Spain's Disentailment: Church Property & Economic Transformation
Mendizábal's 1836 Disentailment
The confiscation of Church property in Spain was conducted in two consecutive phases. Regular church property was nationalized and sold in an orderly manner starting in 1836, by a decree issued by Prime Minister Juan Álvarez Mendizábal under powers delegated to him by the courts a few weeks earlier. The 1836 confiscation was a cornerstone of Mendizábal's program to finance the ongoing war against the Carlist party, to clean up the national estate, and, in Mendizábal's own words, to create a substantial landowning class materially interested in the triumph of the liberal cause.
During the five years following Mendizábal's decree, sales amounted to approximately 1,700 million reales. The exact number of hectares sold remains unknown.
Espartero's 1841 Disentailment & Sales
In 1841, with General Espartero as regent, a new fundamental rule in disentailment law was established: the Law of September 2, 1841, which treated the property of the secular clergy as national assets. These assets belonged to the Spanish Church, excluding the monastic orders, which had already been affected by Mendizábal's policy. Therefore, until 1844, the sale of assets belonging to both the regular and secular clergy proceeded rapidly. The return of the Moderate Party to power in 1844 caused sales to be virtually suspended until the Madoz Law.
Total sales between 1836 and 1844 amounted to approximately 3.447 billion reales, equivalent to about three-fifths of the Church's assets in 1836.
The Madoz Law: General Confiscation of 1855
The so-called Madoz Law, or General Confiscation, of May 1, 1855, marked the final and most significant phase of this extensive operation. It was termed a "general confiscation" because it encompassed not only Church property but also all "redeemed" assets, meaning those belonging to the state and municipalities. Ultimately, it aimed to sell by auction all real estate that belonged to the state and municipalities, as well as remaining Church property.
Impact on Property Structure
How did the confiscation affect the structure of property? The prevailing opinion among scholars is that the confiscation reinforced the existing structure of Spanish agrarian landownership. Buyers of disentailed land were generally wealthy or at least well-off individuals, including:
- Aristocrats
- Military officers
- Clergy
- Existing landowners
- Merchants
- Businessmen
Property Distribution & Ownership Changes
Regarding the confiscation's effect on property distribution, the most authoritative work on the subject, by Richard Herr, suggests that the confiscation did not introduce a fundamental change in the ownership structure. In other words, while property changed hands, it was generally not significantly concentrated or dispersed.
Cultivation of Underutilized Land
According to Herr, what was most remarkable was that the disentailment led to the cultivation of large tracts of land that had previously been underutilized, poorly managed, or entirely unworked. This increase in acreage was necessary to feed a slow but steady population growth observed since the early eighteenth century.