The Marqués de la Ensenada (1702-1781) is well known as one of the best Spanish rulers of the 18th century. The enlightened man, a great promoter of naval power... He had, however, a very sinister side: he sponsored a plan to exterminate the gypsies.
As a reformist politician, Ensenada intended to increase the state's revenue-raising capacity: people had to work and pay taxes. For this reason, he could not allow the existence of subjects who practiced nomadism and survived from traveling businesses that did not pay taxes. The gypsies, in his opinion, constituted an "evil race" that not only led a different lifestyle from the majority, it was also responsible for all kinds of criminal acts.
To proceed with their elimination, the all-powerful minister of Fernando VI sought a way to prevent them from procreating. In the absence of children, their extinction would end up taking place.
Already in 1745, still under the reign of Felipe V, Ensenada promulgated a law that established the death penalty for all those gypsies who were arrested outside their neighborhood. However, it was one thing to give orders and another to enforce them. Many local authorities disagreed. Being more in touch with everyday reality, they knew that many Roma led as sedentary lives as others. Since that was the case, why did they have to be punished?
The minister, who had not foreseen this tolerant attitude, had to back down. As José Luis Gómez Urdáñez says in The Marqués de la Ensenada. The secretary of everything (Punto de Vista, 2021), it seemed then that the "good" gypsies were not going to be bothered. In reality, Fernando VI found that his trusted man was exposing a plan, apparently without fissures, to put an end to that sector of the population that was so uncomfortable for him.
The army would show up in the towns where they lived, close the retreat points and proceed to carry out mass arrests. In prison, the inmates would be separated by sex. Since men and women would not have contact with each other, the disappearance of the gypsies would only be a matter of time.
For a government as Catholic as the Spanish, such a project raised a moral question. Was it legitimate to put obstacles to the marriage institution, in order to prevent its objective, that is, the generation of new human beings?
The Bishop of Oviedo, Gaspar Vázquez Tablada, assured that no attempt was being made against the principles of Christianity. Since all Gypsies were suspects, whether or not their actual guilt could be proven, an indiscriminate measure was entirely reasonable. You had to take precautions!
The king's confessor, the Jesuit Rábago, also spoke out in favor of the same policy. God, according to what he said, was going to rejoice "if the king succeeded in extinguishing these people." His only objection, according to Gómez Urdáñez, was that this affected a privilege of the Church, since the victims would no longer have the right of refuge in Catholic churches. For the rest, the fate of those human beings did not concern him.
With these ecclesiastical guarantees, Ensenada could have a clear conscience. In 1749, the royal troops carried out a gigantic raid on different parts of Spain. Nearly 9,000 people were arrested. Children over the age of seven were unceremoniously separated from their mothers.
The prisoners reacted in various ways. In some places, like Alicante, they offered no resistance. In others, in the case of Granada or Seville, riots broke out and there were deaths.
The big operation was a huge botch, and for that reason it caused even more suffering than imaginable in such a situation. The gypsies were concentrated in places where there were neither beds nor the necessary food to survive. No one had bothered to consign the essential budget items. In the Cádiz Arsenal de la Carraca, for example, more than a thousand men piled up who nobody could feed.
The authorities saw how the operation was getting out of hand, in the absence of elementary logistics with which to manage the forced transfer of so many people. The civilian population, meanwhile, in many cases helped the victims to avoid the persecution. Some were able to hide in the homes of payos. Certain aristocrats also lent help.
Ensenada, despite everything, did not give up. Although he had found that his plan was not as feasible as he had imagined, perhaps there was another way. And if he banished all those gypsies to the lands of America?
There was an insurmountable legal hurdle. Felipe II and other monarchs after him had prohibited gypsies from crossing the Atlantic. The Spanish superminister found himself, then, in a blind alley. In the era of enlightened despotism, he tried to hide his failure by offering forgiveness to all those who had suffered his decisions. According to what he said, his intention had been to limit himself to "collecting the pernicious and ill-inclined."
Even so, he did not give up his intentions. Until his fall from grace in 1754, he continued to search for a way to achieve the disappearance of the Roma people. His words had been just an act of political hypocrisy.
Some years later, the Count of Aranda (1719-1798), another politician with a reputation for enlightenment, proposed a very similar project, although even more cruel. Where Ensenada spoke of separating mothers and children at the age of seven, he proposed that the measure be applied as soon as they were born. Thus, gypsy children would never learn to speak their language, the language that Aranda, using his derogatory terminology, called “gibberish”.
Fortunately, the idea did not find support and did not come to fruition. Another minister, Floridablanca (1728-1808), would prefer to put aside the heavy hand and make a gesture of approximation by stating that the Roma did not come "from any infected root".
