by Benjamín Gaillard-Garrido
“We, and all the individuals of society, must equally offer to the King’s heart our will and our intents, which are the blood of the Kingdom; and serve him with our talents, our labor, and our industry, which are the spirits that animate him as the legitimate Father of the Fatherland.”[1]
Written in 1786 by Capuchin friar Joaquín de Finestrad, El Vasallo instruido en el estado del Nuevo Reino de Granada y en sus respectivas obligaciones is widely recognized as an important document for late colonial Colombian and Latin American intellectual history. Its title can be translated as The Vassal, Educated on the State of the Kingdom of New Granada and on His Respective Obligations. The text evolved out of the cleric’s multiple sermons, given in the years 1781 to 1786 throughout the Viceroyalty of New Granada—a colonial possession of the Spanish Empire roughly encompassing modern day Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama. Historians such as González (2001), Phelan (2010), and Palti (2012) have, thus far, approached the text from the history of political thought as a classic example of absolutist Catholic political theory during the Age of Revolutions. Beyond this interpretation, however, the Vasallo is also part of a larger tradition of political-economic thought whose importance, influence, and continuity for the postindependence republican period has been obscured by the historiographical antinomies between colony and republic, monarchism and liberalism, and reform and revolution.
As the scholars cited above have noted, the Vasallo is primarily a reaction to the Comunero Rebellion, an insurrection that took place in 1781 in the central-northern Andes of New Granada. During this uprising, peasants, artisans, and part of the clergy, with the support of certain sectors of the creole elite in Bogotá, took up arms against the colonial government. Weary of additional fiscal burdens and monopolies in a context where foreign commodities were beginning to seriously out-compete local production, the rebels rose up under the slogan “Long live the king and death to bad government!” demanding tax reductions, greater local autonomy, and ultimately marching on Bogotá with a force of nearly 20,000.
Finestrad’s political-economic and moral-doctrinal positions can certainly be analyzed in immediately contextualist terms—i.e. in the aftermath of the 1781 Comunero Rebellion—and as a broader response to the wider colonial context of imperial crisis marked by persistent fears of mass unrest and popular upheaval throughout the Andes in the last three decades of the eighteenth century. I argue, however, that the text is better understood as a theoretical attempt to reconcile the spheres of the sacred and the worldly by articulating a synthesis between an absolutist, quietist moral doctrine and an aggressively developmentalist agrarian political economy in the much larger context of an emergent commercial society. Reading the Vasallo from this perspective provides an indirect entry point into some of the fundamental social transformations under way in late colonial Colombia, such as rising commercial exchange, the expansion of mercantile capital, a sustained process of monetization, an increased separation between historical actors and their means of production, a marked process of class differentiation between Spaniards and creoles, and the growing importance of the mestizo as a social category.
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The text’s immediate concern is without a doubt one of post-insurrectionary pacification. Its larger and in my opinion more important object, however, is one of long-term reform and political salvation. Taking a close look at the Vasallo, we find a series of recurrent themes throughout text. Topics such as the need for fiscal, economic, and labor reforms; agrarian and industrial development; moral and religious reforms; absolute obedience to God, king, and government as divine entities; and observance of penance, prayer, and renunciation. Two distinct registers, however, mediate the entire text and constitute its backbone: the sacred and the worldly, the spiritual and the material. At the level of analysis, these two registers correspond to the discourse of Catholic doctrine and the discourse of political economy respectively. At an empirical level, however, both registers are of course found side by side and are often difficult to disentangle in key parts of the text, since certain of its core concepts—such as labor—straddle both spheres.
We might begin to appreciate the depth of the Capuchin’s disquietude by considering his descriptions of the Viceroyalty. Remarking at length on the wretched state of the Kingdom and its vassals, Finestrad noted: “[W]hat has been presented to my sight is all abomination, all inconsistency, and all vicious cunning and deception. Indecent customs, scandalous nudity, affected airs, love songs, dishonest novels, sensual friendships, stumbling steps, delinquent familiarities, age-old prostitutions, usurpations of rights, frequent fornications, outrages of injustice, and satirical hearsay with the capacity to weaken the observance of the most sacred precepts. Everything is a formidable entrenchment against the might of grace” (279). The friar thus located the origins of such decadence in the vassals’ complete estrangement from the sacred. And, yet, this moral-theological accusation represented only one side of his reasoning.
On the worldly, political-economic side of his argument, Finestrad located the origins of the Viceroyalty’s material misery in the vassals’ idleness, in their tendency for vagrancy and beggary. Early in chapter III, he remarked that the King’s subjects have “left agriculture in the most pitiful abandonment, despite the fact that they enjoy a rich and fertile land […]” (111). Later, in chapter VI, he noted that “the idler, the vagabond, is a corrupt member of society and an infamous deserter of the State,” (148) which one must “return to the useful body of the nation” (146). Summarizing his political-economic project, the cleric recommended: “Let all those who live in the mountains […] be reduced to a sociable community; let new settlements be established; let the idle and vagabonds be seen; let the unruly and daring be restrained; let there be a conscription of criminals and delinquents, and as contagious members, let them be overseen by strong authority, let them be sent to work in the mines, to open roads, to cultivate deserted lands, to cut precious woods, to exploit the natural oils, and to found new towns […]” (139). Reevaluating to the theme of idleness in the closing chapters of the Vasallo, Finestrad decried the “innumerable multitude of hands that have neither land to cultivate nor trades to which to apply themselves” (346). Morally wretched and materially miserable; severed from the sacred and impotent in the world: such was, according to the cleric, the state of the vassals in the Viceroyalty of New Granada.
In order to address the sinful wretchedness of the Viceroyalty on both moral and economic terms, Finestrad sought, on the one hand, to infuse civil society with Catholic moral doctrine. He argued, for example, that since “[p]rior havoc and public punishment failed to reform the customs [of the people], the miracle of grace and the tears of Jesus are necessary for them to emerge from the tomb of vice.” (281) Elsewhere, he remarked that “[i]f a true reform of morals is not introduced, if vice is not destroyed, if confusion is not uprooted and Religion, holy fear, and good order are not sown, the scourges sent by God will not cease to afflict us” (285). On the other hand, the friar read Catholic doctrine in specifically political-economic terms. He observed that “[f]actories or manufactures are those that repair evil and enrich the Nation” (346). In his discussion of public education, the cleric wrote: “Through education, the vassal is taught to repress vice and embrace virtue; to contribute to the promotion of society and to cherish within himself the maxims of the best government” (129). With public education, “the gospel will dawn more floridly and the obligation of vassalage will be more firmly signed” (130).
In this fused reading of morality and political-economy, civil society possessed the potential to embody God’s kingdom on earth. For Finestrad, this potential would be realized through the sole form of political organization capable of constraining society to embrace both virtue and utility in a state of humble and obedient resignation: absolute, divine, and hereditary Catholic monarchy. In this respect, the contrast with Adam Smith could not be greater, despite the fact that both thinkers were committed to commercialization. For Smith, the “sub-rational,” natural instincts that led from practices of truck and barter to large-scale commercial exchange did not require the “additional force” that the baser human passions called for, such that, for the Scottish thinker, a practice of prudence and frugality was sufficient to maintain social cohesion. (Rothschild 2012; Winch 1992)
For Finestrad during the early Age of Revolutions, the reconciliation between the spheres of the material and the spiritual called for a much more direct intervention. It required from each vassal a pious, obedient, and industrious subjectivity. From the perspective of this essay, this subjectivity shares with the work ethic that Weber identified in certain eighteenth-century protestant denominations a common object, namely the commercialization of social relations. In chapter VIII of the Vasallo, for example, the friar noted: “The yoke of the fiscal reforms, which seems insufferable, is made bearable and tolerable with the attention of the superior precepts of nature and religion […]” (225). Earlier in chapter VII, he made clear that “Religion alleviates difficulties and dissolves all hindrances to the fulfillment of obedience” (194). Finally, in chapters IX and XI, he added that “[w]aiting in peace for more tranquil times is the true freedom of the oppressed Provinces” (250) and that “[a]ll the burdens laid by the State are gentle yokes if what gives them life is penance and reconciliation with both Majesties [the royal and divine]” (303).
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In June 1781, the authorities and rebels came to an agreement known as the Capitulations of Zipaquirá. Yet immediately after, the authorities voided the agreement, alleging that it had been resolved not by mutual consent but by force. Following the end of the insurrection, the colonial government took urgent measures to restore order, including the public execution of a number of Comunero leaders. In this context, we can glean a clearer picture of Finestrad’s concept of subjectivity from his remarks on the penalties imposed on the insurgents. In chapter XI, he declared that “civil penalty only attends to the temporal surface […]” (294). Genuine atonement would only be attained through “tears, prayer, and the cilice,” (296) and by returning to “internal mortification and bitterness of the heart” (287). It was thus the vassal’s task to examine his conscience and punish his flesh were he to sense the least semblance of guilt.
From the cleric’s perspective, however, returning to the bosom of Religion, to a state of resigned yet joyous subjection was required not only from the insurrectionists, but also from each and every vassal throughout New Granada. The scale and ambition of his reformist-redemptive project is clear in the passages where he seeks culprits for the weakened state of the Viceroyalty. There, the friar fluctuates between the use of a categorical “you,” circumscribed to the insurrectionists: “what sacrilegious action did you commit against the August Majesty of Your King and natural lord […]? You insulted his images, his Vicars, his Depositaries of Justice” (351)— and a longer-lasting, more ecumenical “we,” which alludes to each and every vassal:“We are the architects of our ruins, the authors of our miseries, and those who prepare the material for our fatal misfortune” (277). This is a more universal, human “we:” ruined, sinful, yet redeemable. Considering the text in this way, we find that the figure of the insurgent actually plays a peripheral role in its overarching argument. The principal object of the friar’s ambitions is in reality the body-politic—the Pueblo—itself: “If the People are persuaded that they are under the indispensable obligation to martyr their flesh, to reduce their body to slavery, and to have their heart penetrated by the most intense pain, there will be no doubt of their certain reconciliation with God” (302).
Finestrad’s faith in his project for total reform is nonetheless marked by considerable anxiety and ambivalence. In chapter XI of the Vasallo, for example, he noted with seeming confidence that “[t]he spirits of divine and human power are inseparable” (299). A few pages earlier, however, the friar observed that “we cannot be part of God and part of the world, because their maxims and laws are entirely opposed and contrary to each other” (295). While indivisible, the spheres of the sacred and the worldly could ultimately never entirely coincide with each other. The task of the educated vassal in the Catholic republic was thus to continually toil—materially, morally, and in a state of resigned yet hopeful suffering—seeking to attain the sacred while remaining inexorably bound by the worldly as a result of original sin, that is, man’s fall from grace.
For Finestrad, however, “[n]o one c[ould] be a good Christian without being a good Patrician, nor a good citizen without faithfully observing the maxim and precepts of the Gospel” (299). In attempting to render worldliness commensurable with the sacred—even if their reconciliation is ultimately unattainable—the Vasallo is part of a larger transformation of Catholic doctrine into modern social philosophy as it begins to grapple with the commercialization of social relations. In this sense, the text shares with other Bourbon enlightened-reformist projects a similar ideological structure, in that they constitute attempts to harmonize the worldly and the sacred by crafting forms of subjectivity capable, in their view, of reforming the Catholic republic through the development of forms of practice that combined moral virtue and material utility.
For the Spanish reformer Joaquín Lorenzo Villanueva, for example, rights and freedom—in the sense of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—were undoubtedly admissible, but only “considered from the point of view of Religion, in a state of nature ruined by Adam and restored by Christ” (Portillo Valdés 2000)—in other words, only within a conception of humanity indelibly marked by original sin and awaiting an always-deferred redemption. While Villanueva understood civil society from a thoroughly Catholic standpoint, he represented, in contrast with Finestrad, a much less austere, much more liberal variant of late eighteenth-century enlightened Catholicism.
In the eighteenth century, enlightened absolutist thinkers such as Finestrad in New Granada, Villanueva in Spain, the Marquis d’Argenson and the Chevalier Ramsay in France, as well as James Steuart in Scotland and the Continent, grappled seriously with the effects of commercialization. They attempted to harmonize the logics of commerce with the core principles of absolutism. For Spanish and creole reformers, the promises of happiness, prosperity, and abundance that we associate today with early liberalism could be reconciled with the fundamental principles of Catholic absolutism, such as absolute obedience to God, king, and government; observance of penance and practice of Catholic virtue; and knowledge of the sacred scriptures. It’s not simply that these intellectuals placed their trust in reason without rejecting their Catholic faith, but rather that, from their point of view, the only genuine, true reason was one bound by Catholic doctrine.
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The stakes of the kind of historical analysis that I have put forward are threefold: first, it allows us to better understand the coherence and rationality of actors such as Finestrad beyond a traditional/modern binary; second, it allows us to eschew the diffusionist explanations that have homogenized highly elaborate yet relatively common worldviews by collapsing their arguments into theories of supposedly European origin; and third, it allows us to ground the salience of both modern liberal and illiberal political thought not in their immediate social context, but rather in the reorganization of society under the advent of commercial relations. From this perspective, the histories of a nascent conservatism and, in some cases, even a nascent liberalism in New Granada—and certainly elsewhere in the Spanish empire—can be traced back to the Bourbon reformist period, with Bourbon reformism as an ideology that sought to grapple with—and was invariably committed to—the commercialization of social relations. The ideological tensions that arose between ethics and commercialization and that began to gain ground in the second half of the eighteenth-century express some of the fundamental, underlying contradictions that straddle the nominally colonial and republican, monarchist and liberal, and reformist and revolutionary ends of the Age of Revolutions. Recent intellectual history’s insistence on independence as primarily a rupture obscures the origin of these tensions and contradictions as well as their continuity between pre- and post-revolutionary periods.
Finestrad’s Vasallo is thus as much an early source of a nascent conservatism as a window into some of the fundamental social and ideological tensions at play in a rapidly commercializing late colonial society. This conservatism, as well as the tensions it sought to grapple with, would be transformed and rearticulated in different guises and under different names in the following century. We can see this in the 1820s and 1830s in the aftermath of the Wars of Independence, when the promises of popular, participatory politics and abolition generated by mass mobilization during warfare gradually gave way to the consolidation of an exclusivist elite politics that insulated the state from the masses and maintained the regime of slavery. We can also see this in the 1870s and 1880s, in the aftermath of the mid-nineteenth century liberal reforms, when, fearful of the “atheistic” and “communistic” turn that the Republic had taken with the advent of popular politics and more egalitarian, inclusive forms of democratic liberalism in the 1840s and 50s, elite conservative and liberal Catholics sought to rebuild a conservative Catholic doctrinal framework to redress the nation materially and morally.
This period, known as the Regeneración, culminated in the notoriously regressive Constitution of 1886, consecutively inaugurating the country’s turn towards an aggressive developmentalist program of raw commodity exports bound by a staunchly authoritarian, conservative, and clerical Catholicism under the governments of Rafael Nuñez, Miguel Antonio Caro, and Rafael Reyes—the age of Conservative Hegemony. This Colombian conservatism would also come to shape and inhabit classical figures of Colombian liberalism itself, such as José María Samper. One need not look too far to recognize that Samper’s late nineteenth-century retreat from participatory politics into the cultivation of elite aestheticism was prefigured in his early yet persistent distrust of the Colombian masses as materialistic and degenerate. In this sense, while the agrarian-reactionary future that Finestrad’s Vasallo instruido outlined never quite concretely materialized, there is no doubt that the currents of thought and practice that the text sought to summon and shape continued to animate the moral-doctrinal and political-economic realities of Colombian historical actors—well beyond the Age of Revolutions.
This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
[1] Joaquín de Finestrad, El Vasallo instruido en el estado del Nuevo Reino de Granada y en sus respectivas obligaciones, transcription and introduction by Margarita González, Bogotá, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2001, 323-24.
Benjamin Gaillard-Garrido is a PhD Candidate in Latin American and Caribbean History at New York University. The author would like to thank Sinclair Thomson, Oya Gürsoy, and Jacob Saliba for their help and feedback.
Edited by Jacob Saliba
Featured image: “The Educated Vassal in the State of the New Kingdom of Granada, and His Respective Duties,” public domain, via Library of Congress.
