Empire-phobia and the Black Legend

Empire-phobia and the Black Legend

by Javier Torres

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

Historian Elvira Roca, author of "Imperiofobia y Leyenda Negra", (Empire-phobia and the Black Legend), puts on the eighteenth-century Spanish elites the responsibility of assimilating uncritically the French doctrine of the Enlightenment, greatly responsible for the negative image of the Spanish Empire which had dominated the world since the sixteenth century.

It is not often that a historical essay keeps itself on the best-selling books list. But historian Elvira Roca (b. El Borge, Malaga, 1966), researcher at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), has accomplished this.

And with a politically incorrect thesis, at that. She has sunk her teeth in a centuries-old Taboo topic, the black legend which Spain has been wearing as a sanbenito.

The book, "Imperiofobia y Leyenda Negra" (editorial Siruela), breaks apart the topics which so successfully had been erected by the enemies of Hispanism. Myths which talk about an obscure and backward Spain despite it having carried its faith to America and having been the foremost world power in the sixteenth century. A stigma from which it could never get rid of.

Elvira Roca claims that none of that would have happened without the bandwagonism of the Spanish intellectuals of the Enlightenment, or the pessimism of the generation of 1898, which helped assimilating and propagating the poisoned narrative cooked on the fire of the lights of the Enlightenment: Spain is guilty.

Having interiorized the complex, the Spanish elites repeated uncritically the Enlightenment doctrine, quite the opposite of what was happening in our neighboring country: Voltaire, who spent his life exiled from a France which prohibited his books, never wrote anything which could suppose an affront to his country. All comparisons are odious.

In her book, Roca recollects that institutions such as the Inquisition, or episodes such as the expulsion of the Jews — something that has been repeated in other European nations at other historical moments — were magnified in such a way that they still burden the imagery of the Spanish collective guilt.

Interview with Elvira Roca:

Is the bad press regarding Spain and its Empire the price to pay for its conquest of America?

It is the price to pay for many things. The anti-Spanish propaganda was useful at a moment in history as part of Protestantism's self-justification, and of several nationalisms; it was a kind of dual mentality which makes up an enemy and transforms it into a devil. The question is not that our history is free from errors and mistakes just as that of any other nation, the matter is the peculiar position that those errors occupy in the European imagery,

Some examples of errors and mistakes in other countries.

The history of France contains very shameful acts, some of them in the twentieth century, but on France has not befallen any general disrepute nor any indictment of anomalous and ignorant people among the whole of Europe. In Spain, that current has been produced with cases which have not in any way been anomalous in European history.

"With the arrival of the Bourbons, our elites copied the Enlightened French and assimilated the idea that there had never been a case of religious intolerance comparable to the Spanish Inquisition"

For example?

The expulsion of the Jews, In no place has it taken the peculiar connotations which it has acquired in our history. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 seems to be unique when actually it was not so; it is something which has occurred in Europe over many centuries. Why is it that in our case it is peculiar and not in others?

Sánchez Dragó wrote the essay "And if he talks badly of Spain, he is Spanish" in which he pictures our complexes and legends. Do we happen to be the main enthusiasts of the black legend?

We have assumed it with absolute enthusiasm. In the eighteenth century the Bourbons arrive, and with them the Hispanophobe French Enlightenment: anything that was prejudicial to Spain was useful to France. But our elites copied the French Enlightened, and propitiated an assimilation that maintains that there had never been a case of religious intolerance comparable to the Spanish Inquisition, when exactly the opposite is the case.

The opposite?

Religious intolerance should be hung around the neck of Protestant peoples, which were much greater persecutors than the Inquisition.

Was there never a reaction to such current?

Our elites generated the tradition by which, if you want to be a prestigious intellectual in Spain, you have to be critical of our country to the point of exhaustion. But that was the only thing imitated from the Enlightenment, because the French Enlightenment always worked favoring the creation of France as a world power. Voltaire passed his life exiled from a France that prohibited his books. But you can never find in Voltaire a single criticism to his country! He could have said that liberty and culture were being persecuted there, but he said nothing of the sort. And not only him, none of the French intellectuals of the Enlightenment wrote anything against France, on the contrary, for them France is the most beautiful country in Europe, where more liberty exists, where the lights of reason shine. 

In other words, the supposed intellectual vanguard of Spain in the eighteenth century actually assumes a foreign doctrine.

The Spanish intellectuals of the eighteenth century, which were persecuted much less than in France, repeat as a mantra the French topic that Spain is a country in which there is no liberty, and culture and science are persecuted. This has created a tradition which keeps alive today.

To what extent did the decline of the Empire in America exert an influence?

The end of the American colonies did not help, either; and towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Spanish elites justify the national crisis resorting to the topics of the black legend: Spain deserves it, this had to end badly because we have been the most intolerant, the champions of the lack of liberty. And so, it is assumed that the blame for the fall of the empire falls on those who built it in the sixteenth century. An absurdity, of course; what would have been logical was to analyze what was occurring in our nineteenth century to explain the collapse of the Empire.

Did the pessimism after the Disaster of 1898 come to stay forever?

The generation of 1898 was incapable of facing the problem which history placed in front of them, and ended up assuming the topics on Spain. But if we analyze the arguments against the Empire one by one, it is not too difficult to dismantle the absurdity of the black legend. What was easier for the relief of that generation was to blame the Inquisition. All except me!

Is it impossible to build up an Empire without having to bear a black legend?

It is almost impossible. I have not studied all of the empires, but in general lines, all share that shadow propitiated in great part by envy. Something happens now with the United States, that we even dress our kids for Halloween, we copy their catastrophic cuisine. There is also a fever for the language, and not because the Sixth Fleet has come to force us to open an academy in our neighborhood. We do it because we want it. And all this at the end generates sentiments of resentment or envy which require a simple explanation. All this generates empire-phobia. Well, that same thing happened with Spain in sixteenth century Europe: Spanish ways were imitated, the Spanish language was studied, and all this distilled an enormous unease.

Would the Black Legend exist had the first conquerors of America not been Spaniards?

The example is in North America, where there had been a conquest, and that has neither been an argument for thinking that all of the English are barbarians nor for thinking that the North Americans have been so since the independence of the thirteen colonies. Spanish America is full of Indians and blood mixing, whereas that does not exist in the North, and what little there exists comes from the pre-existing Spanish population, since one half of the US territories had belonged to the Spanish Empire. A half-Navajo friend of mine from Texas once told me: "I have never emigrated. It were the United States the ones who came to my home" Few Indians were able to survive in the territories that they occupied from the East to the West.

Not all colonizations were the same, of course.

The Enlightened never saw the Spanish cities, hospitals, universities or cathedrals in America. Nor the Leyes de Indias (laws of the indies), nor the mixing, nor the population growth; neither did they talk of the French taste for scalping, or of the French having never been capable of building a city in America in a century and a half. Nothing did the French ever leave in America. Nevertheless, they spent their life talking of the shame which Spain supposedly meant for humanity.

"The idea that Spain colonized the southern part of America and the result is poverty whereas the British colonized the North and the result is wealth is false."

In contrast, Spain left universities and cathedrals, You may be right in that about envy.

Only in Spanish America were there universities. The British empire during its second expansion left only four. Spain left a spectacular educational infrastructure. The pain and sorrow is that it was destroyed in great part after the independence, period during which Spanish America suffers total impoverishment. The idea that Spain colonized the southern part of America and the result is poverty whereas the British colonized the North and the result is wealth is false.

Another myth?

When the wars for independence started, the Spanish Viceroyships were much richer than the thirteen North American colonies. And this can be measured in terms of population, demography, justice, speed of mail, purchasing power, educational system... After the independence from Spain, however, everything collapsed in a few decades: the South impoverished itself by leaps and bounds, while the Anglo-Saxon North grew fast. The supposed 'liberation from Spanish tyranny' resulted in a brutal impoverishment of the population. In fifty years they passed from being at the head of the train to the tail.

In just one day during the French Revolution, more people were murdered than in the almost four centuries of the Inquisition. Why is it that some do all the misdeeds and others are given the blame?

We study the French Revolution as if it had been a great achievement for humanity. I perceive a certain ineptitude among Catholics in dealing with the propaganda and controlling the public opinion prevailing over them. This battle was lost at the moment Protestantism got the peoples of Southern Europe assume their moral inferiority. Spain gets the beating mostly because of its ineptitude. We don't get to see that, on the other side, a self-interested and manipulated public opinion is being generated This staging is not casual.

"Protestants grew with the notion that a perverted religion had existed, a wicked Christianity and a degraded message from Jesus Christ had existed (the Roman Church)"

Do we keep seeing this today?

That all of Europe should have gone to Germany to put their money during the last crisis, when it has been the Germans the ones responsible for three successive bankruptcies, says it all. The Germans have never in their life paid their debts. Since the time of Bismarck, they drag a history of non-payments. But nonetheless, the whole world knocks on the doors of the German banks to leave their money there. Spain, on the contrary, paid her debt with the United States after the war of 1898, assuming the Cuban one in addition.

Is the black legend built against Spain comparable to that of other empires, such as Rome, the United States or Russia?

It is very difficult to try to measure the virulence of any propaganda against Rome, but we can measure the one against the USA. But I would like to emphasize that the only case of empire-phobia in Europe is that against Spain, and the importance it has in our setting is decisive: Protestants grew with the notion that a perverted religion had existed, a wicked Christianity, and a degraded message from Jesus Christ had existed (the Roman Church).

By happenstance, could Catholicism be what inspired the enemies of Spain to construct the Black Legend?

No, not at all. It is all the way around. They use Catholicism as an alibi. Had it not been Catholicism it would have been something else; they needed to fabricate something to put them in a position of moral superiority. It was necessary to attack Spain and the bases of its morality insofar as it was a powerful empire. Spain had a position in the world contrary to the national churches such as that existing in England. Spain could do nothing more than defend Catholicism which in turn defends a supranational morality; that is to say, it does not belong to any nation nor to any king. On the contrary, the protestant churches are property of the nations to the front of which kings or Lutheran princes had put themselves. The Spanish Empire always defended the position that religion is above all nations.