Proximity, Informal Power, and the Via Reservada: Convergences and Particularities in the Governance of the 18th-Century Spanish Monarchy

Proximity to the monarch was a defining characteristic of governance and power in the eighteenth-century Spanish monarchy. Access to the king extended across both domestic to political spheres, involving emissaries and agents as well as businessmen and diplomats. This ostensibly regulated access was nevertheless permeated by informal practices of power—forms of soft power—that sought to increase proximity, including physical closeness to the king or, at the very least, to his principal ministers and trusted advisors. The vía reservada has traditionally been associated with such practices. In this presentation, I examine these three dynamics together, considering broader transformations in the monarchy's governance—such as the primacy of individual offices over collegial bodies—in order to define the specific characteristics of each. To do so, I draw on several case studies from the long eighteenth century: the affective proximity of the Marquis of Valousse and Philip V; the informal power exercised by royal confessors (particularly the French confessors of Philip V, Daubenton and Robinet) in the distribution of political privileges; and selected cases of the vía reservada, through which I see to clarify the boundaries between these different forms of exercising government.