Anyone who knows a little about Spain during the Civil War and the postwar period knows that land, in the southern areas, was one of our main problems. The landowners hoarded large properties, while thousands of day laborers and their families were forced to live with the most basic things.
The highly unequal distribution of land property had its roots in the Middle Ages, when the so-called Reconquest involved the distribution of considerable areas among the nobility. Henceforth, the aristocrats would cede, in their wills, part of their domains to the Church, with which it also became an important economic power.
The lands of the privileged estates could not be alienated and were also free of taxes. In the 18th century, the enlightened people attributed the country's agrarian backwardness to its existence. Then there was talk of confiscation, that is, expropriating properties to put them on the market.
Godoy, the favorite of Carlos IV, made an attempt in 1798. Pascual Madoz would make another in 1855. But, without a doubt, the most famous confiscation was that of Mendizábal, in 1836. The famous liberal minister was desperately looking for ways to increase the income of the State, at a time when a lot of money was needed to sustain the war against the Carlist insurrection, a counterrevolutionary movement that questioned the values of liberalism.
Where to get the funds? From the sale of Church property. The State expropriated them, but, in exchange, it assumed the obligation to maintain the members of the religious orders of both sexes, who from then on would have to reside outside their former convents. They had to be guaranteed, as stated in the corresponding decree, "an honest and decent existence, typical of the religious sentiments of this Catholic nation."
Business was lousy, according to Alejandro Nieto in Mendizábal. Peak and crisis of civil progressivism (Ariel, 2011). From that moment on, the Government had to spend more than it received from the alienation of the land. Although the number of pension beneficiaries decreased over the years due to death, there were thousands of people who had to be cared for.
The constitutional regime, in this way, did nothing more than make enemies. The thousands of men and women religious who had to subsist on insufficient money were not predisposed to sympathize with the cause of liberalism. The State of the time was always bad payer, not only with the members of the Church, but with the whole world.
Those who did make cash were the buyers of the lands that constituted the so-called “national assets”. They had the opportunity to pay in comfortable installments, while the value of their new properties did not stop increasing. This is how great fortunes were amassed that went to the middle and wealthy classes. These people, who may have sympathized with liberalism, soon gave up any revolutionary temptation. Now, after millions of acres changed hands, they had too much to lose.
From this perspective, the confiscation throws a deeply negative balance. He did not give land to those who needed it, but only to those who had enough money to buy it. For Jaume Vicens Vives, this was a huge missed opportunity. Instead of undertaking an agrarian reform for the benefit of the Castilian, Extremaduran and Andalusian peasants, what was done was a simple transfer of property from the hands of the Church to those of the aristocrats and bourgeoisie. The result would have been a landlordism even more powerful than that which existed in previous centuries.
Antonio Miguel Bernal, in his research on western Andalusia, also came to the conclusion that ownership had become even more concentrated along this path: "The sale of ecclesiastical lands did not create new latifundia, but rather, given the average size of the disentailed properties, rather they came to reaffirm the large properties already incipient or already consolidated”.
Daniel Aquillué, on the other hand, in Spain with honor. A history of the Spanish 19th century (La Esfera de los Libros, 2023), offers a considerably more optimistic vision. In his opinion, it was an essential tool to finance the war effort against Carlism and achieve final victory: “Without the confiscation of Mendizábal it would have been unsustainable to build the building of the Spanish nation-state, with a monarchy in economic bankruptcy. The confiscation cleaned up the already national Treasury and not that of the monarchy, it allowed borrowing, obtaining liquidity, boosting the economy, increasing social support for the liberal system.
According to Aquillué, we cannot criticize Mendizábal for not carrying out an agrarian reform and distributing the land among the day laborers: that was not the goal of liberalism at the time. To lament otherwise would be to fall into an anachronism.
Where are we left then in the face of this disparity of criteria? Perhaps it is possible to arrive at a synthesis solution. Alfonso Lazo, in his work on the case of Seville, maintained that the confiscation of Mendizábal represented an economic success and a social failure. The first, for the improvement in agricultural performance. The second, because the peasantry saw how their standard of living worsened or, in the best of cases, remained the same. With the change of owners, the usual thing was the increase in the rent that was charged to the tenants.
The debate, in any case, is not easy to settle. In an academic article, Juan García Pérez stated that the increase in production was not due to the confiscation measures, but to other reasons. The rise in agricultural prices or the boom in demand, the result of population growth, stimulated development.
On the other hand, it is not entirely clear either that the confiscation of ecclesiastical lands was as decisive as had been believed when it came to shaping the structure of agrarian property in Spain. According to García Pérez, other factors were more important, such as the abolition of the mayorazgos, the institution that prohibited the alienation of the assets of a specific family.
For the conservative authors, Mendizábal had done nothing more than allow a large-scale robbery of the Church's assets. Leftist historians, on the other hand, considered the process insufficient. What seems clear is that we are facing one of the reforms that contributed to the establishment of capitalism in Spain, based on a concept of property focused more on the right of the individual than on that of the community.
