Madrid: City of The Enlightenment

In 1785 Tomas Lopez, Royal Geographer to King Charles III and Spain's foremost cartographer, published his Piano Geometrico de Madrid. It was a particularly fine map of the Spanish capital and a typical product of later eighteenth-century enlightened European thought: elegant and accurate, at once both stylish and scientific.

Only in its optimism did it mislead its users, for Lopez drew onto it buildings which were as yet unfinished or still being planned. His map embodied the achievement of surveyors, architects and geographers who during the 1750s and 1760s had carefully studied Madrid's topography, mapped its 506 streets and squares, and enumerated its 7,500 houses, monasteries, hospitals and other dwellings.

That Lopez should include on his map uncompleted structures is not surprising. Since the accession of Charles III (1759-88) to the throne of Spain and its extensive and increasingly prosperous overseas empire, much of Madrid had been turned into a dusty construction site. Yet 'interior Madrid' - the densely populated town which lay within the modest city wall - had not been transformed. Impressive monumental structures had indeed been erected and certain urban improvements effected which impressed both the ministers who had implemented them and foreign visitors who described them in enthusiastic terms.

But the baroque inner Madrid of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remained largely unchanged. Instead, the crown and Madrid's municipal government had concentrated their efforts on the peripheral city. This lay beyond the heavily built-up neighbourhoods and just inside or immediately outside the city wall. From the banks of the puny River Manzanares on the west, around many of the poor districts of the south and, above all, on the long eastern side of the city, wide, straight, well-paved roads were laid. They were lined with double or treble rows of trees, beautified with fountains and statues and enhanced with fine new gates in the city wall. These paseos - de la Florida, de Atocha, del Prado and de Recoletos - were intended as much for strollers as for vehicles and transformed, if not interior Madrid, then at least the approaches to it.

The paseos were built to accomplish several objectives: to beautify Madrid and make it a more magnificent capital, worthier of its king and empire; to afford comfortable, safe, decent and well-ordered open spaces in which Madrid's citizens would gather and entertain themselves; and to provide an appropriately handsome setting for some of the most prominent new institutions of the Enlightenment in Madrid.

The Paseo del Prado and its northern extension, the Paseo de Recoletos, were especially singled out to fulfil the latter aim. Thereby the paseos were destined to give physical form to some of the foremost aims of Spain's enlightened reformers. By examining the Paseo del Prado-Paseo de Recoletos and the cultures - intellectual, artistic and political - out of which it arose, it is possible to understand much of the Spanish Enlightenment as well as its impact on the capital itself.

Madrid had only been Spain's capital since 1561, when Philip II made what had been a town of purely secondary importance the political centre of his empire. During the following two centuries its population expanded almost without interruption until, according to the census of 1797, it reached a total of some 200,000, similar to the Berlin and Vienna of those years, but far behind Paris or London - the capitals of Spain's imperial rivals.

Despite its demographic growth, it remained throughout the old regime period a court city, dominated by the king's household and government and their interests, as well as by the courtiers and other nobles and commoners attracted by the prospect of jobs, pensions, good marriages and high status.

Together, the crown, nobility and church owned more than half Madrid's land and buildings, and commanded its economy. The latter thrived on the receipt of taxes, rental income and feudal dues which flowed in from all over Spain and America. In such an economy the commercial middle classes had little to offer save the merchandising of necessities for the poor and luxury goods for the aristocratic and bureaucratic elites.

Large scale manufacture - except for a few royal factories producing porcelains, tapestries and similar luxuries - was virtually unknown and the poor generally found work as servants or badly paid unskilled workers and street vendors. Poverty was widespread, as were the problems of begging and vagrancy, petty crime, prostitution and street violence to which it contributed. Moreover, the second half of the century, particularly the years after 1785, witnessed an aggravation of the condition of the poor and a notable increase in their numbers. The threat this implied to order inspired some of the most significant of the reforms undertaken under Charles III.

The maintenance of order, implementation of justice, the crucial supervision of supplies of bread, wine, oil and other staples and the upkeep of Madrid's public spaces fell to the municipal government acting under the supervision of the king and his ministers. The king appointed the chief municipal executive, the corregidor, and most of the city's police and judges.

Throughout the old regime period, however, these essentially royal officials had to share power with the ancient oligarchy of aldermen - regidores - mostly hereditary, sometimes having purchased or rented their office, frequently corrupt, habitually inefficient and sometimes absent from their post for months or years at a time. They were normally rich merchants or noblemen and were naturally the object of considerable criticism and attempts at reform in this period.

Thus, new offices were created by the crown, most notably in 1768 the alchaldes de barrio (neighbourhood magistrates) to undermine traditional oligarchical power and more effectively co-operate with the crown in imposing further reform.

Still, even with the co-operation of an outstanding royal servant like Jose Antonio Armona, corregidor from 1777 to 1792, municipal government remained at best unwieldy, at worst riven by factionalism and rivalries between competing authorities. Only by steadily prodding or bribing it was the crown normally able to enlist the municipality on the side of reform and renovation of the city itself.

That renovation and beautification were needed was widely understood by mid-century, at least among foreign observers and conscientious natives. Madrid's physical aspect was notoriously disappointing and many travellers were dismayed by the filthy, insalubrious, unlighted and unpaved streets. Joseph Baretti, the Anglo-Italian man of letters who visited Madrid in 1760, was so appalled by the stench that he fled the city after only a few days' stay.

Other visitors from more sophisticated capitals noticed the lack of attractive facilities for public socialising as poor Madrilenos gathered with friends in the streets and the rich largely stayed secluded behind closed doors. Visitors almost always remarked on the absence of monumental buildings, grand squares and imposing vistas, and found ugly and mean the architecture of nearly all private houses and mansions. Even great churches, in this cathedral-less city, were few.

Not surprisingly, when Charles III -who had lived in Italy since 1731 as Duke of Parma and, from 1734 to 1759, as the first Bourbon king of Naples - arrived in his capital for the first time since he left it as a young boy, he was depressed by almost all that he saw. His determination to impose change provided a major impetus for the coming reforms.

Yet, monumentality was not entirely absent when Charles arrived in 1759. The huge, Italianate baroque New Palace, perched high above the Manzanares on Madrid's western edge and the sprawling Buen Retiro Palace and gardens on its eastern extremity, were worthy of any capital. The two palaces were linked by the series of great ceremonial streets running east to west bisecting the baroque Madrid of the Habsburg kings. Alcala, Mayor and San Jeronimo Streets and the Puerta del Sol which linked them had since the sixteenth century been the venue of the great processions which marked early modern monarchical authority and ecclesiastical power.

These streets, lined with churches, convents and aristocratic mansions, most of them architecturally undistinguished and the fine renaissance City Hall, were virtually the best Madrid had to offer. To Charles III and his ministers they seemed unworthy of the greatness of the Spanish imperial monarchy. Equally significant, they seemed to reinforce too strongly the presence of the church in an era in which enlightened thought set out to undermine baroque religiosity and clerical influence in secular life.

The Enlightenment was as varied and multifaceted in Spain as in most other European societies, the ideas and programmes of enlightened reformers moulded by differing social and cultural conditions. Although Madrid was its capital, it flourished in a number of provincial cities like Barcelona, Cadiz, Zaragoza and Seville. Yet, despite variations, certain themes brought the reformers together. Enlightened thinkers naturally prized reason and critical thought, optimistically enthused about the power of science, practical knowledge and modern technologies. They, even clerics, as they often were in Spain, favoured a somewhat more secular society and a more restricted role for a streamlined church, purified of its baroque excesses.

The gates to an improved society would be opened with the keys of science and reason as well as that of political economy, and economists, both Spanish and foreign, were perhaps the greatest heroes of the 'Caroline Enlightenment'. This was so in part because of the rightly-held belief that Spain's economic backwardness held back its culture and restricted its international role. A wealthier Spain would be stronger but also socially more united, more humane, more orderly. With their moral fervour, enlightened thinkers tended to stress the need for self-discipline, hard work, the values of education and purified elite and popular cultures, shorn of hedonism and frivolities.

The latter trait was most apparent in the widespread campaign for 'good taste' in all the arts, from architecture to poetry and strongly affected the physical improvement of Madrid. But the characteristics which most typified Enlightenment reform in Spain were - apart from the heavy the arts as means of improvement -the impetus it received from Charles III and most of his ministers and the significant role played by some noblemen. Among the latter were both titled aristocrats like the grandee Pedro de Alcantara, Duke of Medina Sidonia, or Juan Pablo de Aragon, Duke of Villahermosa, and untitled hidalgos like Caspar Melchor de Jovellanos, a brilliant lawyer, economist and outstanding man of letters.

Predictably, numerous and frequently determined antagonists opposed many reform programmes and found in the Inquisition a degree of support. But the latter institution had, by the 1760s, lost much of its bite. Indeed, both Spaniards and foreigners often remarked on the ease with which Inquisitorial restrictions were bypassed while inquisitors themselves, especially in Madrid, were sometimes cultivated as sympathisers of moderate enlightenment.

Only during the reaction of the 1790s against the excesses of the French Revolution did most progressive thinkers find themselves effectively hedged in by the ministers and inquisitors of the new king, Charles IV (1788-1808).

Under Charles HI, however, the king and his family, his ministers, sundry aristocrats in Madrid and elsewhere, many clerics and royal officials and some men and women of the professional and commercial middle classes harboured reformist ideas and patronised broadly enlightened artists and writers. As Madrid was the centre of courtly, political and artistic Spain, it inevitably shone above other cities and benefited most from the presence of its relatively sophisticated and cosmopolitan elite.

New institutions, like the Madrid Economic Society founded in 1775, and the Royal San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts set up in 1751, were created to foment reform in Madrid and serve as models for provincial cities. Older institutions, like the Royal Spanish Academy were made the seat of reformist thinking.

Salons - tertulias - grew and flourished, particularly from the late 1740s to the 1790s. The liveliest of them were hosted by men and women of wealth and distinction, usually aristocrats or senior government officials, but including even a few clerics like the Benedictine monk Martin Sarmiento, who gathered artistic and intellectual friends about him in his monastic cell.

Such official and informal institutions encouraged several important phenomena. One was a gradual transformation of sociability in the capital. Gatherings of cultivated friends, strongly influenced by French and Italian manners, helped open out the previously secluded Madrid middle class or aristocratic household. It was in part, as with so much enlightened behaviour, a question of style and fashion, of imitating the foreigner, of learning from travel or reading imported novels and seeing French plays.

Another closely related phenomenon was the appearance for the first time of a number of talented, well-educated women at the centre of Madrid's cultural life. As hostesses, as members of the various royal academies, as participants in the growing polemic of the 1780s and 1790s regarding the role of women - and, rarely, as scholars, scientists and journalists - a few women exercised a powerful role.

The Ladies' Committee -Junta de Damas - of the Madrid Economic Society, established in 1787, was a notably conspicuous meeting place for such women. They were normally aristocrats who invested time, talent and money in educational, public health, industrial and other projects and research.

A few, like the duchess of Osuna -Maria Josefa Alonso Pimentel, very rich and in her own right duchess of Benavente - and Maria Francisca de Sales Portocarrero, Countess of Montijo, grandmother of the empress Eugenic, stood out in employing their wealth and intelligence to create a special world uniting taste and ideas. The duchess' famous villa and garden outside Madrid, the Alameda de Osuna, combined paintings by Goya and others, architecture and landscape design to conjure up an extraordinary marriage between fantasy and Enlightenment in her 'garden of ideas'.

This culture of the wealthy, enlightened elite, so heavily gallicised and secular-minded, was increasingly alienated from the ordinary people of Madrid, as well as the more traditionalist middle and upper ranks who chose to play no role in enlightened society. By the early 1760s, the reformers, aware of the widening cultural gap, began to target popular culture for change. Behind their aesthetic: concern lay the ever present fear of disorder and violence, the constant threat of the capital's masses against Bourbon authority.

High food prices and the shortage of necessities could easily spark riots, as they did in the spring of 1766. The so-called Esquilache uprising, named after the Sicilian-born minister who was a principal target of the crowd's anger, spread from Madrid to many cities across Spain. It badly frightened the king and his ministers and helped inspire a series of innovations in policing and municipal administration in Madrid. Their apparent success led the crown to impose similar reforms on most municipalities.

Esquilache's successor as Charles' chief adviser on most internal matters was Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Count of Aranda, a rich and well-travelled grandee and army general. Aranda, an energetic and resourceful reformer, made the reordering of Madrid a principal aim. He was minded to tread carefully, however, for some earlier reforms - the imposition of dress controls against the traditional long cape and uncocked hat, both ever popular amongst Madrid's working people - had helped provoke the 1766 riots. Yet, with the cooperation of several ministerial colleagues, in particular the Marquis of Grimaldi and Pedro Rodriguez Campomanes, Aranda and his successor, the Count of Floridablanca, were able to make some significant changes to the culture and physical aspect of the city.

The king's control of the city was enhanced by doubling the size of Madrid's garrison; by imposing the alcaldes de barrio, who took police supervision into every household, at least in principle; and by establishing the General Superintendency of Police in 1782. But the fist of Bourbon authoritarianism was also clothed in the velvet of paternalism, with other reforms that aimed to win the co-operation of Madrilenos or educate them into new ways consistent with the intentions of enlightenment.

The posts of deputy of the people and procurator were established for Madrid and other cities and were intended to serve the interests of the ordinary male subjects who elected them as well, of course, as those of the crown. Programmes from the early 1760s to pave and light the city's streets and remove the human and animal waste which had traditionally befouled them, were extended and implemented. The Manzanares was canalised and the Municipal Charity Committee, devised by Armona, was so successful that Charles III ordered similar bodies to be set up elsewhere. Free primary schools, essentially vocational, were established in each neighbourhood. Their task was as much to instill the values of Christian obedience, decent language and deportment and a sense of order and diligence, as to teach the three Rs and other skills.

The free schools, intended for the children of the poor, were a small part of the complex enlightenment campaign for the reform of sociability and manners among both the masses and the propertied elite. Frenchified 'civility' - a word whose meaning was at the time being invented - would be exported from the tertulias to Madrid's taverns, streets and middle-class sitting rooms.

The repeated attempts to put an end to bullfighting failed, but the encouragement and reform of the theatre in Madrid was more successful. The latter was a project which attracted the enthusiastic support of some of Spain's finest thinkers who, like Jovellanos, believed refined and conscientious neo-classical drama would help produce good citizens. Aranda, who also promoted masked balls open to the fee-paying public, ordered new theatres built and old ones revamped to make them safer, more attractive, and more suitable to dramas of 'good taste'. Aranda, Jovellanos and the king himself would have agreed with the Duke of Medina Sidonia when the latter wrote that with such entertainments available 'the power of the clergy diminishes ever more.'

They and other enthusiasts agreed, too, that social and cultural reform should be expressed in bricks and mortar. Enlightened intellectuals tended to accept that the arts, particularly painting and architecture, were crucial vehicles of change and from the 1750s the Academy of Fine Arts brought together artists and intellectuals. From the court too, issued plentiful and discerning patronage, as Charles III, Charles IV and several Bourbon princes invested much time and money encouraging refined baroque and neo-classical painters and architects.

Many others followed suit and the neo-classical language of painters such as Anton Raphael Mengs and the architects Ventura Rodriguez and Juan de Villanueva, designer of the Prado Museum, provided the predominant vocabulary of taste among the enlightened. Goya, too, was their ally, despite his rejection of neo-classicism in most of its varied forms.

Charles III, who had added numerous important buildings to Naples and nearby towns during his years as king there, sought from his first months in Spain to enhance his new capital. He revised building regulations, requiring owners to construct more Imposing houses and churches and new projects to be vetted by the Academy of Fine Arts. He had a number of Madrid's most attractive and substantial buildings erected: the Customs House - now the Ministry of Finance - the Post Office in Puerta del Sol, the Royal College of Medicine and Surgery amongst them. Other projects originated by his predecessors were continued, often on a truly magnificent scale. Such was the Saint Charles General Hospital - now the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia - whose vastly ambitious scale made it financially impossible to complete as originally planned.

While interior Madrid was thus made more imposing, its periphery was effectively transformed by its new paseos. Though originally conceived earlier in the century, they were built mainly after 1760. They were a belt of groves and gardens, both celebratory and utilitarian, encouraging both aesthetic delight and intellectual improvement. They daily attracted many citizens who strolled, rode, lounged and took refreshments amongst their trees, fountains and pavilions. Grandees had new mansions built nearby - the grand neoclassical palaces of the Albas, Villaher-mosas and Berwicks Included - and they were immortalised in tapestries designed by Goya. They embodied in urban space many of the aesthetic, cultural and social aims of enlightened thinkers.

This was true above all of the Paseo del Prado. There, along its entire length and from the 1760s into the early nineteenth century, one structure after another was planned and built to express enlightenment programmes: the General Hospital and adjacent College of Surgery and opposite them the Astronomical Observatory dominated its southern end. To the north were the new Botanical Garden, the Museum of Sciences - now the Prado Museum - the great fountains of Neptune -and Cybels and the magnificent Puerta de Alcala.

They were intended to help transform Madrid's culture and Spanish society, combining beauty and sociability with science. The paseos and their buildings were also overwhelmingly secular, with only one major new church among them. Thus the paseos symbolised the optimistic hopes of the best enlightened thinkers.

Not all these hopes were, however, achieved. Even among the most enthusiastic reformers there was, from the mid-1780s, an understanding that much of their labour had been futile, that much remained yet to be changed and that their own energies might not suffice. The physical improvements imposed on Madrid were largely successful. Travellers describing the capital in the 1770s and 1780s were impressed by its well lit, clean and impeccably paved streets; by the Paseo del Prado, which became one of Europe's finest thoroughfares; and by most of the structures Charles III had had built.

They were less impressed by the mediocre cultural level they found, even at times among the aristocratic elite. According to the English traveller, Joseph Townsend, a cleric and scientist, Madrid's public libraries went largely unused, museums almost empty of visitors and free science lectures sparsely attended. Salon conversation was too often vapid, intellectual attainment too frequently shallow.

Lack of interest among the educated, opposition from traditionalists, limitations of funds, talent and perhaps of political will, help explain the relatively restrained success enlightened thinkers enjoyed in truly transforming Madrid's culture. In this, too, the Paseo del Prado may stand as a symbol, with its ambitious and unfinished General Hospital and the Botanical Garden, beautifully designed according to the best scientific standards, allowed to fall to ruin in the disturbed days of Madrid's nineteenth century.

Charles C Noel was until recently Senior Lecturer in History at Thames Valley University. He has contributed several articles to books on Eighteenth-century Europe including Enlightened Absolutism. Reform and Reformers in later Eighteenth-century Central Europe, ed H.M. Scott (Macmillan, 1990).