During the last third of the eighteenth century, in which the majority of Hispanists locate the Enlightenment, rationalism polarized the Republic of Letters, or ‘Empire of the Soul’, as Rodríguez Mohedano had described it. The ostensibly universal concepts of ‘good taste’ and ‘the sublime’ were understood and applied in ways that late baroque humanists had not envisioned. Mariano Madramany noted, for example, that Spanish authors had adopted the flat style (precisely what the French handbooks of formal logic, rhetoric and poetics had recommended), and that French authors had adopted a penchant for enigmas and ingenious conceits (precisely what the French had condemned as ‘Gothic’). Through prominent ministers rationalism polarized the Republic, by decree and by example.

Resistance to Gothicism in the Nineteenth Century

The hardening of literary and political styles and institutions that occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century appears to have surprised Antonio de Capmany (1742–1813), secretary of the Spanish Royal Academy of History (1776–1790). In 1808 he issued a call-toarms, in his Centinela contra franceses, which was also a call-to-pens: ‘This is no time for he who can grasp the lance to stand around with his arms crossed, nor to keep his tongue stuck to his tastebuds he who can use his way with words to educate and inspire his compatriots. Our most precious liberty is threatened, the motherland is at risk and calls out for defenders. From this day forward we all are soldiers, some with the sword and others with the pen …’

Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, author of Corona gótica, castellana y austríaca and Idea de un príncipe político-cristiano, had inspired the nineteenth-century sentinel. On his opening page Capmany quotes the baroque statesman: truth is not demonstrated to the ignorant by debating, but by sticking it in their faces. An alarmed Capmany claimed that Spaniards no longer read their own satires, histories and plays. In effect, they were no longer Spaniards. Certainly, they did not possess a consciousness of the Nación as it had been articulated by Saavedra Fajardo and other statesmen and authors from the Habsburg era: