Pablo de Olavide

Pablo de Olavide y Jáuregui (Lima, Viceroyalty of Peru, 25 January 1725 – Baeza, Spain, 25 February 1803) was a Spanish politician, lawyer and writer.

He was born in a rich and influential criollo Basque family in Lima and studied at the National University of San Marcos, from where he earned a doctorate in Theology in 1740 and a degree in Law in 1742.

He wrote a report about the project for a new agrarian law (1768), which is one of the most important Spanish physiocrat writings.

The envious Fr Romauld let it be known that Olavide was part of an indiscrete transgression concerning the Spanish clergy; accusing him of reading prohibited books and speaking disrespectfully of the Catholic religion.

He was thus removed from his offices, exiled from Madrid, the Royal residences, from Sevilla and even from Lima; imprisoned on remand in 1776, and condemned to eight years of reclusion in a monastery in 1778 for being a believer in the doctrines of the Encyclopedie and for having kept company with Voltaire and Rousseau.

The French imprisonment experience was shocking for him and he returned to religious observance and even wrote an apology of Christianity, anonymously published in Valencia in 1797: El Evangelio en Triunfo, o historia de un filósofo desengañado (The Gospel of Triumph, or the story of a disenchanted philosopher).