Review of González Cruz, Propaganda e información en tiempos de guerra España y América (1700-1714)

Published by the

University of Pennsylvania Press

Hispanic Review autumn 2011 Volume 79.4

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g on za´ le z c ru z, davi d. Propaganda e informacio´n en tiempos de guerra Espan˜a y Ame´rica (1700–1714). Madrid: Sı´lex, 2009. 304 pp. In the aftermath of a constitutional court rescinding Catalun˜a’s 2006 Statute of Autonomy—a decision which brought over a million protestors onto the streets of Barcelona on July 10, 2010—issues of identity and culture in Spain have received renewed attention in the press. Many Catalans trace the loss of their autonomy to the defeat of the Habsburg contender for the Spanish throne in the early eighteenth century. During and immediately after the war, the Bourbon King Philip V punished the rebellious kingdoms of Arago´n and Valencia by decreeing a series of reforms that established uniform legal codes in lieu of their regional privileges (fueros). Contemporary Barcelona commemorates the 1714 siege of the city with a monument to Catalan liberties, taken away at the hands of a centralizing monarch. The prominence of the period is such that, since the early twentieth century, Catalans celebrate their National Day on September 11, the anniversary of the end of the war. In Propaganda e informacio´n en tiempos de guerra, historian David Gonza´lez Cruz concludes that the War of the Spanish Succession (1700–1714) did not precipitate separatism or protonationalism in provinces such as Catalun˜a. While a great deal of propaganda appealed directly to Catalans in their own language, and questions concerning foralism became increasingly contentious, Gonza´lez Cruz maintains that the war must be understood as a struggle for legitimacy between competing dynasties rather than as a battle between nations. Hispanic Review (autumn 2011) Copyright 䉷 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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Scholars have noted the importance of economics in the contest for dynastic supremacy in early-eighteenth-century Europe. The English and French invested a tremendous amount of resources into the War of the Spanish Succession precisely because they coveted the trade and mineral wealth of Spanish America. Drawing upon the paradigm of Atlantic history, Gonza´lez Cruz thus offers a corrective to the view of the war as a purely European affair. Mining the archives of more than ten nations, including Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and France, the author demonstrates the interconnectedness of the Hispanic monarchy, even in times of crisis and conflict. Propaganda was spread through the networks that linked far-flung provinces together, from European and Atlantic trading routes to religious and even academic circles. In spite of censorship and attempts to control information across war-torn regions of Spain, many printing presses functioned at the margins of legality and distributed potentially subversive materials. For example, champions of the Bourbon cause deliberately fabricated news of the death of Archduke Charles, published in an official-looking gazette in Seville. Strategies of dissimulation were pervasive, and networks of spies worked assiduously to gather intelligence. The importance of overseas opinion was not underestimated, as clerics from Catalun˜a and Valencia, areas of strong support for Charles, were prohibited from travel to the Indies by 1706. Documents indicate that Philip worried particularly about the effects of religious propaganda on the indigenous peoples of America. Smuggling became increasingly fraught, as ships from ports not authorized to engage in transatlantic commerce might be carrying seditious letters to Spanish America. Ensconced in Curac¸ao, the Dutch circulated periodicals along the coast of Venezuela that may have induced the city of Caracas to embrace the cause of the Habsburgs in 1702. Agitators in English Jamaica likewise attempted to sway officials in the Spanish Antilles to the Austrian side. For the most part, however, America remained an outpost of almost unanimous support for Philip during the course of hostilities. The church served as a crucial conduit for selling the claims of competing factions to the populace. Even the Papacy weighed in on the subject, initially supporting Philip prior to recognizing Charles in 1709. Gonza´lez Cruz describes the posting of edicts on cathedral doors and university walls, the reciting of pastorals during dı´as festivos and the careful crafting of personalized correspondence in which candidates vying for legitimacy made their cases. The high clergy, including the Bishop of Salamanca, implored men of the cloth to take up arms against the allies of the Austrian pretender. The Bishop argued that a war of religion had erupted as Calvinists and Lutherans, enemies of the true faith, were waging a heretical campaign to profane the sacred spaces of Catholic Spain (49). The Archbishop of Zaragoza went so far as to mandate that priests confront parishioners during

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confession and refuse to pardon the sins of the partisans of Charles. Some pamphlets claimed that Allied powers had supported the Habsburgs only because they would be allowed to proselytize in the aftermath of an Austrian victory. One letter from a prominent naval officer recounted the seizure of an English vessel, captured in waters off the Galician coast. The ship reportedly contained tens of thousands of books printed in Spanish, published in order to propagate England’s ‘‘sect’’ in Spain (78). Many sections of the text highlight the rise of civil society and the importance of public opinion across the Spanish monarchy. However, the subject might have been explored in more depth, as the reach and reception of early-modern print culture is difficult to determine with certainty. Similarly, secret meetings of aristocrats seem to be equated with Enlightenment-era tertulias, although the impact of such discussions is hard to measure. Gonza´lez Cruz stresses that much of the wartime propaganda clearly was calibrated for a popular audience, from theater and poetry to satire and song. Iconography also played an important role, as public ceremonies portrayed the drama of the war with portraits and imagery of the competing Catholic princes. Oral transmission contributed to the diffusion of printed texts, and cafes and inns presented opportunities for travelers to exchange the latest news and rumors. Yet the actions of different segments of society during the war are not corroborated with the political rhetoric so carefully analyzed throughout the book. Adopting a synchronic approach, the author eschews a narrative based upon class, chronology or region. Henry Kamen has written that there was a major ‘‘propaganda campaign directed at the peasantry’’ of Valencia, for example, which centered upon claims that peasants would be freed from their seigniorial obligations (The War of Succession in Spain 1700–1715 [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1969] 279). Such exhortations were predicated upon the lingering resentments of an uprising that had been suppressed in 1693. This culminated in what Kamen terms a veritable social revolution in the Valencian countryside by 1705, as a majority of nobles remained faithful to the Bourbon cause. The revolts also resonated within urban zones of the province, as many French merchant communities were purged by supporters of the Austrian candidate for the throne. By and large, these issues remain outside of the scope of the book under review. Gonza´lez Cruz distills an impressive amount of research into six compelling chapters, covering the entirety of Spanish possessions from Naples and Spanish America to the diverse regions of the Iberian peninsula. He highlights the complex internal dynamics as well as the broader dimensions of a conflict that saw troops from England, Ireland, Holland, the Holy Roman Empire, France, Portugal, and Spain fight on behalf of two of the most powerful dynasties in Europe. In sum,

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Gonza´lez Cruz successfully amplifies our perspective on the arsenal of print and visual propaganda produced during the War of the Spanish Succession. s co tt ea st ma n Creighton University

i rv in g, d. r. m. Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila. New York: Oxford UP, 2010. x ⴐ 394 pp. According to D. R. M. Irving, Filipinos have traditionally summarized, ‘‘in an ironic formula,’’ the three hundred and fifty-three years of their country’s history before finally becoming a Republic in 1946 as: ‘‘three hundred years in a convent, fifty years in Hollywood, and three years in a concentration camp’’ (12). Irving takes the reader on an impressively coalesced historical and ethnomusicological journey of the Philippines, focusing primarily on the country’s ‘‘three hundred years in a convent,’’ particularly that of its most important city, Manila, a key strategic Imperial Spanish colony and center of communication between Spain and Asia. As the largest Spanish-occupied territory in the region, the archipelago’s important geographic location created a milieu of musical transactions between Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan during the early modern period and beyond. To engage the reader in this discussion, Irving utilizes the musical concept of ‘‘counterpoint’’ as a metaphor for the syncretism that eventually occurred throughout the Philippines, as a colony that absorbed European dominant musical practices, as an assimilator of these practices to its own music through the study and documentation of Filipino musics by Spanish missionaries, and eventually as a Filipino conduit of Spanish Imperial and religious subversion. Drawing from Ferdinand de Saussure’s and Claude Le´vi-Strauss’s ideas of opposition ‘‘to explore the creation of musical meaning within cultural and social contexts of early modern colonialism and globalization,’’ and from Jacques Derrida’s challenges to ‘‘the ideological assumptions and contradictions that are implicit in the early modern documentation of crucial and formative intercultural encounters,’’ as well as Edward Said’s ‘‘contrapuntal analysis’’ revealing ‘‘distinct (and opposing) voices of the elite and the subaltern in colonial societies’’ (4–5), Irving connects the process of socialization and religious conversion to the intricate idea of ‘‘opposition’’ inherently present in musical counterpoint: Without opposition we can have no high pitches or low pitches, no loud notes or soft notes, no fast speeds or slow speeds. Forget consonance and dissonance; never mind major and minor. All these qualities in music can be defined only

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