Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea was born on December 21, 1718 at the castle of Sietamo, a lordship of his family near Huesca in Aragon. The house of Abarca was very ancient, a fact of which Don Pedro, who never forgot that he was a " rico hombre " (noble) of Aragon, was deeply conscious.
His father was a proprietary colonelin in the regiment " Castilla".
He was educated partly at Bologna and partly at the military school of Parma.
After initially preparing for the priesthood, he entered the army, in which he became director of the artillery, introduced the Prussian system of drill in the Seven Years’ War, and commanded in the short campaign against Portugal (1762). In 1764 he became captain general of Valencia.
In 1766, after riots in Madrid, Charles III dismissed his Italian minister Leopoldo de Gregorio Squillace and called Aranda to be president of the Council of Castile. Aranda convinced Charles that the riots had been instigated by the Jesuits and prepared the decree for their expulsion from Spain and Spanish America in April 1767.
He was dismissed as council president in 1773 and made ambassador to France, where he remained until 1787 and absorbed “French ideas, ” becoming an admirer of Voltaire and a strong supporter of the American colonies in their war for independence from Great Britain. His friends worked for his return against his rival, José Moñino y Redondo, the conde de Floridablanca, but Charles III died and Charles IV made no change.
When Floridablanca attempted to silence news of the French Revolution and failed to intervene to save Louis XVI, Charles IV was persuaded to dismiss him and recall Aranda, who relaxed the censorship and tried without success to placate the French.
In November 1792 he was dismissed and was replaced with Manuel de Godoy.
After the French revolutionists executed their king, Aranda opposed Godoy’s policy of war with France and was ejected from the royal council and exiled to Jaén.
In 1795 Charles allowed him to retire to his estate in Aragon, where he died on the 9th of January 1798.
Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea was a Spanish general, diplomat, and minister, one of the most prominent reformers in the government of King Charles III (1759–88).
He was made a knight of the Golden Fleece.
By Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists he was erected into a hero from whom great things were expected.
In Zaragoza in his honour was installed a bust.
But his great achievements, which gave him a high reputation throughout Europe with the philosophical and anticlerical parties, were his expulsion of the Jesuits, whom the king considered responsible for the riot of 1766, and the active part he took in the suppression of the order. Aranda had come much under foreign influence by his education and his travels, and had acquired the reputation of being a confirmed sceptic.
He restored order and aided the king most materially in his work of administrative reform.
Aranda held strong regalist views, but his authoritarian character caused him difficulty.
His ability, hisremarkable capacity for work, and his popularity made him indispensable to the king. But he was a trying servant, for his temper was captious and his tongue sarcastic, while his aristocratic arrogance led him to display an offensive contempt for the golillas (the stiff dollars), as he called the lawyers and public servants whom the king preferred to choose as ministers, and he permitted himself an amazing freedom of language with his sovereign.
His open sympathy with the French Revolution brought him into collision with the violent reaction produced in Spain by the excesses of the Jacobins, while his temper, which had become perfectly uncontrollable with age, made him insufferable to the king.
In 1749 he married Dona Ana, daughter of the 9th duke of Hijar, by whom he had one son, who died young, and a daughter.
