Ilustración y liberalismo en España

Valle Inclán explained it in the modernist verses of La Marquesa Rosalinda. Unlike France, here they did not fly freely behind the groves, nor the furtive kisses of the Trianon, nor the ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau: with the branches of the groves, here the Inquisition was making bonfires. The economic backwardness, despite the empire, and intolerance, created extreme conditions for the lights to take root in Spain and despite the enlightened absolutism reform effort made this almost heroic task possible. An intellectual minority found a structure of opportunity in the reform policy of enlightened despotism, which illuminated the problems and at the same time showed the impossibility of solving them within the class order and without breaking the wall of the Holy Office. Hence the outbreak in a short time, not of a simple reformism, but of an alternative political consciousness that points to a Constitution. Before the name, liberalism is born. Under the "infamous Godoy", Jovellanos dixit, the river is transformed into guadiana and although the political and economic objectives are specified, the current, diverted by the valid one, leads to 1808. The trajectory will find in Goya a witness capable of expressing through unique images the drama of a progress of reason that ends in tragedy.