Spanish Land Reform in the 19th Century
1. Was There Land Reform in 19th-Century Spain?
To bring about the modernization of the sector, two conditions had to be met:
- A change in the structure of land ownership. This involved the alienation of land through a law that separated ownership from large landowners (the Crown, Nobility, and Church, known as “dead hands”). The land would then be sold on the market.
- The new landowners had to introduce technological innovations in agriculture to make the land productive.
The Confiscation
The 19th-century Spanish confiscation broadly followed the model of the French Revolution. However, even in the 18th century, timid disentailment measures had been taken, and the desirability of disentailment had been debated since the reign of Carlos III.
In essence, this 19th-century liberal land reform involved the confiscation by the State of property belonging mostly to the Church and the municipalities. These seized goods were later sold at public auction, and the proceeds constituted a substantial fraction of the budget revenues.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, during the aegis of Godoy, the Spanish State carried out the first appropriation of Church property. This was followed by sales of these goods, and the amount obtained was allocated to the redemption of certificates of public debt. Godoy’s era was a time of large deficits in the Spanish Treasury. This led to the use of both municipal and Church property to remedy the state’s financial straits. According to Herr’s calculations, between 1798 and 1808, 1,600 million *reales* were generated from sales—a very high figure that shows the magnitude of the action undertaken during the reign of Charles IV.
There was also a process of secularization during the reign of Joseph Bonaparte, affecting the assets of the clergy and aristocrats who resisted French domination. The purpose of this operation seems to have been more to encourage and engage “addicts” than to raise funds for the Treasury. The total amount from sales during this confiscation is unknown.
Since the civil war of Independence, alienation emerged as one of the major political issues that would divide progressives and conservatives in the 19th century.
The Courts issued a general decree of confiscation based on a report by José Canga Argüelles. The decree provided for the mass confiscation of real estate belonging to traitors and Jesuits, as well as military orders, convents, and monasteries suppressed or destroyed during the war. It also included part of the heritage of the Crown, and more than half of public lands. These goods could be purchased partly in cash and partly in debt securities.
The decree did not apply because of Fernando VII’s coup in 1814. However, it already contained the essential features of the great 19th-century disentailment measures: national property auction and admission of debt securities as payment. That is, the concept of secularization as a *tax measure*, not as land reform. In other words, it was a measure to restore the balance of public finances through restitution (via the sale of national lands) of public debts, rather than a redistributive measure of property designed to promote the rural poor. As a fiscal measure, the confiscation favored the middle and upper classes, who were the majority of holders of public debt. It even benefited, or at least did not hurt, the poor, as they had been benefiting from the semi-furtive use of Church land and vacant lots.
Confiscation legislation after the death of Ferdinand VII is very bulky. During the 19th century, several thick legal collections were published, attesting to this abundance. However, the fundamental law is limited to a few key laws, and increased disentailment activity occurred during some well-defined historical moments.