Democratic Enlightenment

390 Rationalizing the Ancien Régime
Alcázar quickly became the meeting place of the Enlightenment in Andalusia.
It featured a regular reading circle, to which belonged the young Jovellanos.
Olavide soon discovered that the social and cultural realities of Andalusia which he
considered distinctly shocking constituted a formidable obstacle to all the reforms he
wanted to introduce. What appalled him most was the peasantry’s wretched condition
and how completely noble status and ecclesiastical privilege dominated local
society. In the province of Seville, 250 local noble lineages, he calculated, headed by
the dukes of Medina Sidonia, Arcos, Osuna, Medinaceli, Alba, Sanlúcar, Béjar, and
Veragua with seven counts, owned, or indirectly controlled, over 80 per cent of the
land with seigneurial jurisdiction over most towns and villages. Medina Sidonia
alone possessed 83,000 peasant ‘vassals’ in thirty villages. Also in Seville province, he
assured Aranda, there were no less than 15,830 ecclesiastical personnel, including
2,588 Franciscans, 774 Dominicans, 732 Carmelites, 985 Mercedarians, 451 Augustinians,
and, until he expelled them, 324 Jesuits. In the city of Seville alone, a
provincial capital with 76,463 inhabitants according to the subsequent 1786 census,
he found 3,500 (in fact there were around 4,500) ecclesiastical personnel, amounting
to around 6 per cent of the total. With twenty-eight convents, eleven more than the
larger city of Madrid, and forty-seven monasteries, Seville had seventy-five monastic
houses, far outstripping Córdoba, Valencia, Granada, and Toledo, all notorious for
high concentrations of clergy. 42 Seville was indeed ‘the imperium monachorum
[imperium of the monks]’ more than any other Spanish city. 43
Unlike Campomanes (who was nonetheless well aware of the chronic social
problems of Andalusia) and Floridablanca, Olavide was an enlightener anxious to
curtail clerical privilege and weaken the regular orders in both land ownership and
the universities. With the Jesuit expulsion, he had, or so it seemed, an excellent
opportunity to reorganize Seville’s university on more secular lines. But his scorn for
religious orders and scholasticism, and admiration for ‘esta gran revolución’ as he
called the Scientific Revolution, encountered fierce resistance from the Dominicans
who were particularly attached to the legacy of scholastic scholarship and had
previously shared the teaching with the Jesuits. Here was a split replicated to a
considerable extent everywhere in Spain and its empire but particularly acute in
Seville.
Olavide’s critique of the Spanish universities, admittedly, had been foreshadowed
in Feijóo and Mayáns; but he went well beyond them and most other reformers,
especially with respect to promoting science and seeking to secularize. His objective,
unlike that of Mayáns, was to transform the academic curriculum root and branch
and establish a wholly new order of studies, discarding Thomism and giving much
greater emphasis to mathematics and the sciences following the doctrines of Wolff,
Newton, Malpighi, Boerhaave, and Leibniz and in Natural Law Grotius, Pufendorf,
42 Barrio Gozalo, ‘Iglesia y religiosidad’, 254; Aguilar Pinal, Sevilla de Olavide, 72–3.
43 Aguilar Pinal, Sevilla de Olavide, 72.