Espada

Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (Gijón, January 5, 1744-Puerto de Vega, November 27, 1811) was a Spanish writer, jurist and enlightened politician. Especially committed to the economic and cultural development of his country, his Report on the Agrarian Law or his Report on public education were relevant.

Biography

Early Years

Casa natal de Jovellanos, where the home museum is located.

He was born into a noble family in Gijón, although without fortune, and was baptized as Baltasar Melchor Gaspar María. After completing his first studies in Gijón, in 1757 he moved to Oviedo to study Philosophy. In 1760, under the protection of the local bishop, he left for Ávila to carry out ecclesiastical studies. His countryman and counterpart, D. Romualdo Velarde Cienfuegos, recently appointed bishop of this city, took him out of Asturias for his "familiar", a kind of private seminary of reforming ideology created by him, where he welcomed prominent Asturian students under his protection, who would reach the highest public positions in the nation. He was the older brother of the poet Josefa de Jovellanos.

In 1761 he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Canons (Canon Law) from the University of Santa Catalina in El Burgo de Osma (Soria), obtaining a degree from the University of Santo Tomás de Ávila on November 3, 1763, a university that He enjoyed a certain intellectual splendor due to the daring doctrines that were discussed in his classrooms and allowed him to obtain a prestigious note in his personal file to access the Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso of the University of Alcalá. His academic training in Avila led him to maintain a close relationship with the Castilian city throughout his life, as a result of his regular contact with friends from this student stage, as well as through the cenacle of the Duchess of Alba in Piedrahíta and the circle of the Countess of Montijo. Enlightened personalities and close friends belonged to the first cenacle, such as the writer Juan Meléndez Valdés, the minister Cabarrús and the painter Goya; while upon his arrival in Madrid in 1790, Jovellanos would stay at the home of the Countess of Montijo, who would also protect him as soon as his situation against the Ministry of Grace and Justice in 1798 became more complicated.

In 1764 he received a scholarship at the Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso of the University of Alcalá, to continue his ecclesiastical studies, graduating with a bachelor's degree in Canons. There he met Gallows and Campomanes.

Aula Magna of the University of Avila in the monastery of St. Thomas, where Jovellanos was named.

After graduating in 1767, he held the position of magistrate of the Royal Court of Seville. There he was mayor of crime and oidor in 1774. In 1775 he was one of the promoters of the Sevillian Patriotic Society, of which he was secretary of arts and crafts.

Madrid

In 1778 he managed to be transferred to the Chamber of Mayors of Casa y Corte in Madrid, partly thanks to the influence of the Duke of Alba, whom he had met in Seville. In Madrid he entered the gathering of Campomanes, at the time fiscal of the Council of Castilla, which entrusted him with different jobs that satisfied him, recognizing Jovellanos as a man of extensive training and recognized solvency in the economic field. In 1780 he accedes to the Council of Military Orders. In 1782 he was part of the commission that launched the Banco de San Carlos. He was a member of the trade board of the Sociedad Económica Matritense and, since December 1784, its director. He writes various studies on the economy of Spain, among which the Report on the Agrarian Law is of singular value, in which he advocates the liberalization of land and an end to privileges such as the mayorazgo and the Mesta, collecting his liberal thinking, a rule on which the Council of Castilla had pinned its hopes to reform and modernize the peninsular agriculture.

Fully integrated into Madrid's cultural life, he was a member of the Royal Academy of History (1779), the Royal Academy of San Fernando (1780) and the Royal Spanish Academy (1781). He was also a member of the Economic Society of Asturias, section in the Principality of the Economic Societies of Friends of the Country.

However, the beginning of the French Revolution paralyzed Enlightenment ideas with Carlos IV and removed most of the advanced thinkers from public life.

Asturias

After the fall of his friend Francisco de Cabarrús, Jovellanos was forced to leave the Court, exiled, settling in his hometown in 1790, where he wrote a Report on shows that he had commissioned the Royal Academy of History and travels through Asturias, Cantabria and the Basque Country to learn about the situation of coal mines and the prospects for its consumption, making his first reports on the councils of Siero and Langreo, future large exporters of coal, especially the last one. Jovellanos had already shown himself in favor of increasing production, for which it was necessary to liberalize mineral exploitation. After his mining trips he presented nine reports with the results of his commission and managed to partially liberalize the exploitation of coal in 1793. He projected the idea of the so-called coal road between Langreo and Gijón that materialized years later, without Jovellanos being able to see it. In Asturias he not only documented the economic possibilities, but also made reports on traditions and festivities.

Between 1790 and 1791 he traveled several times to Salamanca to take charge of the reform of the Colleges of Military Orders. As sub-delegate for roads in Asturias (1792) he tried to speed up the completion of the works on the road to Castilla (which he had begun in 1771), in order to end the isolation of Gijón, but the lack of funds would make it impossible to finish.

At the initiative of Jovellanos, the Royal Asturian Institute of Nautical and Mineralogy was created in Gijón in 1794, in which he tried to apply the ideas of the Enlightenment in teaching.

Last years

After the alliance with revolutionary France, Manuel Godoy wanted to carry out certain reforms and have the most important of the Enlightenment, so he offered Jovellanos the post of ambassador to Russia, which he rejected. However, on November 10, 1797, he accepted the position of Minister of Grace and Justice, from which he tried to reform justice and reduce the influence of the Inquisition, but after nine months in government he ceased on August 16, 1798 and returned to Gijon. There he projected the creation of an Asturian academy, whose function would be the study of Asturian history and language, and he produced 200 Asturian lexicon sheets.

In December 1800, after the dismissal of Mariano Luis de Urquijo as minister of state, Godoy returned to power and ordered the arrest of Jovellanos on March 13, 1801 and his exile to Mallorca, first to the monastery of Real Cartuja from Jesús de Nazaret, where he was well treated by the monks —in the current municipality of Valldemosa—, and then to the Bellver castle prison. During the years in prison his physical problems worsen and his religiosity increases. Little by little, and thanks to the fact that he kept the minister's salary, he bought luxurious furniture and many books, despite suffering from cataracts. Released on April 6, 1808, after the mutiny in Aranjuez, he refused to be part of the government of José Bonaparte and represented Asturias in the Junta Central, a government of which he made its regulations together with Martín de Garay. From there he promoted the meeting of the Assembly directing the Cortes commission, but the entry of the French into Andalusia forced the government to leave Seville and take refuge in Cádiz. The propaganda of the aristocrats who refused to meet with Cortes caused the fall of the Central Board and the establishment of a regency, whose regulations were redrafted by Jovellanos and Martín de Garay. The slander poured out against the centrals made several of them leave Cádiz, as happened with Jovellanos, who embarked for Asturias, but a storm led him to Muros on March 6, 1810.

He stayed in Galicia for several months and wrote the political justification for his actions in the Central Board, Memoria en defensa de la Junta Central , which was printed in La Coruña. After the departure of the French from Gijón, on July 27, 1811 he left Galicia and returned to the Asturian town, although a French counterattack meant that he had to leave once more. Sick with pneumonia, he died in the fishing village of Puerto de Vega, in the Navia council, on November 27, 1811.

Jovellanos Sepulchre in the Remedies Chapel of his home.

Initially his remains were moved to the Gijón cemetery, moving again in 1842 to a mausoleum in the church of San Pedro, built to house the man from Gijón. In 1936 and before the imminent blowing up of the temple, they were relocated by the writer Pachín de Melás in the Superior School of Commerce with the permission of the mayor Avelino González Mallada. Later, in 1940, they were taken to the Remedios chapel, next to his birthplace.

Work

Jovellanos cultivated several literary genres (such as poetry and theater) but his main writings were essays on economy, politics, agriculture, philosophy and customs, from the reforming spirit of enlightened despotism.

Portrait of Jovellanos at the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, attributed to Antonio Carnicero, c.1797.

Notable among them is the Report on the agrarian law, which he wrote in a first version in 1784, but which he did not send until 1787 to the Sociedad Económica Matritense, which sent it to the Council of Castilla and which It was published in 1795. In it, Jovellanos was in favor of eliminating the obstacles to free initiative, which he grouped into three classes: political, moral and physical. Among them were the vacant lots, the Mesta, taxation, the lack of useful knowledge of the owners and farmers, the bad communications and the lack of irrigation, canals and ports. To correct this situation, Jovellanos proposed that communal vacant lots and mountains become private property, dissolve the Mesta, fence off the farms, and that the leases be based on the free agreement between the settlers and the owners. In turn, he also defended the limitation of mayorazgos, the tax reform, and the suppression of ecclesiastical amortization or the obstacles on farmers.

To this we should add the reform of education, to make it more practical, giving more importance to scientific subjects, and the investment of the State in public works. These measures would create the conditions for the constitution of a land market, an increase in production and the creation of a unified national market that would make it possible for the population and its standard of living to increase, which would serve as the basis for the start of industrialization..

During his stay in Seville he was one of the participants in Pablo de Olavide's social gathering, which influenced him to start writing love poetry and wrote the first version of the tragedy El Pelayo (1769) and the comedy The honest delinquent (1773). Pelayo or The Death of Munuza is the only tragedy written by Jovellanos. It is a work of youth, composed in Seville, in 1769, when its creator was twenty-five years old, although it was corrected between 1771 and 1772. The work was reworked that gave rise to a new version, made between 1782 and 1790. It should have been transmitted in manuscript. Only in 1792 did an impression appear, and this one of a pirate nature. Its representation did not take place until 1782, thirteen years after it was written; that year it premiered in Gijón. At the beginning of October 1792 its premiere took place in Madrid. Jovellanos's contribution to comedy is reduced to a single work, and this one on the limits of the genre: The honest delinquent, written in Seville for Olavide's social gathering, and premiered in Madrid twenty years later., in 1767. It is a sentimental comedy, Spanish derivation of the "comédie larmoyante", created in France by Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée.

He also translated the first book of Paradise Lost, by Milton. He was the promoter of a series of improvements in his hometown, such as the Gijón-León highway, which, although it was not completed, meant the transfer of Asturian maritime trade from the port of Avilés to that of Gijón. In addition, he promoted all kinds of reforms at the national level, being a key enlightener of the time.

Bibliography of his works

Bust of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1809), work by Angel Augusto de Monasterio (Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid).

Plate of the street of Jovellanos in Madrid

Literary Works:

• Theatrical works: Pelayo / Munuzatragedy. Seville, 1769 and The honored criminalSeville, 1774.
• Poetic compositions and romances.
• Funeral praise of the Marquis of the Plains of Alguazas. Read at the Matritense Economic Society on August 5, 1780.
• Elogio de Ventura Rodríguez. Madrid, January 19, 1788 Matritense Economic Society.
• Elogio de Carlos III. Read at Real Sociedad Económica de Madrid on November 8, 1788.

Correspondence:

• Vid. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Complete works, tt. II al V. Ed. critique, introduction and notes by José Miguel Caso González. Oviedo, IFES. XVIII / Ilustre City Hall of Gijón, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1990.

Diary and memories:

• Journal (1790-1801).
• Family memories (1790-1810).
• Travel daily from Bellver (Mallorca) to Jadraque (Guadalajara). Return from exile. Mallorca, April 5, June 23, 1808.

Pedagogical works:

• Report to the Protomedicate on the State of the Medical Society of Seville and the Study of Medicine at its University, Seville, September 3, 1777.
• Speech on the language and style of a geographical dictionary. Madrid, June 23, 1788. Read by the author at the Royal Academy of History.
• Regulation for the economic, institutional and literary government of the school of the Immaculate Conception of Salamanca, according to the new plan approved by S. M. in consultation of the Royal Council of Orders. Salamanca, August 16, 1790.
• Pedagogical Memories (1790–1809).
• Ordinance for the Royal Asturian Institute. Gijón, December 1, 1793.
• Opening prayer at the opening of the Royal Asturian Institute. Gijón, January 7, 1794.
• News from the Royal Asturian Institute. Gijón, June 21, 1794.
• Course of Spanish Humanities. Royal Asturian Institute. Gijón, 1794.
• Letter to Doctor Prado on the method of studying law. Gijón, 17 December 1795.
• Prayer on the need to unite the study of literature to science. Royal Asturian Institute. Gijón, 1797.
• Exposition to the Prince of Peace in response to eleven points on public instruction in Spain. Gijón, 1797.
• Plan to fix university studies. Madrid, 1798.
• A plan for the education of nobility and of the wealthy classes. Aranjuez, 1798.
• Address on the study of historical Geography. Announced at the Asturian Institute of Gijón. February 16, 1800.
• Report on public education or theoretical-practice education treaty with application to schools and schools of children. Valdemosa Cartridge. Mallorca, 1802.
• Instruction given to a young theologian when leaving the University, about the method to be observed to be perfected in the study of this science. Bellver Castle, 1805.
• Bases for the formation of a general plan of public instruction. Seville, 16 November 1809.

Economic works:

• Causes of the decline of economic societies. Madrid, January 19, 1786.
• Report on the Agrarian Law File. Gijón, 26 April 1794.
• Report on oil extraction to foreign kingdoms. Seville, May 14, 1774.
• Introduction to a speech on the study of the civil economy. 1776.
• Report on the promotion of the merchant marine. Madrid, 1784.
• Report on replacing a new method for silk yarn. Madrid, Trade and Currency Board, 1789.
• View on boarding foreign cloths for our colonies. Madrid, 1789.

Works with Asturian themes:

• Address to the Royal Society of Friends of the Country of Asturias, on the means of promoting the happiness of that Principality. Madrid, April 22, 1781.
• Letters from Asturias or Letters to Ponz (1782-1792).
• Critical judgment of the ancient history of Guiggia. Gijón, August 9, 1782.
• Representations on the Pajares Road (1783-1799).
• Mining reports (1789-1797).
• Plan for the formation of a dictionary of the dialect of Asturias. Gijón, 1790.
• Instruction for the formation of a bable dictionary. 1801.
• Aiming on the dialect of Asturias (Instruction for the formation of a geographical dictionary of Asturias). 1804.
• Origin and introduction of agriculture in Asturias. Bellver Castle, 1804.

Writings on art:

• Address delivered by the Society of Friends of the Country of Asturias, on the need to cultivate in the Principality the study of the natural sciences. Oviedo, May 6, 1782.
• General improvement plan proposed to Gijón Town Hall. 1782.
• Report to the General Trade and Currency Board on the free exercise of the arts. (According to Ceán is from Madrid, November 29, 1785).
• Memory of Bellver Castle, historical-artistic description. Bellver Castle, 1805.
• Description of La Rioja. Gijón, April 16, 1795.

Writings commissioned by the various academies:

• Speech delivered to the Society of Friends of the Country of Asturias.
• Reports on works of art (Granada, Córdoba, Bellver, Asturias).
• On the need to join the study of the legislation of our history and antiquities.
• Madrid, Academy of History, Address of Reception. Madrid, February 14, 1780.
• Elogio de las Bellas Artes. Announced at the San Fernando Academy. Madrid, July 14, 1781.

Legal writings:

• Report on prison reform. Seville, 1768-1778.
• Aims and deductions relating to Spanish Public Law. Seville, July 1, 1774.
• Inner organization of the hospices, with respect to their salubrity. Economic Society of Seville, 1778.
• Report on general pardons. Madrid, July 1, 1779.
• Reflections on Spanish legislation regarding the use of graves. Presented at the Academy of History in 1781.
• Address on the need for language study to understand the spirit of legislation. Madrid, September 25, 1781.
• Report on the ancient and modern ecclesiastical discipline concerning the place of graves. Madrid, May 9, 1783.
• Address to illustrate the matter of a report requested by the Royal and Supreme Council of Castilla to the Economic Society of Madrid, on the establishment of a Montepío for the nobles of the Court. Madrid, 1784.
• Memory for the settlement of the police of public shows and their origin in Spain. Gijón, December 29, 1790. It was introduced in 11 June 1796.
• Representation to Charles IV on what was the Court of Inquisition. 1798.
• Report on the abolition of the storm test. Seville, 1768-1778.
• Plan of a dissertation on Visible Laws. Madrid, 1785.
• Exhibition on the organization of the Courts. 1809.

Political Writings:

• Memory read in the Economic Society of Madrid about whether or not the ladies should be admitted. 1786.
• First representation to Carlos IV. Valdemosa, Mallorca, April 24, 1801.
• Second representation to Carlos IV. Valdemosa, Mallorca, 1802.
• Representation to Fernando VII. Mallorca, April 18, 1808.
• Memory in defense of the Central Board. Santa Cruz de Ribadulla, May 2, 1811.
• Report on the causes of the decline of economic societies. Madrid, October 3, 1786.
• Reflections on Democracy. (s.a.)
• "Political and philosophical writings"

Biographical Documents:

• Biographical notes. Cabarrus; Campomanes. Madrid, 1782.

Translations

• Translation Voyage dans l’Egypte pour decouvrir les sources du NilJames Bruce. 1795.
• Extract and translation of the History of the Cartuja de Valldemuza, by Fray Alberto Puiz. 1801.
• Translation in romance decaying the tragedy Ifigenia of Racine. 1794.

Botany:

• Treaty of Mallorcan botany or medicinal flora of Valldemosa. (1801).

Specialized bibliography

• Case, José. Life and work of Jovellanos. Ed. Cajastur. Oviedo, 2004.
• Sanchez Corredera, Silverio. Jovellanos y el jovellanismo. Pentalfa Ediciones, Oviedo 2004.