Land Confiscation During the Bourgeois Revolution
The confiscation was a pivotal event in the process of the bourgeois revolution. It represented a fundamental change in the system of ownership and land tenure.
Understanding the seizure by government confiscation of collectively owned real estate, either ecclesiastical or civil, that after the nationalization and for subsequent sale at auction, they become a new property, private, with full freedom of use and disposal, as well as now have the free goods provided ordinary private property. We must be careful not to confuse ‘disengagement’ with ‘confiscation’. In the first case, the goods are free in their own holders, like primogeniture. In the second, their owners lose them, they go to the State, under whose command are ‘national assets’, and the State sells to individuals, and to make buyers buy ‘free goods’.
This phenomenon was applied in full force during the progressive domain in the Regency of María Cristina (1836-1837), during the Regency of Espartero (1841-1843) and later in the Two Progressive periods, also headed by Espartero (1854 – 1856) and in the reign of Isabel II. However, it must be remembered that this process had its precedents.
Indeed, first during the reign of Charles III, but only from a theoretical point of view, when the enlightened criticized the depreciation of real estate and blamed it for being the main cause of the stagnation of agriculture. Enlightened reformers of the eighteenth century, concerned about getting the most out of the land and natural resources, including the source of wealth and strength of the State, had suggested the need to change the manorial system of land ownership. In the Old Regime, a large part of the land was in dead hands, i.e., monastic lands or domains related to municipalities and, in addition to not paying taxes, they could not be sold by their owners, were out of the market and therefore could not be capitalized or improved. If you wanted to promote land reform, it was necessary for it to become private property subject to technical improvements.
Later, with Godoy in 1798-1808, when the war policies and growing public debt forced the initiation of a seizure of municipal and ecclesiastical goods with an amount of about 1600 billion reais when it obtained permission from the Holy See to expropriate and sell assets of the Jesuits and Waqf (hospices, charity, etc.) which came to be one-sixth of the hundreds of millions of public debt in real worth.
Already during the Cortes of Cadiz, laws were made which provided for the abolition of convents and religious orders and the sale of their properties.
The restoration of absolutism in 1814 meant the cancellation of exclaustrations and the return of goods sold to the monks. Finally, in the Liberal Triennium, the decisions of the Cortes of Cadiz re-entered into force, but in 1823, the absolutist regime returned, and Ferdinand VII was forced to return the goods sold.
It would therefore be upon the death of Ferdinand VII, when the Liberals, mainly progressives, put in place the legal and economic machine, able to put in huge amounts of land sales.
In fact, during the regency of Maria Cristina (1833-1840), wife of Fernando VII and mother of the future Elizabeth II, the liberals, in giving support to her in the lawsuit that she faced dynastically, in a civil war (Carlist War 1833-1840), against Fernando’s brother, Carlos María Isidro, were laying the foundation of the liberal construction of the building. First, the moderates (1833 – 1836) and then the progressives in its broadest expression, (1836-1837 and 1841-1943) were undermining the old structures of the Old Regime.
Although liberals and moderates were in the Liberal family, they had noticeable differences on how to build the new political regime.
So the moderates thought that the reforms had to be done without compromising their properties and supported order and a strong authority, so as to strengthen the powers of the Crown and to minimize political participation. Progressives, on the other hand, were proponents of radical and far-reaching reforms, limiting the political role of the Crown and broadening the electoral base.
So it would be these, the progressives, who would enter into power as a whole in 1836, by the pressure of a military coup (revolt of the sergeants of La Granja), which initiated the revolution truly liberal. In particular, their strong man Mendizabal, undertook fundamental reforms for which he assumed the portfolio of State, War, Navy and Treasury. Their agenda included the reform of the Electoral Act of 1834, very restrictive that only affected the economically powerful, with a more extensive one, the restoration of press freedom and other fundamental rights, the fundamental reform of the tax system and all was primarily responsible for the ecclesiastical confiscation law, the most important legal framework approved in Spain to tackle the “land reform” that liberals wanted.
There were three objectives Mendizabal aspired to reach, with his laws of disentailment:
- Financial goal: to find revenue to pay the State’s public debt, both domestic and foreign. Thus, financial problems would be solved and funds would also be obtained to finance the war against the Carlists.
- Political objective: to increase the number of supporters of liberalism, creating a sector of owners who felt attached to the Elizabethan liberal regime, for property buyers of disentailed lands would link their fate to the liberal side’s victory in the war, for a hypothetical victory of the Carlist force to return the properties to the Church. Furthermore, it should be noted that much of the regular clergy was a supporter of the Carlist cause.
- Social goal: to create a middle class of peasant proprietors.
Thus, the name of Mendizabal is attached to the ecclesiastical confiscation, but also in the earlier confiscation of church property, there since shortly before the rise of Mendizábal, two decrees were approved (July 15, 1834 and July 4, 1835) by which the Inquisition was finally suppressed and the Jesuits were abolished again in Spain. The assets of both institutions were engaged by the state to the extinction of the debt. In the month of July, the suppression of convents and monasteries that had less than twelve professed was decreed, their property to be applied to the same purpose as before. Mendizabal’s policy was not absolutely new, what he did was to systematize and radicalize these measures of his predecessors.
On October 11, 1835, Mendizabal promulgated a decree which suppressed religious orders and justified the measure, while their property was considered disproportionate to the media that the nation had at the time. Another decree, issued on February 19, 1836, put on sale all the assets of the Communities and religious corporations that were extinct, and also those that had already passed to the consideration of national assets, or would acquire in the future.
The disentailment sequence is based on two levels. The first refers to the suppression of religious institutions and the implementation of their assets to the extinction of