Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, conde de Aranda

Painting of the Conde de Aranda by José María Galván .

Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea-Ximénez de Urrea y Ponts de Mendoza , Count (Spanish: conde) of Aranda (born August 1, 1719 in Siétamo ( Huesca , Spain ); † January 9, 1798 Épila ( Saragossa , Spain)) was a Spanish nobleman, enlightener and politician. He served as chairman of the Castile Council ( Presidente del Consejo de Castilla (1766–1773)) and as Prime Minister under King Charles IV ( Secretario de Estado de Carlos IV (1792)).

Live and act

Youth, training and military career

Pedro Pablo Abarca was born into a noble family in a castle in Siétamo, Aragon. His father was Pedro Alcántara Abarca de Bolea, 9th Count of Aranda, Marqués de Torres. His mother's name was María Josefa Pons de Mendoza, Countess (Spanish: condesa ) de Robres. He also had a sister named Ana María Engracia Abarca de Bolea Pons de Mendoza. With the death of his father in 1742 he inherited his title and became 10th Count of Aranda.

First, Pedro attended school in his hometown. When he was seven years old, the family moved to Italy: his father was in a Spanish regiment in Italy during the Polish (1733–1738) and Austrian War of Succession (1740–1748).

Abarca first attended the Jesuit college in Parma . At the age of 17 he joined the army of Infante Karl, later Karl III. of Spain . In 1739 he married Ana María de Pilar Fernández de Híjar, daughter of Isidro Fadrique, the 8th Duke of Híjar.

In 1740 he became Colonel ( coronel ) of the Spanish Army, 1st Grenadier Battalion of the Castile Regiment under the command of José Carrillo de Albornoz y Montiel, I duque de Montemar (1671-1747). He fought in the War of the Austrian Succession from 1740 to 1748. In 1743 he was seriously wounded in the battle of Campo Santo in Italy; he recovered in Spain and then took part in the fighting until the end of the campaign.

Withdrawal from active military service, travel

In 1746 de Aranda resigned from active military service and was appointed Chamberlain to Philip V. In 1747 the new king, Ferdinand VI , promoted him . , to the field marshal. He took care of the administration of the family property and from now on traveled through France and Italy.

He later moved to Prussia , where he also met Friedrich the Great personally. There he studied the structure of the Prussian army , whose training and organization he was later to apply in Spain. He is also said to have taken the march of a grenadier regiment there to Spain in 1753, which later became the Spanish national anthem Marcha Real .

In 1755 he returned to Spain, was promoted to lieutenant general and received the title of Spanish grandee, first class.

Diplomatic service for Ferdinand VI.

From 1756, appointed by Ferdinand VI. , he was ambassador to Portugal. Lisbon had recently been destroyed by a severe earthquake that also killed the Spanish ambassador. He managed to build up a good relationship with the Portuguese court; in recognition of his services, he was accepted into the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1756 . In 1757 he was promoted to general of the artillery. However, he gave up this position after differences with the Captain General of Catalonia. From 1758 he withdrew into private life.

In the service of Charles III.

When Charles III. ascended the Spanish throne, Aranda was recalled to civil service. He was appointed ambassador to the court of August III. (Poland) posted to Warsaw. August had to move there during the Seven Years' War , as his home country Saxony was occupied by the Prussians . As opponents of Prussia, Saxony and Poland were indirect allies of France. During his activity in Poland he visited several Polish cities, including Gdansk .

In January 1762, Spain entered the war on France's side, and the Count of Aranda was ordered back to Spain. He took command of the invading army that invaded Portugal. After initial successes, bad weather forced the Spaniards to retreat, and peace was concluded in November 1762.

In the course of the fighting in America, British troops had taken the strategically important port of Havana in Cuba in July 1762 with little resistance . From February 1763 on, Aranda presided over the court martial, which brought those responsible on the Spanish side to account. He was promoted to captain general, the highest rank he could attain.

Captain General of Valencia and Murcia

In 1764, with the rank of general captain, he received civil and military command of the provinces of Valencia and Murcia. In this function he also had to report to the court. In the Portugal campaign he had drawn the enmity of the powerful Leopoldo de Gregorio , marquis of Esquilache. Aranda became the representative of the Aragoneses , a current of local politicians who advocated a moderate reformist attitude and were in opposition to the mostly Italian advisors to the king, who ordered Spain to adopt ruthlessly radical reforms.

Madrid hat riot

Engraving by Motín de Esquilache from 1766.

In 1766, the population of Madrid rose against radical reforms, which, among other things, prohibited the wearing of traditional Spanish clothing and made French fashion mandatory. During the riots of the Madrid hat revolt , Motín de Esquilache in 1766, de Aranda briefly took over the affairs of state.

The uprising was directed against the Marqués de Esquilache (1699–1785), minister and closest adviser to King Charles III. The king had fled to Aranjuez and handed over the reins to him as a personal trust. Aranda ordered the rebellion to be put down by military means, but the troops were unable to restore the authority of state power. It was only thanks to the intervention of two Jesuits, Padre Osma and Padre Cueva , that the insurgents yielded to minor concessions and the dismissal of de Esquilache.

President of the Castile Council

The king appointed Aranda President of the Council of Castile. In this capacity, he promoted many enlightened reforms and proved to be a pragmatic modernizer. He promoted trade and agriculture and also continued the policy of local self-government that the Italian reformers had begun. During his tenure, Madrid was divided into barrios . In educational policy, he tried to bring the frozen Spanish universities back to a good level with new curricula.

His church policy was controversial: he expelled a large number of priests from the city of Madrid without any action. Opposite the court and the public he accused the Jesuit order of having caused the hat riot. This was not a purely Spanish phenomenon: the Jesuit order was also exposed to severe criticism in other European countries during these years. Aranda trained but at the court of Charles III. the driving force that led to the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 .

His confidante Pablo de Olavide implemented his reform efforts in Andalusia . Several thousand settlers from Central Europe - including Germany - were settled there to develop the country.

In 1771 a dispute broke out between Spain and Great Britain over the Falkland Islands . Spain had sent an expeditionary force - also at Aranda's instigation - but had to cede Port Egmont (Falkland Islands) to the British. This took Jerónimo Grimaldi , representatives of radikalreformistischen Golillas and Prime Minister to Aranda to discredit the king. He had to resign from the chairmanship of the Castile Council.

Ambassador to Paris

Pedro Abarca asked the king for a military order. Although Spain was involved in some conflicts and wars at the time, the monarch refused to accept this request. In 1773 he was instead used again in a diplomatic mission: he was appointed ambassador to Paris . In 1774 Louis XVI ascended the French throne and Spain, like France, supported the American side in the American War of Independence against the British.

American independence was sealed in the Peace of Paris (1783) . With this treaty, Spain regained Florida and Menorca from the British, and Count Aranda led the negotiations on the Spanish side. His wife died that same year. His potential heirs (a son and a nephew) had also died before him. In 1784, at the age of 65, he married his seventeen-year-old niece María del Pilar Fernández de Híjar Palafox. The marriage remained childless.

In Paris he also met several encyclopedists and educators, such as Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert .

Prime Minister under Charles IV.

In 1787 he returned to Spain from France. During his time in France he had exchanged views with the greats of the Enlightenment and was particularly influenced by Voltaire . The authorship of the so-called “de Aranda memorandum”, which advocates political and military stabilization between the countries of Spain, England and the United States of North America, was wrongly assumed to be his.

Charles III died soon after his return, and the new King Charles IV and his influential wife Maria Luise von Bourbon-Parma initially made no move to entrust him with new tasks.

In return, Aranda worked to overthrow his rival at court, José Moñino y Redondo , Count of Floridablanca. He succeeded in this in February 1792 with the active help of the queen, who of course pursued the goal of helping her favorite and lover Manuel de Godoy to office and dignity.

Temporarily, however, Aranda was given the office of Prime Minister. During his short term of office the declaration of war fell on revolutionary France after King Louis XVI there. had been completely disempowered. Spain achieved no military success, and Aranda was released in November and later exiled to Jaén at Godoy's instigation . Instead, Godoy was appointed Prime Minister.

The court later allowed him to travel to Andalusia, initially for spa purposes. He was later allowed to return to his family property. He died there in 1798.

Web links

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, online
• Biography (spanish)
• Biography (spanish)

literature

• Conversation Lexicon or Encyclopedic Concise Dictionary for educated classes. AF Macklot, Stuttgart 1816.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Marie-Nicolas Bouillet , Alexis Chassang (ed.), "Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea" in: Dictionnaire universel d'histoire et de geographie . 1878.
2. ↑ ↑ Helmut Reinalter (Ed.): Lexicon for Enlightened Absolutism in Europe. Böhlau-Verlag, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2005, ISBN 3-8252-8316-X , pp. 119–123.
3. ↑ under the command of Conde Juan de Gages (1682-1753) this had replaced José Carrillo de Albornoz y Montiel, I duque de Montemar (1671-1747).
4. ^ Ilja Mieck : Prussia and Western Europe. In: Wolfgang Neugebauer (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Prussischen Geschichte. Volume 1: The 17th and 18th centuries and major themes in the history of Prussia. De Gruyter, Berlin, New York 2009, pp. 411–850, here p. 611 .
5. ↑ Helmut Reinalter (Ed.): Lexicon on Enlightened Absolutism in Europe. Böhlau-Verlag, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2005, ISBN 3-8252-8316-X , p. 122.