junta, before dissolving, had agreed to call the Cortes in two estates, but they had failed to convoke the upper house of grandees and church prelates. In Cadiz the regents were surrounded by a radical populace which included the city's enlightened merchants and many government officials and others who had fled before Joseph's armies. The regents feared the effect of now issuing a call for a second estate for the Cortes, and never did so. They made another critical decision. Only in unoccupied Spain could any semblance of free elections be held. Not to leave the occupied provinces unrepresented, and also to have deputies from America (which the Central Junta had declared an integral part of the monarchy), the regency provided for temporary substitute deputies chosen among the citizens of these areas present in Cadiz. Many of them enlightened bureaucrats and clergymen, the substitutes formed nearly half of the Cortes when they met, and they insured that the body would have a radical orientation.

From the outset, the Cortes put conservatives ill at ease. At their opening meeting, on September 24, 1810, while proclaiming Ferdinand legitimate king, they declared themselves sovereign in the name of the nation, a step the Centra] Junta, although more revolutionary in its origins, had never taken. When Bishop Quevedo, head of the regency, refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Cortes unless he could qualify it by the proviso that it did not infringe on Ferdinand's ultimate soverignty, the Cortes ordered him to prison and kept him there for months until he took the oath without qualifications. In November 1810 the Cortes proclaimed freedom of the press in all matters except [67] religious dogma and established lay juntas with jurisdiction in matters of the press. Within two months the Cortes had attacked both the concept of royal absolutism and inquisitorial censorship.

Many of the deputies who supported these measures were young and little known. They represented the appearance of a new generation at the head of Spain. In spirit they were heirs to the Jansenists and enlightened Spaniards of the previous century, but they had been formed in the days of Godoy and the French Revolution and were more extreme than their elders. They angered conservative clergymen and troubled even moderates. In the last months prior to his death in January 1811, Jovellanos, the leading reformer of the 1790's, was frightened by their measures. They were soon called "Liberals" (the first use of this term as a political label). Almost all the substitute deputies were Liberals, whereas a majority of the regularly elected deputies were of the other party, known as the "Serviles." The division was ominous for the future.

In December 1810 the legislators established a commission to write a constitution for the Spanish nation. Heading it were Agustín Arguelles and Diego Muñoz Torrero, the leaders of the Liberals. Late in 1811 the Cortes subjected their draft to extensive debate, enacted it, and proclaimed it on March 19, 1812, the fourth anniversary of the advent of Ferdinand VII. The Constitution of 1812, the first written constitution enacted by a European nation that was fighting the French, was a decisive document in the history of Spain. It declared the nation to be sovereign and defined Spaniards as all men of free birth in the realms on both sides of the Atlantic. It specified the civil rights of citizens as well as their duties, and it declared the religion of the nation to be Catholic, with none other allowed. It created a one-house legislature, the Cortes, to be chosen biennially by universal male suffrage with an indirect system of elections. The king, no longer absolute, held the executive power and had a suspensive veto over legislation. At the local level, the Cortes abolished señoríos, the feudal jurisdictions held by aristocrats. They replaced the ayuntamientos long controlled by hereditary oligarchies with freely elected municipal governments. Carrying to the extreme the process of centralization that had been going on under the Bourbons, they replaced the remaining local privileges and distinctions by a system of administration, taxation, and representation that applied equally to all Spain and the former colonies. A Council of State, in which ecclesiastics and grandees would make up only one fifth of the membership, took the place of the separate royal councils, including those of Castile and the Indies.

In other words the Cortes of Cadiz had turned Spain and its former colonies into a single vast democratic nation that bridged the ocean. Support for centralization and uniformity came from the deputies of the periphery. There was no fear of unity if Castile did not [67] dominate the nation, and the incorporation of Spanish America into the nation and destruction of local oligarchic rule meant that in the future Castile would not.

In a lengthy preamble the Cortes sought to legitimize the new charter by finding a historical pedigree for it. They called the constitution a revival of Spain's medieval fueros and cortes. They explained the new uniformity as a return to the unity of Visigothic days. The unicameral legislature without privileged orders, so unmedieval, they called a necessary corollary to the new equality of all citizens. Many critics at the time and since have pointed out that the constitution resembled the French one of 1791 more than anything out of Spanish history; but in the daring simplicity of its egalitarian and unitary structure it was more radical than any constitution that came out of revolutionary Paris.

Unoccupied Spain initially accepted the constitution and began to carry out its provisions. From the start covert opposition was present, especially among the clergy. The troublesome Bishop Quevedo, back in his see in Galicia, refused to swear to it without the qualification that ultimate sovereignty lay with the king, and this time he escaped to Portugal to avoid arrest. For many he was a martyr to Ferdinand's cause.

A year later the Cortes, with a much smaller majority than usual, abolished the Inquisition on the grounds that its procedures violated the rights of the citizen proclaimed in the constitution. The Liberals thus gave a radical solution to the dilemma of the Jansenists and progressives of an earlier era. The conservative clergy, who had bit their tongues at earlier acts of the Cortes, found here an issue on which they could attack the Liberal majority. Many refused to read the decree in their churches as ordered by the Cortes and stated in their sermons that the Inquisition alone could guarantee the purity of Catholic worship promised by the constitution. Napoleon had abolished the Inquisition in December 1808. Were not the Liberals who repeated the measure really Frenchmen at heart rather than Spaniards?--That was the inference behind their sermons.

The Liberals were unable to silence their critics. A flourishing press in Cadiz eloquently expressed their position, and the Serviles did not have publicists to match them, but the clergy could get their message to a far wider audience through the pulpit. Furthermore the clergy had support among the large landowing class of Castile, for the Cortes had abolished seigneurial rights, and the free election of ayuntamientos threatened their dominance over local government. The Liberals even proposed to distribute monastic lands to veterans of the war, waking fears for the property of the church that the Central Junta and regency had carefully defended. Many Spaniards outside the centers of enlightenment like Madrid, Cadiz, and other main cities became [67] suspicious of the Cortes and the Constitution of 1812. Elections for the first regular Cortes, which met in Madrid at the end of 1813, returned a much smaller Liberal majority than those present in the Constituent Cortes.

4. While the Cortes were remaking the political structure of Spain, the French armies, taxed by the constant harassment of the guerrillas, slowly lost their momentum. By 1812, the British and Spanish forces began to liberate conquered territory. In August Wellesley reached Madrid. Although Joseph Bonaparte soon reentered the capital, his success was brief. In 1813 Napoleon called his best troops in Spain to central Europe to salvage his position after his disastrous invasion of Russia, leaving Joseph defenseless against his enemies. Wellesley routed the French at Vitoria on June 21, 1813. Joseph fled to France, arid the remaining French forces rapidly evacuated Spain.

The end of military operations did not bring calm to the war-torn country, racked now by the political conflict between Liberals and Serviles. The outcome rested on the position Ferdinand would take on his return. Ferdinand had spent his time in captivity writing sycophantic letters to Napoleon, but Spaniards knew nothing of this and still idolized him as their innocent young king, betrayed by the monstrous French tyrant. In December 1813, Napoleon got Ferdinand to sign a treaty of alliance against the British and sent him back to Spain shortly thereafter.

Ferdinand proved disloyal both to Napoleon and to the Cortes which had ruled in his absence. Once on Spanish soil he gave ready ear to Servile spokesmen who came to meet him. Ignoring instructions of the Cortes to come at once to Madrid, he went to Valencia, where he soon found army commanders who favored the overthrow of the Liberals. With assurance of their support, on May 4, 1814 he declared the original convocation of the Cortes illegal and all their legislation null and void. Spain would return to the status quo before the French attack. In Madrid Liberal deputies, caught by surprise, sought popular support, but only a few small disturbances protested the king's decree. Spaniards welcomed the return of Ferdinand as joyously as they had his accession six years earlier. Few questioned the motives of their beloved king. The Constitution of 1812 disappeared, local ruling groups resumed their authority, and the Inquisition hunted out Liberals and Jansenists. Some Liberals fled, but many were arrested, and their leaders, including Arguelles, went to prison in the garrisons of Africa.

It was twenty-five years since the death of Charles III. In one generation the nature of political authority had changed irrevocably. Before 1789 the figure of the monarch transcended internal divisions.

[67] With the advice of his councilors, he determined the objectives of government and acted as ultimate arbiter for conflicting interests. After 1814 the king could no longer play such a role. The ministry of Godoy, replete with disasters for which he was only partly to blame, and the reputation of Charles IV as an ineffectual cuckold, discredited the crown. The French Revolution meanwhile revealed a new kind of political life, where sovereign citizens organized in parties around different political doctrines struggled for ultimate control of the country. The removal of the king from Spain in 1808 left Spaniards in a position similar to that of Frenchmen after 1789, lacking a supreme ruler. When the Cortes met at Cadiz and decided to write a constitution, they claimed to be returning Spain to medieval practices, and they doubtless were sincere, for they did not blindly imitate foreign examples. But they could not hide the fact that a written constitution which said "Sovereignty resides essentially in the nation"⁽²⁾ was the symbol of a new age. Ferdinand on his return could abolish the constitution, but he could not erase the memory of these years from Spanish minds.

Into this new political bottle, the debates of Cadiz poured the old wine of eighteenth-century issues. The Liberals pushed the policies of the Bourbon kings toward their logical conclusion: uniform centralized government, destruction of local oligarchies, distribution of church properties to private owners, freedom of expression from religious authority in nonreligious matters. But the Cortes lacked the aura of royal majesty, and the Liberal constitution became a partisan program, not a national creed. Those who felt threatened, including in the end the king, denied the legitimacy of the new order. Taking the lead were clergymen, who stood to lose both income and moral authority. Thus the constitutional question came to center on the incipient ideological conflict of Charles Ill's day. Political and religious issues had become inseparable. Although they were loyal Catholics, Liberals saw the conservative clergy as their main enemy; while conservatives felt they were fighting antireligious doctrines imported from France.

Beloved on all sides, Ferdinand might have acted impartially and become a constitutional monarch. But he was a mean, short-sighted man, and on his return he treated the Liberals as traitors. Like most European rulers after 1815, he believed he was reestablishing royal absolutism, but that was dead beyond recall. He was only giving the crown a partisan role in the new political life, hardly different from other interest groups. Spain was entering a period of bitter civil conflict as it sought to adjust to the era of popular sovereignty that began for Europe in 1789.

1. Decree of January 22, 1809.

2. Article 3 of the Constitution of 1812.