Cádiz, Spain
It might surprise you to learn that the first time the term “liberal” was ever used to describe a political group or agenda was not in France, England, or even the United States. It might surprise you even more to learn that it was first used here in Andalucía, Spain, in 1810, in the ancient port city of Cádiz.
Last Friday, I caught an early train to Cádiz not simply to escape the heat in Madrid. Sure the coastal breeze has its charms, but what I was really after was a glimpse of the church that hosted the cortes —the representative assembly–that drafted and approved the Constitution of 1812, what was then the most liberal governing document of its time.
In 1807, the Spanish Crown allowed Napoleon’s troops to pass through Spain on their way to invade Portugal. But that double-crossing Napoleon wound up occupying most of the peninsula, setting up his older brother Joseph as the king of Spain, and placing Spanish King Fernando VII under house arrest in a chateau in the Loire Valley. Despite laying siege to Cádiz, however, he could not bring this dynamic, international city built on imperial trade to its knees.
In the absence of a legitimate monarch, this is where nationalist leaders ultimately hunkered down to form a resistance government during what became an all-out war to push out the invading French. In what must have been a moment of inspiration, they chose to resurrect the cortes, the medieval precursor to the modern democratic parliament that had not been used for centuries, to create a written constitution to govern the Spanish Empire in a dire situation.
It may or may not come as another surprise to learn that the modern parliamentary assembly was invented in León in northern Spain in the late 12th Century. During the Middle Ages, various Spanish kingdoms convened similar assemblies. According to Australian political theorist John Keane, the “modern practice of parliamentary representation” was “born of despondency” during the struggle between Christians and Muslims over the Iberian Peninsula.
King Alfonso IX of León knew he couldn’t continue to impose taxes to pay for battles to push back Muslim armies without making compromises to his realm’s most powerful estates that would inevitably dilute his powers. So, in 1188 he assembled a parliament of representatives made up of nobles, bishops, and wealthy citizens. This assembly in León was “of profound importance,” writes Keane, because visitors to the court–the origin of the term cortes–were no longer expected to simply vow allegiance to their sovereign’s will. They could now demand that their interests be taken into consideration if the monarch wanted political and financial support for his policies.
Given the state of the Spanish Crown during the War of Independence, the government council knew that they had to root the legitimacy of the monarchy—they continued to support King Fernando VII in exile—in the people of Spain rather than in God. They were also responding to the incipient independence movements in Latin America. Thus, for the first time in Spanish history, deputies were elected from across the empire—the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, and the Philippines—to make decisions on behalf and for the future of the monarchy.
The liberales was the name given to the group of political and economic reformers who made up a narrow majority of the Cortes de Cádiz. What did they believe in? Mexican political theorist Roberto Breña argues that “the first Spanish liberalism was a mixture of traditional and revolutionary elements.” It placed individual liberty at the center of Spain’s political design for the first time in its history. The liberals’ handwork can be found in the most enlightened articles of the document, including one that protects individual rights, another that insists that the purpose of government is to care for the wellbeing of the individuals that make up the nation, and the right to free expression. The 1812 Constitution also called for the division of powers, freedom of the press, the privacy of the home, universal manhood suffrage, and significant restrictions on the power of the king.
As fate would have it, Fernando VII returned to Spain in 1814 whereupon he rejected the constitutional monarchy established by the Cortes of Cádiz and reestablished the absolute monarchy he had left in 1808. But the Constitution of Cádiz lived on. In 1854, no less a figure than Karl Marx observed that “far from being a servile copy of the French Constitution of 1791, it was a genuine and original offspring of Spanish intellectual life.” And that hints at why the story of liberals in Cádiz is so important. While they did not carry the day politically in their own time, their document lived on to become an extraordinary symbol to reformers in Spain, its former colonies, and beyond for decades and centuries to come.
Liberals–and liberalism–have come a long way and taken on many forms since the term was first used in 1810. For instance, the liberals in Cádiz were proud Catholics and supportive of a constitutional monarchy while other forms of liberalism have been decidedly republican and anti-religious. Likewise, contemporary American liberalism, which prioritizes individual rights and fairness, is very different than the liberalism of the New Deal era, which focused on reigning in the excesses of capitalism.
The story of the Constitution of Cádiz reminds us that liberalism started as a movement to both include people in–and liberate them from–government. Today’s resurgence of populism is a byproduct of the imbalance between the desire to empower people versus the desire to free them–between democracy and liberalism.
Over the past few generations, liberalism has forgotten the importance of listening to people. Contemporary liberals have not only become much too dogmatic but also way too comfortable using governmental power to achieve their goals, whether the public wants them or not. That’s literally the definition of undemocratic. We’ve even seen the recent emergence of a punitive lock ’em up–or cancellation–liberalism, which is arguably not very liberal at all.
Of all the books and essays I’ve read on the subject recently, perhaps none has done a better job reminding me of liberalism’s potential for renewal than one written for The American Scholar in 1955 by the late U.S. Vice President and Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey.
Liberalism, he wrote, “lacks the finality of a creed, and thus it is without the allure of those dogmas which attract the minds of men by purporting to embody final truth.” If that weren’t reassuring enough, Humphrey insisted that even as liberalism must “preserve the spirit and fact of dissent in the political community,” it must also “recognize its ultimate loyalty to a majority-rule society and to the protection of all the factors which make such a society possible.”
While liberalism and democracy are always in tension, we sometimes forget that the former should always be in the service of the latter. If today’s populist surge is ever going to be defeated, liberals will have to recapture the spirit of liberalism from when it was first born.
