Approaches to the History of Spain

Approaches to the History of Spain

APPROACHES

TO

THE HISTORY

OF SPAIN

by JAIME VICENS VIVES

Second Edition, Corrected and Revised

TRANSLATED and EDITED by JOAN CONNELLY ULLMAN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1970

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1967, 1970, by

The Regents of the University of California

Second Edition, 1970

ISBN: 0-520-01299-2

First Campus Edition

ISBN: 0-520-01422-7

Aproximación a la historia de España, first published in Barcelona, Spain, by Editorial Vicens-Vives, 1952. The English translation is based on the 2d edition, published by Editorial Teide in 1960 for the Centro de Estudios Históricos Internacionales of the University of Barcelona.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 70-127105

Printed in the United States of America

Maps by Alice Alden

Foreword

I do not have the credentials to introduce a historian, much less one of the caliber of Vicens Vives, but I can contribute a few reminiscences that will help the reader to understand somewhat the spirit in which Approaches to the History of Spain was written.

I met Vicens Vives in person about the year 1951. Everything by him that I had read — a thorough doctoral dissertation in three volumes on Ferdinand II and the city of Barcelona (published 1936-37), various history textbooks written and published during and after 1942, and his contributions to Estudios de Historia Moderna, a historical and bibliographical journal he published in collaboration with his students — had made me imagine him as the meticulous type of historian who concentrates on facts and documents and is not at all disposed to let himself be carried away by rhetorical considerations. This impression was confirmed by our first personal meeting, in 1951, which was followed by others during each succeeding summer until the very sad one of 1960, when Vicens Vives died at the peak of his career and with many projects still to be carried out.

Vicens Vives was a man who did not play with historical facts. His every affirmation was based upon a solid pile of documents. There was a reason why Vicens had a reputation for some years of devouring archives, of being a man who could literally go through an entire archive in one fell swoop. He was a born historian, a man for whom the past was a living presence in the traces left behind by men and institutions. But it would be erroneous to think that he simply restricted himself to collecting documents and presenting them in an orderly fashion. A true historian does not merely reproduce the past verbally; he must also, and above all, synthesize it and give it meaning. Approaches to the History of Spain bears witness to Vicens Vives’ power of synthesis; never has so much been said about this history in so few pages. Vicens was, then, a complete historian, able to proceed from a synthesis to an analysis. He was a man who never overlooked a document, but was also one who knew which facts were essential and would not allow history to become a sheer accumulation of facts.

All that I have said, although it is a great deal, is still not sufficient to characterize Vicens Vives’ work and personality. Of these there are three aspects that I should like to emphasize.

In the first place, Vicens Vives was possibly Spain’s first truly modern historian. Rhetorical history, into which so many Spanish historians had fallen, or stumbled, completely repelled him; no one was so unrhetorical or so adverse to resounding phrases as Vicens. History that concerned itself merely with ideologies struck him as suspect; under the guise of any ideology whatsoever, a historian might very easily jettison facts and documents. Purely political and institutional history merited somewhat more his respect, but still wasn’t really what he wanted. What, then, was Vicens Vives’ criterion for the writing of history? Simply the criterion (which had already been cultivated outside of Spain but which reached Spain for the first time, and in its full maturity, through the works of Vicens) that, instead of stopping at major events of greater or lesser renown, one should try to penetrate through them to the firmer subsoil of social and economic developments, as analyzed from a rigorously statistical viewpoint. It isn’t that Vicens Vives did not know about the great events, or even that he disdained them; what he did was to consider them in terms of data that Spanish historians have not normally used. For Vicens Vives it was very important, of course, to know whether the Cortes had or had not met in a certain year. But it was also extremely important, and at times even more important, to know how many ships had unloaded cargoes in the city of Barcelona on such and such a date, what the tonnage of the ships was, and, naturally, what merchandise they brought. It seems unnecessary to say that it was also very important to know how men had organized themselves in social groups and what pressures these groups had exerted.

Secondly, Vicens Vives was perfectly aware that, even given all the data and documents one might want, to write history is — in the last analysis — to interpret. This is not just a matter of selecting facts — which might very well be selected not in order to interpret but simply to support a prejudice — nor of more or less vague and profound hermeneutics (more often vague than profound) by means of which a historian penetrates sympathetically or emphatheti- cally into the men of the past. The kind of interpretation that he advocated and achieved involved a very special operation: to allow one’s imagination to flower without ever loosening its roots in the solid ground of facts. There is a Catalan expression which seems made to order as a description of Vicens Vives’ attitude, one that might be translated as to keep your feet on the ground. Vicens, historical writings, no less than his entire personality, are living testimonies to the attitude expressed in the Catalan expression which means not to beat about the bush (andarse por las ramas) and consequently, not to get lost either in the clouds or in a labyrinth. It means simply to be firmly rooted in reality, which is where Vicens was from the beginning to the end.

The third aspect of Vicens Vives’ work and personality can be easily deduced from the first two, but it deserves a brief comment. Because he was alert to the reality of the past, had no illusions, and yet was free of any paralyzing skepticism, Vicens Vives was highly interested — and with each year increasingly so — in a part of history that still does not exist: the future. My conversations with Vicens, which were enriched by his always very pertinent references to the past, were almost invariably oriented to the future — the future, obviously, of Catalonia and of Spain. These were not merely daydreams; Vicens Vives was thinking about the future in terms of very specific and very concrete possibilities. Besides being a historian, Vicens Vives was thus, in a way, a politician. Unfortunately, the era in which he lived did not permit him much freedom to maneuver, but he took full advantage of the little he had.

Historians usually get together with historians, and Vicens Vives did not disdain such professional contacts. But he was more frequently in the company of writers, economists, philosophers, scientists, industrialists, workers. All learned from him, but at the same time he learned from all of them. He learned that a human community, which is what makes history, is composed not of any one kind of person but of many kinds, often in mutual conflict. Vicens Vives certainly did not restrict himself to an academic discussion of the problems of Catalonia and of Spain. An academician by profession, Vicens Vives had the least academic personality one could imagine. He did not live in an ivory tower; he lived out of doors, because that was where the history he had done so much to scrutinize and interpret takes place.

The reader has in his hands a work that Vicens Vives considered minor; after all, it was originally only an article for an encyclopedia. But the best qualities of an author are often revealed in certain minor works. With no display of documents, with the minimum of facts, yet always the essential ones, Approaches to the History of Spain is the work of a historian who, had he set out to do so, could have written a book on each one of its sentences. Instead he preferred to condense a book in each sentence.

This book is thus essential in many ways: it goes to the root of the problem; it teaches much more than many a series of voluminous and indigestible tomes. It was an excellent idea on the part of Professor Joan Connelly Ullman, whose abilities as an historiaq I learned to appreciate during her years at Bryn Mawr College, to translate this work, and an excellent decision on the part of the University of California Press to publish it. Anyone who would like to start learning something about the history of Spain can without hesitation begin with these Approaches.

JOSE FERRATER MORA

By Way of Prologue

In the prologue which I wrote in October 1952 for the first edition, I described how this book had originated in the meetings then held every Monday in the history seminar room of the University of Barcelona. The group was not very large: a dozen friends, either university colleagues or recent graduates who, in the course of plowing through the arid program of studies then in effect, had lost neither their vocation nor their enthusiasm. These conversations, generally dealing with methodology, proved to be extremely stimulating because of the participants’ enthusiasm and because absolute freedom of discussion was an established rule. Endless nuances developed as our discussion ranged from comments on a provocative article in the latest issue of a Spanish or foreign publication to very subtle observations in a general evaluation of the work of Karl Jaspers or Arnold Toynbee, who were then in vogue. We often focused our attention, of course, on the problematical aspects of Spain’s history, for we were the first to lament the decadence in the post-Civil War period of this type of research, a decadence due as much to the rigidity of old molds of scholarship as to the blithe ideological intuitions of persons who did not want to be bothered with the hard task of digging into archives.

The enthusiasm of our meetings suggested that it might perhaps be of interest to sketch, in a very few pages, the fundamental structure of Spanish history. My purpose, however, was not to produce a new synthesis of the Peninsula’s past, but rather to provide a general account of problems on which friends and collaborators, and all who feel a sincere obligation to penetrate into the historic existence of Hispania, could base their work. 1 This idea was still in embryonic form when the amiable pressures of a friend, Santiago Nadal, forced me to act. Nadal asked that I collaborate on a dictionary of politics being prepared under his direction, and we agreed that my contribution should first be published as a short book. It appeared in bookstore windows and had an unexpected, splendid success. This discouraged the editors of the dictionary and they decided not to include my article. I state this purely as bibliographical information, but also as a justification for omitting the note that appeared on the frontispiece of the first edition of this book. 2

I must attribute its success in the bookstores to the fact that for the first time in fifteen years the public had found a book on Spanish history that was impartial. Based on a dispassionate and concrete analysis of events (at times I would summarize a monograph in one adjective), my assertions were presented simply as working hypotheses, in order to have them perfected or discarded by future research. For this reason I had given the book an extremely modest title. I would attempt only to approach the true history of Spain, and I would do so without rhetoric or grandiloquence, but rather with the artisan’s effort to persevere in his work and to perfect it.

My Approaches soon called for a new edition. Hispanists in Germany and North America, where my book had been well received, were particularly insistent in their demands. But an approach needed some time to mature before a second edition would be possible. I had to observe for a while: what would be the advances in research; which would be the great works of synthesis; what would be the orientation of the various schools; what would be the definitive positions? Thus it seemed prudent to wait a few years, particularly because historical science in Spain, which had only recently emerged from its dreams of rhetorical grandeur, had begun developing three movements. These were a revitalization of the philological-institutional school, an abrupt burgeoning of the socioeconomic methods advocated by the Annales in Paris,3 and the elimination (less rapidly than had been foreseen) of the ideologism 4 of the post-war period. To these movements we must add the contributions (at times, major contributions) of the foreign historians who have concerned themselves with Spain, as well as the equally forceful interpretative works by Américo Castro and Claudio Sanchez Albornoz — two intellectual lights of exiled Spain.5

As a consequence, the seven years that separate the first and second appearances of my Approaches may be considered of capital importance in the development of Hispanic historiography in the twentieth century, especially because of the type of publication appearing during that period. Outstanding among these are three general histories (by Ramón Menendez Pidal,6 Luis Garcia de Valdeavel- lano,7 and Fernando Soldevila 8 ) and two dramatic interpretations of the Peninsula’s past (by Castro and Sanchez Albornoz). There are also several very distinguished sociological contributions (for example, those of Julio Caro Baroja⁹ ), as well as the achievements in the field of economic, socio-economic, and regional history by the Catalan and other schools. In addition, there have been a remarkable number of monographs, books, and magazine articles, which in content are, in general, far superior to those of the preceding two decades.

Reflecting on this material, I am led to believe — and this is my second point — that we find ourselves in a period of transition. In one way this period is characterized by the liquidation of a series of anachronistic positions (in general, those of the scholarly and philological school of Castilian nationalism), and in another way by the birth of a new concept of writing history, responsive to real life and pulsing with human blood, and incompatible with great abstract themes and with those political and ideological drugs that have poisoned Hispanic historiography.

The increasing dissemination of new auxiliary methods (demography, economics, sociology, and statistics) warrants the belief that, within a short time, order will be imposed upon whatever has been capricious and unintelligible in Spain’s historical jungle, and that clarity and moderation will sweep away the romantic foliage and baroque obscurantism. In other words, we shall become faithful to ourselves, not take refuge in metaphysical speculation in order to avoid a conscious understanding of our past experience.

In the evolution of this historiographical movement, the Barcelona school has during the past seven years been in the vanguard.10 We, its members, have toiled without ceasing since January 1953, the same month in which the first edition of this book appeared. During these epic years, through the pages of the Indice histórico español11 and of the Estudios de historia moderna12 we have struggled to open new horizons for our science and to liberate it from all fetishes; we have broached subjects not previously considered in our historiography, and we have presented without acerbity aspects formerly embittered by disagreement or else systematically avoided.

As we have advanced, we have found numerous collaborators — persons already proceeding in our direction or colleagues who have joined us along the way.13 But we have also had to engage in some skirmishes — intellectual ones, needless to say. Victorious or defeated, we bear no grudge toward anyone. We are always ready to welcome historians of good will who come from any camp, group, or school whatsoever. From our circle we regretfully exclude only those persons who leave the arena, carrying with them their political hatreds, and who launch their darts from behind the parapets of comfortable and unearned official redoubts.14

I hope I have justified my decision not to reedit this book until now. I might add that, following the inundation of the preceding decade, we now find ourselves in a relatively serene moment. The waters appear to be stilled. Thus I can proceed with my task and push my Approaches towards its second appearance, which I hope will be as fortunate as the first.

But before I begin, I must caution the reader about the methodology that governs the book. Here I have no recourse but to show my credentials as a professional historian,15 and the best way I can show them is to repeat a few paragraphs from the prologue I wrote in 1952, modifying them where I deem it necessary.

We all know — I wrote in 1952 — our reaction some thirty years ago against the narrative method that prevailed as the norm in university lectures and, above all, as a fundamental guideline for historical research. Since then Spanish historiography has sought a new methodological orientation, at times as an outgrowth of movements originating abroad, at other times attempting its own formulation of the study of the past. These developments have not, however, extinguished a devotion to the old narrative system. It still has many partisans in our country because we find it impossible simply to discard the oldest of historiographical methods. We need only to contemplate the extensive lacunae in Hispanic history to realize that we still must sacrifice a few principles in order to maintain a system which, although it has already failed in its objectives, is indispensable for filling in such lacunae. In order for us to profit directly or indirectly from the work of historical narrators, we ask only that they be thorough and exact in their scholarship and that they be knowledgeable about new methods of research. Quite apart from this, it should be emphasized that it is still useful to publish a good collection of documents on any problem in Spain’s internal or external history.

I have purposely used both of the foregoing adjectives.16 Because the narrative method was accused of superficiality — it never reached a conclusion of any significance — its place within the national methodology was taken by one called (for what exact reason I do not know) internal history. Those were the years when German procedures invaded our science. Ernst Bernheim was the idol of our professors.17 Although the exact results of such a method were not known, everyone surrendered to the almost mythical impact of that name. Ah, internal history! Its dissemination undeniably had great benefits: it put a stop to romantic improvisation, exacted an impartial criticism of sources, and made indispensable an extensive addition of archival material. All of this was needed and welcomed. But because of the simultaneous development of research in the history of law, the new methodological experiment ended up being a cold and sterile history of institutions.18 Little by little the human factor, the basis of all historiography, was forgotten. Importance was bestowed upon the framework instead of the contents, upon the conduit of energy instead of the charge which the conduit merely transfers passively. The conduit — the institution — was moved about from one side to the other. These moves filled the texts of conscientious monographs and occasioned formidable scholarly controversies. Today it is sad to contemplate the results that were achieved. One can barely sustain even one of the theses formulated by the great institutional masters at the beginning of the century.

This virus penetrated deep into our medieval field, creating sad havoc when it paired with another, equally dangerous virus, that of pure philology, the myth of the document.19 Spanish medieval studies are thus today in a dead-end street where words, not men, are debated. In general, medievalists have forgotten that any word is a carryover from an earlier period and therefore cannot provide them with a perfect image of the new, vital reality they are trying to define. They have also forgotten that any institution, by the simple act of encasing a vital tension or of achieving a new equilibrium of forces, is stillborn or at least inert. The vital content of an institution comes from the men who use it as the means for fighting to achieve their own ambitions. The passage of time only aggravates this problem, because an institutional body either deforms its