nd by the middle of the 19th century had . . . the most illiterate population in western Europe" (86).
Spain's first modern secular reformers were French advisers to its 18th century Bourbon Kings, Philip V and Charles III. Influenced by the Enlightenment, they viewed the Catholic Church as the chief obstacle to the modernization of Spain and sought to curtail its privileges and increase state control over the universities. The Catholic Church in Christian Spain had been the official state church since the time of the Visigoth rulers of the 5th century A.D. Catholicism in Spain acquired its particularly crusading and intolerant spirit during a seven centuries-long struggle to expel the Moors, the reconquista. The church became the symbol of national unity during the rule of the Catholic kings during the 15th century. Led by the followers of St. Ignatius of Loyola and his Society of Jesus, it spearheaded the Catholic Counter Reformation, which imposed through the Index and the Inquisition a stultifying conformity on Spanish intellectual and cultural life and dominated Spanish education.
Spain's first steps toward industrialization, primarily in Catalonia and the northeast provinces, the War of Independence of the early 1800s and the influence of the French Revolution spurred the emergence of Spanish liberalism. A small group of middle and upper class liberals proclaimed at Cadiz the Constitution of 1812 which recognized the role of the Catholic Church but attempted to place limits on the size of its religious orders and called for the expropriation by the state of unused church lands. For more than 20 years, monarchists and other reactionary elements known as Carlists and military factions struggled with the liberals for control of the state. In the 1830s Liberal Prime Minister Jose Mendizabal sold off church lands, forever associating liberals with anti-clericalism. This measure cemented further the alliance between church and ...