Enlightenment in Spain
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Age of Enlightenment (in Spanish, Ilustración) came to Spain in the eighteenth century with a new Bourbon dynasty after the decay of the Spanish economy, bureaucracy, and empire in the latter years of the former Habsburg dynasty. This period of reform and 'enlightened despotism' focused on modernising the Spanish government, infrastructure, and institutions, culminating in the rule of King Charles III and the work of his minister, José Moñino, count of Floridablanca.
The century began with the War of the Spanish Succession over the ascension of a relation of Louis XIV of France to the throne of Spain and ended with the Napoleonic Wars in which Spain would become a bloody battleground. Charles III's successors, fraught by war, foreign intervention, unrest in the empire, corruption, and the pain of reform, would face an increasingly restive and unstable Spain, the painful consequences of which would become the civil wars that dominated Spain in the nineteenth century.
