A “Household” of One

In 1838, a group of British reformers called the Chartists proposed several ideas so dangerous that most of them eventually became normal government practice.  This is frequently what happens to dangerous ideas, provided their original advocates have been safely buried.

The Chartists took their name from the People’s Charter, which demanded voting rights for adult men, secret ballots, equal electoral districts, the removal of property qualifications for members of Parliament, annual parliamentary elections, and payment for MPs.  They were largely a working-class movement with the radical notion that working people might deserve a little say in how the country was governed.

Paying legislators was particularly offensive to a system that had arranged matters so nicely for gentlemen who already had money.  A wealthy man could afford to serve in Parliament without a salary.  A carpenter might have difficulty explaining to his children why supper had been postponed until the conclusion of parliamentary debate.

The Chartists’ argument was reasonable: removing the legal barriers to holding office accomplished little if financial barriers remained.  Being eligible for a job you cannot afford to accept is a rather decorative form of equality.

Britain eventually introduced regular salaries for members of the House of Commons in 1911, at £400 a year.  That was seventy-three years after the People’s Charter, demonstrating the British talent for considering a proposal carefully until nearly everyone who proposed it was dead.  By 1918, five of the six demands had been substantially achieved.  Annual parliamentary elections remained unadopted, perhaps because even reformers have limits to their endurance.  Annual elections would have meant year-round campaigning, something that even the most dedicated Chartist would find repulsive.

The British had no monopoly on the suspicion that government should be open to people without inherited estates.  During the revolutions of 1848, demands for broader voting rights and more representative government swept across continental Europe.  French reformers were not Chartists, but they confronted the same practical problem: allowing a workingman to become a legislator was not terribly useful if accepting the position required him to stop eating.  Nor was paying representatives a brand-new British export.  France had introduced legislative compensation during its first Revolution in 1789, before subsequent monarchies returned to the comfortable arrangement of leaving parliamentary service to aristocrats who could afford it.

After overthrowing the July Monarchy in 1848, France’s Second Republic restored payment for representatives at twenty-five francs a day.  Its new constitution went further, requiring every representative to receive an allowance that he could not renounce.  That prevented a wealthy member from ostentatiously serving for nothing while implying that colleagues who needed groceries were somehow less patriotic.  France thus put the principle into practice more than sixty years before Britain introduced regular parliamentary salaries in 1911.  Apparently, the French could dispose of a monarchy and establish a legislative payroll faster than the British could finish discussing the matter.

Which brings us to New Mexico, where we are still debating whether legislators should receive a salary.  We like to call ourselves the Land of Enchantment (although, occasionally, the enchantment appears to involve stopping the calendar so that we can admire a glorious past that never was).

New Mexico is the only state in the nation that does not currently pay its legislators a salary.  That does not mean they receive no money, as they receive per diem allowances and mileage, including payments for eligible interim committee work.  Nevertheless, there is a respectable argument that the absence of a salary makes service harder for people who cannot simply leave their regular employment.

A legislature drawn exclusively from people who can afford to serve is absolutely not representative of people who cannot.  On the other hand, if we paid our legislature on the basis of the results of their work, they would owe the electorate money.

Our neighbors settled the basic question long ago.  California provided compensation under its 1849 Constitution.  Texas paid its first state legislators in 1846.  Colorado began at statehood in 1876, and Arizona did likewise in 1912.  Their original payments were generally daily compensation for service, separate from travel allowances, but the payments increased over time.

But agreeing that legislators should be paid does not require approving whatever compensation arrangement happens to arrive wearing a respectable hat.

On November 3, New Mexico voters will consider Constitutional Amendment 4.  It would provide legislative compensation tied to the state’s median household income, beginning with the Legislature seated in 2029.  Using the Census estimate cited in discussions of the proposal, that means approximately $67,800 annually.

Notice the word “household.”

This is not the median income of an individual New Mexican.  A household may contain two earners, or more, whose incomes are combined.  Under this proposal, one legislator would receive compensation benchmarked to the income of an entire median household.

Apparently, election to the Legislature would allow one person to become a household for payroll purposes.

To be fair, the formal wording does say “median household income.” The word has not been concealed in invisible ink.  But shorten that to “median income,” and voters could reasonably imagine the earnings of a typical individual worker.  The household conveniently disappears while the household-sized paycheck remains.

That is the sort of technically accurate wording that can produce a thoroughly misleading impression.  Whether anyone deliberately intended that result is another question.  I will point out, however, that our state legislature has a long history of weasel wording such statutes. 

There is another detail worth keeping in the same sentence: the salary would be in addition to existing per diem and mileage allowances.

Recent reporting puts New Mexico’s per diem at $247.  At that rate, a thirty-day regular session produces $7,410 in allowances, while a sixty-day session produces $14,820.  Add an illustrative salary of $67,816, and the totals become $75,226 and $82,636.

Averaged across the two-year cycle, that is approximately $78,931 annually before mileage, interim committee allowances, or special sessions.

Now compare that with an individual worker’s wages.  New Mexico’s Department of Workforce Solutions reports a median annual wage across occupations of $45,870 for 2024.  Our illustrative legislative salary-plus-session-allowance package would be about 72 percent higher.

In the short-session year, the difference would be approximately 64 percent.  In the long-session year, approximately 80 percent.  Evidently, representing the average worker could become considerably more remunerative than being one.

Even before allowances, the proposed salary would exceed current base legislative pay throughout our neighborhood.  Texas pays $7,200 annually, Arizona $24,000, Oklahoma $47,500, and most Colorado legislators $47,561.  Utah, touching us at Four Corners, pays by the legislative day.  Colorado’s announced increase to $50,802 in 2027 would still leave it below the New Mexico figure.

That is a comparison of base pay.  Different session lengths and expense allowances prevent an honest claim that every New Mexico legislator would receive more total money than every legislator next door.

Nor do our thirty and sixty-day regular sessions represent the entirety of legislative work.  Committees meet between sessions, constituents have problems year-round, and studying legislation presumably takes time.  At least, we should encourage the practice.

The strongest argument for salaries is that they could broaden the pool of people able to serve.  That is worthwhile.  It is not a guarantee that those elected will govern better.

A paycheck does not raise an IQ.  Direct deposit is not an educational program.  We could pay every member handsomely and still assemble a chamber willing, on a whim, to repeal the Law of Gravity—probably with an emergency clause and an exemption for campaign contributors.

The Chartists wanted ordinary people to be able to enter Parliament.  They did not promise that everyone who entered would become extraordinary.

Pay legislators if that is the public’s judgment.  But tell voters plainly what the salary would be, which income measure determines it, and what allowances remain on top.

If the proposal is good enough to pass, it ought to survive being explained.

Peterloo: When a Peaceful Protest became a Military Emergency

Watching the current demonstrations in Paris, one is reminded that governments have a remarkable ability to see whatever they want when looking at an angry crowd.  President Emmanuel Macron has apparently discovered that, if you squint hard enough, a protest can look remarkably like a parade.  And should the distinction become too difficult to make, there is always the option of leaving the country.  Macron recently embarked on a three-day tour of five Persian Gulf countries while France was still dealing with the aftermath of massive demonstrations.  Presumably, the view from Qatar offers a somewhat more reassuring perspective on French domestic politics.

The French, of course, have a long and distinguished tradition of expressing displeasure with their governments.  Occasionally, buildings catch fire.  Sometimes a king loses his head.  Compared with the eighteenth century, today's politicians have relatively little to complain about.

The British, meanwhile, have traditionally preferred to think of themselves as more restrained.  Their political reforms were supposedly achieved through sensible debate, parliamentary compromise, and stiff upper lips.  This comforting national mythology tends to overlook August 16, 1819, when British cavalry attacked approximately 60,000 people who were assembled peacefully in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform.

The event became known as the Peterloo Massacre.  It remains one of the more disgraceful episodes in modern British political and military history.

Britain After Waterloo

Four years earlier, Britain and its allies had finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.  After more than two decades of almost continuous warfare with revolutionary and then Napoleonic France, peace had returned to Europe.  Unfortunately, peace did not bring prosperity to the ordinary British worker.

The end of the war brought demobilization, unemployment, and economic depression.  Soldiers who had spent long years learning how to break things and kill people returned home expecting to resume their civilian lives, only to discover that civilian life had very little use for them.  Industrial workers suffered from declining wages, while the price of food remained painfully high.

The Corn Laws of 1815 made matters worse by restricting grain imports until the market price hit a minimum floor, thus protecting British landowners from foreign competition while maintaining high bread prices.  This was an excellent arrangement if you happened to own several thousand acres of farmland worked by underpaid peasants.  It was somewhat less attractive if your children were hungry.

The political system offered little opportunity for relief.  Parliamentary representation was distributed according to arrangements that would have delighted a medieval nobleman.  Some almost deserted villages, known as rotten boroughs, continued electing members of Parliament, while rapidly growing industrial cities remained grossly underrepresented.

Manchester, already an enormous center of textile manufacturing, had no parliamentary representation of its own.

The people who created much of Britain's industrial wealth had virtually no voice in determining how the country was governed.

The Radicals Assemble

Radicals, at least in this time and place, were dangerous extremists who entertained such alarming notions as giving Manchester parliamentary representation and questioning why a nearly deserted borough owned by a single aristocrat could send two members to Parliament.  Some even believed that a working man might possess a political opinion worth hearing.  Naturally, gentlemen who inherited their influence regarded this as an assault on civilization.

The reform movement demanded broader voting rights, fairer parliamentary representation, and an end to the political dominance of wealthy landowners.

One of its most prominent leaders was Henry Hunt, a charismatic speaker known as Orator Hunt.  He advocated parliamentary reform and believed that large, peaceful public meetings could demonstrate the strength of popular support.

Reformers organized a demonstration for August 16, 1819, at St.  Peter's Field in Manchester.

The organizers made considerable efforts to ensure that the meeting remained peaceful.  Participants were instructed to arrive unarmed, wear their best clothing, and maintain orderly behavior.  Groups marched into Manchester from surrounding towns carrying banners, accompanied by bands and sometimes entire families.

Women participated prominently.  Female reform societies carried their own banners, and Mary Fildes, president of the Manchester Female Reform Society, stood on the speakers' platform.

It was, in many respects, a festive and entirely peaceful occasion.

Indeed, had the Manchester magistrates squinted appropriately, they might have mistaken the entire gathering for a parade.

Unfortunately, the magistrates were not inclined toward creative interpretation.

The Cavalry Charge

Local authorities had become increasingly alarmed by the growth of radical politics.  The French Revolution remained a particularly unpleasant memory for Britain's governing classes, who could imagine no circumstances under which ordinary people who were demanding political rights might be anything other than potential revolutionaries.

From a nearby building, the Manchester magistrates observed the growing crowd

Eventually, they decided to arrest Hunt and several other speakers.

Rather than sending a few constables to deliver an arrest warrant, they summoned the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, a volunteer cavalry force composed largely of local men, including tradesmen and shopkeepers.

The yeomanry were neither especially well-trained nor particularly sympathetic toward the demonstrators.  More than a few had been drinking.

Armed with sabers and mounted on horses, they charged into a densely packed crowd containing men, women, and children.

There was nowhere for thousands of people to escape.

The cavalry hacked at demonstrators, while terrified spectators trampled one another in attempts to flee.  Banners were torn down.  People were knocked to the ground, struck with sabers, or crushed beneath horses.

The regular army's 15th Hussars was subsequently ordered into the field to help clear the crowd.

Ironically, some of these soldiers had participated in the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo four years earlier.  Having helped defeat a foreign emperor, they were now similarly employed against British civilians demanding the right to participate in their own government.

Among the victims was two-year-old William Fildes, knocked from his mother's arms in the confusion surrounding the military’s arrival and mortally wounded when trampled by horses.

In a matter of minutes, an entirely peaceful political gathering had become a scene of extraordinary violence.  Modern accounts generally identify eighteen people who died from injuries associated with the massacre, while approximately 700 suffered injuries.

For a demonstration whose organizers had explicitly discouraged violence, the consequences were appalling.

Why Peterloo?

The name was deliberately sarcastic.

The Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 had been celebrated as one of Britain's greatest military victories.  Four years later, British cavalry had distinguished itself by attacking unarmed civilians in Manchester.

The comparison was irresistible.

Journalists and reformers began calling the event Peterloo, combining St.  Peter's Field with Waterloo.  It was not intended as a compliment.

The name captured the absurdity of treating peaceful working-class demonstrators as though they were enemy soldiers on a battlefield.

One suspects that the authorities would have preferred something less memorable.

The Government Responds

Surely, you say, after cavalrymen had killed and injured hundreds of British citizens, the government would investigate the disaster, punish those responsible, and reconsider the grievances that had brought so many people together.

That would have been a reasonable response.

The British government chose a different approach.

The authorities defended the magistrates and the troops.  Reform leaders, including Hunt, were arrested and prosecuted.

Rather than expanding political rights, Parliament enacted the Six Acts in December 1819, restricting large public meetings, tightening controls on radical publications, and providing additional powers to suppress political agitation.

The government had discovered a familiar principle: if citizens complain about being denied political representation, the quickest solution is apparently to make complaining more difficult.

The repression nevertheless generated widespread outrage.

Journalists, reformers, and ordinary citizens condemned the violence.  The radical newspaper The Manchester Observer helped popularize the name Peterloo.  John Edward Taylor, horrified by the events, subsequently helped establish The Manchester Guardian in 1821.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, then living in Italy, responded with his extraordinary political poem The Masque of Anarchy, attacking the government and calling for nonviolent resistance.

The massacre had become a symbol of the struggle for democratic reform.

Did Peterloo Accomplish Anything?

Nope.   At least not immediately.

Hunt went to prison.  The government strengthened its powers of repression.  The aristocratic parliamentary system continued operating much as before.

But Peterloo permanently damaged the claim that Britain was governed through a harmonious relationship between rulers and ruled.

The massacre exposed the willingness of Britain's political establishment to employ military force against people demanding representation.  It also demonstrated that parliamentary reform had become a national issue that could not simply be ignored.

The Reform Act of 1832 eventually eliminated many rotten boroughs and gave Manchester parliamentary representation.  However, most working-class men remained excluded from voting.

Further reforms followed in 1867 and 1884.  Broad male suffrage and limited female suffrage arrived in 1918, while women finally obtained equal voting rights with men in 1928.

From Peterloo to equal parliamentary voting rights, the process took more than a century.

A Familiar Problem

There is something depressingly timeless about the events of August 1819.

Ordinary people face economic hardship.  They conclude that their government is indifferent to their grievances.  They organize demonstrations.  Political leaders interpret the protests primarily as threats to public order rather than evidence of public dissatisfaction.

Sometimes the demonstrations turn violent.  Sometimes the violence begins with those supposedly responsible for maintaining order.

And occasionally, a government discovers that the distinction between protecting the state and protecting those who govern it has become rather difficult to maintain.

The Peterloo demonstrators were not attempting to overthrow the British monarchy or establish a revolutionary republic.  They wanted a political system in which the industrial population of Britain enjoyed meaningful representation.

That demand seems remarkably modest today.

Yet in 1819 it was considered sufficiently dangerous to warrant cavalry charges against unarmed men, women, and children.

The next time we watch demonstrations in Paris, London, or elsewhere, we might remember the people of St.  Peter's Field.

Governments are rarely enthusiastic about large crowds demanding change.  But history suggests that the consequences of refusing to listen can be considerably more serious than the inconvenience of a protest.

And if the crowd really does look like a parade, perhaps it would be wise to leave the cavalry in the barracks.

Whatever Floats Your Goat

This has been an unusually interesting week for new discoveries, particularly discoveries of things that have spent several thousand years waiting for someone to notice them.  In Egypt, two colossal statues have turned up, one depicting Ramses II and the other statue…. Well, that was probably Ramses too, but we’re not certain.  Ramses seems to have regarded any empty patch of Egypt as in desperate need of another statues of himself.

In Iraq’s Shanidar Cave, a newly studied Neanderthal skeleton offers a less flattering family portrait.  A hole in the shoulder blade was probably the result of a wooden spear.  An earlier, severe facial injury had been survived, suggesting assistance from companions.  Two serious injuries indicate either warfare or some seriously clumsy hunters.  Either way, our distant relatives apparently understood nursing long before anyone invented health insurance.

Meanwhile, recent finds at a Roman fort near Frenni Fawr in Wales lend credence to an old story about the emperor Magnus Maximus camping nearby.  The fort was identified in 2024 and the latest discoveries include late fourth-century coins.  This does not prove the emperor slept there, but it gives the local legend something better than a tourist brochure.

Across the pond, the Amelia Earhart searchers have (once again) persuaded Purdue and its supporters to financially back another tropical expedition.  Having spent years in academia, I admire anyone who can get a university to help finance what looks suspiciously like a South Pacific vacation.  At the present rate of progress, the searchers should soon discover Chicago.

The discovery that really caught my attention, however, involves a much older missing conveyance: a small merchant vessel sank off Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.  It went down roughly 4,500 years ago, during the age when Egypt was building its great pyramids.  While pharaohs were arranging permanent accommodations, somebody else was trying to deliver groceries.

Near Kekova Island, a team led by Hakan Öniz of Akdeniz University has investigated a scatter of pottery about a hundred feet underwater.  The site was documented in 2024, jars were recovered in 2024 and 2025, and more extensive excavation began this year.  Comparison of the pottery with examples from other sites suggests a date around 2700–2400 BCE.

That potentially makes this the oldest known seagoing shipwreck, although archaeological championships are best awarded in pencil.  The date rests on pottery comparisons, and further study may refine it.  Even without a gold medal, the wreck is extraordinary.

Do not picture a majestic galley, much less a miniature cruise ship.  Researchers estimate a vessel perhaps thirty feet long, a working boat carrying ceramic containers and the people responsible for getting them somewhere profitable.  No wooden hull survives to tell us its precise construction.  Its appearance must therefore remain a reconstruction, not a photograph conveniently misplaced by the Bronze Age harbor authority.

More than thirty storage jars survive, some broken, others remarkably intact.  These amphorae have handles and flat bases.  Three stone anchors were also found nearby, although the preliminary report cautions that their connection with this particular wreck remains uncertain.  A busy coast can accumulate the maritime equivalent of several generations’ garage contents.

Some jars still contain visible residues.  Karin Sowada, the Macquarie University archaeologist helping study the finds, describes material substantial enough to be seen, rather than merely detected by laboratory equipment.  Oil, wine, and tree resins are possibilities.  Reuse complicates matters: a container’s last contents need not have been its first.  Apparently, saving a perfectly good jar predates the invention of the kitchen cupboard.

But my favorite object is a peculiar vessel bearing nine marks and two holes.  Researchers suggest that it might have been a churn used to produce dairy products.  That possibility opens a delightful window onto life aboard: perhaps these sailors carried goats.

Not sculpted goats.  Not goats painted on pottery.  Actual goats, with the kind of opinions that only goats can have.

We must distinguish an attractive interpretation from an established passenger list.  A possible churn does not prove that live animals traveled aboard, and nobody has produced a Bronze Age manifest reading “thirty jars, four sailors, two goats, one increasingly irritated captain.”  The vessel could have served some other purpose.  Nevertheless, onboard dairying is among the possibilities the research team is considering.

Consider the practical appeal.  Fresh milk does not tolerate a long Mediterranean voyage particularly well without refrigeration.  A living animal, however, carries tomorrow’s milk inside itself.  Turn some of that milk into a suitable cheese, and you have another way of managing provisions.  The arrangement would require water, fodder, space, and someone willing to perform farm chores on a moving deck.

It would also require cleaning up after the refrigeration system.

Imagine, purely as reconstruction, the morning routine.  Check the weather.  Check the cargo lashings.  Check whether the goat has eaten a cargo lashing.  Milk the goat while the boat rolls.  Explain to the captain why breakfast is now in the bilge.  Ancient seafaring becomes considerably less romantic when somebody has to hold the bucket.

This is why the little vessel interests me more than yet another enormous royal head.  Kings generally leave ample evidence of what they wanted us to think about them.  A possible butter churn tells us what a nameless sailor may have needed before lunch.

The trading network is equally revealing.  Think of the eastern Mediterranean as connected shores, not isolated civilizations neatly boxed into separate textbook chapters.  Inland producers supplied coastal communities; ports connected those communities to other ports; ships moved goods between them.  Cargo could change hands repeatedly before reaching its eventual consumer.

The university reports that clay analysis points to workshops in the Jordan Valley.  That concerns where the containers were manufactured, not necessarily where every substance inside them originated.  From the Levantine coast—roughly the eastern Mediterranean shores of modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories—merchants could carry goods north toward southern Anatolia or southwest toward Egypt.

Following Anatolia’s southern coast westward would bring a vessel into the waters around Kekova.  Connections could continue toward the Aegean, including Crete and northwestern Anatolia, where Troy stood.  Similar pottery found in those regions, and around Giza, Saqqara, and Abusir in Egypt, helps archaeologists trace the wider circulation of containers and commodities.

Egypt provides a useful example.  Sowada points to Byblos, in modern Lebanon, as a port through which Egyptian trade operated.  Imported materials included cedar, resins, and metals.  Silver reaching Egypt around 2600 BCE has even been traced to mines near Athens.  That does not put Egyptian sailors in every harbor; intermediaries could connect distant markets.  International commerce was already considerably older than international baggage fees.

That does not mean this boat called at every place on the map.  Troy and Crete are proposed destinations, not addresses recovered from a shipping label.  Nor must every jar have traveled directly from its maker to its final owner.  Picture overlapping routes, coastal stops, and exchanges between merchants, rather than a regularly scheduled Bronze Age Mediterranean Express.

Still, the implications are considerable.  A shipment required potters, agricultural producers, people to move goods to the coast, sailors to transport them, and customers expecting delivery.  The pyramids command our attention because they remain magnificently visible.  The quieter economic world around them is harder to see, particularly when its evidence lies beneath a hundred feet of water.

We do not know what sank this boat, or what happened to its crew.  The surviving jars cannot answer every question.  But they bring us close to people whose ambitions were probably more immediate than immortality: deliver the cargo, collect payment, find supper, get home.

And, if the dairy interpretation proves correct, feed and milk the goat.  History has room for that, too.

The Emperor’s Public Relations Department

This week, my students seemed particularly interested in a painting of Napoleon standing in his study.  This was encouraging.  There are days when I suspect that the most compelling visual aid in a university classroom is the clock above the door.

The painting, by Jacques-Louis David, deserves a little attention.  The clock reads 4:13, the candle is nearly exhausted, and Napoleon looks as though he has been working all night.  Large numbers of papers suggest the labor of government.  Here is the emperor, sacrificing sleep for France—a message that probably went over better than a painting of France sacrificing its sons for the emperor.

Naturally, this is a carefully constructed image, rather than a candid snapshot of Napoleon caught answering his email.  David was selling an idea.  Once students begin looking further for that idea, the furniture becomes evidence, the clothes become arguments, and an apparently innocent clock turns into a government press release.

David was exceptionally good at this.  Across his career, he painted royal commissions, revolutionary martyrs, and imperial magnificence.  Governments changed (sometimes with considerable assistance from a guillotine), but there remained a steady demand for someone who could make the people in charge look as though they belonged there.

Before we accuse modern politicians of inventing image management, we might spend a little time with four of David’s paintings.  Although the technology has improved, the customers would recognize one another immediately.

Start with three Roman brothers who are enthusiastically volunteering for something their relatives plainly wish they would reconsider.

In Oath of the Horatii, the brothers swear to defend Rome against its rival, Alba Longa.  Their father holds up their swords.  Hands reach forward, legs brace against the floor, and everyone on the masculine side of the painting appears to have been assembled with a carpenter’s square.

The women, meanwhile, collapse into curves.  They understand the complications.  The families on the opposing sides are connected through marriage and betrothal, which means that whoever wins, somebody at home will be burying someone she loves.  Military glory has once again neglected to consult the people expected to clean up afterward.

Look at the architecture.  Three arches divide the picture into the brothers, their father, and the grieving family.  The setting is severe, orderly, and conspicuously short of decorative clutter.  Nobody has put a porcelain shepherdess on a side table.  This is a room designed for Duty, with no comfortable chair for Second Thoughts.

The men offer themselves to the state.  The women show us the bill.

We can read the painting as a celebration of patriotic sacrifice, but David has made the cost impossible to miss.  A good classroom question is whether the women weaken the patriotic message or make the sacrifice seem more noble.  Students generally discover that looking at a painting is easier than settling the argument it starts.

There is another trick here:  David gives us the moment before the violence, when everyone can still look splendidly principled.  While an oath is clean, the consequences are messier.  Governments have always preferred recruiting posters to casualty reports, and the distance between those two documents is a fair portion of military history.

Then comes the useful complication: this was a royal commission.  Louis XVI’s government helped sponsor the stern civic morality that later viewers could associate with revolution.  The monarchy was perfectly willing to encourage virtue, apparently assuming that virtue would remain respectful of the monarchy.

That assumption required revision.              

By 1793, David was deeply involved in revolutionary politics.  Jean-Paul Marat, a radical journalist and David’s political ally, had been murdered in his bath by Charlotte Corday.  David gave the Revolution an indelible image of its fallen champion.

He also gave Marat a substantial improvement in public relations.

Marat suffered from a painful skin condition, which helps explain the bath.  David’s painted Marat, however, has remarkably clear skin and an expression of peaceful exhaustion.  This is not the face of an inflammatory journalist whose political writing helped feed the Revolution’s appetite for violence.  This man looks as though he has died trying to finish a thank-you note.

His arm hangs downward and his head falls to one side.  The white cloth, the exposed body, and the wound recall Christian images of the suffering and the dead Christ.  The resemblance does not require every viewer to identify a particular religious painting.  European Catholics had spent centuries learning what a sacred death looked like.  David could draw on that visual education while changing the name of the martyr.

The pen remains in Marat’s hand.  Corday’s knife lies on the floor.  One man writes; someone else kills.  That is a remarkably efficient argument, particularly if you leave out what the man had been writing.

Corday herself is absent.  Her letter is present, helping tell the story of access gained through an appeal to Marat’s sympathy.  The rough wooden box suggests simplicity, while David’s dedication gives it something of the character of a memorial stone.

Almost everything directs us toward compassion.  Almost nothing invites us to examine Marat’s politics.

This is what makes the painting so effective and so useful to teach.  David has not merely shown us a dead man.  He has arranged the evidence so that we feel we already know the man’s moral character.

A political obituary can leave things out.  This one leaves them out beautifully.

Eventually, France acquired Napoleon, who offered David an entirely different opportunity to improve reality.

In Napoleon Crossing the Alps, the future emperor sits on a magnificent rearing horse.  His cloak billows, his hand points forward, and his expression suggests that crossing a mountain range is a minor inconvenience between breakfast and destiny.

The horse appears excited.  Napoleon does not.  That contrast matters.  Here is a man capable of controlling tremendous energy without losing his cool.  The animal provides the horsepower, but the rider supplies the judgment.  You are supposed to imagine that he can manage France the same way…no matter what.

Below him, soldiers struggle with the actual work of moving an army through the mountains.  They are small.  Napoleon is enormous.  Any organization that has ever produced an annual report will understand this arrangement.

Then look at the rocks.  David places Bonaparte’s name alongside Hannibal and Charlemagne, two earlier commanders who had crossed the Alps.  This is a recommendation letter written by history, itself, with David helpfully supplying the signatures.

There is, of course, a small problem.

Napoleon actually made the crossing on a mule.

A mule was sensible transportation for a difficult mountain path.  Sensible transportation, however, is a poor foundation for an equestrian monument.  Nobody looks at a mule and immediately thinks, “There goes the next Caesar!”  Instead, the they wonder whether he remembered the blankets.

The original painting was commissioned by the king of Spain.  Napoleon’s heroic image already had an international market.  David supplied a conqueror who could dominate a wall long before French armies arrived to complicate Spanish enthusiasm.

The mule got him across the mountain but it was the horse that got him into our heads.

Once Napoleon became emperor, mere heroism needed accessories.

David’s enormous coronation painting supplies them: gold, robes, clergy, dignitaries, and enough ceremonial fabric to suggest that the Revolution had principally been a dispute over who got to wear the velvet at the costume party.

Despite the familiar title, Napoleon is shown crowning Joséphine.  He is the person conferring status.  The pope is present, but Napoleon occupies the active center of the ceremony.  Religion supplies solemnity without monopolizing the action.

The laurel crown invokes Rome.  The golden bees on the imperial robes reach back to the Merovingian origins of French monarchy.  The cathedral supplies Christianity.  Napoleon’s regime was young, but its wardrobe had an impressive ancestry.

And there, prominently seated, is his mother.

She did not attend.

David included her anyway.  An absent mother might suggest family disagreement, and family disagreement was not part of the approved imperial composition.  Paint offered a convenient solution.  Most of us have to settle for explaining why somebody missed the wedding; Napoleon could (and did) have the absence corrected.

The whole gathering makes a new dynasty appear established.  You can almost forget that a few years earlier, France had been busy dismantling hereditary privilege, one head at a time.  Now there are new relatives to elevate, new titles to distribute, and new portraits to order.  Apparently, abolishing an aristocracy does not eliminate the demand for one.  It just creates vacancies.

None of this makes David a bad painter.  Quite the reverse:  if the work were clumsy, we could dismiss it without much effort.  His skill is precisely why the argument deserves our attention.

This is why I enjoy using David in class—his paintings give students something concrete to interrogate.  Who gets the light?  Who holds the weapon?  Who is larger than everyone else?  Who has disappeared and who has been added?

Those questions work surprisingly well on contemporary political photographs, too.  We still have flags, carefully selected audiences, rolled-up sleeves, and politicians photographed working late.  We simply require less drying time.

David understood that people remember a convincing image long after they forget the qualifications.  Two centuries later, we still picture Napoleon on that horse.

Somewhere, a mule is entitled to a correction.

The Apartment That Moved Parliament

María del Carmen Abascal wanted to remain in her apartment.  At 87, after more than seven decades in the same Madrid home, she probably thought she had demonstrated sufficient interest in the neighborhood.

Known as Maricarmen, she occupied an apartment in the Ibiza neighborhood of Madrid’s Retiro district.  Cadena SER described it as 90 square meters—about 970 square feet, a reasonably substantial apartment in a desirable part of a major European capital—not a broom closet with a picturesque view of the plumbing.

Her family’s lease dated to 1956.  It had passed from her father to her mother and then to her.  Unfortunately, a family’s attachment to a home and the legal life expectancy of its lease are different things.  The courts concluded that her protected right to inherit the tenancy had ended years earlier, with subsequent occupation continuing through tacit renewals.

The new owner, Urbagestión, wanted a new arrangement.  Maricarmen reported a proposed monthly payment of €1,650.  Her existing payment was roughly €440–€480, although the company said much of that covered community expenses, heating, and water, with the real base rent of only €204.  Her pension was about €1,450.  You don’t have to be a math wizard to see this poses something of a problem.  You cannot spend €1,650 out of €1,450 unless you are a national government.

Before issuing the landlord a black cape and a mustache suitable for twirling, however, consider the other side of the ledger.

At September’s advertised rental levels, apartments in her neighborhood averaged about €26.10 per square meter monthly.  Apply that to the reported 90 square meters, and the result is approximately €2,350.  The broader Retiro district averaged €24, producing a figure of €2,160.  On that basis, the proposed €1,650 was about a quarter to a third below the local benchmarks.  These are rough comparisons, not an appraisal: condition, amenities, and the disputed floor area matter.

Nevertheless, “more than she could afford” and “more than the apartment was worth” are not interchangeable statements.

The company’s stated position was that it had offered a substantial discount from market rent after obtaining a favorable legal ruling.  It also said it owned this apartment, rather than the entire building—a distinction somewhat trampled in the rush to describe the villain.

Why raise the rent? To obtain a larger return from the property.  That is the financial explanation.  I have not seen accounts proving that maintenance, taxes, or financing made precisely €1,650 necessary.  But an owner does not have to be approaching bankruptcy to notice that an asset could earn considerably more.

Conversely, purchasing an occupied apartment is not the same as discovering an elderly tenant unexpectedly growing behind the refrigerator.  The occupancy was part of the investment.

There were legitimate interests on both sides, which made the situation poorly suited to a political meme that would fit a bumper sticker.

On September 23, Maricarmen was evicted.  The sight of an elderly woman being removed from her longtime home supplied the housing crisis with something statistics rarely provide: a sympathetic face.  Thousands demonstrated, and protesters established an encampment in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.  The demands soon extended beyond one apartment to stronger protections for tenants generally.

What the protestors probably don’t know is that under Spanish law, Maricarmen’s historic lease agreement, with a monthly rent set at a decades old low rate, expired eight years ago.  During that time, instead of finding a cheaper neighborhood to live in, her lawyers used every possible delaying tactic since, legally, the rent was frozen at the last agreed upon rate until the court case was finally settled.  When the case was finally seen in court, Maricarmen was promptly ordered to leave the building or pay the higher rate.  She chose to remain until the police, armed with a court order, evicted her.

Eventually, negotiations produced an agreement allowing her to return under an eight-year lease, with her payment limited to 30 percent of her net income.  Municipal intermediaries helped arrange it.  The compromise protected her home without requiring everyone to agree about the entire Spanish housing market before handing back the keys.

The national government, however, had a larger set of keys in mind.

On September 29, it adopted emergency housing decrees that included protection against certain evictions of vulnerable households without alternative accommodation through the end of 2030, compensation for affected landlords, and extraordinary lease extensions.  This was not a universal prohibition on evictions, although “qualified suspension subject to eligibility requirements” makes a disappointing protest chant.

The underlying housing problem certainly deserved attention.

Spain is often imagined as the place where northern Europeans go to enjoy sunshine, drink good wine, and spend less money.  The sunshine and supply of wine remains relatively dependable.  The housing bargain requires closer examination.

Spanish housing costs are not uniformly higher than those elsewhere in Europe.  Eurostat’s 2023 comparison placed Spain near the EU average, well below Ireland and Denmark.  But international price comparisons do not pay local wages into local bank accounts.  A rent that looks attractive to someone arriving with a foreign pension can look appalling to someone earning a Spanish salary.

The Bank of Spain has specifically identified the heavy housing burden borne by renters.  National averages blend their experience with that of established homeowners, including people who paid off their mortgages years ago.  Averaging those groups together is rather like calculating the swimming ability of passengers and lifeboats.

Nor is this simply a matter of greedy landlords discovering greed last Tuesday.

The Bank of Spain estimated that new household formation exceeded completed new homes by roughly 400,000–450,000 during 2022–2024.  That does not mean all those households were homeless.  It does mean that substantially more households were competing for accommodation than new construction was providing.

A substantial and growing share of these new households—especially immigrants and young people—enter the rental market rather than buying.  In contrast, only about 90,000–100,000 new homes are completed annually, and the number of purpose-built rental (Build-to-Rent) apartments is far smaller, typically in the low tens of thousands at most.

This creates an annual shortfall of around 130,000–160,000 housing units overall, with an even tighter gap in the rental segment.  The cumulative deficit since the early 2020s is estimated at roughly 750,000 homes and could exceed one million by 2028 if construction does not accelerate sharply.  The imbalance is concentrated in high-demand areas such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and the Mediterranean coast, and it continues to push up rents while shrinking the stock of available long-term rental apartments. 

The European Commission points to obstacles including construction labor shortages, development delays, and insufficient development-ready land.  Spain also has a small social rental sector: roughly 1.5–1.7 percent of households, compared with about 6–7 percent across the EU.  Meanwhile, Spanish home prices rose 12.7 percent in 2025 and will likely continue to rise sharply.  There is plenty of demand and a decidedly inadequate supply of affordable alternatives.

Into this situation comes rent control, carrying a clipboard and promising to magically improve the arithmetic.

Spain limits certain annual rent increases and permits additional restrictions on new leases in officially designated high-pressure areas.  These are not identical rules imposed on every apartment throughout the country.  The distinction matters, although it does require politicians to use more than six words.

Rent controls can help the tenant who already has a covered apartment.  The difficulty is for the person still looking for one.

If a regulation reduces the expected return from offering a rental, some owners may sell, pursue another permitted use, or decide that becoming a landlord is an ambition best left unrealized.  Developers considering rental housing make similar calculations.  The strength of that effect depends on the rules, exemptions, costs, and other incentives; it is not proof that every rent restriction stops every construction project.

Still, the government ordering a lower price does not magically create more apartments.  Building apartments is the result of a business decision and if the government eliminates the chance of profits, that decision is never going to be positive.

Catalonia’s figures show moderation in registered rents under its controls.  Preliminary research also suggests a reduction in new tenancy agreements, although the researcher acknowledges limitations.  Both outcomes can occur together: better terms for some tenants and fewer opportunities for others.

A sensible policy must therefore answer two questions: how to keep vulnerable people housed today and how to provide enough homes tomorrow.  Answering the first by ignoring the second is how a temporary emergency acquires commemorative anniversaries.

Meanwhile, Maricarmen had her agreement, the demonstrators had forced national attention, and the government had announced a ban on evictions until 2030.

There was just one remaining, niggling detail.

Today, on October 2, the Spanish Parliament rejected the eviction bans.  Several small political parties banded together and supplied the opposition necessary to defeat the eviction bar.  Among the objections was the argument that the measures would further discourage rental supply.

The promised protection through 2030 had failed its parliamentary vote three days after its announcement.

Maricarmen’s eight-year agreement suddenly looked considerably more durable than the government’s solution.

Maricarmen has a lease.  It was the government policy that had a short-term rental.

This is a victory for one elderly woman in Madrid.  Her landlord, Urbagestión obviously figured out that the bad publicity was more expensive that the loss of a single apartment’s rent.  In the long run, Urbagestión is a winner, too.

But across Spain, the companies that build rental units have carefully watched all of this and have concluded that the cost of construction has just gone up again.