The Traditions of Liberty in the Atlantic World : Origins, Ideas and Practices [1 ed.] 9789004299689, 9789004299641

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The Traditions of Liberty in the Atlantic World

Atlantic World Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500–1830

Edited by Benjamin Schmidt (University of Washington) Wim Klooster (Clark University)

VOLUME 32

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/aw

The Traditions of Liberty in the Atlantic World Origins, Ideas and Practices Edited by

Francisco Colom González Angel Rivero

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover Illustration: Johann Moritz Rugendas: Study for Lima’s Main Square (ca. 1843), Museo de Arte de Lima.

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1570-0542 isbn 978-90-04-29964-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29968-9 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Contributors viii Introduction 1 Francisco Colom González and Angel Rivero

part 1 A Changing Colonial World 1 Brazil and the Languages of Modernity 15 Rubem Barboza Filho 2 Empire, Nation, and Republic in the Transformation of the Modern Hispanic World 40 Anthony Pagden

part 2 Revolutions and Independence 3 Ibero-American Republican Humanism and the Intellectual Roots of Mexican Independence 63 Ambrosio Velasco 4 Decorum and Liberty in the Spanish-American Revolutions of Independence 83 José María Hernández 5 The American Independences and the Crisis of the Ancien Régime Republic: A Comparative View of the United States and Brazil 109 Cicero Araujo and Gabriela Nunes Ferreira

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Contents

part 3 Varieties of Liberalism 6 The Tradition of Liberty in Canada at the End of the Eighteenth Century 131 Michel Ducharme 7 The Portuguese Uprising of 1820: A Forgotten Atlantic Revolution 155 Angel Rivero 8 Liberal Ideas and Patrimonial Practices in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America 169 Francisco Colom González Index 199

Acknowledgements The inspiration for this book was conceived after a seminar on this topic at the University of London in May 2010. Susan Hodgett, Adrian Pearce and Maxine Molyneux are to be thanked for hosting the seminar at the Institute for the Study of the Americas in collaboration with the Fundación Canadá. Equally important was the contribution by the International Council of Canadian Studies, which provided the funding for the initial meeting. The subsequent work was made possible by the research project Philosophy and the Political Space (Plan Nacional I + D; Ref: FFI2012-31640), directed by Francisco Colom González at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council (csic) in Madrid. Janis Taylor Harvey reviewed the final version of the texts and patiently attended the editors’ questions concerning English vocabulary and style.

List of Contributors Cicero Araujo is Professor of Political Theory at the University of São Paulo (Brazil), Researcher of the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa, and of the Centro de Estudos de Cultura Contemporânea. He works on the field of political theory and has published different essays and articles on republicanism, democratic theory, justice and constitutional theory. Rubem Barboza Filho is Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brazil), and current editor of the journal Teoria e Cultura. He is the author of several articles on Ibero-American political thought and the book Tradição e Artifício. Iberismo e Barroco na formação da América (1999). Francisco Colom González is Research Professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council. He has written extensively on the relation between intellectual history, cultural diversity and social change. Among his publications are the edited volumes Relatos de nación. La construcción de las identidades en el mundo hispánico (2005), Modernidad iberoamericana (2009), and ¿Hacia una sociedad post-secular? La gestión pública de la nueva diversidad religiosa (2011). Michel Ducharme is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia (Canada). He has widely published on Canadian political and intellectual history. He is the author of Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques (2011), which was awarded the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize of the Canadian Historical Association. José María Hernández is Professor of Political Philosophy at the Spanish Open Univeristy in Madrid (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia). He has published mainly in Spanish on Moral and Political Philosophy. He is also author of a book on Thomas Hobbes, Retrato de un dios mortal (2002), and is currently working on a book on toleration and cosmopolitanism. Gabriela Nunes Ferreira is Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of São Paulo (Brazil) and researcher of the Centro de Estudos de Política Contemporânea. She is the

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author of several books and articles on Brazilian political thought and intellectual history. Anthony Pagden is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and History at the University of California Los Angeles. His research has concentrated on the relationship, cultural, political and legal, between the peoples of Europe and its overseas settlements and those of the non-European world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He is the author of more than a dozen books, many of which have been translated into a number of European and Asian languages. His most recent publication is The Burdens of Empire (2015). Angel Rivero is Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain). He is recurring visiting professor at several universities in Portugal and Latin America. His last book is La constitución de la nación (2011), which won the 1808 Bicentenary Price. Ambrosio Velasco is Professor of Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and has been visiting professor at several universities in Latin America. His most recent publications are Republicanismo y multiculturalismo (2006) and La persistencia del humanismo republicano en la formación de la Nación y el Estado en México (2009).

Introduction Francisco Colom González and Angel Rivero Since its inception in the aftermath of World War ii, Atlantic history has gained momentum as a discipline focused on a geographical realm that has for a long time been perceived in a fragmented way. There are several antecedents demanding a new historical narrative that transcends the narrowness of the old national approaches. In 1932 Herbert E. Bolton proposed a pioneering continental perspective on the New World that reflected ‘the epic of Greater America’. He suggested that the processes conventionally studied from a national perspective were indeed ‘phases common to most portions of the entire Western Hemisphere’, and that ‘each local story will have clearer meaning when studied in the light of the others […]; much of what has been written of each national history is but a thread out of a larger strand’.1 Most current historians have come to accept the futility of considering from local perspectives a series of processes that were in fact of a transatlantic and hemispheric dimension. In 1949 Fernand Braudel’s path-breaking work on the Mediterranean put the model in place for the so far elusive attempts to write a similar history of the Atlantic world.2 The vast diversity of natural environments, cultures, and human groups that border the Atlantic rim are mainly responsible for such elusiveness, as it is difficult to identify elements that have been shared by the entire region and that can be equally accessible to different fields of scholarship. The emergence of an Atlantic approach to modern history was eventually the collateral result of political developments, and more concretely of the Cold War, as Bernard Bailyn has observed.3 From the international political arena this perspective jumped into the realm of academia, where historians of colonial societies, empires, and the slave trade found in it a way out of the theoretical restrictions imposed by national historiographical conventions. Although this oceanic world was built by the enduring interaction of Europeans, Americans and Africans, the Atlantic as a historical space was in its origins a European creation, for it was through European navigation, trade, conquest, and colonization that its four shores came to be connected and represented as 1 Herbert E. Bolton (1933) ‘The Epic of Greater America’, in American Historical Review, 38/3, 448–474. 2 Fernand Braudel (1972) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip ii, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row). 3 Bernard Bailyn (1996) ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itinerario 20/1, 19–44.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004299689_002

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an integrated unity. With time, however, the concept of Atlantic history has developed nuanced differentiations. The seminal idea stated that during the early modern period the European, American, and African shores of the Atlantic could be dealt with as a single unit of analysis and a clear chronology. This view has been challenged by more recent approaches highlighting the existence of multiple Atlantics: for example, a black or Afro-American Atlantic, a South Atlantic, an Iberian Atlantic. Similarly, whereas the Age of Discovery is generally recognized as marking the beginning of a relatively coherent period of colonial domination, intercontinental trade, and cultural exchange, its terminus has been more contested. For this reason, Atlantic history has continued to mean different things to different people and in different academic fields.4 Intellectual history has not been alien to these developments. Initially, it seemed awkward to portray the history of ideas as being interlinked with the developments of a maritime space. Even if the conventional canon of political thought has always been implicitly Eurocentric, it is usually represented as constituting a universal patrimony. The fact is that modern political theory cannot be studied without taking into account the inter-oceanic connections and the role of the Atlantic as a space for the circulation of ideas. We need simply to bring to mind the resonance of an overseas world in the utopias of the Renaissance, the sixteenth-century debate on the justice of the Conquest of America or the repercussion of John Locke’s involvement in the colonial enterprise on his theory of property. The discovery, cognition, and appropriation of a New World overseas was an immense challenge to the political imagination of early modern Europe, a task for which the references of classical antiquity were of limited usefulness. The boundaries of political sovereignty had to be readjusted to the new geographic reality. Similarly, the uncertain status of the American natives – their alleged state of nature or barbarism – and the moral limits to their dispossession and subjugation had to be ascertained. The vessels that transported commodities and human beings across the Atlantic also brought with them new notions on the just order of society and diffuse expectations about the future in a land of promise. This was certainly not the case for the peoples that endured the impact of European colonization and for the thousands of African slaves who survived the brutal conditions of the Middle Passage. In an ironical inversion, the image of the Americas as a utopic reference for liberty and prosperity was built upon denial of such ideals to a vast portion of its native and imported population. This is a fact that no 4 Alison Games (2006), ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, American Historical Review 111/3, 741–757.

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book dealing with the idea of liberty in the Atlantic world can ignore, but at the same time such a topic demands in-depth treatment that the present volume cannot undertake without deviating from its main objective. The main allusions here to slavery will therefore be found in relation to the colonial crisis, the opportunities open to slaves by the military necessities of the contending parties during the wars of independence, and the role played by that peculiar institution in the internal organization of the new independent states. In fact, for a long time the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and the subsequent slaughter of the white settlers in the island acted as a deterrent to the political ambitions of the Creoles in the Caribbean. The historical delay of Cuban independence until the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, can be interpreted as a side effect of the reliance of the local slave-owners on the Spanish authorities. Long before that, in a report written in 1802, the Captain General of Caracas warned the government in Madrid against the global consequences of the slave rebellion that was developing in Haiti. The peril that the example of such an insolent usurpation represents to the European dominions in America cannot be concealed anymore. If the triumphs of that arrogant Negro [Toussaint-Louverture] were to continue, the colonies of the New World would yield a terrible example to the temerity of all the coloured peoples that the different metropolis will be in no position to remedy. The American possessions are thus on the verge of the most abominable commotion in their commerce, agriculture, and political subsistence.5 The crisis of European colonialism in the Americas has been the cornerstone for the Atlantic interpretation of political modernity. Robert R. Palmer was the first to summarize the period between 1760 and 1800 as an age of democratic revolutions that changed the political foundations of both America and Europe.6 In a different vein, John G.A. Pocock has popularized the idea of an Atlantic republican tradition that would eventually extend its influence from Renaissance Italy, through the English Civil War, to the American Revolution.7 The Iberian world and Haiti were conspicuosly absent from both studies, their 5 Letter from Manuel de Guevara Vasconcelos, Captain General of Caracas, to the Secretary of State; 29 January 1802. Archivo General de Indias. Estado, 59, N.17/1. 6 Robert R. Palmer (1956) The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press). 7 J.G.A. Pocock (1975) The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

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experiences thus erased from the records of the Atlantic constitutional process.8 So was Canada, whose itinerary towards political liberty ironically reverses that of the United States. If we were accept these omisions we could reluctantly conclude that Lockean, Machiavellian, and Rousseaunian doctrines did not take root in Latin American soil, and that Tory ideas monopolized the Canadian political imagination during its foundational period. It is common knowledge nowadays that democratic and liberal ideas were indeed present and active in the early constitutional experiences of Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. They also peppered the Patriot’s movement in Upper and Lower Canada during the 1837–38 rebellions, even if de Tocqueville did not seem to have perceived the political malaise brewing under the surface when he visited the region a few years earlier. The reasons for these gaps in conventional historiography probably run deeper than the few decades that separate the North Atlantic and Iberian revolutions, or the gradualism that characterized state formation in Brazil and Canada. As a collateral result of American Loyalism, the history of British North America has usually been confined behind the continental divide that Seymour Lipset recognized in his classic comparison of American and Canadian political cultures.9 In the Latin American case, the historiographical prejudice is somehow older. From John Quincy Adams to Hegel, the intuition that the political changes in the southern part of the hemisphere obeyed a different set of rules and motives from the north has had followers galore. For very different reasons, during the nineteenth century Latin American historias patrias adopted an opposite perspective. The wish to break up with the colonial past urged local historians to attribute an ideological continuity to all the revolutions in both American continents. An alternative viewpoint also became prevalent in the 1940s, when a series of conservative scholars asserted the existence of a specific Hispanic path to modernity that had drawn its inspiration from Catholic values. According to this, the intellectual roots of the Spanish-American emancipation stemmed from Salamanca and Iberian scholasticism, and not from Paris, Geneva, and the Enlightenment. The Atlantic approach has helped alleviate the burden of this sort of historical exceptionalism. The political upheaval that shattered European colonial empires at the end of the eighteenth century and gave birth to a new order in the Americas is currently studied in a more interconnected fashion, as a series 8 José Antonio Aguilar (2000) En pos de la quimera. Reflexiones sobre el experimento constitucional atlántico (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica). 9 Seymour M. Lipset (1990) Continental Divide: the Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge).

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of Atlantic revolutions.10 English-speaking academia has similarly opened up to a broader understanding of the Atlantic space.11 Taking this revolutionary cycle as an axis, this book tries to shed light on the historical background, theoretical origins, and political traditions that have been often neglected by conventional approaches to Atlantic history, and it does so by resorting to authors stemming from different vernacular environments. Furthermore, democracy and liberalism are not conceived here as a mere agglomerate of ideas transmitted through readership or editorial circulation, but mainly as normatively oriented social practices with a discursive dimension, which we here call the traditions of liberty. Here we can identify different vernacular and borrowed elements that travelled back and forth the Atlantic and took root on both its shores. The chronology of these experiences does not necessarily imply a causal nexus or a Eurocentric centre–periphery development. The political and ideological relations involved in them are more complex than this. Rather, we should conceive of the Atlantic space at the gates of the revolutionary cycle as a geopolitical network whose internal connections had been expedited by the consequences of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). After the loss of New France to England, the eclosion of the American Revolution prompted the French intervention in the colonial conflict; inversely, France’s war effort against Britain in America triggered the economic predicament that catalysed the French Revolution. What is less known is that Spain was also instrumental in the American war of independence, that the expansion of the Anglo-American frontier to the West and the blockade and temporary loss of some Spanish outposts in Cuba and the Philippines during the Seven Years’ War prompted the metropolis to initiate a series of military, administrative, and economic reforms that planted the seeds of later political developments. By forcing a continental blockade on Britain in 1806, Napoleonic France pushed Britain to pursue new markets in Southern America. This commercial and strategic reaction created a new relation between Britain and the emerging powers in this part of the Atlantic world. From the mid-eighteenth century, the feel of decline of the Spanish monarchy was evident both to its administrators and to its adversaries. The Bourbon reforms tried to regain some of the competences that the fiscal crisis under the late Hapsburgs had forced the Crown to offer for sale. The expectation, as Anthony Pagden has portrayed in his chapter in this book, was to reorganize the empire in order to convey it a new purpose and identity based on agricultural production and commercial 10 11

Wim Kloost (2010) Revolutions in the Atlantic (New York: New York University Press) David Armitage, ed. (1998) Theories of Empire, 1450–1800 (Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate).

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trade, rather than go on relying on mineral extraction, imports taxation, and military domination. The composite structure of the monarchy should therefore give place to a modern colonial system through which both the metropolis and its overseas subjects would reap the beneficial effects of commerce. The rearrangement of imperial policy along the lines of enlightened commercial humanism implied, however, to redress what had been originally the unintended result of the economic paucity of the Crown, a de facto co-option of local administration in America by the dominant Creole groups. This administrative reappropriation, though, was interpreted by the colonial elite as a denial of liberty. In Bolivar’s famous words, the Spanish-American Creoles had been ‘harassed by a conduct that not only had deprived them of their rights but kept them in a sort of permanent infancy with regard to public affairs […] We have even been deprived of an active tyranny, since we have not been permitted to exercise its functions.’12 The initial act of the Spanish-American Revolution was bred at the core of the empire, with the collapse of the monarchy as an effect of Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1807–08 and the deposition of the Spanish king. From there it was projected onto its American colonies as a crisis of political legitimacy, which created a power vacuum that encountered a varied but simultaneous response. In Portugal, the transplantation of the Royal Court to Rio de Janeiro prevented a development similar to that in Spain, but it completely altered the political relations within the empire, as Brazil was raised to the status of a kingdom within the Crown, which eventually led to the dissolution of the bond that had united both Atlantic shores under the Bragança dynasty. The relation between freedom and colonialism was thus a crucial one. Empires could hold heterogeneous political bodies under the same authority, but could republics, or for that matter, constitutional regimes, preserve their freedom, and yet possess colonies? The answer to this question would prove negative: no transatlantic nations were created out of the old colonial empires. However, in an interesting contrast, the federalization of the colonial link that was rejected by the British parliament first and by the constitutional processes in Spain and Portugal later, found a new opportunity in the remaining British possessions in North America, out of which the Dominion of Canada emerged as a reaction to the events taking place south of its border. Thus, there is clearly an Atlantic space of political connections and socioeconomic processes that brought about a new regional system by abolishing 12

Simon Bolívar (1951) ‘Reply of a South American to a Gentleman of this Island’ [Jamaica letter, 1815] in Selected Writings of Bolivar, trans. Lewis Bertrand (New York: The Colonial Press).

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the precedent. Similarly, the implementation of liberal and democratic rights involved a series of continental-wide debates on the meanings of liberty, political dignity, and the suitable institutions for a free and orderly society. But beyond this family resemblance, can we recognize a distinctively Atlantic political tradition shared by all the historical actors in the region? If the establishment of constitutional regimes followed different courses, there are a number of basic ideas that were certainly shared by all of them. First, there is the idea of independence as a precondition of a free polity: liberty in the EuroAmerican Atlantic implied the termination of the colonial bond. Connected with this idea of independence is a new understanding of sovereignty. In the British Whig tradition, all the constitutive parts of society shared sovereignty: the king, the nobility, and the commons. In the French absolutist tradition, sovereignty was synonymous with the authority of the monarch. After the Atlantic revolutions, sovereignty was no longer a balance between the social estates nor an attribute of the king: it belonged to a collective body termed the people or the nation, even if it was not easy to define who made up such people or nation. The third feature of this shared tradition is the notion of individual rights. These were not a completely new idea, for its roots go deep into the political history of Christianity. What was new was the juridical codification of such rights in a Constitution or a Bill of Rights in order to set limits to collective political power. The polity, as in the past, was understood as a common effort for achieving security and happiness for all, but the goal of life in common was now instrumental to individual flourishing. The different chapters in this book show how independence, sovereignty, and individual rights crystallized in dissimilar political forms: the United States was founded as a republic; France began as a constitutional monarchy, then became a republic, a consulate, an empire, and back to constitutional monarchy; Britain was a constitutional monarchy since the end of the seventeenth century, but constitutional values were reinforced in this period; from its inception Brazil was founded as a constitutional monarchy; Spain, like Portugal, converted monarchy to constitutionalism through a political revolution disguised as legal reformation; and except for the two monarchical intervals in Mexico, the new independent states in Spanish America assumed a republican form. So if independence, sovereignty, and individual rights were embodied in different political forms, they nonetheless can be summarized in a single word: constitutionalism. What was a radical novelty then has since become a permanent feature of the Atlantic political order. These issues have been organized into three main sections in this book: the antecedents to the dissolution of the colonial empires, the independence movements, and the varieties of liberalism that took root during the process of

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state formation. In the first chapter, Rubem Barboza Filho addresses the plight of Brazilian modernity. According to the conventional narrative of state formation in Brazil, the legacy of three centuries of Portuguese colonialism was perceived as a historical burden that had to be eliminated for the sake of social modernization. The move into oblivion of the baroque colonial heritage, sanctioned by the intuitive contraposition between backward and modern societies, resulted in the sacrifice of entire generations of the Brazilian people for the sake of an idealized country that was to be created in the future by the modernizing elites. Here Barboza Filho views the baroque as the aesthetic cauldron in which an original Ibero-American civilization took shape and found a way for self-expression. Much in the vein of authors like Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, José Antonio Maravall, Octavio Paz, or Severo Sarduy he reacts against the demophobic bias of such modernizing ideologies and seeks to demonstrate the inclusive and democratic potential of Brazilian baroque and popular culture. For this purpose he develops a three-tiered philosophical interpretation of modernity as interplay between the languages of reason, interest, and affection. Far from reflecting the struggle between backwardness and modernism, early independent Brazil became a struggling arena for these three languages and their consubstantial possibilities, a dispute that culminated with the defeat of the language of affections, and the triumph of an impoverished modernity solely imagined in the terms of reason and interest. Anthony Pagden explores, in the second chapter, the changing political imagination of the Spanish-speaking world: from the composite monarchy of the early modern period, the attempts at an imperial confederation, and the failed devise of an Atlantic constitutional arrangement with the colonies, to the final crisis that paved the way for independence. This evolution and ultimate rupture did not go without ideological discussion. Pagden compares the internal appraisals on the weakness of the Spanish Monarchy, which censured the mounting costs of incessant territorial expansion, with the external critiques that saw the source of Spanish decadence in its religious intransigence and the reckless pursuit of military glory. He also highlights the political and ideological divergence that developed between Spain and its former colonies, and the emergence of two very different kinds of republican projects in British and in Spanish America, which have been conventionally labelled ancient and modern. According to Benjamin Constant’s famous definition, ancient republics were prone to militarism and committed all their citizens to the common project of its government and defence.13 As a result of this, individual autonomy 13

Benjamin Constant (1988 [1819]) ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’, in Political Writings, trans. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), 308–328.

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was completely subjected to the authority of the community. Modern republics, by contrast, are large commercial societies ruled through representation, where private life remains separate from the public arena. Pagden concludes that even if it would be an oversimplification to suggest that the cultural and political traditions of Spanish-Americans were exclusively drawn from the ancient model, that their leaders were never able to escape the type of Cesaristic republicanism that pervaded their political vision. The aim of Ambrosio Velasco in the following chapter is precisely to demonstrate that the roots of this Latin American ancient republicanism do not derive exclusively from Rousseaunian doctrine or the classical tradition. The humanistic culture of New Spain, with its iusnaturalistic approach to indigenous rights – as reflected, for instance, in the work of Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz, a Novo Hispanic philosopher and missionary – offered the intellectual basis for a type of Creole patriotism that, in the author’s view, impregnated the Mexican movements for independence. Much like Barboza Filho in the case of Brazil, Velasco finds that the sources of an original Novo Hispanic–Mexican political tradition, deeply ingrained in baroque colonial culture, were erased by the ideological bias of nineteenth-century liberalism. José María Hernández also explores the motives for Spanish-American independence in his chapter, but he does so from a different angle: the idea of decorum and its rooting in Spanish political philosophy. Decorum demands that political actors adapt themselves to the changing circumstances and expectations with certain standards of human dignity. In the Spanish tradition of government, at least from the early sixteenth century, decorum could be best understood in terms of the necessary unity of natural, civil, and divine law. In this tradition, every political change should be fully congruent with the representation of such unity. However, with the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and the outbreak of the Spanish-American rebellions, decorum adopted a whole new dimension. In the revolutionary juntas organized to resist the French invasion, decorum – now understood in America as equal representation with the metropolis, and ultimately as independence from it – re-emerged as the right and sole answer to the new situation. The Brazilian path to independence was exonerated from the tortuous and violent circumstances of Spanish-American emancipation. The relocation of the Portuguese Crown in Rio de Janeiro while fleeing the Napoleonic invasion, together with the conditions imposed on it by the alliance with Britain, completely transformed the traditional relations between centre and periphery in the Portuguese Empire. In an ironic turn of history, Portugal – now under the administration of a British pro-consul – became the periphery, and Brazil the metropolis. Unlike Spain, the continued authority of the Bragança dynasty in America prevented the balkanization of her colonial dominions. In their

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respective chapters Cicero Araujo, Gabriela Nunes Ferreira, and Angel Rivero explore the consequences of this peculiar process on both sides of the Portuguese Atlantic. Araujo and Nunes Ferreira recreate the conceptual tension between territoriality and freedom that characterized the debate on the republic during the ancien régime. In the eighteenth century, as they have noticed, the city-republic was in fact a residual political form. Under the influence of Montesquieu, the parliamentary regime established in England after the Glorious Revolution was generally viewed as an amalgamation of monarchical and republican institutions, and also as a more promising model for the preservation of freedom than the ancient republics. A key issue was nevertheless the compatibility between republic and empire as political forms, and more precisely whether republics could preserve their freedom while possessing colonial domains. The advent of the crisis of European imperialism in the Americas would bring these questions onto centre stage. The authors compare from this perspective the American and Brazilian independence processes, and maintain that, in spite of the obvious differences, both cases expressed unresolved constitutional issues resulting from the tensions between absolutism and the rise of parliamentary rule. For them, the British case is significant because it revealed the possibilities and limitations for reform within the ancien régime, and the impact of these on the imperial domains. The evolution of the English monarchy towards a parliamentary regime after the Glorious Revolution in 1688 had eroded the role of the king as a personification of imperial unity and tightened the subjection of the colonies to the metropolis. This is why, according to Araujo and Nunes Ferreira, the revival of republicanism in the Anglo-American colonies was possible only after the meaning of the republic was completely reversed during the discussion on the imbalances of imperial relations. In Brazil, the hosting of the royal court had a similar effect on the transatlantic relations of the empire as soon as the liberal revolution triumphed in Portugal in 1820. However, as they point out, there are major differences between both experiences in relation to the political form of the new independent states, their territorial structure, and the role of slavery in them. All this brings us to consider the varieties of liberalism that took root in these regions at the end of the revolutionary cycle. By 1825, the British subjects living in the colonies that later became Canada were – together with the Cuban and Puerto Rican Creoles – the only colonists of European ancestry in the Americas who had not joined the revolutionary movements. Nor did they adopt grandiloquent founding documents based on the rhetoric of liberty. This has conventionally led to the viewing of political practices in the British North American colonies as being part of a counter-revolutionary tradition.

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In his chapter, Michel Ducharme makes the inaccuracy of such assessment clear. He uses the Canadian case to illustrate how the ideology that cast American Loyalists (and future Canadian subjects) against American Patriots cannot be framed as an opposition between revolutionary liberalism and counter-revolutionary conservatism. Both experiences refer to a contraposition between revolutionary republicanism and commercial liberalism instead, which were respectively labelled as Country and Court ideology. The Constitutional Act of 1791, by means of which the political foundations of Upper and Lower Canada were settled, rested indeed on a modern concept of freedom. This was, however, a freedom based on British-styled parliamentary sovereignty, not on popular or national sovereignty, as in the United States and France. It was also this modern version of freedom that was instituted in Portugal by the revolution of 1820, but the new Constitution portrayed it as a restoration of the traditional Portuguese liberties, not as a political innovation. In his chapter, Angel Rivero shows that although political ideas are important for the course of political events, the context in which they are put to work is at least equally important. Thus, as the Portuguese example portrays, it was possible to have a liberal revolution without a great debate of ideas, and this was feasible because liberalism is not only a political doctrine but also a constitutional arrangement devised to deal with the practical problems of social complexity. In this sense, events such as the Portuguese revolution of 1820 and Brazil’s independence in 1822 cannot be understood without focusing on the wider context of the Luso-Atlantic connections. It was revolution in Europe and the Americas, seafaring, and intellectual communication that made the inception of liberal politics in Portugal possible. The last chapter of this volume deals with an issue that for generations has disconcerted interpreters of the Iberian world, namely how to understand the creation of nominally liberal institutions in the absence of a recognizably liberal culture. During the nineteenth century, Latin American societies experienced a decided change towards more competitive forms of political integration. These experiences were systematically worded in the language of liberalism. With few exceptions though, Ibero-American liberalism failed to deliver many of the political goods promised by the countless constitutions proclaimed throughout its two centuries of history. Drawing on the Weberian notion of patrimonialism, Francisco Colom González maintains that some of these features can be attributed to the social and political conditions of the postcolonial period. But liberal ideas in the region were not an alien transplant. They drew on local experience and on imported ideas filtered through autochthonous intellectual traditions, thereby assuming new social meanings

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and political functionality. Spain and its former colonies had to create modern state institutions out of the rubbles of a traditional and multi-ethnic empire. Even if the emancipative function of liberalism was formally alike in both continents, the initial conditions were different. Whereas in Spain liberal constitutionalism could proceed by submitting royal authority to the rule of law, political structures overseas had to be created anew from below, by asserting new centres of power over a multiplicity of contending groups and centrifugal regions. In this context, liberal institutions had to adapt to the patronage and praetorian practices that accompanied the erection of weak nation-states in the region. This is why, short of conceiving the liberal discourse in this context as a negligible flatus vocis, the gap that separated the theory from the practice can only be conceivably bridged if the political actors were able to perceive in the latter some type of affinity to the normative meanings and social uses of a not too distant colonial past. The works collected in this volume offer a wide range of perspectives on the multiples dimensions of liberty in regions of the Atlantic world that have been traditionally neglected by the conventional study of political ideas. By emphasizing the comparative aspects of these experiences, their inter-connectedness, and the key role played by the Atlantic cleavage for their theorization, this book helps to reveal the role of this oceanic space as a correlate of the rich and varied regional traditions that converged in the inception of political modernity.

part 1 A Changing Colonial World

∵

chapter 1

Brazil and the Languages of Modernity1 Rubem Barboza Filho October 1897. After almost nine years of existence, the Brazilian Republic had mobilized its army in seventeen states of the federation to confront what seemed a huge threat to its existence: the small town of Canudos. Set in the arid backlands of Bahia, with around 25,000 inhabitants, it had resisted an attack by the government’s police forces and had successively defeated three military expeditions. For two years it had remained unscathed, and was now facing, in the dry Bahian springtime, the fourth military assault, waged by a large troop including the best and most modern in the Brazilian army. On 5 October it was condemned. Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909), in Rebellion in the Backlands, considered the best book written in Brazil in the twentieth century, succinctly recounted the last day of the rebellion: Canudos did not surrender. The only case of its kind in history, it held out to the last man. Conquered inch-by-inch, in the literal meaning of the words, it fell on October 5, toward dusk – when its last defenders fell, dying every man of them. There were only four of them left: an old man, two other full grow men, and a child, facing a furiously raging army of five thousand soldiers.2 On 6 October, all the houses in Canudos were destroyed. What would have led the young Brazilian Republic to a ‘war of the end of the world’, to borrow the title of Vargas Llosa’s novel about this tragedy, unique in the history of Brazil? Responses were and are varied, until today: the fear of a monarchist uprising, the need for intervention in the region’s land conflicts, the struggle against barbarism in the name of civilization, the urgency to establish the republic’s legal and homogenizing dominion over differences of every kind, the anti-religious bias of the republicans in confrontation with the messianism of the backland’s population. Euclides da Cunha himself, an ardent supporter of civilization and correspondent for a newspaper in São Paulo, had gone to the war-torn territory judging Canudos a kind of Brazilian Vendée, the French region that fought the revolution 1 Translation by Joseph F. Quinn. 2 Euclides da Cunha (1994 [1902]) Rebellion in the Backlands (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004299689_003

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that had begun in Paris in 1789. His book, written a few years later, is a mea culpa and the scathing denunciation of ‘crime and madness’ of the republic, of its army, and of a Church fearful of popular religiosity. This attack on the political fanaticism of the coastal republic came tempered with the defence of a nationbuilding programme that was set on the ‘bedrock of nationality’, the Backlanders. The republic, however, did the opposite, by killing them. Even if it was an ‘irruption from the past’ – the term is also from Euclides – why did Canudos and its Backlanders fight and prefer death over surrender? The republican rhetoric, seconded by the coastal press, offered a justifying response: it was due to the barbarism of a mestizo population of religious fanatics and monarchists, unable to understand the civilizing and liberating character of the republic. Euclides’ book refuted this impenitent discourse of the republican elites, showing that while there was barbarism in the backcountry, it also had spread to the coastal cities. The distant republic meant nothing to the Backlanders. They wanted something else. But what did they want? The Canudos tragedy is emblematic of the political transformation that Brazil had undergone and which had been triggered in the 1840s. In fact, it is a result of this change and a summary of its meaning. Until then, the turbulent situation that spanned the pre-independence period, the autonomy of the early years of the young nation, was organized as an ongoing experiment of negotiation between what I call the Brazilian Baroque tradition and the ideals of the Age of Revolutions. Liberalism, Republicanism, and Constitutionalism provided an ideological course for a society that was already complex enough to seek its independence and incorporate the values of freedom and equality into its tradition. After the Regency Wars (1831–40) – when the country was governed by regents because of the absence of the first emperor and the young age of the heir – Brazilian political elites gradually adopted a new strategy for the construction of a country similar to those that seemed exemplary of the new times, as in France, the United States, and England. They strengthened control over the sources of power – slavery and landlordism in the economic sphere and state control in the political dimension – while formulating a discourse against the old colonial tradition and its principal subject, the common people. For this, they gave the libertarian dimension of Liberalism and Republicanism a regressive and exclusionary twist. The premises, values, and institutions born out of the great revolutions of the eighteenth century, which had offered a general sense of direction for Brazilian politics, thus assumed a new role: they became grounds for condemning the people and the social and cultural traditions that had been created over the previous centuries. From that moment on, the great historical narratives of Brazil came to be built on the backward/modern dichotomy, a conceptual pairing with

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wide circulation in Brazilian academia even up to the late twentieth century. This analytic dyad fictionalized the past and confounded it with mere backwardness, obscuring in this way the democratic potential of the local tradition and the people who had nurtured it for three centuries. It froze the image of three centuries of colonialism in a framework of violence, exploitation, arbitrariness, and medievalism, blaming traditional society for all the political and economic ailments that impeded the full modernization of the country. The political elites proceeded to organize a permanent break with tradition, thus marking the rhythm of the sluggish Brazilian ‘passive revolution’, always protected from the threats of a people defined as barbaric and/or immoral.3 This strategic change wrought by the elites cannot be understood as a mere exercise of power and dominion. It had the real purpose of breaking with the Baroque forms of construction of Brazilian society over the previous centuries and with a certain conception of freedom, sterilizing what could be a particular and creative way of participating in the period of expansion of democracy and in the exchange of ideas and goods, which made the Atlantic world a special territory of social and political experimentation after the Age of Revolutions. By Brazilian baroque tradition, I mean a way of life that arises from the encounter of different peoples, founded on the need for mutual translation of their symbolic contexts and on the recognition of the differences as possibilities of life made available to all. In this sense, the type of society that arose in the midst of slavery and various forms of violence was not only miscegenated, but a way of life formed by continuous experimentation of possibilities of understanding and a constant reinvention of their original symbolic contexts. There was, in its dynamics, nothing that would prevent incorporating into its lifeworld the possibilities offered by what the elites of the nineteenth century saw as modernity, that is, the state and the market, the citizen and the individual, free land and freedom itself. Canudos and the Backlanders were undoubtedly an ‘irruption from the past’, as Euclides da Cunha chose to express it, but from a past that harboured a tradition fighting to stay alive. The modernizing threat of the republic revealed the power that stirred under this tradition. The Backlanders scrutinized the most modern face of the republic – its army – just as they observed the movements of the sun, the moon, the stars, clouds, winds, rivers, and animals. They studied its organization, its weapons, its strength, and its weaknesses, and reorganized the city as a maze of narrow streets almost inaccessible to an invasion. And without any previous training, they invented guerrilla warfare, successively defeating 3 Luiz Werneck Vianna (1997) A revolução passiva: iberismo e americanismo no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Revan).

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police and military forces. Stunned, surprised, and challenged the modernizing republic, the Backlanders reinvented themselves and their tradition to the supreme humiliation of the exclusive coastal civilization; they displayed a courage that was unknown or had been forgotten, a sacrifice in the name of a way of life that they felt they had the right to maintain. It was upon these people that the republic should be erected, Euclides was convinced. But the republican establishment was convinced otherwise, and set on to destroy the long tradition that had formed the Backlanders and the Brazilian common man.

The Normative Languages of Western Modernization

The perception of incompatibility between local tradition and a modern world ruled by the market, individual rights, and state organization lingered throughout the whole of the twentieth century. Brazilian political thought, academic or not, has been traditionally driven by the obsession of turning Brazilians into Western-styled citizens. This is the reason why it took on the social dualities outlined by the nineteenth-century elites so seriously. In order to criticize this ideological reduction, I will resort here to an epistemological and philosophical interpretation of the modern world as a plural experience constituted by the interplay of three main normative languages, what I term the languages of interest, reason, and affections or sentiments. This approach can offer a broader view of the choices made by the Brazilian elites immediately after independence, in the attempt to synchronize the young nation with their own imagination of the West, and the potential reaction of the common people. Strategically administered by the elites, the languages of reason and of interest turned into weapons against the baroque modes of sociability of Brazilian society – a special variant of the language of affection – thus denying most of its people any significant role in the running of the country until the 1930s. Last but not least, I will defend the hypothesis that this negotiation between the languages of reason and interest was perfectly conceivable within the dynamics of Brazilian popular culture, that is, from the language of affections. In my use of the term, a normative language is not to be understood as an instrument for representing the world. It rather refers to a way of life, thus recalling the conceptions issued by Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Gadamer.4 4 Ludwig Wittgenstein (2005) Philosophical Investigations (Malden, ma: Blackwell); Wilfrid Sellars (2007), In the Space of Reasons (Cambridge, ma and London: Harvard University Press); idem (1997) Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press); Hans-George Gadamer (2013) Truth and Method (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic).

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Language is all that the world is, in the sense that nothing exists outside or beyond it. Far from being the expression of a timeless transcendental structure, it is historically transcendental, in that its change over time does not detract from it being the condition of our experience of the world. It contains what we might call, along with Sellars, a ‘space of reasons’, a set of public language games.5 To know something or to justify an action, therefore consists of placing a thing or a judgement within that space of reasons. In other words, knowledge is inseparable from social practice, namely the practice of justifying our judgements and assertions about others. A judgement or a belief can be justified only by another judgement or belief present in our space of reasons, without the help of something outside the language. The idealistic heritage in Sellars’ anti-foundationalism – the space of reasons conceived as a self-regulated enterprise – has been criticized by John McDowell.6 He agrees with the criticism of the naturalist claim that the world shapes our mind, but does not seem pleased with the belief that we are the only ones responsible for our thoughts and theories, a premise that transforms the world into a projection of our ‘space of reasons’. He claims the possibility of a ‘minimal empiricism’, associated with the perspectives of Hegel, Gadamer, and Aristotle. The world would exert a normative restriction on our thinking in the ‘court of experience’, that is, in the exercise of our receptivity of the world. McDowell flees the risk of turning his empiricism into a camouflaged operation of ‘naked and raw naturalism’, understanding our nature as ‘second nature’, in Aristotle’s terms. He shows how, in Aristotle, humans reach the space of reasons through ethical education, which can instill in their lives the proper way: ‘The habits of thought and resulting action are a second nature’, he observes, to reject the idea of an extra-conceptual world, situated outside of language. For McDowell, the ethics education presupposed by Aristotle is only a particular case of a more general phenomenon of acquiring a second nature, a process he calls Bildung, in the wake of Gadamer and the German tradition. I do not intend to deepen this discussion here. My intention is simply to pick up on McDowell’s suggestive proposal – his idea of the habits of heart, of thought and action as second nature. Sociologically, the approach to this second nature can be made by resorting to Weber’s ideal types,7 understood as instruments for deciphering the spaces of reasons at play. Ethical-political languages, used in the manner of ideal types, 5 Sellars, In the Space of Reasons. 6 John McDowell (1994) Mind and World (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press). 7 Max Weber (1964) The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York and London: The Free Press/Collier Macmillan).

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may not literally correspond to a logical articulation of concepts, as in Weber, but to the ‘well understood’ forms of each language, that is taking into account their normative nature. In what follows, I will limit myself to describe the main characteristics of these normative languages and to link them to the justification of a permanent break with the past in Brazil, emphasizing the anthropological premises and the institutional consequences of this type of discourse.8 The common premise of the various languages of modernity is to be found in the recognition of human desire, of the cupiditas of man as a basic and foundational power of subjectivity, as a force that acts creatively in the world.9 These languages developed with the aim of disciplining such desire, clad with unending ontological creativity. The language of interest is built on an anthropological conception of the individual as a fundamental agency of society, a notion that makes of each man a unique specimen of the species, a being endowed with an inside – that makes him subsist on his own – and an outside, the other individuals and society, born out of the external relationships between them.10 Every individual – a specifically modern concept – is thus formally vested with civil or negative rights, so that everyone can enjoy maximum freedom to pursue their own goals, their cupiditas. The legal-political dimension of society is understood as a second-order covenant, and it exists only as a formal and positive expression of individual freedom, devoid of material conceptions of justice. John Locke would be the prophet par excellence of this language. The language of reason grew out of the modern scientific revolution, so that reason escaped from the cocoon of science and assumed the role of universal organizer of human life. It rests on the definition of men as citizens, who can only fully exist after the social contract and through the enjoyment of positive rights. This anthropological model is realized in the extent that, through public and rational communication and deliberation, citizens work out their own law, with broad jurisdiction over their own individual interests, and carry out, through state action, the general will of the political community. Rousseau and Kant can be mobilized for the prophetic formulation of this language, which always aims to be situated as meta-language. 8

9 10

For a more thorough description of what I mean by these languages, see Barboza Filho, Rubem (2009) ‘The Languages of Democracy’, Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 23/67, 15–37. Saverio Ansaldi (2001) Spinoza et Le Baroque: Infini, Désir, Multitude (Paris: Kimé). Louis Dumont (1986) Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Norbert Elias (1982) The Civilizing Process (New York: Pantheon Books).

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The language of affections is based on the Aristotelian premise of men as we, of a web of social relations, existing only in their relations, and binds perfection to an infinite process of continuous reopening of human potential or desire. What matters to this language are the modes of relationship between men, a Machiavellian inspiration present in Spinoza and Marx, and that redefines democracy as the unceasing pursuit of relationships that allow all men the fulfilment of the potential that exists in each individual. If, in the language of interest, the individual already exists before his social relations; in the language of reason, men only acquire anthropological fullness as citizens after the social contract; in the language of affection they only attain their ambitions in social relations. The basic question of this last language refers to the modes of organizing social relations, which can be good or bad, in the words of Spinoza: good if they increase my power and that of all, and bad if they have the opposite effect.11 The language of affections is historically prior to the languages of reason and of interest, which only gain autonomy in Europe after the sixteenth century.12 These languages of modernity are not incommensurable, neither theoretically nor practically, as can be seen in the ambitious Hegelian synthesis that associates them in one ethical whole: the sentiment, which is present in the family dimension; the interest, which makes itself present in civil society; and reason, in the state sphere.13 Society, for Hegel, is an ethical, not a moral whole. Honneth interprets this Hegelian synthesis as an articulation of the various forms of recognition necessary to the existence of modern and free societies.14 These public languages and their articulations are essential elements of the ‘space of reasons’, the ‘second nature’ of the European and the American modernity. They were born of the actions and the power of social elites that generalized patterns of behaviours, values, and beliefs, such as we can find in Marx’s analyses concerning ideology, in the Weberian reflection on ‘Western rationalism’, in Norbert Elias’ perspective in The Civilizing Process,15 and even in Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age.16 The Europeans and the Americans have moved within these languages, using them to justify their actions and claims, and living them as a second nature, built over centuries and associated in many ways. 11 12 13 14 15 16

Gilles Deleuze (1988) Spinoza, practical philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books). Moses I. Finley (1973) Ancient Economy (London: The Hogarth Press). Rubem Barboza Filho (2008). Honneth (2007). Elias (1982) The Civilizing Process. Charles Taylor (2007) A Secular Age (Cambridge, ma and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University).

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These ways of life or normative languages, however, are not purely endogenous European. The expansion of Europe over the world, initiated by force in the fifteenth century, transformed the planet into a vast scenario of exchanges between different peoples and cultures, with decisive impact on the construction of these languages. In particular, the Atlantic world became a tangle of symbolic and material exchanges, with diverse consequences on the three continents involved, a tangle whose complexity does not fit into the traditional Eurocentric view of history.17 The idea of different normative languages, used as a heuristic device, helps illuminating the core of a process born of the encounter between distinct peoples and symbolic universes; it reflects the mutual translation of different ways of life,18 a moment always repeated and originating new languages that escape from their original conformations through contact with others. In this sense, Brazil is a model case of the Atlantic world, of the possibilities born of this constant need for translation between different languages, and invention of new languages. The remainder of this article will explore the moment, crucial to the country’s recent history, when the original language of Brazilian society, spontaneously invented through the course of four centuries, and its democratic potentially, faced a modernization strategy that condemned its constitutive dynamics to extinction.

The Modernization Strategy of the Brazilian Elites

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the composition and orientation of Brazilian political elites changed. While in the period immediately following independence jurists predominated – linked to civil law and trained at the old University of Coimbra, in Portugal – in the second half of the century most of the political elite was made out of lawyers, linked to the world of economic interests.19 Their members were familiar with the way of life of the North – through visits or stays – and with the elaborate expressions of the languages of interest and of reason. Although they were relatively cosmopolitan in their attitude, they were frightened by the turbulence of the period of independence, and especially by the violence of the civil war that ignited between 1832

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Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (2001) How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Sellars (1997) Empiricism. José Murilo Carvalho (1981) A construção da ordem (Brasília, Editora da unb).

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and 1840. Moved by an interest in modernizing the country, they carried out a dual strategy with profound consequences for Brazilian history. First, they hypostatized the languages of reason and of interest as future models for the country, rejecting them as present possibilities. This strategic perception of the normative languages of modernity made of liberalism – in its various versions – a ‘missing link’ in the national history, in the words of Raymundo Faoro.20 Second, they used those two languages as an instrument for condemning the extant Brazilian people and the local tradition, thus conceiving the modernization of the country as a long-term process that should transform its people and destroy the Iberian roots of Brazil in favor of a vague Americanism.21 In this way, the possibilities contained in the languages of interest and of reason were snatched from the common man, who thus was bound to become a citizen without the right to political participation and to rebuild himself as a productive individual without access to land or other forms of property. This type of reception of the two languages can be found across the political spectrum of the Brazilian elites, who were guided by the conviction that there existed an ethical and cultural incompatibility between the Brazilian tradition and the modern world; that is, that it lacked an ‘elective affinity’ between local tradition and a modern capitalist society with state organization. Paulino José Soares de Souza, the Viscount of Uruguay, represents the conservative version of this position. An influential politician and a member of the Regency government, in his Ensaio sobre o direito administrativo [Essay on Administrative Law],22 he sought in Guizot the inspiration for a prudent strategy for the modernization of Brazil. Guizot asserted the need to close the post-revolutionary period in France by combining the forces of freedom – which were brought to Europe by the Barbarians – and the forces of order (a legacy from the Roman Empire and the Church) by means of a strong state, based on the rule of law and supported by a strong middle class. In his essay the Viscount analyses Brazil through the lens of Guizot, and asserts that the barbarism of the people and the particularism of the elites could only be overcome by the pedagogical and redemptive action of a modern state oriented toward the strict enforcement of the law, politically centralized, and administratively decentralized. A state linked to a general interest in building the nation, and indifferent to the will of the people, so that this could be redeemed. 20 21 22

Raymundo Faoro (2007) A República Inacabada (São Paulo: Editora Globo). Sérgio Buarque Holanda (1988) Raízes do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio). Paulino José Soares de Souza (2002 [1862]) Ensaio sobre o direito administrativo (São Paulo: Editora 34).

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The liberal alternative found one of its spokesmen in Tavares Bastos, a political leader and influential journalist during the reign of Dom Pedro ii, who equated imperial centralization with an Asian method for stifling the country. Bastos demanded the organization of an American-styled federalism instead, but without emphasizing the self-government of the American townships. Free from imperial tutelage, provincial elites could then define their interests and set appropriate strategies for correcting the immoral character of the Brazilian race through education or immigration from Northern countries. Brazilians would thus be re-created as autonomous individuals and free citizens.23 This was the direction present in the Republican Manifesto of 1870, signed by about sixty prominent figures from the Brazilian political scene, including lawyers, engineers, doctors, businessmen, and civil servants. This was a strange manifesto, in which the word republic appears only once. What it proposed was the replacement of the monarchy by constitutional means – that is, without the need for popular mobilization – and the adoption of a federalist regime, without a single word about the abolition of slavery or agrarian reform. It is no wonder that the people, years later, watched dumbfounded (the expression is from a witness of the time) the military parade that inaugurated the republic in 1889.24 The cruelest version of these narratives, with growing acceptance among the elites, attributed the origin of the problems of Brazil to the racial characteristics of its population. In the fictional explanation of the backward/modern pair, the Indians, Africans, and mestizos – who constituted the overwhelming majority of the Brazilian population – were regarded as immoral and primitive peoples for being allegedly closer to nature and distant from modern civilization. Incapable of taking control of their lives and passions, these people would always be prisoners of disorderly interbreeding, thus reproducing the features that indisposed them for disciplined work and responsible political participation. This was, for instance, the vision of Louis Couty, a French doctor residing in Rio at the end of the nineteenth century, a tropical version of de Tocqueville. Upon analysing the effects of slavery in Brazil, Couty proclaimed his conclusion, and generally that of the Brazilian elite: Brazil did not have a real people.25 It had a population of blacks, Indians, and mestizos of every sort, all tainted by slavery and immorality. Only the immigration of Europeans could save these 23 24 25

Aureliano Cândido Tavares Bastos (1975 [1870]) A Província: estudo sobre a descentralização no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia Editora Nacional). José Murilo Carvalho (1988) Os Bestializados (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras). Louis Couty (1881) L’Esclavage au Brésil (http://www.archive.org/details/lesclavageau‑ brs00coutgoog).

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human groups from themselves, over time and in the future. Couty is just one of the names that attributed inferiority to the Indians and blacks, an inferiority intensified by the degenerative effects of miscegenation, according to racialist theories born in Europe that claimed a scientific basis, as in Buffon, Gobineau, and Lombroso. Thus, the actual inhabitants of Brazil were either to be forgotten or replaced by new northern white population, or redeemed from their moral impotence without the right to claim any significant role in Brazilian life. The synchronization of Brazil with the vanguard of Western civilization, together with its moral and political redemption, should therefore result from the action of an enlightened agent motivated by reason or by material interests, that is, by a civilizing state or by the liberal elites. Such agent would be charged with the responsibility of creating the type of human beings suited for a modern world, thus replicating in the tropics the societies existing in the North. Such was the vision behind the long-term revolution devised for liquidating the Brazilian baroque tradition and its human characters, both worthy of being thrown into the trashcan of history, in the opposite direction to that imagined by Euclides da Cunha. The Brazilian elites focused on modernization in order to escape the dilemma that Pagden, in Chapter 2 of this volume, has recognized in the trajectory of other South American countries, namely the tragic choice between a modern and an ancient republic. This slow and drawn out ‘flight forward’ was fed by the perception of an incompatibility between the ‘spaces of reasons’ of the languages born of the Age of Revolutions and the one particular to the Brazilian baroque tradition and extant people. But which was the nature of this baroque tradition, chosen as an enemy by the Brazilian elites and defiantly present at Canudos?

The Brazilian Baroque Tradition

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Minas Gerais was the richest and most populous province of the Portuguese overseas empire. The occupation of the territory began with the passage from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, when the bandeirantes (trailblazing pioneers) from São Paulo scouted out and confirmed the auriferous wealth of the region. The abundance of gold transformed the heart of what would later become the province of Minas Gerais into the vortex of a human movement, unprecedented for its violence and magnitude in the vastness of the empire. Gradually, this multitude was organized into a dense network of cities, a social structure formerly unknown in the interior regions of Brazil, and spawned a dynamic market that resisted

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the growing scarcity of gold. This set of cities hid a surprising process, which has been revealed by more recent research. In 1789, the population of the province was 326,847 people, 52 per cent of them free individuals. Despite the constant arrival of new waves of slaves, in 1808 this percentage increased to 65 per cent, in a population of 433,069 people. This increase of the free population was the result of the growing number of former slaves who had become freedmen. They took advantage of a contractual instrument called curtailment, already known in Olinda, Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities on the Brazilian coast. Under this arrangement the slaves took on the obligation to pay their masters their price within a given time, in instalments, being free to obtain these resources from their work. According to Eduardo França Paiva,26 there were 123,000 freedmen in the 1780s, a base of a growing middle class of former slaves with property holdings, varied economic interests, and a dense network of relationships with officers of the Crown and prelates. In the early nineteenth century, this contingent of ex-slaves exceeded the number of slaves in the province. Thus, through the existence of an urban and dynamic market, slaves could obtain their freedom from the wages of their own work. This fact supports the hypothesis that the expansion of the domestic market could become a powerful solvent of slavery in Brazil. But how can it be explained that the slaves – supposedly primitive, immoral, heirs to an ethos contrary to the modern one – were able to obtain their ­freedom by dealing with this distant and complex world of the market? Furthermore, how could a heterogeneous, disorganized, violent crowd, mesmerized by gold and diamonds, by raw interest, without help from the Crown, build a city with the sophistication, the architectural originality, and the aesthetic unity that confers a special charisma to Ouro Preto, the former capital of the province and today a world monument? How can one explain the creation of an entire city by such a multitude as a work of art with airs of a republic, in the words of the greatest Brazilian poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade? The way of building the city was equivalent, and coincided with, the form of transforming a multitude into a society, that is, building the city was the action of the multitude that chose with ever increasing clarity, its model of good life, reflecting such choice in the architecture of the city. In fact, by gathering a multitude from all quarters of the Portuguese empire, the auriferous region of Minas Gerais could draw from all the experience accumulated during the preceding centuries by whites, mulattos, slaves, former slaves, and even Indians. It is this experience, consolidated in the gold period, that I call the Brazilian 26

Eduardo França Paiva (2006) Escravidão e universo cultural na colônia. Minas Gerais 1716– 1789 (Belo Horizonte: Editora da ufmg).

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baroque tradition, the same that in in 1789 organized the first major revolt against Portuguese rule, followed by the revolt in Salvador, the capital of Bahia, in 1798. How does one understand this baroque tradition then? My hypothesis is that the association or miscegenation of three different versions of the language of affections originally formed Brazilian society: that of the Portuguese and Europeans, of the indigenous peoples, and of the Africans, thus creating an original baroque tradition. This hypothesis is unusual in Brazilian sociological literature, due to the hegemony of the backward/modern conceptual pair. The fuller understanding of Brazilian baroqueness is quite recent, thanks mainly to authors such as Carpeaux, Theodoro, Avila, Gomes Furtado, Machado, and Campos in the wake of the rediscovery of the baroque made by our late Modernism.27 But these authors, who gradually came to recognize the baroque as a style of art, and even as a style of life, still hesitate to accept the baroque nature of our social and cultural origins, a way of life that was capable of exhibiting a complexity higher than that expected under the control of Portuguese absolutism and counter-Reformation Catholicism. On the other hand, the term miscegenation generated – and still generates – great semantic confusion and debate.28 The premise of ethnic and cultural miscegenation as degeneration and pathogenesis, which obstinately persists among the Brazilian elites throughout the twentieth century, was countered by the adoption of an opposing model, which does not seem realistic for the Brazilian case. Thus, the association between baroque and miscegenation demands caution, and in this final part I intend only to present schematically an alternative way of understanding the formation of Brazilian society, its capacity to incorporate the languages of interest and of reason through an update of its baroque language of affections. The positive version of miscegenation follows a general pattern that assumes a zero point – the meeting of two peoples and two languages, or different cultures – and the birth of a tertius, which then transcends the particularity of the original cultures and creates a new and homogeneous identity endowed 27

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Otto Maria Carpeaux (1943) Origens e Fins (Rio de Janeiro: c.e.b); Janice Theodoro (1992) America Barroca: Tema e Variacões (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo/ Editora Nova Fronteira); Affonso Ávila (1994) O lúdico e as projeções do mundo barroco (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva); Celso Furtado (1999) ‘Formação Cultural do Brasil’ in O Longo Amanhecer. Ensaios sobre a formação do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra); Lourival Gomes Machado (2010) Barroco Mineiro (São Paulo: Perspectiva); Haroldo de Campos (2011) O seqüestro do Barroco na Formação da Literatura Brasileira. O caso Gregório de Matos (São Paulo: Iluminuras). Peter Burke (2009) Cultural Hibridity (Cambridge: Polity Press).

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with a wider universality. This is the model that we can find in Darcy Ribeiro with O povo brasileiro [The Brazilian People], in José Vasconcelos with his cosmic race, and in Bolívar Echeverría, who associates miscegenation and the baroque, in the wake of an important group of Latin American thinkers, like José Lezama Lima, Octávio Paz, Alejo Carpentier, Uslar Pietri, Severo Sarduy, and Claudio Véliz.29 Echeverría raises the crucial issue of translation in the encounter between the Indigenous peoples and the Europeans. He makes use of Malintzin (the native lover of Hernán Cortés) to dramatize the result of the confrontation between the oriental, circular historicity of the Indigenous peoples, with their ritualized language, and the open historicity of the Europeans and their living language. By mediating the conversation of Montezuma (her emperor) and Cortés (her lover), Malintzin ends up becoming the creator of a truth full of lies, notes Echeverria, of a language whose truth could only be recognized by a third party, still to come. The careful examination of the Gilberto Freyre trilogy – Casa Grande & Senzala, Sobrados e Mucambos, and Ordem e Progresso [The Masters and the Slaves, The Mansions and the Shanties, and Order and Progress] – leads us to a more realistic perception, not of a tertius, but of an ongoing process that always presupposes plurality and difference.30 For a full understanding of this Brazilian tradition it is necessary to suspend certain assumptions that seem obvious to modern languages. First, for the peoples that are met here, despite their differences, there was no such distinction between nature and culture like modernity constructed it. In contemporary Western societies, the realm of the innate corresponds to nature, over which we exercise control, including control over our bodies. Culture is science, art, technology, the sum total of achievements, inventions, and discoveries that define our idea of civilization, and with which we control nature. Achievements that become institutions and norms, reproduced and enlarged, organize what Wagner calls a ‘cumulative process of refinement’.31 That would be the context of meaning of any type of work, innovative or simply productive, in modern Western societies. For ancient, peasant, and tribal peoples, the definition would be different: their actions are based on the idea of the ‘world as a hypothesis’; they do not imagine the possibility of 29

30

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Darcy Ribeiro (1995) O povo brasileiro (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras); José Vasconcelos (1927) La raza cósmica: misión de la raza iberoamericana (Barcelona: Agencia Mundial de Librería); Bolívar Echeverría (2001) La modernidad de lo barroco (Mexico: Ediciones Era). Gilberto Freyre (1933) Casa-Grande & Senzala (São Paulo: Global Editora); (1936) Sobrados e Mucambos (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional); (1959) Ordem e Progresso (Rio de Janeiro: Olympio). Roy Wagner (1981) The Invention of Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press).

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revealing it logically or scientifically, and they make of what we call culture, the innate, and not the artificial. For them humanity would be the realm of the innate, and the entire game of invention to which they are devoted is also a game of preserving men as ‘social animals’, using the expression that characterizes the language of affections. These peoples are not constituted by a grouping of individuals, with an inside and an outside and endowed with a buffered self, such as defined by Charles Taylor, or by citizens sculpted by reason. They are naturally oriented to the exercise of constant translation and association, precisely because they see one another as human only in the internal relations of their groups and in the ties between their groups and others. Second, in the process of interlocution between distinct societies and cultures, the movement of assimilation and rejection occurs through metaphors, analogies, or allegories born of their original context and projected on to the other and towards the other, a movement that occurs in two directions and under control of the original contexts. Each of these contexts is disturbed by the new one and tries to assimilate it, incorporating it into its common stock of symbols. According to Wagner, what prevails in these cases are the differentiating controls against the backdrop of the conventional context, in order to confirm or reinvent them. In this perspective, we do not deal with ethnic miscegenation as the biological determinant of a ‘fusion of horizons’ between diverse peoples. Quite the contrary, this allows us to visualize Brazilian society as the ever-mutating result of diverse experimentation in understanding and dialogue between Indigenous, African, white, and mestizo peoples, amidst the violence of slavery, indigenous genocide, and European greed. This approach dismisses the evolutionistic anthropological perspectives, and also suspends the validity of the usual belief in the immutability of those societies identified as traditional. At first, America and its peoples were perceived in the perspective of the marvellous, as in the case of Christopher Columbus, astonished by something for which he had no preconceptions. But soon Europe, especially Iberia, is obliged to look into this novelty that emerged from the ocean, once the equivalence is rejected between the Americans and the antipodean beings, that is, not human. Fundamentally, Native Americans will be framed by two concepts that will have a long lifespan in European thought: either they were barbarians, or they were just savages that could be redeemed from their condition.32 In the debate promoted by Charles V, in the year 1550 in Valladolid, the humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda defended the barbarian condition of the Indigenous, ensuring the legitimacy of the war 32

Michel Foucault (2003) Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the College de France (1975– 1976) (New York: Picador).

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against them and for their salvation, a perspective that was shared by most Europeans in later centuries. Bartolomé de las Casas, sustained by the neoThomism, attested to the humanity of the Indians and to persuasion as the only legitimate form of conversion and incorporation of these peoples into civilization.33 Still guided by the same pair, Montaigne opened a kind of reflection that approaches Rousseau, and that makes of the savage, especially of the Brazilian Indian, a being close to nature and master of an overabundance of freedom, a perception that influenced the French revolutionary imagination.34 Dedicated to the conversion of the Indians, Dominicans and Jesuits eventually established, through the development of neo-Thomism, the first declaration of universal human rights, as noted by Skinner.35 Also from the neo-Thomists came the vision of a way of incorporating America that preserved the political and cultural autonomy of the Native Americans, at the same time projecting the Iberian empires as federated entities, a persistent political tradition revived in the independence of Mexico centuries later, as Ambrosio Velasco explains in Chapter 3 of this book. This tradition, less clearly than in the Mexican case, will have specific impact on Brazilian independence, especially in the preservation of the monarchy as the political regime of the new nation. But if the European imagination and reflection, along with greed, were activated by the other, what did the Tupi of the Brazilian coast think about those bearded malodorous men arriving by sea? Viveiros de Castro makes use of a sermon by Father Antonio Vieira – a famous character of the Portuguese world of the seventeenth century and a Jesuit already afflicted by the disenchantment of indigenous missionary work – to decipher the perspective of the naturals of the new land.36 In this sermon, the Jesuit makes a comparison between marble and myrtle: Europeans, once converted, are like marble in their constancy; the Indigenous, on the contrary, are like myrtle which soon loses its shape, because they believe, then soon disbelieve. However, observes Viveiros de Castro, what the Jesuits called the inconstancy of the savage – the disposition to accept and then quickly abandon Christian teachings – was the expression of exchange and of honour, a manifestation of the motive and driving 33 34 35 36

Edmundo O’Gormann (1992) A Invenção da América (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade Estadual Paulista). Michel de Montaigne (1972) Essais (Paris: Librairie Générale Française); Afonso Arinos de Mello Franco (2000) O Índio Brasileiro e a Revolução Francesa (São Paulo: Topbooks). Quentin Skinner (2002) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2011) A inconstância da alma selvagem (São Paulo: Cosac Naify).

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force of these indigenous societies, the apprehension of alterity and its subordination to the local social logic, an alterity without which the world ‘would founder in indifference and in paralysis’.37 If the Portuguese and the Jesuits were interested in the Indians as useful animals or potential Christians, Viveiros de Castro points out, the indigenous peoples’ interest in the Europeans was in their full otherness, as ‘the possibility of transfiguration, a sign of the reunion of what had been separated in the beginning of the culture, therefore able to return to extend the human condition, or even surpass it’.38 The experience of human existence as the domain of the innate has a specific manifestation here: the indigenous identity, personal or collective, is radically relational and is attained only through the presence of otherness. The Indians were thrilled with the ideas of god – non-existent in their symbolic universe – especially of a god as creator and omnipotent, and of the immortality of the soul, an immortality that they pursued as warriors. They allowed the incorporation of such ideas into their symbolic universe, as possibilities to be explored that tied them to the missionaries and Christians. Soon they became disenchanted though, disillusioned with the violence of this other, the European, who was initially received as completion of a humanity that had split at the beginning of times. Nevertheless, the natives absorbed the symbolic elements brought by the Europeans, making them part of their culture because ‘they made sense’ in the context of an encounter, desired or not.39 Not merely helpless victims of a colonial project, they changed their practices and induced the whites and the missionaries to make the corresponding changes. In other words, rather than abandoning themselves to rejection, or to a fusion of perspectives with the other, they expanded, redefined, and reinvented their symbolic contexts. The spaces of reasons of each of these symbolic universes were not closed, marbled, and imperialist. And they were involved in a potentially destructive game, which is why each sought to establish limits, ever-changing, of assimilation and rejection, a movement that Lévi-Strauss classified as the search for the ‘optimum of difference’.40 Thus, the Indigenous abandoned what the missionaries saw as pure cannibalism – the ingestion of the enemy’s body in the form of a thin soup – preserving by other means and rituals the basic notion of anthropophagy, namely the collective incorporation of the other and his virtues. Eventually they left aside polygamy, a European concept that they could 37 38 39 40

Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 206. Cristina Pompa (2003) Religião como tradução (Bauru: edusc). Claude Lévi-Strauss (1952) Race and History (Paris: Unesco).

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never understand, but they never gave up warfare, the fundamental centre of an identity narrative, even if preserved in the form of myth. When these and other limits could not be sustained, they either fought or fled to the inland forests, or simply died or became ‘generic Indians’, lost in the world, according to Darcy Ribeiro. While the savage Brazilian stimulated European reflection on freedom, the African slave brought to America did the same in reverse, as pointed out by Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott.41 Modern slavery, African and American – Atlantic, in short – did not merely make the advance of capitalism and the European hegemony possible in the world, as Cooper again notes in another book.42 The plantation economy, based on landlordism and slavery, was the backdrop of the figures by Spinoza, a Portuguese Jew and former pupil of the Jesuits, representative of sorrowful passions: the despot, the slave, and the priest comforting both for their lack of freedom.43 The figure of the slave became the antithesis of what a free man should be in Europe, but he was more than the Spinozian sufferer of sad passions. Uprooted from their social ties and their habitat, separated from their people and scattered across the immensity of Brazil, and America, the slaves were condemned to reinvent new social ties in extremely vulnerable conditions.44 But even driven by necessity, they sought new forms of integration through the reinvention and translation of their original symbolic universes. At no time, even during the abolitionist campaign in the nineteenth century, was there in Brazil any type of reflection, theological or not, that justified slavery. Slavery was a fact, and in view of this fact the missionaries reacted to protect the American natives, but not to defend the Africans. Slavery soon became one fact connected to another: slavery was black. But there was no intrinsic relationship between slavery and race in Brazil: African slaves could be freed. And even if this statement causes chills, slavery was a form of social reintegration of peoples captured and taken from Africa, particularly in Brazil, where, according to Gilberto Freyre,45 the Mohammedan influence made, from the master’s family, an extended family that included the slaves. These

41

Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott (2000) Beyond Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press) 42 Frederick Cooper (2014) Africa in the World. Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press). 43 Baruch Spinoza (1989) Ethics (London: Dent). 44 Cooper et al., Beyond Slavery 45 Freyre, Casa-Grande & Senzala

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gaps were crucial to the secular learning of the slaves in Brazil, as we shall see, and they also sought the ‘optimum of difference’ observed by Lévi-Strauss. The encounter between Europeans, Indigenous, and Africans in Brazil, as in America, was never concentrated in a time; it persisted over the centuries. Europeans never stopped coming. Contact with the Aboriginals is not over yet. Six million Africans were brought as slaves to Brazil,46 over the course of about 300 years. This systematic and continuous repetition of the ‘zero point’ renewed the need for experimentation and reinvention, without the emergence of a homogeneous tertius, that is, a biologically or culturally unified people. Mestizos carried within themselves, in their bodies and actions, this identity, both relational and plural, moving between differing and seemingly antagonistic symbolic universes or spaces of reason. Roger Bastide attempted to explain this internal plurality of the Brazilians, especially of the Brazilian blacks, developing what he called a ‘cutting principle’, that is, the ability to move between symbolic contexts that remain different, without tearing apart their personal identity.47 What may have eluded Bastide is the kind of identity that was born of this relational conception of men, which did not replicate in the tropics the drama of the fragmented Augustinian soul, one of the foundations of the European conception of identity as indivisible and marmoreal. But Bastide’s comprehensive effort underscores this mode of translation and dialogue between different peoples who were repeatedly placed in contact. The Portuguese baroque, in all its religious, political, artistic, urban, and familial manifestations, in Brazil transformed into an ongoing process of mutual assimilation between diverse and relational symbolic contexts. I cannot recapture all the richness of the baroque as a European phenomenon, but it is certainly a variant of the language of affections, especially in the Iberian world, for its neo-Thomistic and Aristotelian foundations.48 And it is also a way of life, as Braudel recognizes, summarizing a lengthy debate involving theorists like Alois Riegl, Eugenio D’Ors, Helmut Hatzfeld, Erwin Panofsky, Arnold Hauser, Walter Benjamin, Carl J. Friedrich, Victor Tapié, Pierre Chaunu, Lewis Mumford, and José Antonio Maravall, among others.49 The baroque is a style of 46 Ribeiro, O povo brasileiro. 47 Roger Bastide (1985) As Religiões Africanas no Brasil: Contribuição para uma Sociologia das Interpenetrações de Civilizações (São Paulo: Livraria Pioneira Editora). 48 Rubem Barboza Filho (2000) Tradição e artifício: iberismo e barroco na formação americana (Belo Horizonte: Editora da ufmg). 49 Fernand Braudel (1993) La Mediterranée et le monde mediterranéen à l’époque de Phillipe ii. Tome 2 (Paris: Armand Colin); Alois Riegl (2010) The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute); Eugenio D’Ors (2002) Lo barroco (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos); Helmut Hatzfeld (1964) Estudios sobre el Barroco (Madrid: Editorial Gredos);

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life that exhibits a special identity, and was appropriated in a specific way by Catholicism and by Protestantism, with different historical significance in the various regions of Europe. The European baroque period was a time of crisis, of exploring new ways of life in religion, politics, culture, and daily life, after having lost the inertia of medieval traditions, the ancient religious unity, and having exhausted the anthropological optimism of the Renaissance. According to Argan,50 the baroque – and not just baroque art – is an operation of persuasion and communication, which finds in the theory of verisimilitude, of Aristotelian origin, its effectiveness. This aspect is of fundamental importance for our purposes. The verisimilitude of the rhetoric refers to what happened, or could have happened, and persuasion develops by taking into account the experience of the persons to whom it is addressed, the moods and the memory of the target audience, the sensus communis, and taste. And it unfolds seeking the wonder and the action on the imagination, thus relativizing the intellective effort by ‘considering the source and the impetus of the affections or the feelings that in turn, would be the motive for action’.51 The baroque, and baroque allegorical art, is not tied to a priori truths, like absolutism or the Counter-Reformation, says Argan. They serve for any subject or agent, and seek to convince men that they belong to a society that is lived as a set of events, without a defined or immutable form. Baroque persuasion does not aim for the truth, but for the useful, the good, for what should be done or avoided, while still maintaining objective criteria for the evaluation of human actions. What results from this is a more ethical than gnosiological character of the baroque artistic mimesis and its allegorical nature, which express the thrust of persuasion and communication, the impulse to forming human groups around the same beliefs and opinions, and beyond the preconceived limits of a formal logic. As Argan notes, for Aristotle mutual persuasion was the foundation of the polis. The theatricalizing and the aestheticizing of life does not therefore correspond to a mere exaggeration, but to this continuous Erwin Panofsky (1939) Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press); Arnold Hauser (1999) The Social History of Art (London: Routledge); Walter Benjamin (2003) The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York: Verso); Carl J. Friedrich (1952) The Age of the Baroque (New York: Harper & Bros.); Victor L. Tapié (2000) Baroque et Classicisme (Paris: Hachette); Pierre Chaunu (1971) La Civilization de l’Europe des Lumières (Paris: Arthaud); Lewis Mumford (1961) The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World); José Antonio Maravall (1986) Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press). 50 Giulio Carlo Argan (1986) Immagine e persuasione. Saggi sul Barocco (Rome: Feltrinelli). 51 Ibid.

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process of persuasion and convincing in a context of crisis of the European consciousness, of increase of religious incredulity, of eschatological insecurity, of corrosion of tradition, and in need of reinventing the normative foundations of common existence. In America, the allegorical nature of Iberian baroque is stretched to form a new society, to create modes of understanding and dialogue with the Indigenous peoples and the Africans, without relinquishing violence. It brought to America the will to power and to dominate, and accordingly sought the imposition of a way of life alien to the other peoples. However, its constructivist pathos was not closed or indifferent to the experience of the other peoples. The operation, over time, of these two aspects can explain the path taken by the Brazilian society that was forming. On one hand, the ethnographic openness that was transformed into a vital openness, the continuous exchange in all the dimensions of life: religion, food, clothing, construction, wars (the indigenous guerrilla war), sexual mores, beliefs, celebrations, and so on. On the other, the Church and the Crown, with their projects for conversion and political domination, gradually gave a direction to this spontaneous and assimilative process present in society. The centrality of persuasion in the Iberian baroque allowed its appropriation on the part of the diversity and plurality of existing symbolic contexts, and was itself re-created as the mode of assimilation, reinvention, and complementarity of the various spaces of reason present in Brazilian society. The persistent, though not necessarily successful, attempt at Christianization of the American natives, the Africans, the whites and mestizos themselves, reveals much about this game between different contexts. The type of religiosity resulting from this missionary enterprise was never one of actual conversion, but of addition, which presupposes a relational identity. Indigenous peoples and Africans assimilated Christians and Christianity, their rites and allegorical propositions, as part of a humanity that encompasses the different into a totality that, baroquely, is never complete. Likewise, the Afro-Brazilian religions equate the Catholic saints with their orixás, spirits protective of every person able to find their proper guide. The same action is carried out by the indigenous peoples, which is the root of the Afro-indigenous religions. To accept and assimilate the other is thus to accept the endless complexity of humanity as a ‘baroque garden’, to take advantage of another expression of Viveiros de Castro. Heirs of a popular Christianity, born from the exchange with other religious practices, such as the Celtic, the Portuguese easily incorporated native American and African beliefs, generating a kind of paradox: all were Christians – like most of the slaves and indigenous – but no one was exclusively Christian. The religious practices, the rites, beliefs, deities, and spirits

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constitute additional possibilities made available to all for confronting a tough and hazardous life, and are a way of experiencing religion that does not fit within the hegemonic European model. The Church was virtually ubiquitous, and thus became universal without being exclusive. And she also offered everyone the strategies for the phenomenalization of the ethnic and religious identities reinvented in Brazil. As they were forming, the languages of reason and interest in Europe sought to reconcile the diversity of individuals with an equality based on formal rights, abstract and effective, and on the idea of universal political representation. In the baroque way of life, especially in Iberian America, representation followed another path: one of the phenomenalization of the experiences and exchanges realized by the plurality of experiments in dialogue and translation. The religious thus became a mediation language, as noted by Pompa,52 and the rites, liturgies, calendars, and art of the baroque were assimilated for this continuous phenomenalization of new and reinvented identities. The same happened with the possibilities present in the Portuguese form of political organization, based on the idea of the corporation. This corporate and jurisdictionalist model consisted of the organization of a world of differences, sanctioned and harmonized by the Crown.53 In Brazil it acquired an enormous plasticity. In particular, blacks and mestizos adapted to the possibilities of this model, organizing their brotherhoods and corporations for the release of slaves, for assistance to the elderly, for building churches – in competition with whites – and for the creation of their particular form of Christianity without giving up their original symbolic contexts and religions. As the cities multiplied and grew, the institutional world of the Church and the Crown, with their rules, laws, authorities, and objectives, emerged as the object of a learning experience by the population, who acquired the capacity to institutionalize the modes of dialogue and experimentation specific to Brazilian diversity, without denying their constant metamorphosis. The great guarantor of this baroque process of mutual recognition, of diversity, was the king, who offered a sense of unity to this multiplicity of experiences. He was the one responsible for the harmony of the whole and its continuity, attributes typical of the baroque king, according to Louis Marin.54 It was precisely the baroque form of apprenticeship that allowed the slaves born in Brazil the use of the curtailment mechanism, something virtually

52 Pompa, Religião como tradução. 53 António Manuel Hespanha (1994) As vésperas do Leviathan (Coimbra: Almedina). 54 Louis Marin (1981) Le Portrait du Roi (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit).

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inaccessible to African newcomers.55 The market possibilities were incorporated into their lives without their conversion into appetitive individuals, as the backward/modern pair demanded. Property owners themselves, they held on to their religions, their brotherhoods, their beliefs, and their customs, using the market as an instrument of liberation, enrichment, and social mobility. The growth and multiplication of cities follow the same pathos. They were built not just as a collection of streets and houses, but as the theatrical arena for the phenomenalization of the subjects who built them, and for the mutual persuasion of the identities firmly implanted in the brotherhoods and corporations of every type. Recalling Argan, the baroque causes men, upon entering a town such as Ouro Preto, to immediately plunge into the concept of a polis, driven by a public life in the streets, in the squares, in the religious and political rituals, in the celebrations, and not in the privacy of the household. That is a way of creating a public space distinct from the one Habermas finds in Europe,56 and it operates in all the major Brazilian cities of the era. It is no wonder that the coastal cities and those in Minas Gerais became agitated by the French and the American revolutions, from below and from above, and that the corporations of every type, religious or not, also acquired a political nature. In these cities, where the fuse of a revolt was lit that soon expanded to the countryside, the values of freedom and equality were taken from traditional utopian expectations, as in the emblematic case of Frei Caneca,57 leader of the Pernambucan revolutions, who tried to associate the neo-Thomism of Francisco Suárez with Rousseau. The designation of empire for the newly independent Brazil was not precipitate, representing the same association between tradition and what came across the Atlantic. It was adopted through the consciousness of an internal differentiation – present in the idea of different peoples and races – that it did not fit the moulds of the nation-state in development in the north of the Western world during the nineteenth century. The notion of empire recognized the tradition of the difference, but did not close the new nation to what was coming from Europe or the United States. The most visible incarnation of the Brazilian Empire, the Emperor Pedro i, was ultimately responsible for the Constitution of 1824, an instrument of Liberalism and Republicanism that proposed an agrarian reform law, sabotaged by the majority of the Brazilian elite. Moreover, it was Pedro ii who drove the process of the 55 Paiva, Escravidão e universo cultural na colônia. 56 Jürgen Habermas (1991) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, ma: The mit Press). 57 Frei Caneca (2001) Frei Joaquim do Amor Divino Caneca. Organização e introdução de Evaldo Cabral de Mello (São Paulo: Editora 34).

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abolition of slavery – which earned him the enmity of the major coffee plantation owners – and the resumption of plans for achieving an agrarian reform that would make Brazil a rural democracy inspired by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson. The exile of the emperor and the proclamation of the republic represented the movement of the political and economic elites interested in burying the grand tradition of internal plurality of the Brazilian baroque itself. The baroque tradition, far from being trapped in backwardness, was opened to the new possibilities present in the great Atlantic revolutions. The postindependence turmoil, and the rebellions during the Regency period, clearly showed the hunger for participation, for taking advantage of the possibilities offered by the languages of reason and interest. For this society, freedom was not bound to individuals, such as in the languages of interest and reason, but to the possibility of reinventing, or not, ways of life and dialogue, of creating spaces for social practices of recognition, persuasion, or rejection. Freedom, in this tradition, was linked to the modes of liberating the creative power present in diversity, a typical conception of the assimilationist language of affections. The assimilationist possibilities offered by the languages of reason and interest was present in the rebellions that preceded and followed Brazilian independence. The Regency Wars – in which about 100,000 Brazilians died, in a population of six million inhabitants – expressed this movement pursuing the actual fulfilment of such possibilities by means of land ownership and effective political participation. These uprisings did not follow the model of the classic American and French Revolutions, or of that of Haiti, in which race played a crucial role.58 The great revolutions in France and the United States somehow buried ancient traditions in the name of the individual and the citizen, their interests, and their freedom. The Brazilian revolts had a different sense: not the destruction of tradition, but its reconfiguration by incorporating into its plastic and diverse space of reasons the individual and the citizen. They were not born of a prior conversion of Brazilians, new marble statues of individualism or republicanism, but rather sought the expansion of a symbolic context through the assimilation of new possibilities and alternatives. If this bottom-up movement had succeeded, it would have broadened the plurality of the modern world and the modalities of access to the potentialities opened by the languages of reason and interest. And that’s exactly what was denied to the Brazilian people. The city of Canudos certainly did not fight because of some inspiration by the American and French revolutions. Forgotten in the backlands, it wanted to 58

Laurent Dubois (2004) Avengers of the New World (Cambridge, ma: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).

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move via the old game of reinventing the baroque tradition, as a violent ‘irruption from the past’. It resisted because it was the only way of life it knew, and its annihilation was the definitive signal that this game was banned and shut down by the elites. Brazilian modernization followed its long course, always looking for something that the Church had not achieved in the first 300 years: the internal conversion of Brazilians, now into Europeans or Americans. Ironically, the twentieth century became the century of an also slow but uncontrollable protagonism of the people, even by their very number. And everything that offered and still offers some identity to Brazilians, in their diversity, was born of this baroque tradition preserved by the common man. As for the elites, it is appropriate to reverse Couty’s question: have we ever actually had them in Brazil?

chapter 2

Empire, Nation, and Republic in the Transformation of the Modern Hispanic World1 Anthony Pagden There never was, in either name or fact, a Spanish Empire. There was, of course, the Holy Roman Empire, whose emperor was for a while also the king of the separate kingdoms of Spain. There was, too, for some three centuries a vast sprawling mass of territory spanning the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans which was ruled over by a ruler in Castile. This was generally referred to as the Spanish Monarchy (at a time, it should be said, when the word monarch carried the implication of universal kingship). Between 1580 and 1648, when the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula were under one rule, there was the Monarquía Católica, the largest, most extensive political unit the world has ever seen which reached from Messina to Macao and where, as the Spanish poet Bernardo de Balbuena nicely phrased it in 1604, ‘Spain is joined to China, and Italy to Japan’.2 On occasions, the kings of Castile and of Aragon (and sometimes also the kings of Portugal) assumed universalist poses, styling themselves – or at least allowed themselves to be addressed as – lords of Christendom or, less modestly, lords of all the world. There was even a rumour, spread by the Venetian ambassador, that Philip ii proposed to have himself made Emperor of the Americas to compensate for the fact that his father had failed to secure for him succession to the Holy Roman Empire.3 But Philip never took the initiative in any of this, and nothing ever came of it. The word empire is used only rarely in official publications even during the eighteenth century, and was banned after Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808. This conglomerate, or composite monarchy, over which the Hapsburgs, and later the Bourbons ruled, and which has since the late eighteenth century been referred to as the Spanish Empire was sustained imaginatively as a single body

1 Some of the ideas in this chapter have been further developed in Anthony Pagden (2015) The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 2 Serge Brezinski (2004) Les Quatre Parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: Editions de la Martinière), p. 49. 3 Anthony Pagden (1995) Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France 1530–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. 32.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004299689_004

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of public law adopted by the empire and embodied in the person – the persona ficta – of the monarch himself.4 But powerful though this unitary image clearly was, and despite such projects as the Count Duke of Olivares’ Union of Arms of the 1620s, no Spanish monarch before Charles iii ever made any sustained attempt to mould the various, culturally heterogeneous realms of which the monarchy was composed into anything resembling the single unitary state, the état unifié of Louis xiv’s imagination. The monarch himself acted as an agent of distribution and communal justice rather than undisputed political authority, and despite the centralizing efforts by successive Castilian rulers from Philip ii to Charles iii, constitutionally the monarchy more often resembled a federation of quasi-independent states than a single legally undivided imperium. As the diplomat Diego Saavedra Fajardo observed in 1639, what Spanish jurists liked to refer to as provinces were in fact what in other states of Europe were more properly designated nations or kingdoms.5 This was, of course, particularly true of the European dominions. Naples and Sicily remained sovereign kingdoms, as indeed did Aragon, Milan an independent Duchy, and the Netherlands a conglomerate of counties and principalities. When in 1539 the great Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria, in a lecture on the origins of civil power, wished to provide his audience with examples of what the Aristotelians called perfect communities – that is, those which were politically self-sufficient – he chose, as his example ‘Castile, Aragon, and other of their like’, one of which was Venice: two separate kingdoms and a republic.6 Even the Americas, although formally incorporated into the Crown of Castile in 1523, enjoyed a large measure of independent political authority, and were invariably described before late eighteenth century as Kingdoms of the Indies, Reinos de Indias, and from 1680 had been governed by a separate code of laws.7 Charles v even listed them separately among his many titles.

4 For the use of this term see Helmut G. Koenigsberger (1986) ‘Dominium regale or Dominium politicum et regale’, in Politicians and Virtuosi: Essays in Early-Modern History (London: Hambledon Press), p. 12. 5 Diego Saavedra Fajardo (1976 [1640]) Empresas políticas. Idea de un príncipe político-cristiano, ed. A. Vaquero (Madrid: Editorial nacional), pp. 75–76. 6 Francisco de Vitoria (1977) De iure belli, in Ulrich Horst, Heinz-Gerhard Justenhoven and Joachim Stüben (eds.) Vorlesungen. Völkerrecht, Politik, Kirche (Stuttgart: Kolhammer), vol. 2, p. 552. This is currently the best edition of the Latin text. 7 The Nueva Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, compiled by the jurist Juan Solórzano y Pereira in the 1650s but only promulgated in 1680 after his death.

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I In common with most extended states, the Spanish Monarchy had been continually expansionist from the moment it had ceased to be a single unitary territory. And, as many contemporaries believed, once any state had embarked on a policy of expansion, if it was to continue to survive, it had to continue to expand. The problem with this was that exponential growth could only, in the end, lead to fragmentation and final collapse. ‘This is the danger of monarchies’, wrote Saavedra Fajardo, ‘that in seeking repose, they become unsettled. Wishing to cease, they fall. In ceasing to work, they become ill.’8 By the midseventeenth century, to many such as Fajardo this was the main reason why the once great Catholic Monarchy now seemed to be foundering. It was the inevitable fate of large overextended empires. To many outsiders, however, the monarchy’s real difficulties appeared to be due less to its political fragmentation, or to its inability to continue to absorb new territory, than it did to its adherence to the ideological strains which supposedly provided it with its coherence: the close identification with the Catholic religion (if not always consistently with the Catholic Church) and the quest for military supremacy. Both had been on prominent display since 1492, that quasi mythical year in which the conquest of Granada, the expulsion of the Jews and Columbus’ first voyage had launched the future Spanish Empire. The discovery and conquest of the Americas had also resulted in the fortuitous discovery of massive mineral wealth. This, however, had been both a blessing and a curse. Sir Josiah Child, president of the English East India Company, observed in 1665 that the Spanish, distracted by their ‘intense and singular Industry in their Mines of Gold and Silver’, had never been in a position fully to understand the value of ‘Cultivating … the Earth, and producing Commodities for the Growth thereof’.9 This overdependence upon staples, in particular precious metals, rather than overextension, which was in Child’s view the principal cause of Spanish decline. It was a widely shared belief. Spain, reflected Montesquieu in 1725, when the impact of the mismanagement of the empire was yet more starkly visible, had failed to grasp where the true wealth of states really lay. Instead of cultivating the land, which meant also improving the condition and welfare of the native inhabitants, successive Spanish rulers had concentrated only on the extraction of precious metals, which were ‘fictional or symbolic’. As a consequence, they had abandoned 8 9

‘Esto es el peligro de las monarquías, que, buscando el reposo dan en las inquietudes. Quieren parar, y caen. En dejando de obrar enferman’: Fajardo, Empresas políticas, p. 604. Sir Josiah Child (1751) A New Discourse on Trade (Glasgow), p. 153.

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‘the  natural sources of wealth for fictional ones’.10 By the mid-eighteenth ­century, when Spain had lost all her former territories in Europe, she had, in Montesquieu’s view, become little more than a dependency of her own colonial settlements. ‘The Indies and Spain’, he wrote, ‘are two powers under one sovereign; but the Indies are the principal one and Spain only an accessory. It is useless for politics to attempt to attach the principal to the accessory. The Indies will always attract Spain to them.’11 The solution to this predicament, suggested in different ways by Child and by Montesquieu, was to transform the Spanish Monarchy from one of conquest to one of commerce, from an ideologically closed society to an ideologically open one. Free trade and freedom from religious and other extra-economic considerations were the only ways in which a modern society could hope to flourish. In that way, concluded, Montesquieu, ‘in place of a great treasury, [the king of Spain] would have a great people’. What this meant in effect was emulating what was widely believed to be the path to success which the English and the Dutch had adopted: the creation of empires based not upon conquest, but upon supposedly peaceful settlement, and not upon the extraction of raw materials, but upon trade. There were, at least by the beginning of the eighteenth century, many in Spain who had come to similar conclusions. Only if, said the widely influential political economist Jerónimo de Uztáriz, Castile now chose to adopt the new maxims by which Colbert had succeeded in transforming France from a nation of warriors into one of merchants, could the Spanish hope to emulate their enemies’ astonishing success.12 But adopting the maxims of your former enemies is, of course, no easy matter. As the Spanish ambassador, Alonso Cárdenas, is said to have told the Earl of Clarendon in 1652, when he argued that the insistence on religious conformity and the restriction of all overseas trade to Castile had been the ruin of Spain, ‘to ask a liberty from the Inquisition and free sailing in the West Indies, was to ask his master’s two eyes’.13 During the second half of the eighteenth century, however, a number of powerful figures began to press for a re-evaluation of the political and cultural objectives of the  Spanish Monarchy along the lines suggested by her French and British 10

11 12 13

Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1949–51) Considérations sur les richesses de l’Espagne, in Roger Caillois, ed. Oeuvres complètes (Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), vol. 2, pp. 10–11. De l’Esprit des lois, xxi, 22, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 648–649. Jerónimo de Uztáriz (1724) Theoría y práctica del comercio y de marina (Madrid), pp. 60–62. Quoted in David Armitage (1992) ‘The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire’, The Historical Journal 35, p. 536.

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­critics.14 They also recognized that the need to reform the monarchy had become far more than the simple quest for an economically productive and political compliant association of dominions. It had become, in effect, a crisis of identity. One of the most striking and most influential of these figures, was José de Campillo y Cossío, secretary to the Navy and the Indies between 1741 and 1743, who drew up a project for the complete overhaul of the overseas empire entitled Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América (A New System of Economic Government for America).15 Spanish America, argued Campillo, had been founded upon, and was still run in the interests of, ‘the spirit of conquest’ (el espíritu de la conquista). As a consequence, Spain now earned less from her American possessions than Britain and France did from the islands of Barbados and Martinique respectively.16 In the sixteenth century conquest had been both legitimate and, to a certain degree, profitable for the Crown. It had been in keeping both with the martial spirit of the times and with the immediate need to subjugate large numbers of Indians.17 But those times had passed very rapidly, and the following century, which should have been a Golden Age, had been instead ‘a century of disgrace and loss’ as the Spaniards, rather than consolidating their hold over what they had already gained, and diversifying the colonial economy, had simply gone on conquering.18 The conquistadores and their heirs, concerned only to perpetuate an archaic society based upon military valour, had failed to understand that wealth derives from political and social order, not from pillage. The consequences had been dire. Look, said Campillo, at the Great Khan (the quasi mythical ruler of China): with less able ministers than the king of Spain and 14

15

16 17 18

For the background to this move see J.H. Elliott (2009) ‘Learning from the Enemy: Earlymodern Britain and Spain’, in Spain, Europe and the Wider World 1500–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 25–51. Although it was not printed until 1789, the Nuevo sistema circulated widely in administrative and court circles before that date. A version of the text, in most places word for word, also appeared as the second part of Bernardo Ward’s Proyecto económico en que se proponen varias providencias dirigidas a promover los intereses de España, first published in Madrid in 1799. Ward’s own contribution, which was confined to a discussion of metropolitan Spain, had been composed in 1762. For a discussion of the relationship between the two texts, see the introduction by Antonio Elorza to Campillo y Cossío (1741) Lo que hay de más y menos en España para que sea lo que debe ser y no lo que es, España despierta (Madrid: Seminario de Historia Social y Económica de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Madrid, 1969), pp. 11–16. Campillo y Cossío (1789) Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América, (Madrid), pp. 2–3. Ibid., p. 14 Ibid., pp. 6–7.

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less territory, he nonetheless has a greater income, and he added darkly, ‘neither are his vassals so oppressed’.19 The Americas had been laid waste by their European conquerors. What had been ‘a whole and politic nation in the hands of the natives and in the darkness of barbarism’, had under its European Christian rulers become instead ‘so many great, uncultivated, unpopulated, almost wholly annihilated provinces, which might yet be the richest in the world’.20 The greatest and most valuable part of the state – its people – had been reduced to a fraction of its previous number and, what few Native Americans still remained had been rendered, through tyrannical abuse, entirely unproductive. It would have been far better, he argued, if the Spaniards had followed the example of the French in Canada and merely traded rather than slaughtering, at enormous cost to themselves, nations from whom they could have derived some economic benefit. Faced, however, as Spain was with a land laid waste, she should now, he argued, ‘to pursue totally different maxims’, and with these turn the corrupt and indolent subjects of the Spanish Crown, towards commerce and the cultivation of those precious fruits [of the land], to create a just community, and by means of good economic government, reduce the Indians to a civil life, by treating them with kindness and sweetness, and thus encourage them to become industrious, and by this means make them useful vassals, and Spaniards. But, he ruefully concluded, ‘we are always standing with weapons in our hands’.21 Campillo y Cossío’s generally pessimistic view of the long-term effects of the Spanish military ethos was echoed most powerfully by Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes, Charles iii’s minister of finance. In 1762, at much the same time as Campillo y Cossío’s Nuevo sistema began to circulate in enlightened circles in Madrid, Campomanes published his Reflexiones sobre el comercio español a Indias (Reflections on Spanish Trade with the Indies), a response to the criticisms of the Spanish Empire made by Josiah Child in his A New Discourse on Trade, and to Montesquieu’s remarks in L’Esprit des lois. ‘All nations believe’, he wrote, ‘that wealth, by means of commerce, navigation and industry is the sole source of public happiness. Today’s wars are more concerned with gaining control over trade with the colonies, than they are with dominium.’22 For centuries the Spanish Empire had been nothing more than conduit conveying 19 20 21 22

Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., pp. 15–16. Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes (1762) Reflexiones sobre el comercio español a Indias, Vicente Llombart Roas, ed. (Madrid: Ministerio de Economía y Hacienda, 1988), pp. 11–12.

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gold and silver to all the nations of Europe from which Spain itself had gained very little. And this he, too, attributed to what had by the mid-eighteenth century been identified as the paramount national malaise: ‘the Spirit of Conquest’.23 Spain, in the crisis years of the seventeenth century, had failed to recognize ‘its true interest’.24 On this point he was entirely in agreement with both Child and Montesquieu. Like Campillo, he was also convinced that ultimately the Spanish problem could only be resolved by a change of identity. To do this, he acknowledged, it would not be sufficient merely to tinker with the existing structures. The Spanish Monarchy had to be re-cast as the Spanish Empire, as, not a single composite monarchy, but as metropolis with a number of colonies. It had, in effect, to be re-invented as something similar to the transatlantic state which the British were then in the process of constructing in North America. The consequences of these transformation were, of course, to be the same in both the north and south – with of course the same disastrous consequences, but Campomanes could not have foreseen that. The Reflexiones set out, therefore, to redescribe the old distinction between the Kingdoms of the Indies, and the various dominions within Europe itself. Campomanes is one of the first to speak consistently of the American colonies, and to treat them, not as a distinct although dependent part of Castile, but as communities comparable with the colonies which France and Britain had established in North-America, quasi-independent communities whose benefits, and whose own internal development, depended upon commerce and agriculture. The mistake, he believed, which the Castilian Crown had made had been to limit access to the American trade to Castilians. The Spanish Empire constituted a vast internal market, yet, in 1596, Philip ii had denied the Portuguese (who were at that time subjects of the Castilian Crown) any share in the American trade, and in 1634, Philip iv had prevented them from trading in the Philippines.25 The same limitations had been applied to Flemings, Italians, and in some cases Aragonese. Campomanes’ project would have opened up the American markets to all the subjects of the Castilian Crown and, crucially, deregulated the trade between them. The introduction of a free-trade zone which was still confined within the limits of the old Spanish imperium was to be linked to a policy of educational restructuring. Spaniards, all Spaniards, had, in Campomanes’ view, to be taught how to be economic beings. This was the project behind his Discurso sobre la educación popular (Discourse on popular education) of 1775, a text which ­reiterates many of 23 24 25

Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes (1775) Discurso sobre la educación popular de los artesanos y su fomento (Madrid: Imprenta de Antonio de Sancha), p. 410. Discurso sobre la educación popular de los artesanos y su fomento, p. 412. Reflexiones sobre el comercio español a Indias, p. 62.

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the points made in the Reflexiones, and which was taken up some years later by Gaspar de Jovellanos’ in his widely influential Informe sobre la ley agraria (Report on the Agrarian Law) of 1793. From such beginnings the ethos of the commercial society would come slowly to replace the older order of domination. And with the establishment of free trade between all its various far-flung regions, Campomanes was confident that Spain would finally ‘change its being’.26 Campomanes, like Campillo y Cossío, and like Jovellanos, was calling initially for economic and structural, not political change, as a means of bringing about the new, modern commercial being of the Spanish Monarchy. Yet it soon became apparent that the only viable political order which would make his new commercial order possible was not an ancient monarchy – the rapidly dwindling concept of a transatlantic community, of a ius publicum, embodied in the legal person of the king – but instead some kind of federation. The man who saw this most clearly was the Count of Aranda, acquaintance of Voltaire and the abbé Raynal, and one-time president of the Council of Castile. In 1783, while acting as Spanish ambassador to France, Aranda prepared a secret memorandum, the Exposición del Conde de Aranda al Rey Carlos iii sobre la conveniencia de crear reinos Independientes en América (Declaration of the Count of Aranda to the King Charles iii, on the usefulness of creating independent kingdoms in America) on the possible dismemberment of the American colonial system. ‘Your Majesty’, he wrote, ‘should dispossess himself of all his dominions in both Americas’, preserving only the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, as a basis for Spanish trade. All the rest, he suggested, should be transformed into four independent kingdoms (corresponding to the four Viceroyalties) ruled in loose federation under not a Spanish Monarch but, as the title had been conceived during the days of Charles v, a Spanish emperor. Such a federation would, Aranda believed, yield more to the Spanish treasury in trade, than the colonies now did in taxation. Once united, the three kingdoms would not only have no further incentive to seek complete separation from Spain, they would also be far more capable, and politically more inclined, to resist the new external threat which Aranda, like most Spaniards, believed, not without reason, to be posed by the new United States. Federal states of the kind he had proposed were, he believed, likely in the long run to be far stronger, and economically more prosperous than any other. The United States had proved this. ‘A day will come’, he warned, all too presciently, ‘when this federal republic will grow and turn into a giant and a colossus, terrible for all those regions’.27 Like the not 26 27

Ibid., p. 23. ‘Exposición del conde de Aranda al rey Carlos iii sobre el conveniencia de crear reinos independientes en América’, in Andrés Muriel (1838) Gobierno del señor rey Carlos iii, Biblioteca de autores españoles, 115 (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1959), pp. 399–401.

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dissimilar project proposed by Lord Shelburne for British America, Aranda’s project came too late, and was ignored.28 But what Aranda had seen was that, paradoxically, the only way to preserve the Spanish Empire, as it was now called, was to reinvigorate the federalizing tendencies which had always been present in the older Habsburg monarchia. Aranda’s project assumed that the colonies could no longer remain a fully integrated part of the metropolis, and that if something radical was not attempted the result would not be merely insurgency. It would be the creation of new states – new nations – which might become not merely independent of the mother country but actively hostile to its interests. Adam Smith had remarked, at the height of the American War of Independence, that the cessation of hostilities by the British (doomed in any case to failure), would persuade, turbulent and factious subjects, to become our most faithful, affectionate and generous allies; and the same sort of parental affection on the one side, and filial respect on the other, might revive between Great Britain and her colonies, which used to subsist between those of ancient Greece and the mother city from which they descended.29 In the same year, Anne-Robert Turgot, then French minister of finance, reflecting on the possible fate of the Spanish colonies in aftermath of the AmericanWar of Independence, came to very much the same conclusion. Colonies, he argued, had actually only ever been of real economic value to those who had free and independent commerce with them, which were generally not their political masters. ‘The revenue which the government derives from the colonies’, he wrote, ‘is a resource of no consequence for the state [of Spain] considered as a political power.’ The states which had really benefited from the American colonies, both north and south, were the Low Countries, the Austrian lands, and Switzerland, the latter two of which had no overseas possession whatsoever. Like Smith, he too, believed that, ‘one would be tempted to doubt 28

29

See Eliga H. Gould (2000) The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p. 166, and J.H. Elliott (2006) Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. 367. Benjamin Franklin greeted Shelburne’s suggestion with the comment, ‘surely there was never a more preposterous chimera conceived in the brain of a minister’. Adam Smith (1977) ‘The Correspondence of Adam Smith’, in Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (eds.) The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press), vol. 6, p. 610.

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if it would not be more advantageous to us to grant them [the Indies] full independence and abandon them to their own devices, rather than wait for the moment when events force us to do so’. ‘Wise and happy’, he concluded would be the nation, ‘which would be content to see its colonies as allied provinces no longer subject to the metropolis’.30 But as both men knew, that what made obvious sense to a political economist made very little to either the British or the French monarchs and their ministers. II After the first insurgency in Mexico in 1810, and the outbreak of war in what is now Venezuela two years later, the similarity between the position of the Spaniards then and the situation in which the English had found themselves in 1776 became starkly apparent. ‘Spain’, declared the French pamphleteer, former Napoleonic ambassador and champion of Simón Bolívar, Dominque Dufour de Pradt in 1817, Ought to ask of herself what it will be necessary to do when she can no longer be conqueror, and no longer keep what she has conquered; whether it would not be as well to make friends of those whom she can no longer have for subjects.31 As we know, however, the Spanish monarchs did not ask themselves such questions. Charles iii and Charles iv could imagine themselves as the rulers of a modern commercial empire. They could even accommodate themselves to a degree of local autonomy among the colonies, and the possibility – actively pursued under Charles iii – that criollos and Castilians might have equal right to public office in both the metropolis and the colonies. What they could not conceive, any more than George iii, was fully autonomous regions within the territorial limits of the monarchy. Their failure to do so led, of course, as it had 30

31

Mémoires sur les colonies américaines, sur leurs relations politiques avec leurs métropoles, et sur la maniéré dont la France et l’Espagne on dû envisager les suites de l’indépendance des Etats unis de l’Amérique [6 April, 1776], Paris, 1791, 30–1. Turgot speaks throughout of both Bourbon monarchies, as ‘we’. Dominque Dufour de Pradt (1817) ‘The Colonies and the Present American Revolutions’ (London), p. 384. Bolívar paid Du Pradt a pension and once described him as ‘a sublime philosopher’, playing Aristotle to his Alexander. See Simón Bolívar (1950) ‘Letter of 21 March 1826’, in Vicente Lecuna, ed. Obras completas, 2nd. ed., 3 vols. (Havana: Editorial Lex), vol. 2, p. 339.

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done in the case of George iii, to insurgency, and the final independence of the colonies. And, as in the North American case, this break resulted not only in the severance of authority between the former metropolis and the colonies; it led ultimately to the creation of two distinctive political systems. For the failure to create any kind of transatlantic political order which could accommodate both the Spanish Monarchy’s view of itself, and the criollos wish for a larger measure of autonomy, led to precisely that ‘change of being’ which Campomanes had hoped to bring about by peaceful means. Independence, for all colonial regimes, means, of course, not merely the assertion of political authority; it means, too, the creation of new nations. It means, in Clifford Geertz’s expansive definition, ‘confronting the dense assemblage of cultural, racial, local and linguistic categories of self-identification and social loyalty that centuries of uninstructed history had produced with a simple, abstract, deliberately constructed and almost painfully self-conscious concept of political ethnicity – a proper nationality in the modern manner’.32 Geertz was describing the birth-pains of the new states in Africa and Asia in the midtwentieth century, but his account will do for most of Spanish America in the early nineteenth. All the nascent states in South America, however, were unlike the African and Asian new nations of the post-war period in being originally Creole societies. Unlike the African and Asians insurgents, the American revolutionaries – from both north and south – were never divided from their rulers by ethnicity. In some cases a language of ethnicity could be used to affirm the colonists’ identity with the land on which they had been born – white Brazilians describing the blond blue-eyed, but Brazilian-born, son of the Emperor Dom Pedro i as ‘coloured like us’, or the Mexican and Peruvian manipulation of Aztec and Inca history. But this identity remained resolutely cultural, and extremely tenuous. The shared cultural and social values of all Creole societies were initially imported from the metropolis. The history of the formation of political identity in America has, therefore, inevitably been the history, not as it was to be in Africa and Asia of a repossession, or even the re-creation of values, so much as their transformation, or – to use that seductive Nietzschean term – transvaluation. As Simón Bolívar told his English correspondent in the most sustained of his political writings, the Jamaica Letter of September 1815, in a passage he repeated four years later in his address to the legislators of the new state of Venezuela, the Spanish-Americans ‘hardly preserve a vestige of what was in other times, and, on the other hand, we are neither Indians nor Europeans, but a sort of middle species between the legitimate owners of this 32

Clifford Geertz (1975) ‘After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States’, in his The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson), p. 239.

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land and the Spanish usurpers’.33 Caught in this way between two cultures and separated by time, race and now, political aspiration, from their European past, the Spanish-Americans, ‘strangers to the world of politics, and estranged from anything which might in some measure exercise our intelligence’, had, as Bolívar vividly phrased it, for three hundred years, ‘passed down the centuries like blind men between colours’.34 The other American society which had broken free from its former European sovereign, the United States of America, was, he warned the future legislators of Venezuela, also wholly unlike anything to be found in the south.35 The English colonies had not only been largely self-governing for most of their existence, they had also preserved their cultural and their racial purity. The Spanish-Americans by contrast, were ‘neither European nor North-American… It is impossible to know with precision to which human family we belong. The greater part of the indigenes have been annihilated, the Europeans have mingled with Americans [i.e. Creoles] and Africans, and these have merged with the Indians and the Europeans’. The only solution to such hybridity lies in its extinction in what he called a ‘perfect political equality’ (una perfecta igualdad política).36 No more criollos, no more Africans or Indians, no more of the proliferating range of mestizos and castas, of which the ‘Kingdoms of the Indies’ had been made up. Now there would be only Venezuelans, Chileans, Mexicans, or Peruvians. Creole identities at the moment of independence, furthermore, were not necessarily linked to a sense of political separateness. They constituted the still-useful distinction made by the early twentieth century cultural historian Friedrich Meinecke, Kulturnationen, not Staatsnationen.37 And so long as these cultural nations remained part of a monarchy composed of a number of such nations under a single ruler, there clearly existed no call for political separateness. And what was true of, say, Mexico or Peru was equally true of Aragon or Navarre. Each colluded in the claim that they were autonomous regions 33

34 35

36 37

Simón Bolívar (1950) ‘Contestación de un Americano meridional a un caballero de esta isla’, known as the Carta de Jamaica, September 1815, in Obras completas, vol. 1, p. 165, and cf. Discurso de Angostura, vol. 3, pp. 676–677. Letter to the Royal Gazette of Kingston Jamaica, September [?] 1815 in Obras completas vol. 1, p. 176. For Bolívar’s complex, and changing, view of the us see David Bushnell, ‘The United States as seen by Bolívar: Too Good a Neighbor’, in David Bushnell and Lester D. Langley eds. (2008) Simón Bolívar: Essays on the Life and Legacy of the Liberator (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield). Discurso de Angostura, in Obras completas, vol. 3, p. 682. Friedrich Meinecke (1922) Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaates (Munich: R. Oldenbourg), pp. 3–22.

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voluntarily associated with a larger political entity which was, of course, not a nation either, nor even a federal government, but a symbolically embodied form: the monarchy itself. When, therefore, that monarchy was dissolved forcibly by Napoleon in 1808, and the monarch himself sent into exile, the traditional focus of loyalty in effect vanished. The Cortes of Cadiz, convened in 1812 in an attempt to create new and liberal constitution for the post-Napoleonic order, tried to re-create the former integrity of the entire Hispanic world by granting citizenship to all the residents (avecindados) over the age of twenty five – with the exception of all slaves, and pure (i.e. unconverted) Indians, males under twenty-five, castas pardas (free blacks and mulattos) and all women – of the former kingdoms on both sides of the Atlantic, in Africa and the Philippines with equal rights and equality of representation.38 Despite its limitations, this definition of the new Spanish nation (nación española) as the ‘gathering of all Spaniards of both hemispheres’ was the most far-reaching experiment in political representation of the age.39 Napoleon’s invasion, declared an enthusiastic Benjamin Constant, might like all his conquests have been anachronistic and unjust, but it had, inadvertently, ‘awoken a great people from their stupor’.40 This initial awakening, however, proved to be a relatively brief one. When Ferdinand vii returned in 1814, he dissolved the Cortes, repudiated most of the articles of the constitution, and oblivious of what had taken place in the north three decades earlier, launched what was to become a prolonged, bloody, and ultimately futile war to reconquer America. But even if the liberal constitution had survived, it is doubtful that it would have been workable, in the long run, for the entire Hispanic world. The American creoles, unlike their Peninsular 38

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See in general, Tamar Herzog (2003) Defining Nations. Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven: Yale University Press), and the essays in Antonio Annino and Francois Xavier Guerra, eds. (2003) Inventando la nación. Iberoamérica. Siglo xix (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica). The castas – those of mixed African and Indian descent – had originally been included, but in an attempt to reduce the number and political influence of the American delegates, their rights were progressively reduced in the drafting of the final document, until they had, in effect, been excluded altogether. See, Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, p. 385. Castas pardas were recognized as Spanish nationals, but not as citizens. African slaves and pure Indians were not the subject of political rights at all. Legally both were things. See J.M. Fradera (1999) ‘Raza y ciudadanía en la definición de los derechos de los americanos’, in Gobernar colonias (Barcelona: Ediciones Península), pp. 51–69. See J.M. Fradera, (2012) ‘Situar la constitución de 1812 en el contexto de las constituciones imperiales’, in José María Portillo Valdés y Roberto Breña (eds.) El Atlántico Iberoamericano y la Modernidad (México: gm Editores), vol. 1, pp. 57–74. ‘Commentaire sur l’ouvrage de Filangieri’, in Gaetano Filangieri (1822) Œuvres (Paris), vol. 6, pp. 71–72. Constant, however, was writing after the Liberal Revolution of 1820.

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counterparts, were unable, ultimately, to describe any future political order in terms of a tradition which could trace its origins back to the supposed Ancient Constitution of Castile, in which the king had supposedly ruled with the participation and consent of his subjects. The political experience of the creoles elite, as Bolívar said over and over again, had only ever been one, not of participation but of exclusion. In the end they had no real option but to effect the transition from Kulturnationen to Staatsnationen, and that required the creation of political societies ex nihilo. One solution to this problem – the solution which the United Provinces of the Netherlands had attempted when it broke away from the Spanish monarchy in 1580 – was to look for political legitimacy through dynastic inheritance. The attempts to import European monarchs, from the request in 1815 by Manuel Belgrano that the Infante Francisco de Paula be made independent sovereign of Rio de la Plata (which was denied) to the tragi-comic reign of Maximilian in Mexico in 1864–67, were, as Bolívar had seen, doomed to failure because a monarchy is always more than a monarch. None of these, nor the new Bourbon monarchies which Francois-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand proposed for South America at the Congress of Verona in 1822, could have survived in practice, with only the support of an imagined aristocracy, ‘miserable’, in Bolívar’s words, ‘covered in poverty and ignorance’, and with none of the social and cultural apparatus which had enabled the Europeans to command the loyalty of their subjects.41 A reconstituted monarchism, however liberal, was, as most of the ideologues of the independence movement recognized, a cultural impossibility in societies whose integrity as communities had, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, come to be largely dependent precisely upon their separation from a monarchical regime. As de Pradt pointed out in 1817, in the number of American constitutions which have come to my notice, there has not been one that included a single word referring to royalty. On the contrary, all are marked by a strong die of republicanism and inclined more to the institutions of the United States than to those of Europe.42 The American Revolution, by creating a republic in place of a monarchy had, he declared eight years later, echoing Tom Paine, ‘given rise to a social reformation which operated throughout the entire universe’. Whatever now became of the former Spanish colonies, they could not fail to follow that ‘social reformation’.43 Or as one historian of the emancipation of Peru, Carlos Lissón, 41 42 43

Letter to General O’Leary, 13 September 1829, in Obras completas, vol. 3, p. 315. The Colonies and the Present American Revolutions, pp. xii–xiii. Dominque Dufour de Pradt (1825) Congrés du Panama (Paris), p. 85.

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bluntly phrased it in 1867, Peru ‘became free because its sons became men, and it became a republic because the republic is the truth’.44 Emancipation from Spain had created amongst her former colonial subjects the desire to become citizens, and citizens in Rousseau’s sense – which was also that espoused by most of the political ideologues of the independence movements –could not be created under the enforced tutelage of monarchy. The early emergence of such significant cultural and political divergences between the colonies and the mother country failed, however, to ensure any degree of political convergence between the colonies themselves. By 1825, the uti posseditis agreement of 1810, which had attempted to reaffirm the old viceregal boundaries, had effectively collapsed, and the Kingdoms of the Indies quickly dissolved into separate republics with a fierce sense of their own local identities and territorial boundaries. Once the monarch as a residual focus of loyalty had gone, the Spanish-American colonies had very little to hold them together beyond a common wish for independence and, at least in the first instance, a common commitment, as du Pradt had seen, to a republican ideal. The fissiparous programmes for some larger structure of states, those of Francisco de Miranda’s new Inca Empire, which was to have embraced – in a curious conflation of the Roman Senate and the House of Commons – the former Viceroyalties of Peru and New Granada, or Manuel Belgrano’s not dissimilar monarquía incásica, aptly named the Reino Unido del Río de la Plata (The United Kingdom of the River Plate) of 1825, all came to nothing. Bolívar’s own project for a union of Gran Colombia which would reach from Venezuela to Chile collapsed even before its creator’s own death.45 The federal option adopted by the BritishAmericans, as Bolívar himself insisted, could not be made to work in the south. The constitution of the United States, he said, was a ‘singular model of political virtues and moral enlightenment’, and it had created in the north what Bolívar called, not without irony, a ‘Republic of Saints’. But federalism of the North American kind relied upon a system of representation, and in Bolívar’s view, ‘our moral constitution did not yet possess the consistency necessary to receive the benefit of a fully representative government’.46 It relied, too, upon a political culture of mutual co-operation, and this, in turn, demanded the kind of cultural cohesion which the culturally uniform former British colonies possessed, but the multi-racial societies of the Spanish Monarchy did not. These marked differences in cultural origins between the British North and the Spanish South resulted in the creation of two very different kinds of 44 45 46

Dominque Dufour de Pradt (1867) La República en el Perú y la cuestión peruana (Lima), p. 16. See Jeremy Adelman (2006) Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 261–263. Discurso de Angostura, in Obras completas, vol. 3, p. 681.

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republican project, which have been conveniently labelled ancient and modern republicanism. The distinction was formulated most clearly by Benjamin Constant in his essay of 1819, De la Liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes (On the Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns). Ancient republics, he pointed out, were necessarily small, militarized societies which involved all their citizens in the common project of government and defence.47 Such communities were composed, in Rousseau’s highly influential redescription of the ancient model, not of men but of citizens, and the private life of the individual was subsumed entirely by the public life of the community, the res publica. ‘What the ancients called liberty’, wrote Constant, constituted in effect, The complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community… Thus among the ancients the individual, almost always sovereign in public affairs, was a slave in all his private relations. As a citizen he decided on peace and war: as a private individual he was constrained, watched and repressed in all his movements.48 Modern republics, by contrast, were large commercial societies whose citizens ruled through representation and whose private lives remained distinct from their public ones, indeed the public domain existed only to protect and enhance the private. They were constitutional and, in the familiar sense, they were liberal also. The liberty provided by the modern republic, and subsequently by liberal democratic society, created what, in Rousseau’s terms, comes close to being a contradiction: the ‘private citizen’. In what its twentieth-century enemies have called ‘the bourgeois liberal republic’,49 men were able to be men and citizens. They have access, if only as voters, to a political life, which they had been denied under the monarchies of the ancien régime; they are thus 47

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Benjamin Constant (1988) ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’, in his Political Writings, trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 312–313, and see Luis Castro Leiva and Anthony Pagden, ‘Civil Society and the Fate of the Republics of Latin America’, in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani, eds. (2001) Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 179–203. This is probably the most important early source of the much debated distinction between positive and negative freedom, which are something similar to, but certainly not identical with Constant’s ancient and modern liberty. For the most recent, and most compelling account see Eric Nelson (2005) ‘Liberty: One Concept too Many?’, Political Theory 33, pp. 58–78. ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’, pp. 311–312. In particular the former Chinese president Deng Hsiao Ping in 1989, see John Dunn (1994) ‘The Identity of the Bourgeois Liberal Republic’, in Biancamaria Fontana, ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 206–225.

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permitted to become fully autonomous social beings; but they are not wholly subject to the state of which they form a part. The liberal state, in other words, provided its citizens not merely with political liberty, but also with civil liberty. For most moderns the crucial defining features of republicanism were its reliance upon representation and its dedication to commerce. This alone could ensure the citizen body the necessarily liberty from constraint – and in particular liberty from interference by the state – which they required to pursue their own private lives. It would, of course, be an oversimplification to suggest that whereas the cultural and political traditions of the north inclined the British-Americans towards modern conceptions of the republic, Spanish-Americans were exclusively drawn by the ancient models. Rousseau himself was well aware that what he assumed to be the political model adopted by the ancient polis (not that Rousseau had, in fact, a very clear or precise idea of just what that had been) would hardly be suitable for a large modern state. But it is broadly speaking true to say that the criollos had only ever pursued free-trade objectives for the immediate economic benefits they would obviously bring. They had little understanding of the European faith in commerce as a civilizing agency which had agitated Montesquieu and via Montesquieu, Campomanes, and Jovellanos, and still less ambition to extend its benefits to the whole of mankind. And they had no understanding of, nor particularly sympathy for, the idea of representation. For not only might it have been the case that, what Bolívar had called the moral constitution of the new states was not yet fit for representation; it was certainly true that representation implied, even in the restricted sense that term was used at the end of the eighteenth century, a broad franchise. Something not so far removed from ancient republicanism, by contrast, seemed to offer the prospect of economic and social regeneration within a united community in which – since the ancient republic had been oligarchical – the old elites could retain all their power and wealth. Only an essentially ancient republic could, in Bolívar’s words, ‘regenerate the character and customs which tyranny and war have bequeathed to us’, and only such a republic would be able to create in the rain forests, ‘a Moral Power, taken from the depths of antiquity and from those forgotten laws which, at one time sustained virtue among the ancient Greeks and the Romans’. Even that most cherished instrument of public compliance in the Ancient World, the Roman censors, was to be a feature of the new American Republic. ‘We shall’, Bolívar told the legislators at Angostura in a passage which, at least as far as the sentiments it expresses, could have been taken directly from Rousseau, ‘renew in the World the idea of a People which is not content with being Free and strong, wishes also to be Virtuous… we shall give to our Republic a fourth power, whose dominion will

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be the infancy, the customs and the hearts of men, the public spirit, the good customs and Republican morality’.50 And this democratic, ancient republic was, he told the Chilean general Bernardo O’Higgins in June 1822, in allusion to Rousseau’s Du Contrat social, to be grounded upon ‘the social pact which must make of this world one Republican nation’.51 All of this, might, as one anonymous and hostile observer noted in 1820, seem to be little more than the image of ‘a world which is, in some way fantastic, that can be made to justify the past and authorise the hopes of the future’.52 But its chimerical nature, which Bolívar himself both saw and rejected, was not its only defect. For it was precisely this ‘fountain of virtue’, as Constant had himself recognized in an article in the Courrier francais attacking El Libertador as a new, and smaller Napoleon, which Bolívar consistently understood by the term liberal. It was the liberty that could be extended only to those capable of practising republican virtue, and they by definition were only those who were powerful enough to carry any force in political life. Similarly the public opinion to which he, and so many other leaders of the independence movement, made continual reference, was not as it was for all other liberal thinkers from Constant to John Stuart Mill (and had been for Montesquieu), namely a force to be used to restrain the ambitions of those in power. It was, instead, the expression of a collective political will, a synonym for Rousseau’s volonté générale. One of the difficulties – one of the many difficulties – of attempting to create Ancient republics in the modern world is that the originals were, as Constant phrased it, ‘driven by necessity against each other, they fought or threatened each other constantly… All had to buy their security, their independence, their whole existence at the price of war. This was the constant interest, the almost habitual occupation of the free states of antiquity’.53 In this respect, all the revolutionary generals in Spanish America were creators of a truly republican military culture. The Bolivarian dictatorship of 1828 was, as Bolívar himself recognized, a threat to the survival of the very liberty he so cherished. But dictatorship was also, as he knew full well, the traditional means by which 50 51

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Discurso de Angostura, in Obras completas, vol. 3, pp. 692–693. Obras completas, vol. 1, p. 619. In Chapter vi of Du Contrat social, Rousseau refers to the initial agreement which transforms a collection of individuals into ‘un corps moral et collectif’ as a ‘pacte’: Du Contrat Social (1964) in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), vol. 3, p. 361. Bolívar was the proud owner of Napoleon’s copy of the Du Contrat social. Reflexiones sobre el estado actual de la América, o cartas al Abate de Pradt (Madrid, 1820), p. iv. The author is anonymous; and see Luís Castro Leiva (1985) La Gran Colombia, una ilusión ilustrada (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores). ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’, pp. 312–313.

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the Roman Republic had overcome its more severe moments of crisis. In Rome dictatorship had, until Julius Caesar usurped it, been a temporary measure. The army was the guarantor not only of the security of the republic from external threat – always a real one; it was also the agency which sustained the respublica when corruption, the terminal disease of all republics, threatened the moral power.54 One further crucial difference, however, between Bolívar and his self-styled heirs lies in the nature of the forces which they controlled. In the republics of the Ancient World, these had been extended citizen militias. In America they were professional standing armies. Washington had been able to disband the Continental Army, because that army had been created to bring into being a society which, for all its outward classicism, had been created out of John Locke and Montesquieu, in the image of a self-assuredly commercial, and finally participatory, republic. The leaders of the SpanishAmerican independence movements, in contrast, were never able to escape from the militarism which was, and remains, an integral part of their political vision. The former Kingdoms of the Indies had, thus, not merely seceded; they had taken on a political form, and espoused a political ideology, which were wholly unlike anything which had preceded them, and anything which might have been imaginable within the older Hispanic world. Furthermore, this decisive break with the political and cultural legacy of the monarchy had occurred at the same time as the monarchy itself was attempting to transform itself into something far closer to a modern liberal state – in the sense that Constant or Tocqueville, or Mill, would have understood the term. III These dual, and complimentary, processes not only resulted in an ever widening political divide between Spain and her former colonies; they were also significant factors in the slow disintegration of whatever national identity Spain had acquired since the Union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1469. For that identity had been very largely centred upon Castile, and the association of Castile with Spain had only ever made sense, particularly after the eighteenth century, within the context of the empire. When that disappeared so, too, did 54

See Anthony Pagden (1992) ‘El final de imperio: Simón Bolívar y la república liberal’, in Luis Castro Leiva, ed. El liberalismo como problema (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores), pp. 107–129.

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any compelling image which would hold together the other satellite regions within the Peninsula itself. Defeat in the war of 1846–48, when independent Mexico, the heir of the Spanish Empire in North America, lost half of its territory to the United States, and the Spanish-American War in 1898, when Spain herself lost the Philippines and Cuba – and with them, of course, any vestige of the old monarchy – further exacerbated this process. During much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as it experimented with one kind of government after another, Spain slowly resolved into the ancient geographical and cultural regions of which the Peninsula had been constituted before the Union. The nineteenth-century model of the nation-state – largely created as a vehicle for thinking about the creation of Germany – has now ceased to work adequately for anywhere other than Bismarckian (and possibly contemporary) Germany. Belgium is now culturally at least two separate communities. The United Kingdom is not so united is it once was. Even France, hailed as the inventor of the modern nation, seems, at least as far as its cultural loyalties are concerned, to be resolving itself into its pre-revolutionary localities. Never­ ‑theless, no modern European nation has gone quite so far towards federalization as Spain. Franco’s attempts to reverse the trends of the late nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth, by forcing into existence a Spain which was supposed to be One, Great and Free, only had the long-term effect of deepening the older divisions, particularly in those regions – Catalonia and the Basque Country – which had fought so hard against him, and of associating the whole quest for a unified state with the most brutal forms of Fascist, or neoFascist, nationalism. There is, however, another aspect to this story. Like all former colonies, detachment from the mother country both politically and culturally was for the new states of Latin America a necessary condition of nationhood. But despite the radical political changes which that involved, it was never fully complete. Certainly, throughout much of this century ties between the new Hispanic world and the old have been as close as those between Britain and France and their former Atlantic – or indeed African or Asian – colonies. And as the integrity of the nation-state, and it capacities for sustaining political stability, became increasingly uncertain after 1945, it seemed to many that some kind of loose association of former colonial regimes might offer the basis for a new world order which would prevent the catastrophes – the great European civil war which had lasted from 1914 until 1945. Pan-Africanness and various league of Asian new states all aspired not only to rid their respective regions of the final vestiges of colonialism; they also attempted, often with disastrous consequences, to re-create the older imperial groupings under new masters. After all centuries of occupation, and the religious, linguistic, educational and

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political changes that this necessarily entails, cannot simply be wholly written off, even by an indigenous, let alone a Creole, people. The ambitions to create a federal Europe in the aftermath of World War ii found a counterpart in the – wholly imaginary – projects for something akin to Miranda and Belgrano’s ambitions for South America. In 1959, the veteran Spanish statesman Salvador de Madariaga conjured up the image of a Federación Iberoamericana, which would include Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile in the south and then, Peru, Gran Colombia, Mexico, and Central America. Madariaga’s political vision always overreached itself. But his insistence that this ‘Hispanic family of the New World’ could not include Spain itself, for Spain now belonged firmly to Europe (no more than, in his view, the British Commonwealth which had, in some vestigial sense replaced the British Empire, could continue to include Britain) was a recognition, even at the worst moments of the Franco regime, that, like Britain and France, Spain, too, would have to abandon its former imperial ties, and with them, something which Madariaga could also see, the likelihood of it remaining a single nation.55 None of Madariaga’s Continent states (‘continentes estados’) as he called them (except perhaps, and not quite as he would have wished, the Agrupación islamica) have, of course, come to anything. Such trading agreements as do exist between the various Latin American states, and between these and the us, have very little to do with any sense of Hispanidad (although they clearly do have something to do with being American), and none so far has aspired to anything resembling even the kind of tentative political expression which was present from the very creation of the European Economic Community. Spain itself is trying to realize some of the potential of the federalized state which had been present since the late fifteenth century. This process has been in part the consequence of the close association between the mother country and her colonies. Spanish political identity, that is, as a monarchy, relied upon the continuing existence of overseas dependencies. When those dependencies vanished so, too, did that identity. Spain clearly does, as Madariaga insisted, belong to Europe, but it does not belong as the Habsburg, or even the previous Bourbon, nation once did. Latin America, on the other hand, is further away from any kind of common political association than it has perhaps ever been. And it may well be that the common legacy of a strongly centralizing, militaristic, patriotic mode of republicanism still makes co-operation, much less political association, difficult to conceive in theory, let alone achieve in practice. 55

Juan José Solozábal (1996) ‘Spain: A Federation in the Making’, in Joachim Jens Hesse and Vincent Wright (eds.) Federalizing Europe. The Costs, Benefits and Preconditions of Federal Political Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 240–265.

part 2 Revolutions and Independence

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chapter 3

Ibero-American Republican Humanism and the Intellectual Roots of Mexican Independence Ambrosio Velasco In contrast to the extended and prevailing view that the intellectual foundations of Mexican independence derived from the French Enlightenment or the North American and French Revolutions, or even from early Spanish liberalism, I will maintain here that the original ideas that motivated and justified the Mexican revolution of independence have to be searched for in a remoter past, namely in the humanist tradition developed by the School of Salamanca in the sixteenth century, which dealt with the controversial legitimacy of the Spanish conquest and domination of the indigenous peoples of America. This humanist tradition was cultivated in New Spain by a series of Spanish and Creole friars who advocated the rights of the Indians against the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest. The topics of Novo-Hispanic political humanism evolved into a sort of Creole patriotism, and during the second half of the eighteenth century this turned into a Mexican nationalism. This process can be viewed as a cultural reaction to the centralizing reforms of the Bourbons, which were often perceived as an encroachment on established colonial rights and privileges. Such reforms included the expulsion of the Jesuits, a firmer control of colonial life, increased taxation, and the expropriation of Church property and assets. Under these circumstances, the scholastic ideas that emerged in the aftermath of the Conquest, and which originally defended the right of the Indians to self-government and the rationality of their cultures, gradually transformed into a political ideology with nationalist undertones that ultimately influenced the independence movements in the early nineteenth century, first as a Creole civil movement and afterwards, in 1810, as a popular revolution.

From Exogenous to Endogenous Intellectual Accounts of Mexican Independence

Until the mid-twentieth century, the most accepted accounts of Mexican independence stressed the intellectual influence of the French Enlightenment and Revolution. Such a view was first proposed by the Catholic Church to

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undermine the legitimacy of the independence movement, and was immediately repudiated by the leaders of the Mexican Revolution, including Melchor de Talamantes, Miguel Hidalgo, and Servando Teresa de Mier. Paradoxically, this interpretation was adopted by most liberal intellectuals of the nineteenth century and became predominant during the following century. Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, an outstanding philosopher of the Spanish republican exile in Mexico, maintained that ideologically Rousseau was the most influential author for the Mexican independence movement, from its inception in 1808 to the most radical moment of the revolution under Hidalgo and Morelos. According to him, Rousseau’s ideas are clearly recognizable in the Constitution of Apatzingán, proposed by Morelos in 1814.1 This view of Rousseau as the most influential political philosopher in the leaders of Mexican independence still lingers on. For example, Howard J. Wiarda sustains that ‘The features that early precursors and leaders of the independence movements had in common are striking… All of them were grounded in the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, especially in Rousseau, and not in the American tradition of Locke, Jefferson, and Madison.’2 Apart from being outdated, the main difference between Wiarda’s and Sánchez Vázquez’s interpretations is that the former recognizes, with a good deal of liberal prejudice, that Rousseau’s influence in Latin American independence processes ‘laid the groundwork for authoritarianism and even totalitarianism’.3 This exogenous interpretation of the intellectual influences in the independence movement was first questioned by Luis Villoro in his El proceso ideológico de la Revolución de Independencia, published in 1953. Later, David Brading popularized this hypothesis in two further works: The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (1985) and The first America (1991). According to Villoro, the intellectual origins of the Mexican independence are mainly rooted in Spanish theological and juridical traditions and in Novo-Hispanic patriotism developed by Creole intellectuals in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In spite of his innovative hypothesis, Villoro’s narrative of the Mexican independence had significant limitations. He argued that conventional Creole patriotism sought only a limited degree of autonomy within the Spanish Empire, and not complete independence. The movement in favour of Mexican 1 ‘In the Constitution of Apatzingán (….) the basic principles of Rousseau´s political philosophy achieve their outmost projection in the process of the Mexican independence’: Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (2011) Rousseau en México (México: Editorial Ítaca), p. 58. 2 Howard J. Wiarda (2001) The Soul of Latin America: The Cultural and Political Tradition (New Heaven: Yale University Press), p. 119. 3 Ibid., p. 120.

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sovereignty had started in 1808 in a non-violent way, as a response of the local authorities to the crisis triggered by Napoleon’s usurpation of the Spanish Crown. For Villoro and many other historians, the real revolution for independence started in 1810, first with Miguel Hidalgo’s insurrection at Dolores and then under his lieutenant José María Morelos. This movement was triggered by the impossibility of attaining autonomy in a non-violent way, and it was both politically and socially differentiated from the first attempt by the Cabildo or town council of Mexico City in 1808. According to Villoro, this second movement was stamped with the ideological influences of the French and American revolutions, the European Enlightenment, and the brand of Spanish liberalism developed in the constitutional convention in Cadiz in 1810–12. The originality of Villoro’s interpretation was therefore not as ground-breaking as it might seem at first glance, but it reached a compromise with the conventional or exogenous account of the process of independence. David Brading, in his outstanding book The First America, convincingly reconstructs the formation of an authentic Spanish-American cultural tradition that, especially in New Spain, gave rise to a type of national identity that he calls Creole patriotism. Brading locates the beginning of this process in the seventeenth century: Creole patriotism, which began as the articulation of the social identity of American Spaniards, was here transmuted into the insurgent ideology of Mexican nationalism… This kind of argument allowed the clerical leadership of the insurgency to avoid any emphasis in such theories as popular sovereignty and universal human rights.4 Brading’s magnum opus is without doubt a major contribution to IberoAmerican intellectual history. Although his main thesis had been proposed decades before by José Gaos, Edmundo O’Gorman, and more outspokenly by Luis Villoro, Brading’s reconstruction of the historical formation and development of Mexican Creole patriotism is more encompassing and detailed. However, he explicitly disregards the presence and significance of the republican humanist tradition that was linked to Creole patriotism. This type of republicanism has its origins in Alonso de la Vera Cruz and Bartolomé de las Casas, and ultimately in the School of Salamanca, and is as important for Mexican independence as Mexican nationalism construed by the Creole patriots. 4 David Brading (1993) The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 581.

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By the time Brading published The First America, Richard Morse proposed a similar interpretation focused on the relevance of Hispanic theological and philosophical thought. Morse considers that Francisco Suárez represents the most brilliant and complete expression of the Neo-Scholastic philosophy that developed in the sixteenth century, and that his thought was decisive for the independence movements. But he also points out that there is a profound contradiction in Suárez’s political theory, since he defends a republican theory of the popular origin of any legitimate political power, but at the same time he claims that the king is not responsible to the community from which his legitimate dominion derives and cannot be punished by that community. Although Suárez recognizes the right of the people to revoke the king’s power, the conditions he proffers are very difficult to fulfil in terms of enforcing that right. Such conditions are in fact a defence for the sovereign’s authority.5 Two Argentinian historians, Carlos Stoetzer and Guillermo Furlong, had advanced Morse’s thesis about the significance of Suárez’s philosophy in the 1960s. As Stoetzer put it, ‘the summit of late Scholasticism was reached by Francisco Suárez, whose political thought was of particular import to Spanish-American independence’.6 Furlong similarly maintained that ‘Francisco Suárez, and no other person, was the philosopher of the Spanish American emancipation’.7 I agree with Furlong, Stoezer, and Morse on the relevance of Iberian Scholasticism to the ideological process of Spanish-American emancipation, and specially in relation to the role of natural law and jus gentium, as Francisco Colom clearly points out in his contribution in this volume; but it is untenable to maintain that Suárez represents the culmination and synthesis of Hispanic Neo-Scholastic philosophy and the most important intellectual influence in the independence revolutions in Latin America, especially in the case of Mexico. Rather, Suárez’s political philosophy represents a shift from the republican principles of Hispanic republicanism of the sixteenth century, especially from the republicanism of the School of Salamanca, represented by authors such as Vitoria, de Soto, and de la Vera Cruz.8 The incoherencies pointed out by Morse in Suárez’s work reflect a radical change towards an anti-revolutionary 5 Cf. Richard Morse (1989) New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press). 6 Carlos Stoezer (1979) The Scholastic Roots of Spanish American Revolution (New York: Fordham University Press), p. 23. 7 Guillermo Furlong (1960) Los jesuitas y la escisión del Reino de Indias (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu), p. 29. 8 For a detailed analysis of the School of Salamanca, see Miguel Anxo Pena G. (2009) La Escuela de Salamanca. De la Monarquía Hispánica al Orbe Católico (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos).

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theory of sovereignty, closer to that of Hobbes than to the scholastic republicanism of the sixteenth century. Suárez is interested in a republican theory to legitimate the origin of the sovereign power of the kings and, if necessary, to control them from above – from the higher authority of the Pope. In addition, he puts severe limitations on the right of the people to depose authorities. In contrast, the founding fathers of the School of Salamanca, Vitoria, de Soto, and especially Las Casas and de la Vera Cruz, are mainly interested in developing a republican theory to question, check, and control sovereign power by the community, and this republican view is more appropriate to justify revolution against tyranny. This important difference between de la Vera Cruz and Las Casas, on one hand, and Suárez on the other hand, suggests that the republican ideas of the School of Salamanca had different interpretations and developments in America and in Spain, and also reveals Suárez’s political philosophy as an inappropriate theoretical foundation for the independence revolutions in Spanish America. Octavio Paz also devoted his attention to Creole patriotism, though with a more conservative stance. Coinciding with Villoro’s interpretation, Paz considers that the French and the American Revolutions were decisive references for the ideology of the Mexican independence, since there was no local intellectual tradition that could promote emancipatory ideas.9 Thus, Octavio Paz shares with many other authors the idea that there was not an Ibero-American republican tradition in México on which to ground the independence movements. More recently, historians such as Jaime E. Rodríguez, Manuel Chust, Virginia Guedea, and Alfredo Ávila have developed a Hispanic interpretation of Mexican independence. They point out that the liberal ideas of the Cadiz Constitution constituted the core of the independence movement in Spain and in Spanish America. The Spanish and American representatives who proclaimed the Consti­ tution of the Spanish Monarchy, transformed the Hispanic world… The American movements of 1809 and 1810, as well as the Spanish movements, were motivated by the common desire to get independence from French domination.10 9

10

‘The absence in Spain and its colonies of a critical philosophical and religious tradition – the foundations of the modern world – made that (…) the Mexicans did not look at their own past, but to the outside (…) The models adopted were the United States and France’: Octavio Paz (1992) Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica), p. 615. Jaime E. Rodríguez, ed. (2002) Revolución, independencia y las nuevas naciones de América (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre Tavera), p. 16.

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According to this view, the main liberal ideas of the Cadiz Constitution came from the Spanish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (with authors like Jovellanos and Feijoo), and not from revolutionary France. These revisionist interpretations represent a shift from French exogenous accounts to Hispanic exogenous explanations. Against all these Eurocentric accounts, in the following sections I will argue that the intellectual foundations of Mexican independence are mainly endogenous, since the central ideas and principles that motivated and justified the independence movements came directly from a Novo-Hispanic or Mexican republican and nationalist tradition that has its remote origins in the School of Salamanca, but which became Mexican with Las Casas and Alonso de la Vera Cruz, who were direct witnesses of the extreme violence and injustice of the conquest and colonization of the American territories. This experience produced a radicalization of the criticism of Spanish domination and exploitation of Indian peoples in America. These two friars were decided defenders of the Indians rights, mainly the right to self-determination of Indian republics and kingdoms, and founded a Mexican humanist tradition that extended for almost three centuries and continuously praised Indian civilizations, defended their rights, and contributed to creating an idea of a new nation formed by all people born in Mexico (New Spain). The most important figures of this Mexican humanist tradition, besides Las Casas and de la Vera Cruz, were mainly Creoles: Juan Zapata y Sandoval, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Juana Inés de la Cruz in the sixteenth century; Juan José Eguiara y Eguren, Francisco Javier Clavijero, Francisco Javier Alegre, Pedro José Márquez, and José Antonio Alzate in the eighteenth century; Servando Teresa de Mier, Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, Carlos María Bustamante, and Ignacio López Rayón in the nineteenth century, among others. They forged, during almost three centuries, the so-called Creole nationalism, and at the end of the colonial period this humanist tradition became a republican ideology that gave justification to the independence revolution.

Ibero-American Humanism

The Renaissance humanist tradition in Spain may not always have been recognized, but it was present and showed certain characteristics of its own. The main difference with the Italian humanism was the overtone of political issues, since a main preoccupation of Spanish humanism was the conquest and domination of the New World. Two different positions on this matter can be recognized: on the one hand, Cardinal Cisneros and Ginés de Sepulveda argued for the legitimacy of the Spanish imperium in America, drawing on the Aristotelian

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notion that the Indians were barbarians. It was therefore necessary to create the appropriate institutions in order to civilize (Christianize) them. On the other hand, Scholastic humanists from the School of Salamanca such as Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto embraced what I have labelled a multicultural approach to natural law. They sustained that the natives, in their own way and according to their particular customs, were as rational as Europeans and therefore were capable of self-government. From this perspective, the Spanish conquest and subjugation of the New World was unjustified. This position was further developed by Bartolomé de las Casas and by Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz, a former student of Vitoria and de Soto in Salamanca, and later one of the founders of the University of Mexico in 1553. As is known, Las Casas, Bishop of Chiapas, was the most resolute defender of the Indian cause at the Spanish Court, and he took part in the famous exchange of arguments on the legitimacy of the conquest at the Junta de Valladolid in 1550–51. The political theory of Vitoria, de Soto, and more radically of Las Casas and de la Vera Cruz, planted the seeds of a political humanism that would steadily develop in New Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My point here is that, in the long term, this tradition also provided some of the ideological underpinnings of the movement for independence. The republicanism of the School of Salamanca should be understood not as a theory on the form of government, as was the case with Italian republicanism, but rather as a theory of sovereignty based on popular consent, both in its origin and practice. This form of sovereignty may adopt different political names: monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy. I will use here the notion of republicanism in this particular sense. This republican theory developed an original approach to natural law by distinguishing two different types of moral principles. General principles, such as ‘every civil authority must seek the common good’, were deemed universal and immutable throughout history, but they were too abstract and ambiguous to be put into political practice. For this reason more specific principles, appropriate to each society, were necessary, and could therefore change from culture to culture. As a consequence of this principle it was accepted that the kingdom of Castile and the Aztec Empire, different as they were, could be both based on natural law, and therefore be fair and rational polities in their own way. In their main works or Relecciones, Vitoria (De Indis, 1539), de Soto (De Dominio, 1532), Las Casas (Argumentum Apologiae, 1550), and Alonso de la Vera Cruz (De Dominio Infidelium et Iusto Bello, 1554) resorted to this kind of theory in order to reject the legitimacy of Spanish rule in America. The native inhabitants of this continent never authorized Charles V, or any other sovereign, to govern them. I will focus here on de la Vera Cruz, not only because he, like Las

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Casas, had direct experience of Spanish rule in America, but also because he spent most of his life amongst the Indians. His main works were written in Mexico, and he can be considered the most outstanding and radical representative of the School of Salamanca in America. Fray Alonso’s inaugural lecture at the University of Mexico was a discussion on whether or not the Spanish domination (dominium) and war (bellum) on the American natives (infidelium) might be justified by any principle. As a result of this lecture, he wrote the Relectio de Dominio Infidelium et Iusto Bello. This work could not be printed during his lifetime because of his differences of opinion with the Bishop of Mexico, and it remained lost until 1958, when Ernest J. Burrus found the manuscript and translated it into English. It was published for the first time in 1967, along with other works, in a Latin–English bilingual edition prepared by Burrus himself.11 Following the path of his intellectual mentors in Salamanca, Fray Alonso reinterpreted Aristotle’s and Saint Thomas’s ideas, rejecting any justification for waging war against the Indians and dispossessing them from their land. Drawing on a secular political theory, he asserted that the origin of any legitimate government must come from the consent of those over whom that rule is exerted, otherwise its authority is fictitious and power is unfair.12 In addition, fair dominium requires the effective promotion of the common good, and when it comes to the most important decisions the authorities must consult the community. If the authorities do not govern according to the common good, they can be revoked. This theory excluded any reference to God, the Pope, or religious faith to justify political domination. Therefore the Bulls issued by Pope Alexander vi in 1493 had no validity, because the Pope had no political jurisdiction over the indigenous peoples of America. Fray Alonso also rejected the argument advanced by Ginés de Sepulveda and the defenders of Spanish rule in America on the barbaric character of the Indians. According to Aristotle, barbarian people are not capable of self-government and must be ruled by rational people (for Ginés, the Spaniards). A Eurocentric and paternalistic conception of Indians was promoted by most Spanish humanists, such as Vasco de Quiroga, Bernardino de Sahagún, and Motolinía, and has 11

12

Ernest J. Burrus (1967–76) The Writings of Alonso de la Vera Cruz. The Original Texts with English Translation, 5 vols. (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute and St Louis, mo, St Louis University). On the reception of the work of Alonso de la Vera Cruz, see Roberto Heredia Correa (2004) ‘Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz De Dominio infidelium et Iusto Bello. Reseña bibliográfica 1958–2003’, Tzintzun. Revista de Estudios Históricos 39, 59–92. ‘Any fair rule must be based on the free will of the people’: Alonso de la Vera Cruz (2004) Sobre el dominio de los indios y la guerra justa, trans. Roberto Heredia (Mexico: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras: unam), Duda I, p. 118.

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prevailed from the sixteenth century to the present. Inversely, and relying on his direct acquaintance with the natives, de la Vera Cruz asserted that the Indians were not irrational or barbarian, but civilized in their own way, according to natural law: ‘The inhabitants of the New World are not childish or irrational, but in their way they are intelligent and some of them are outstanding … Therefore, they are not incapable of governing themselves’.13 Fray Alonso’s humanism was also sustained by Bartolomé de las Casas, with whom he maintained a close friendship. Las Casas, for instance, stated that The power of the sovereign stems immediately from the people. It is the people who made the kings sovereign, and any other government that has a legitimate origin… On any issue that might benefit or harm the community, the government must act according to general consent.14 Although for Fray Alonso and Las Casas, Spanish rule in the New World lacked a legitimate origin, they considered that the king’s authority might de facto become legitimate by ceding autonomy to the indigenous peoples and returning the properties that the Encomenderos had illegally taken from them, so that they could improve their general welfare. Given these conditions, and granted the recognition of the king’s authority by the Indians, Spanish rule could become legitimate. The fulfilment of such conditions implied a sort of confederation of the Indian and Spanish republics, each one of them enjoying a significant degree of autonomy under the sovereignty of the king. The recognition of the full rationality of the Indian cultures was a core element of Novo-Hispanic humanism, and with time it gave rise to what David Brading has termed historical indigenism, that is, the amalgamation of the nativist myths of Creole patriotism – like neo-Aztequism, devotion for the Virgin of Guadalupe, hostility towards the gachupines (Peninsular Spaniards) – with the more modern vindication of political sovereignty.15 The development of a distinct Creole identity, which was already perceptible in the seventeenth century, is closely linked to historical indigenism, and it has been identified with the origins of Mexican nationalism by contemporary historiography. 13 14

De la Vera Cruz, Sobre el dominio de los indios y la guerra justa, Cuestión x, p. 359. Bartolomé de Las Casas (1974) ‘El poder de los reyes y el derecho de los súbditos’, in Derechos Civiles y Políticos (Madrid: Editora Nacional), p. 73. 15 Severo Martínez Peláez (2009) La patria del criollo: An Interpretation of Colonial Guatemala; translated by Susan M. Neve and W. George Lovell (Durham, nc: Duke University Press); see also David A. Brading (1985) The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Fray Alonso’s proposal was one of the first and most radical critiques of the Spanish imperium in America. At the same time, it was a defence of the rights of the indigenous peoples and an advocacy of their human dignity. Similar claims were made by many of the Ibero-American humanists, particularly in New Spain, but also in Peru and in other colonies. Juan Zapata y Sandoval, for instance, an Augustinian friar like Fray Alonso and a professor at the University of Mexico, published De iustitia distributiua et acceptione personarum ei opposita disceptatio (On Distributive Justice) in 1609. There he speaks as a Mexican and claims the right of the Creoles to have precedence over the Europeans in holding public positions in America. Other Novo-Hispanic authors such as Juan de Torquemada (who wrote Monarquía Indiana) and Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora (the author of Teatro de virtudes políticas) praised the political virtues of the ancient Aztec princes and proposed them as a model to be imitated by the Spanish Viceroys. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the most brilliant Mexican literary figure of the colonial period, made a significant contribution to Mexican identity by integrating elements of the Pre-Hispanic and the Spanish cultures, as well as to modern science and philosophy.16 She returned to the radical and critical views of Las Casas and de la Vera Cruz. In her dramatic poem Loa al auto sacramental ‘El Divino Narciso’, Sor Juana dialogically confronted Mexican native religion against Christian faith, thus resembling the famous dialogue of the twelve Franciscans and twelve Nahuatl priests held in 1524. In this dialogue, Sor Juana highlights the coincidences between the two religions and the more profound and honest religious feelings of the Indians. She also contrasts the sophisticated rationality of the Indians with the violent actions and attitudes of the Spanish soldiers. This inverted image of the relationship between Mexico and Spain was a clear rejection of the alleged superiority of Spain in relation to American Indians, and, at the same time, a defence of the dignity and rights of Mexican people, who needed no foreign rulers. It is important to point out a major difference in the position of these baroque authors from their Scholastic predecessors in relation to the Indians. Whereas Las Casas and de la Vera Cruz defended in theory and in practice the rights of the living Indians, and refused to grant legitimacy to the Spanish 16

On this point I disagree with David Brading’s appraisal of Sor Juana. According to him, ‘Sor Juana did not contribute to the growth of Creole patriotism, other than to figure in her own right as a cultural icon, since both her ambition and talent found expression and fulfillment within the universal tradition of Spanish literature’: Brading, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism, p. 373. This view is close to Octavio Paz´s interpretation of Sor Juana’s thought.

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dominium over them, most of the Novo-Hispanic writers of the seventeenth century rhetorically vindicated the glorious past of the Indian civilizations, but despised the living Indians.17 Whereas they argued for the right of the American subjects to hold office in the colonial government, they condemned the Indians revolts and never overtly denied the legitimacy of Spanish rule. Even if the republican ideas of Las Casas and de la Vera Cruz inspired the indigenist rhetoric of Creole patriotism, such positions were not expressed with the same energy until the independence movements of 1808 and 1810. In any case, the main contribution of the Creole humanists to the Mexican political tradition consisted in laying the foundations of a national identity in which praise and admiration for the indigenous past were a core element. Among these authors we must single out the work of Juan José Eguiara y Eguren, who in 1745 started a biographical series, Biblioteca Mexicana, which includes more than a thousand references to Mexican authors. According to Antonio de la Torre Villar, the Biblioteca Mexicana represents not only a defense of a vigorous Mexican humanist tradition developed over two centuries, but also a clear nationalist claim that México had a cultural identity and was a mature nation.18 During the second half of the eighteenth century, the anti-American turn of the European Enlightenment urged many Novo-Hispanic authors to engage in an international discussion on the merits of the natural and cultural history of the American continent.19 The expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish and Portuguese realms had a catalyzing effect on this process, as some of the most brilliant Ibero-American authors belonged to this religious order. During their exile, figures like Francisco Javier Alegre, Francisco Javier Clavijero and Pedro José Márquez, helped to spread the knowledge of Mexico and its past in the 17

18 19

This type of Creole attitude is commonly referred to as historical indigenism. Alluding to an outstanding representative of this view, Brading points out: ‘Although Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora has been described as a Mexican nationalist, he is best defined as a Creole patriot who sought to endow the imperial city of Mexico with both a distinguished past and a glorious present. His attitude to the Indians was decidedly ambiguous, since if he took pride in the grandeur of Tenochtitlan, he despised the contemporary native populace as degraded and drunken (…) His patriotic preoccupations were to be turned to political account during the Insurgency of 1810, when ideologues such as Fray Servando Teresa de Mier and Carlos María Bustamante appealed to the grandeur of Mexico’s native past to justify the rebellion against Spain’: David Brading, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism, pp. 371–372. Cf. Ernesto de la Torre Villar (1989) ‘Estudio introductorio’ a Juan José Eguiara y Eguren’, in Historia de sabios novohispanos (México: unam), p. xxxii. Antonello Gerbi (1973) The Dispute of the New World: Tthe History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press).

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European milieu. Clavijero, for instance, who wrote his Historia Antigua de México while in exile in Italy, tried to respond to the Eurocentric prejudices on America expressed by authors like Robertson, Buffon, and de Pauw. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier extended this cultural patriotism to the religious sphere by sustaining in a sermon delivered in 1794 at the Cathedral of Mexico city that, long before the Spanish Conquest, a primitive form of Christianity existed in America. According to him, Quetzalcoatl was in fact a transfiguration of the Apostle Saint Thomas, and the Virgin of Guadalupe was a reincarnation of the pre-Hispanic goddess Tonantzin. As it was easy to assume – and certainly the Viceregal authorities did so – there was a subversive potential in such a statement, for if the most valuable aspect of the Novo-Hispanic civilization, that is, Christianity, was not owed to Europe, the legitimacy of the colonial order as a whole was called into question.

Republican Humanism and the Mexican Independence

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the idea that New Spain was a different nation from metropolitan Spain was widely accepted among local intellectuals. The cultural references of Mexican identity were primarily based on the old Creole patriotism and historical indigenism, but this bore a political undertone. As Zapata y Sandoval and many other local intellectuals earlier claimed, Spanish-Americans should have privileged access to civil and religious positions in the colonies. This claim can be interpreted as an updated reminiscence or transvalorization of sixteenth-century republican ideas, which defended the right of the aboriginal peoples of America to selfdetermination. By the nineteenth century, it could already be sustained that the naturales were all those who had been born in America, meaning not only the Indians but the Creoles and mestizos as well. The amalgamation of these different elements helped to nourish an emancipating consciousness among some segments of the Creole elite, who found an unmatched opportunity for mobilization during the crisis prompted by the Napoleonic invasion of Peninsular Spain in 1808. The first movement was led by some Creole members of the Ayuntamiento (city council) of Mexico, who demanded that an autonomous governing board should be installed in order to fill in the power vacuum created by the abdication of the king. This attempt was thwarted by the Audiencia, which was dominated by Peninsular Spaniards. This first autonomic initiative, which was supported by the Viceroy Iturrigaray, was finally aborted by a political coup led by a group of Spanish merchants.

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A closer look at the arguments raised by the leaders of this first autonomist movement allows us to recognize the old republican ideas of the sixteenth century. The most radical among these early activists was the Peruvian-born friar Melchor de Talamantes, who defended the right of the Mexicans to govern themselves on the basis that all political power derives from the people, and when there is no longer a king or a legitimate government, sovereignty should return to its original source. With this republican principle, the Creole members of the Ayuntamiento called to several meetings (juntas) of representatives of civil corporations and authorities in order to discuss and determine the course of actions to solve the political situation. In these meetings the most influential document was a dissertation by Melchor de Talamantes about the legitimate causes for the independence of colonies, titled Representación nacional de las colonias. Discurso filosófico. Among other legitimate causes for independence, Talamantes pointed out three: ‘When the metropolis is subjugated by another nation’, ‘when the metropolis oppress their colonies’, and most important, ‘when the separation from the metropolis is demanded by the popular will of the colony’. In relation to this last cause, Talamantes stated: ‘When the voice of colonial inhabitants claim for independence from the metropolis, then the independence is decided and proclaimed by the national voice with no need of further reasons or motives.’20 The republican ideas and principles contained in this document are clearly influenced by the republican humanism of the School of Salamanca, cultivated, transmitted, and radicalized by Ibero-American writers for almost three centuries. Before Talamantes and other Creole leaders, such as Azcárate, Villaurrutia, and Primo de Verdad were arrested,Talamantes persuaded the Viceroy Iturrigaray to convoke a ‘General Assembly of the Kingdom of New Spain’. This congress was intended to preserve Mexican sovereignty through independence from the Peninsular juntas that resisted Napoleon in Spain. The violent repression that followed this first movement convinced the supporters of self-rule that the only way to succeed was by means of open rebellion. This was first attempted without success by Jose Mariano Michelena, a Creole military, in Valladolid in 1809, and later in September 1810 by Miguel Hidalgo, a parish priest from Michoacán. The difference between these movements is not, as Villoro has stated, that the first was moderate and autonomist and the second more radical and leaning towards independence. In my view, the 1808 movement was mostly inspired by the intellectual and civil segment 20

Melchor de Talamantes (2004 [1808]) ‘Representación nacional de las colonias. Discurso filosófico’, in Ernesto de la Torre Villar, La Independencia de México (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica – Editorial mapfre), p. 200.

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of Creole society, whereas in 1810 what was witnessed was a violent revolution carried out by poor peasants, most of them Indians, led by Creoles such as Miguel Hidalgo. Both movements favoured independence, and in both the old ideas nurtured by the Novo-Hispanic political humanism resonate. Hidalgo and Morelos included social justice in their demands so as to gain popular support for their cause, but above all they resorted to popular religion, particularly to the icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as a mobilizing device for the rural masses. This does not mean that the popular movement for independence lacked intellectual foundations or an ideological direction. Hidalgo, Rayón, and Morelos had been brought up in the tradition of the Ibero-American humanism. Hidalgo was the dean of the College of San Nicolás in Valladolid and had training in theology and natural law. Morelos was bachelor of the same College of San Nicolás, and they shared with Carlos María Bustamante and Servando Teresa de Mier the idea that Mexico existed as a nation long before the Spanish conquest. In September 1813, during the inaugural session of the Chilpancingo Congress, where Mexican independence was for the first time proclaimed, Morelos made his famous statement: Genius of Moctezuma, Cacamatzin, Cuauhtimitzin, Xicotencatl and of Caltzonzi, as once you celebrated the feast in which you were slaughtered by the treacherous sword of Alvarado, celebrate now this happy moment in which your children have reunited to avenge the crimes and outrages committed against you. These children are now ready to free themselves from the claws of tyranny and fanaticism that could have chained them forever. On 12 August 1521 our freedom was taken in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, but on this day, 14 September 1813, in this happy village of Chilpancingo, those chains are broken forever.21 The document submitted to the Congress, eloquently branded Sentimientos de la nación, declared that sovereignty resides in the people, who are free to reform their political institutions for their own benefit. Simultaneously, fray Servando Teresa de Mier published Historia de la Revolución de la Nueva España, antiguamente Anáhuac in London, in which he rejected the Cadiz Constitution as an attempt to counter the Mexican movement for independence. On one hand, his justification of the Mexican revolution drew on nativist arguments (‘America belongs to the Americans, because their mothers were Indians and their fathers Creoles who were born in American territory’), but it also drew on the Scholastic tenet that postulated the retroversion of 21

Quoted in David Brading, The First America, pp. 580–581.

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sovereignty to the people in case of vacatio regis.22 There is thus a recognizable degree of continuity between the ideas that inspired the municipal movement in 1808 and the popular rebellion that broke out in Michoacán in 1810. Eventually, the independence of Mexico in 1821 was not the outcome of any of these movements but the result of a short-lived agreement between Creole military Loyalists and insurgents as a reaction to the restoration of the constitutional regime in Spain. However, in spite of the modern ideas on liberty waved during the revolutionary period, both movements drew their deeper intellectual roots from the legacy of Ibero-American political humanism. But if this intellectual tradition was forged by Creoles, how can we explain the participation of the Indian masses in a revolution that was intellectually founded in republican humanism and Creole nationalism, and politically directed by Creoles, not by Indians?

Indian Participation in Mexican Independence

According to Luis Villoro, the social structure of New Spain in the second half of the eighteenth century was an important factor in the process of Mexican independence. Middle-class Creoles and Indian villages (pueblos de indios) were severely affected by the Bourbon economic and administrative reforms. Among the most important measures was an increase in taxes owed to landowners and Crown attempts to evict indebted properties. The reforms also encroached on the control of the Indian communities over their communal lands, which was essential not only for their economic sustenance and social organization but also for their cultural identity. In the cultural sphere, the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish domains, thus dissolving New Spain’s educational system. These reforms fed the hostility of both Creoles and Indian communities against Peninsular Spaniards. Unfortunately, Mexican historians did not further develop these considerations that Luis Villoro pointed out in 1953 in El proceso ideológico de la revolución de independencia. Twenty years later, American and British historians such as John Tutino, Brian Hamnet, David Brading, and, more recently, Erick Van Young, started to pay attention

22

Cf. Roberto Breña (2005) ‘Pensamiento político e ideología en la emancipación americana. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier y la Independencia absoluta de la Nueva España’, in Francisco Colom González, ed., Relatos de nación. La construcción de identidades nacionales en el mundo hispánico (Madrid: csic – Iberoamericana Vervuert), vol. 1, pp. 73–102.

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again to the social causes of Mexican independence.23 In The Other Rebellion Van Young maintains that the Indians continuously participated in revolts and insurrections throughout the colonial period. The number and significance of these social movements increased considerably from 1765. Most of the Indian revolts were linked to rural conflicts for community lands. According to Van Young, these conflicts were not merely economic or agrarian, but were subordinated to claims for local autonomy and the preservation of the cultural identity of Indian villages. The pueblos or repúblicas de indios were the main social units of the native population in New Spain. They had been established during the first decades of the colony and, according to the Leyes de Indias, they enjoyed a relative degree of political and administrative autonomy, with a town council similar to the Spanish Cabildos. As Lockhart points out, the pueblos de indios were in fact adaptations of the main political pre-Hispanic unities called altepetl.24 By 1803, 90 per cent of the three million Indians of New Spain, or 60 per cent of the total population, lived in over 4,000 pueblos de indios.25 The Bourbon reforms had tried to limit their autonomy and to transform them into municipal units similar to the Spanish structures but subject to stricter control by the Viceregal authorities. The tenacity of the Indian communities to preserve their pueblos against the administrative design of the Crown supports Young’s hypothesis that the Indian revolts had a political motivation – to preserve their local autonomy, communal lands, and cultural identity – and helps us to understand the massive participation of the Indians in the revolution of 1810. However, these native revolts did not intend the emancipation of the Viceroyalty from the Spanish Crown. Rather, the Indian movements were motivated by their long tradition of local political practices,26 and reacted against the modernizing initiatives of the Crown in favour of a more efficient 23

24

25 26

John Tutino (1986) From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton, n.j.: Princeton University Press); Brian R. Hamnett (1979) The Economic and Social Dimension of the Revolution of Independence in Mexico, 1800–1824 (Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld); David A. Brading (1971) Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); and Eric Van Young (2001) The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press). James Lockhart (1992) The Nahuas After the Conquest: a Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, ed. (2010) Historia mínima. La educación en México (Mexico: El Colegio de México), p. 581. Van Young, The Other Rebellion, p. 789.

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and centralized administration. As Stoezer pointed out, the result was somehow ironical, for ‘the Bourbons introduced various political innovations in Spain and the empire that they took from France. Though they were intended to put an end to Spain’s decline, they proved counterproductive and actually disastrous to Spanish interests’.27 The crisis of the Spanish Monarchy in 1808 created an appropriate occasion for transforming this opposition into a general uprising in Valladolid in 1809 and in Dolores in September of 1810. The Creole leaders of these emancipatory movements asked for and obtained the support of the pueblos de indios. In order to avoid the separation of the colonies, the Constitution proclaimed in Cadiz in 1812 tried to offer a political alternative. For this purpose it granted equal citizenship to all the Spaniards of ‘both hemispheres’. The Constitution included the Indians into citizenship, but the castas (mixed-race subjects) and the blacks were excluded.28 Such equality was merely apparent, because Indian political rights were circumscribed to the local sphere. In addition, there was an uneven representation of the American and the European branches of the monarchy. This was one of the main reasons that led Servando Teresa de Mier to reject the alternative offered by the Cadiz Constitution. This limitation of rights and the unequal representation of Spanish-American citizens is evidence that the Cadiz Constitution represented a type of constitutional colonialism that did not satisfy Creole or Indian expectations. Regrettably, this type of discrimination against the Indian communities has been preserved in Mexican constitutionalism as a form of internal colonialism to the present day.29 Indian communities did not really claim the type of individual liberal citizenship granted by the Cadiz Constitution. They rather tried to preserve the autonomy of their local republics, where for centuries they had elected their 27 Stoezer, The Scholastic Roots of Spanish American Revolution, p. 114. 28 Discrimination against Afro-descendants was pervasive in the Ibero-American world during the colonial period. Neither the Church nor secular humanists ever proposed to abolish slavery, only to constrain it. In the Bull Sublimis Deus of 1537 Pope Paul ii forbade the slavery of Indians and of any Christian subject, but he did not mention black Africans. Even Bartolomé de Las Casas, who clearly fought Indian slavery, did not condemn the enslavement of Africans, and initially recommended the importation of black slaves in order to avoid the extermination of the Indians, especially in La Española. See Isacio Pérez Fernández (1995) Bartolomé de las Casas, o.p. De defensor de los indios a defensor de los negros (Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban). According to Miguel Anxo Pena, the only person who condemned slavery in general was Francisco José de Jaca in the seventeenth century. Hidalgo was the first to abolish slavery in Mexico in 1810. 29 Pablo González Casanova (1965) La democracia en México (Mexico: Ediciones Era).

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local authorities and practised some form of direct representation. In spite of this, the Indians tried to take advantage of the limited spaces that the new Constitution opened to preserve their republican practices. Since in New Spain the Indians were far more numerous than the Creoles and the other groups, when the Cadiz Constitution was reestablished in 1820, the conservative Creoles that fought against Hidalgo and Morelos, wary of the possible expansion of Indian political influence, proclaimed an independent monarchy in 1821. Thus paradoxically, the consummation of Mexican independence occurred as a conservative reaction against the Indian uprisings. Conclusion Against the long-standing view that the intellectual foundations of Mexican independence are mainly exogenous – stemming from the European enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, or Spanish liberalism – I have argued that the central ideas and principles that motivated and justified the Mexican revolution of independence came directly from a Novo-Hispanic humanist tradition that has its remote origins in the School of Salamanca, a term used to describe the natural law tradition founded by Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, and other Spanish clerics in the early sixteenth century. These ideas were continuously cultivated in New Spain and in other SpanishAmerican colonies by Creole intellectuals who defended the rights of the American Indians after the Conquest. At the core of this humanist tradition was a republican notion of legitimate authority based on the will and consent of the people, and on a multicultural view of the Mexican nation. This view envisioned a new Mexican identity based on the fusion of indigenous and Spanish culture, very different from the European nations but of equal value with them. This humanist tradition became more active and radical during the second half of the eighteenth century as a response to the modernizing reforms of the Bourbon administration, which were perceived as hostile to American interests and which radicalized the conflicts between American and Peninsular Spaniards. Under these circumstances, the political crisis triggered by the French invasion of Spain in 1808 thrust traditional Novo-Hispanic patriotism into a nationalist ideology that prompted the independence movements in Mexico. Thus, the main intellectual sources of Mexican independence are not exogenous but internal to Mexican cultural and political tradition. This tradition mainly refers to the type of Creole patriotism developed by Creole humanists from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, who affirmed the value and originality of Mexican, or more generally, American culture against the alleged

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superiority of Europe. This Creole patriotism was founded on historical indigenism, a mixture of baroque eclecticism with an Americanized Spanish culture in which religious symbols like the Virgin of Guadalupe were central to integrating Indians, mestizos and Creoles in a common cause against Spanish cultural, political, and economic domination.30 This autochthonous tradition could be thus perceived as a radicalization of the republican humanism of the School of Salamanca. Whereas the Jesuit version of this republican theory, especially with Suárez, tended to justify the popular foundation of monarchical power, and in the last instance to endorse the hierarchic authority of the Pope, in America the core ideas of the School of Salamanca were addressed to defend the rights of self-government of the American subjects of the monarchy, initially the Indians, and afterwards mestizos and Creoles as well. This is the reason why Mexican republican humanism constituted a more adequate template for grounding the claims for independence than any other type of imported ideology. Besides this humanist tradition there was another political stream rooted in the pueblos or repúblicas de indios, with their participative forms of local government, that was called into question with the Bourbon reforms of the late eighteenth century, inspired by French absolutism. This native tradition was determinant for the massive participation of the Indians in the revolution. In spite of this antecedent, modern Mexican constitutionalism did not re-establish the autonomy of the Indian communities after independence. Autonomy for Indians communities is still one of the most important demands in twentyfirst century Mexico. The independence revolution that began in Mexico in 1810 was defeated in 1815. After Morelos was captured and executed, the insurgents dispersed and were reduced to local guerrilla movements, especially in the south, under Vicente Guerrero. These small groups never represented a real threat to Spanish rule in New Spain. Paradoxically, the consummation of independence in 1821 was not an outcome of the revolution or of insurrectional movements, but of an agreement – the Plan de Iguala – promoted by Agustín de Iturbide, 30

The significance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the formation and expansion of Mexican national identity has been sustained by many contemporary historians, philosophers, and literary critics such as O’Gorman, León Portilla, Lafay, Brading, Carlos Fuentes, Bolívar Echeverría, and de la Torre Villar among others. Octavio Paz, for instance, has signalled that ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe [is] an image that has contributed more to the idea and the consciousness of the Mexican nation than all the official myths that have been propagated by successive governments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’: Octavio Paz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe, p. 618.

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a high-ranking officer of the royal army, with the civil and religious authorities of the Viceroyalty. This move was prompted by the insurrection of the expeditionary troops stationed in Spain and ready to be shipped overseas, and it led to the re-establishment of the Cadiz Constitution in 1820. The Plan de Iguala proposed a monarchy instead of the democratic republic proclaimed by Morelos in the Constitution of Apatzingán, and offered the Crown of the new Mexican Empire to the King of Spain or to a prince of the Spanish royal family if he was ready to assume it in the American continent. Iturbide and the Viceroy Apodaca signed the agreements for independence in August 1821, and independence was proclaimed on the 27th of the following month. The Mexican Empire was thus born, but the Creole and republican ideologies that had triggered the movements for independence in 1808 and 1810 were dead.

chapter 4

Decorum and Liberty in the Spanish-American Revolutions of Independence José María Hernández1 If we are to believe the accepted narrative of Spanish-American Independence, what prompted the dissolution of the Spanish Empire in America was the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808.2 In Spain itself, resistance to the French, led by the various juntas (or government councils) organized to fight the occupying forces, began almost immediately. On the other side of the Atlantic, the colonial authorities formed their own juntas as soon as news of the invasion reached them, and they sought to assume control of their respective territories. Quarrels over precedence among the juntas on each side were seen as a serious instance of conflict with metropolitan authorities. For many years the Spanish Crown had sought to secure a system of colonial government that would prevent the rise of a challenging, autonomous political class composed of the so-called criollos or Creoles – American-born Spaniards. The political response from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, however, was initially more loyal than revolutionary. The question was, who would represent the king now that he had lost effective control of his dominions? This was indeed a more pressing issue than whether monarchy should be abandoned, as finally happened, in favour of the new liberal republics. For the most part, what I shall call, using a classical term, decorum, not independence, was the question of the hour. I Nowadays we do not talk much about decorum. Liberalism is usually associated with globalization, free markets, and minimal regulation. Decorum is seen as obsolete, as part of the ideological remains of a forgotten past. However, as the new century advances and mayor challenges arise, we have come to realize that our enduring moral dilemmas and liveliest political debates usually 1 The would like to thank Anthony Pagden for his valuable advice and his kind reading of an earlier draft of this chapter. 2 On the general narrative of the Spanish-American independences in English, see, e.g., J. Lynch (1986) The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton & Company). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004299689_006

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derive from the cultural patterns that lie at their base. Let me take a moment, then, to explain what I mean by decorum in this context as well as my purpose in trying to make sense of this term in relation to the idea of liberty. First, in the original classical sense, decorum meant that political actors had to adapt to the multiplicity of circumstances and expectations required by the occasion. The Greeks termed this sense of accommodation το πρεπον (tò prépon). The Romans, who exercised a more lasting influence over the ideologies of the Spanish-American revolutions of independence, called it decorum, in the sense of that thing which is fitting or appropriate to any given situation. Classical rhetoric remained a central element in political education throughout Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early modern period, only to disappear in the nineteenth century.3 Second, it was highly significant that the age that saw the decline of decorum also saw the rise of a historically unprecedented concern for the dignity of the individual. The contemporary languages of liberty carry the same classical demand that all political actors – individuals or states – behave according to certain standards of human dignity. In this context, however, decorum, following Cicero’s account in De Officiis, acquired a more rational, moralizing tone.4 Third, images of decorum were frequently used by states to strengthen their power, at both institutional and ideological levels. In this third sense decorum was seem as part of the state’s public actions rather than as propositional, as part of the activity of legitimation rather that the quality of legitimacy, to use a distinction once made by Max Weber.5 This also reminds us that most states in the past have been able to conduct acts of decorum, particularly in circumstances accompanied by acts of war, by claiming openly, but often falsely, a rational explanation for those actions. The fact that Spanish-American claims for liberty arose initially not from a public debate on political legitimacy but from a breakdown in decorum as 3 The standard ancient texts of classical rhetoric are Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the anonymous Rhetoric ad Herennium, Cicero’s De Inventione and De Oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. For a general outline of classical and modern rhetoric, see G. Kennedy (1980) Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press) and T.M. Conley (1990) Rhetoric in the European Tradition (New York: Longman). 4 M.T. Cicero (2005) De Officiis, bilingual edition Latin/English by Walter Miller (London: Loeb Classical Library), vol. 1, 14, 15. See also D. Kapust (2011) ‘Cicero on Decorum and the Morality of Rhetoric’, European Journal of Political Theory 10/, 92–112. 5 Weber’s famous typology of modes and sources of legitimacy forms part of his ‘sociology of domination’ (Herrschaftssoziologie) and is to be found in the monumental compilation Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922).

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legitimation, a failure in the chain of bureaucratic actions that states use to assert their political rights, invites a consideration of the differences between the different Atlantic revolutionary experiences and traditions. From this perspective, the officials of the Spanish Monarchy, nurtured in baroque traditions of government, were perceived more as cultural agents than as moral actors. Decorum was at the core of their activities of government, as Lucas Alamán pointed out in his account of the absurd ceremonies performed by the officials of Mexico City.6 Needless to say, although the political culture in Spanish America does not easily conform to a single pattern, the crisis across the Kingdoms of the Indies followed a common sequence. The paramount question, as we have seen, was about which institution was better prepared to represent the monarchy in absence of the king: the Viceroys, the Audiencias, the Cabildos, all of them, or none of them? Was it necessary to call a special congress to represent the king during the interregnum? If this has been the answer in Spain, why should it not be as well in the American kingdoms? The French revolutionary model was decidedly to be avoided. In fact, the Americans responded with a bid to reassert the old traditional ties. All over the north and south, the juntas, using the so-called ‘mask of Ferdinand vii’, responded by declaring their loyalty to the king.7 In New Spain, even the instigators of the Hidalgo revolt of 1810 felt obliged to proclaim insurrection in the name of the king, and, on the same grounds, refused to recognize the regency government in Spain. Putting aside differences among regions as disparate as Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina, it seems that Spanish-American revolutionary ideologies, in contrast to the Anglo-American, grew mostly out of the tenets of Catholic political theology.8 This is the narrative that has helped us to make

6 L. Alamán (1883–1885) Historia de México, con una noticia preliminar del sistema de gobierno que regía en 1808 y del estado en que se hallaba el país en el mismo año, 5 vols. (Mexico: Imprenta de Victoriano Agüeros), vol. 1, pp. 176–177. 7 The ‘mask of Ferdinand vii’ is a metaphorical figure used by some historians to suggest that the expressions of loyalty to the king by many insurgent juntas was an elaborate masquerade to conceal pro-independence purposes. See M.A. Landavazo Arias (2000) La máscara de Fernando vii. Discurso e imaginario monárquico en una época de crisis: Nueva España 1808– 1822 (México: Colmex). 8 Early examples of this may be found in M. Giménez Fernández (1947) Las doctrinas populistas en la independencia de Hispanoamérica (Madrid: csic); T. Halperin Donghi (1961) Tradición política española e ideología revolucionaria de Mayo (Buenos Aires: eudeba); C.O. Stoetzer (1982) The Scholastic Roots of the Spanish American Revolution (New York: Fordham University Press).

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sense of the very different trajectories followed by societies in the Spanish- and English-speaking worlds.9 II Spain and the Spanish-American peoples share a relatively peripheral position in the history of liberalism. Despite the fact that liberalism is usually associated with British and French experiences and ideas, the term liberal, as a political adjective, was coined in the discussions that led to the proclamation of the Spanish Constitution in the city of Cadiz on 19 March 1812.10 What in Spain is known as the War of Independence (for the English the Peninsular War) began on 2 May 1808. The royal family had been relocated in Valençay, in the south of France, where the newly proclaimed king, Ferdinand vii, and his father, Charles iv, had been forced to resign their claims to the Crown in favour of Napoleon, who in turn had placed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. 9

10

A second version of this narrative insists on the very different political and economic cultures that had grown from these two intellectual traditions. See R. Morse (1982) El espejo de próspero (Mexico: Siglo xxi), and R. Morse (1989) New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas (Baltimore, md: The Johns Hopkins University Press), esp. chapters 3 and 4, which he respectively calls ‘the prologue and epilogue to El espejo’, a book that has no English translation; see also C. Véliz (1994) The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America (Los Angeles: University of California Press); and H.J. Wiarda (2001) The Soul of Latin America: The Cultural and Political Tradition (London: Yale University Press). The conclusions that can be drawn from these comparisons are not the same. Richard Morse has enthusiastically discovered that ‘the tension between order and liberty stressed by English theorists such as Hobbes and Locke was less salient in the Ibero-American World, [where] a rather different polarity set the moral precepts for a hierocratic yet communitarian society against the moral requirements of state building’: Morse, New World Soundings, p. 4. This is taken somewhat sceptically in Véliz’s application of Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehogs and foxes to the English and Spanish-American cultures. And Wiarda, for his part, believes that ‘both these conceptions, the Lockean and the Aquinas-Suárezian, are currently in trouble, as are the societies founded on their principles; both may be out-dated, and both are facing crisis of legitimacy’: The Soul of Latin America, p. ix. On the role played by the protagonists and the press in identifying the group of liberals in Cadiz, and le travail of this new partisan definition in the rise of European liberalism, see J. Marichal (1995) ‘Liberal: su cambio semántico en el Cádiz de las Cortes’, in El secreto de España. Ensayos de historia intelectual y política (Madrid: Taurus) and J. Fernández Sebastián (2008) ‘Liberalismos nacientes en el Atlántico iberoamericano: liberal como concepto y como identidad política’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 45, 149–195.

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In Madrid some circles (the so-called afrancesados) were willing to accept the new arrangements, but the vast majority of the country was not. The revolutionary juntas set up to resist the invasion established a central governing body, first in Aranjuez and later in Seville and Cadiz. The debates on the first Spanish Constitution began on 24 September 1810, on the Isla de León (Cadiz), where the deputies had taken refuge from the French. The Count of Toreno, who was present in Cadiz, describes in Book 13 of his magnum opus, the Histoire du soulèvement, de la guerre et de la révolution d’Espagne (1835–38), the two issues that dominated the early sessions of the assembly: the representation of the Americas in the new Constitution and the freedom of the press. The American deputies raised the first issue, and Agustín de Argüelles the second. According to Toreno’s account: During this discussion and the previous one about America, the main political factions of which the Cortes was composed, emerged. These, as in every deliberative body, were mainly divided into those who favoured the reforms and those who did not. The public described the first, undifferentiatedly, with the adjective liberal, perhaps because they frequently used such phrases as liberal ideas or principles in their speeches. And, as often happens, the term was subsequently transferred from describing matters to describing people. The opposing party took longer to receive its own epithet, but finally a witty author classified them as servile. […] There was yet a third party in the Cortes which vacillated in its conduct and which tended to tip the balance of decision towards whichever side it favoured. This was the American party. Although they were generally in agreement with the liberals, they tended to depart from their company on some questions relating to the Americas [Ultramar], and whenever the question of giving more strength and vigour to Peninsular government arose.11 The Constitution established universal male suffrage, national sovereignty, and freedom of the press. It also supported land reform, free trade, and a monarchy with a severely constrained monarch. The Constitution was the outcome of the mid-eighteenth-century circulation of the ideas of the European

11

J.M. Queipo de Llano, Count of Toreno (1848) Historia del Levantamiento, Guerra y Revolución de España, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Madrid: J.M. Alegria), vol. 3, p. 163; my translation. The work was originally published in French.

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Enlightenment in Spain and across the elites of the Spanish Empire.12 But the Cadiz experiment ended abruptly with the restoration of absolutism by Ferdinand vii upon his return to Spain in 1814. When the king rejected the Constitution, the American Creoles turned to independence as their only alternative, having seen that equal representation for the American territories was neither in the mind of the absolutist king or on the agenda of liberal deputies.13 For the American party, decorum emerged again as the right and sole answer. However, in these new circumstances, this no longer meant loyalty but emancipation. For the Americans, decorum was no longer a self-legitimation practice within the bureaucratic machine of the Spanish monarchy; it was, instead, an appeal to the meaning of what is decent and proper in morality and reason in the Ciceronian sense. The wars that pitted Creoles against Spaniards lasted until 1825. By then, all the former Spanish-American colonies, with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico, had won their freedom. The intense and continuing conflict could only be justified and sustained for such a long period of time on the basis of a new rhetoric that made of war an absolute moral necessity. Three generations of scholarship have taught us just how far-reaching was the impact of the war on the relation between Spaniards and the settler populations in the Americas. Occurring, as it did, within the larger context of the Age of Democratic Revolutions,14 for the first generation, the ideology of the Spanish-American movements of independence was mainly inspired by the French and American revolutionary experiences. The second was more 12 13

14

J. Sarrailh (1954) L’Espagne éclairée de la seconde moitié du xviiie siècle (Paris: Impr. Nationale). Although the Americans were united through shared victimization and strategically paired with liberals or absolutists, depending on the occasion, as Toreno says, it has been reasonably argued that the assumption that they always acted in unison is misleading. See, e.g., M.T. Berruezo (1986) La participación americana en las Cortes de Cádiz, 1810–1814 (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales) and M. Chust (1999) La cuestión nacional americana en las Cortes de Cádiz, 1810–1814 (Valencia: Fundación Instituto Historia Social). For a general approach that addresses the search for autonomy within the Crown in the first place, and independence from it afterwards, within the more permanent divide ‘tradition vs. reform’, ‘liberalism vs. absolutism’, see J.A. Aguilar Rivera (2000) En pos de la quimera. El experimento constitucional Atlántico (México: fce-cide), and more in detail J.M. Portillo (2006) Crisis atlántica. Autonomía e independencia en la crisis de la monarquía hispánica (Madrid: Marcial Pons). R. Palmer (1959–61) The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Now reissued in one volume with a foreword by D. Armitage.

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interested in the Spanish soul of the revolutionaries themselves, and argued that although moved by international circumstances, the minds of the revolutionaries were conditioned by distinctly Spanish traditions. The third generation tried to be more specific. By focusing on the role played by the Constitution of Cadiz they set out to identify which particular characteristics in the ideology of these actors were French, English, or Spanish.15 All in all, in my view, this has so far been a debate concerned only with family resemblances. The critical question which all three address is to what extent does philosophy inform culture, and vice versa. This chapter aims to explore the connexions between philosophy and culture that made possible the transformation of the early bids for loyalty (and self-government under the Spanish monarchy) into the period of later wars not only for independence but also for the realization of a new political form. In doing so it emphasizes the way in which, in this particular context, decorum should be understood as a category in critical analysis, not just as a socio-cultural concept. III In 1992, François-Xavier Guerra published a book that has subsequently become a main reference point for the field. Drawing inspiration from scholars of the French Revolution, and seduced by Jacques Lacan’s familiar term l’imaginaire, his book Modernidad e independencias places great emphasis on the link between the fate of public culture and the fate of political philosophy. Guerra describes the emergence of modern legitimacy, the new legitimacy of the nation, and the sovereignty of the people as a gradual cultural transformation that took place in the sphere of political representation. This process occurred within what he calls ‘the social and political imaginary’ of the Hispanic World.16 For Guerra, ‘the problem of representation is, from the starting point of the peninsular uprising [against Napoleon], the central problem of the Hispanic revolution’.17 Initially, Spaniards and Creoles revitalized the 15

16 17

An example of these three generations in J. Ocampo (1999 [1972]) El proceso ideológico de la emancipación (Santafé de Bogotá: Planeta); D. Brading (1993) The First America. The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), and J.E. Rodríguez, ed. (2002) Revolución, independencia y las nuevas naciones de América (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre). F.X. Guerra (2009) Modernidad e independencias. Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro), p. 30. Ibid., p. 224; my translation.

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imperial doctrine that the colonies were in fact kingdoms in a personal union with the Crown. As Napoleon had destroyed that union, sovereignty had thus reverted to the people, that is to say, to the original body of the Spanish Monarchy. Guerra argued that this old body politic was represented in the theory of historical constitutionalism as a hierarchical aggregate of kingdoms, cities, corporations, and social estates (nobility, clergy, and the so-called third estate). The ceremonial practices of the Spanish Monarchy enhanced this conception. Officials and civil servants took part in these ceremonies according to their ranks. He claims, however, that the public mobilization against Napoleon brought to life a new theory of representation based on what Jürgen Habermas has famously called the ‘structural transformation of the public sphere’,18 a transformation which took place in a space of social communication configured by books, newspapers, coffee houses, political associations, and public demonstrations. Eventually, this transformation led to a redefinition of the people as a nation, understood not as a juxtaposition of estates, cities, or kingdoms but as a homogeneous space in which individuals and sovereign recognize each other through the modern electoral process. So far as I know, no one has yet challenged this narrative. However, its critical potential, important as it surely is, cannot be grasped simply by reconstructing the cultural imaginary of the Hispanic world. My aim here will be to show that it is not only culture that frames politics, as this type of historiography tends to assume. On the contrary, public philosophy, understood in the Kantian sense, as the exercise of the apparently most innocuous kind of freedom, ‘the freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters’,19 offers the only site for a real transformation of our political cultures. A distinction between the symbolic production and the imaginary re-production of societies may be of some help at this point. This distinction is a complex one, and I have no space to examine it in any detail; but it is worth pointing out that Max Weber, as mentioned above, made a crucial advance by establishing a key contrast between the quality of legitimacy, and the activity of legitimation within the state. Legitimacy, according to Weber, points to the philosophical connection between power and government; legitimation points instead to the activities of government in general, and in particular to those inherent in government

18

19

J. Habermas (1992 [1965]) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press). I. Kant (1970 [1784]) An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 55.

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officials. There is a nice account of this distinction in Rodney Barker’s Legitimating Identities: Weber’s definition of the state as ‘the human community which (successfully) claims the monopoly of legitimate coercion’ has been quoted frequently, and its significance as frequently not noticed. He was not arguing that governments needed some quality called ‘legitimacy’ to survive, nor that one of the things that governments sought was such a resource. His focus was upon an activity, legitimation or the making of claims to authority, which was one of the defining characteristics of all government (....) Weber is talking not about some abstract quality, ‘legitimacy’, but about an observable activity in which governments characteristically engage, the making of claims. What characterises government, in other words, is not the possession of legitimacy, but the activity of legitimation.20 In Weber’s account the plurality of legitimacies becomes apparent within the general framework of a value-free description of social patterns, and is more important than the distinction between legitimate versus illegitimate forms of government. In this view legitimate is not opposed to illegitimate domination. It may be recalled that since the early Middle Ages the concept of usurpation has always accompanied the concept of legitimate government and has helped to clarify it. This is something still apparent in Benjamin Constant’s political writings, which have been claimed as a decisive influence on Spanish-American Creoles. Oddly enough, Weber did not discuss the sense of successful legitimacy but instead concentrated his efforts on pure philosophical types of legitimate domination: the traditional, the charismatic and the rational. The real divide, however, is obviously between successful and unsuccessful legitimacies. That would explain the particular stress placed on the desire for prestige, fame and glory that drives all political organizations, which Weber typically identifies when he writes that ‘in no instance does dominion voluntarily limit itself to the appeal to material or affectual or ideal motives as a basis for its continuance. In addition, every such system attempts to establish and cultivate the belief in its legitimacy’.21

20 21

R. Barker (2001) Legitimating Identities. The Self-Presentations of Rulers and Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 13–14. M. Weber (1978 [1922]) Economy and Society, trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (London: University of California Press), p. 213.

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Although Weber himself did not pursue this last insight, the schools of social history and symbolic anthropology, in the work of such writers as Norbert Elias and Clifford Geertz, have kept alive an interest in the role of collective behaviour in the definition of agency and consent.22 In our case, this is the enduring pursuit of glory with which states habitually seek to engage their subjects’ attention. Some historical precedents will certainly help to show how some of these activities pose a real challenge to the now divided understanding of liberty and decorum, while at the same time giving us the opportunity to go one step further by illustrating the many connexions between symbolic and imaginary, philosophical and cultural orders, before we return to our main theme. IV The diplomatic relations between Spain, England, and France from the latter part of the fifteenth to the end of seventeenth century, contain overwhelming evidence that the symbolic taking of possession was regarded as the crux of legitimacy in the acquisition of sovereignty.23 This fact is representative of the great significance attached by discoverers and their sovereigns to the formal (imaginary) acquisition of newfound lands. The so-called rituals of possession (planting crosses, marching in procession, or collecting soil, etc.),24 though apparently directed towards the natives, acquired their full symbolic meaning only in relation to other European powers. Thus, the social and political imaginary – the stock of images, along with the means of producing and circulating them – has to be differentiated from other, non-mimetic realities. This is the symbolic reality of power and subordination, the substance of every political philosophy. I do not wish to deny the importance of the social and political imaginary in the rise of a new legitimacy. In combination with other assumptions, it could be used to describe the transition from epic poems and notarial records to newspapers and modern elections. In Guerra’s study, this means 22

23 24

See, e.g., C. Geertz (1980) Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press) and N. Elias (2000 [1969]) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jepbcott with some notes and corrections of the author (Oxford: Blackwell). A. Keller, O. Lissitzyn and R. Mann (1938) Creation of Rights of Sovereignty through Symbolic Acts, 1400–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press). See P. Seed (1995) Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492– 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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that representations are to be considered, as Stephen Greenblatt put it once so elegantly, ‘not only as products but producers, capable of decisively altering the very forces that brought them into being’.25 In our context, the Iberian geographical discoveries and their representations brought a whole new dimension to our intellectual world. Before Christopher Columbus became the first European to reach the Lucayan Archipelago in 1492, distant territories were perceived as potentially lucrative markets for commodities that the Europeans lacked, and for which the Muslim rulers, who were seen as their perpetual enemies, had created an eager demand. In the Mediterranean, the Moors were thought to inhabit terrae irredenta, lands that needed to be restored to legitimate Christian rulers, whereas the territories in the rest of Africa were terrae nullius, meaning not that these were uninhabited lands, but that they were lands inhabited by peoples without a decent civility or polis.26 At first glance it was obvious that the Americas were not, formally speaking, terrae irredenta, since they could never have formed part of the Roman Empire. However, as the Conquest advanced from the Caribbean to the mighty empires of Mexico and Peru, it became clear that these lands were not terrae nullius either, because their inhabitants clearly did have forms of civil government. Therefore, a process of global identification began in order to reclassify them. This is the process that prompted Hernán Cortés to call, and therefore represent, the Mexican temples as mosques, which made them into kingdoms in need of redemption, and thus, if only by extension, terrae irredenta. Now, let me move from the cultural to the philosophical dimension, although these are, of course, interconnected. As we have seen, codes of decorum were applied not only to etiquette, lavish costumes, and all kinds of cultural events, but also to protocols for declaring war and the acquisition of territory by force. This means that what some political philosophers, following John Rawls,27 call now ‘the law of peoples’ came for the first time into force through a short of deterritorialization of the old Roman ius gentium, ‘the law of nations’. This was first applied to the American situation in the sixteenth 25 26

27

S. Greenblatt (1991) Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 6. See, J. Hart (2008) Empires and Colonies (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 23–26, and J. Simsarian (1938) ‘The Acquisition of Legal Title to Terra Nullius’, Political Science Quarterly 53/1, 111–128; and more recently A. Fitzmaurice (2007) ‘The Genealogy of Terra nullius’, Australian Historical Studies 38, 1–15. J. Rawls (1999) The Law of Peoples (Boston: Harvard University Press).

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century by a Dominican friar, Francisco de Vitoria, and then expanded by his followers, the so-called School of Salamanca – the last of whom was the Jesuit Francisco Suárez. All were theologians and all, broadly speaking, adapted the Thomist/Stoic notion of koinos nomous or ‘common laws’ – those laws that, while not being written, seem to be recognized by all, as Aristotle defined them – in order to make philosophical (secular) criteria to serve cultural (religious) ends. Victoria justified the Spanish evangelical mission in America in terms of both a supposedly natural right of access of the peoples to all parts of the globe and a similar duty to the protection of the innocent. This new international code based on Christian natural law has, therefore, everything to do with a philosophical notion (humanity) that remains crucial to our political culture. In a sense, which I cannot elaborate here, we are all the beneficiaries of a synthesis between Aristotle and Cicero operated by sixteenth-century Spanish philosophy that most people are largely unfamiliar with. The Christian law of nations was held to be an instrument for the resolution of conflicts not only among Christian states but also between Christian and non-Christian states. Within the new political culture, the European powers could understand each other in the future, even though they might currently disagree on the practical conditions for legitimately creating a trans-global authority. This becomes crystal clear in the crucial issue of the papal grants of imperial jurisdiction – the so-called Bulls of Donation – which Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand received from Pope Alexander vi in 1493, and which were an essential instrument of the old Christian political culture. The most relevant of these documents, which remained a key part of the social and political imaginary of the Hispanic World for almost three centuries, drew a symbolic line in the Atlantic, and granted dominium jurisdictionis over all the territories in the Western part to the Spanish Crown on condition that missionary work among their inhabitants was carried out at their monarch’s own expense.28 We may recall that all the territories to the East had already been ceded to the Portuguese by Pope Nicholas v in 1455. Papal donations played a controversial role in settling rivalries among Christian powers, not to mention the bitter reaction of other monarchs to the Spanish-Portuguese decision to treat the globe as theirs alone. 28

The bull Inter caetera, issued on 4 May 1493, drew the line 100 leagues west of Azores or Cape Verde Islands. One year later Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, which displaced the line, the Tordesillas line, as it came to be called, 370 leagues west of Cape Verde, approximately along longitude 46° 30’ W. These arrangements would be completed by the Treaty of Saragossa, which established of a counter-meridian in the Pacific Ocean in 1529.

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The point I want to make here is that the act of dividing the vast and yet unknown world between Spain and Portugal on the basis of symbolic possession, and on an idea of legitimacy more imaginary than real, was indissolubly associated with the old Christian political culture. But the question of the legitimacy of the use of force, if the native peoples were to offer some sort of resistance to the missionary objectives set out in the papal bulls, was a question for the new Christian political culture, for the new international code based on Christian natural law. This was the main question addressed in the Valladolid Debate of 1550–51, where the imperial Latin chronicler Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and a Dominican bishop, fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, met in a disputatio about the rights of the Spanish Crown across the Atlantic. Las Casas challenged Sepúlveda’s claim that violence against the Native Americans was justified because of their grossly indecorous behaviour. Sepúlveda favoured the use of military force – when it proved to be necessary – in order to accomplish the mission of the Spanish Crown in the New World. Las Casas, by contrast, insisted that the use of any kind of violence would destroy the nature of the papal mission itself. The dispute, held in two sessions before the Council of the Indies (the supreme legislative body for the newly found territories), has been presented as the archetypical clash of two positions: imperialist versus visionary Christian, humanism versus scholasticism, or colonial party versus Indian party. But Sepúlveda and Las Casas had too many principles in common for this to be a satisfactory account for their disagreement. Both, for instance, shared the same Stoic–Christian principles of a universal natural law and both accepted the authority of the papal bulls (which the School of Salamanca did not). What they disagreed on was rather the application of these principles. Sepúlveda and Las Casas had a real controversy because they had a common political culture, old and new, on which to disagree. They shared a political culture, but they disagreed in their public philosophies. In my view, this is the key point in what may be termed the foundational debate in Spanish-American intellectual history, a debate that, as we shall see, was to play a crucial role in the ideologies of independence.29 But, before going any further, let me say something else on the details of this debate. Sepúlveda wrote two main dialogues in Latin, both of which began with a brief survey of the traditional causes for a just war. His real intention was to introduce a new category of just war: the war against those retarded peoples who refuse the 29

Las Casas published the proceedings of the second session, and the summary of the first made by Domingo de Soto, in Aquí se contiene una disputa o controversia [1552], B. de Las Casas (1992) Obras completas (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 14 vols.), vol. x, p. 103–193.

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imperium of wiser, prudent peoples. This new category has classic precedents in Cicero and Augustine. But his main source was Aristotle’s account of the natural slave.30 According to Aristotle, the natural slave is a human being without control over his passions, a subject who may have reason but no deliberation.31 This human being can only participate in the polis through a third person, a proper person: namely his master. In Sepúlveda’s Aristotelian interpretation, slavery by nature is induced, inbred over many generations as a second nature. In other words, it’s not the absence of a common humanity but the corruption of the social and political institutions that justified the imperium of civilized, humanitarian peoples (gentes humanitiores) over retarded, barbarian peoples.32 Las Casas perfectly understood that Sepúlveda’s dialogues were an exercise in public philosophy directed against the Scholastics and their monopoly of such figures as Aristotle, and he decided to counterattack with the same weapon. Firstly, the extremely dubious Aristotelian link between barbarism and ugliness, on which some humanists placed so much emphasis, is used by Las Casas to prove that it is precisely the beauty, sincerity, and pacific character of the Indians which constitutes the best available indication of their natural access to practical reason. By contrast, it is we, the Europeans, who are violent, greedy, and cruel. In other words, he inverted the formal position of barbarians and civilized peoples. He also reverses the humanists’ commitment to rhetorical decorum which Sepúlveda had employed as grounds for his appeal to action (contentio). Instead he appeals to decorum in order to arrive at a true political association. The Ciceronian definition of ‘polite conversation’ (sermo), the kind of speech ‘to be found in social groups, in philosophical discussions, 30 Aristotle, Politics (1254b–1259b). 31 Aristotle, Nic. Ethics (1142b). 32 Sepúlveda, who was also a reputable Greek scholar and the author of a respected Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politics, puts the argument forward in his first dialogue, De convenientia militaris disciplinae cum Christiana religiones dialogus, qui inscribitus DEMOCRATES (1535), but he doesn’t fully develop it until 1550, when he wrote Democrates secundus. See I.G. Sepulveda (1780 [1535]) Democrates, in Opera, ed. Real Academia de la Historia, 4 vols. (Matriti), vol. 4, p. 237, trans. from the Latin by Angel Losada in J.G. Sepúlveda (1963) Tratados Políticos de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos), p. 153. Cf. J.G. Sepúlveda (1984 [c.1549]) Democrates Segundo, bilingual edition Latin/Spanish by Angel Losada, 2nd ed. (Madrid: csic), pp. 57–65. In general I have followed the translations of Losada, although for Democrates primus, in particular, I have checked Losada’s translation against the Latin text edited by the Real Academia de la Historia in 1780, where Sepúlveda uses the unusual Latin expression gentes humanitiores.

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and among gatherings of friends’, provides the basis for Las Casas’ política conversación.33 It was also the rhetoric that Erasmus recommended for preaching. Decorum in preaching demands patient accommodation to listeners, using moderation as the most effective form of persuasion.34 Furthermore, the fact that decorum, in the Ciceronian sense, could mean not only the most suitable or proper expression in public discourse, but also a specific conformity to what is decent or proper in morality and reason, indicates that public philosophy has to achieve a unity of divine law, natural law, and civil law, and that any political argument has to be made fully congruent with that unity.35 On the whole, these were the three basic lines of Las Casas’ public philosophy: the inversion of the Aristotelian distinction between barbarians and civilized peoples, the Ciceronian conversation of humanity as the only source of legitimacy for the Spanish mission in the New World, and a standard Thomist view on theological unity that was intended to inform all public disputes and show a new radical face. He sought to develop these lines in his prolific writings, petitions, and histories. These, however, remained unpublished for many years. The text which was best known to his contemporaries, and indeed still is to us, was the most bitter and virulent face of his public philosophy: the Brevissima relación (A Very Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies), the incendiary little book that he published in Seville in 1552 without a royal licence, although respectfully dedicated to the new Spanish regent, Philip ii. With this little book Las Casas advanced the foundations of what would later become the Enlightenment’s critical discourse on imperialism. The book became a perennial bestseller, particularly among Protestant circles, with forty-three translations (Dutch, Italian, French, German, English, and Latin) between 1578 and 1648. In it Las Casas speaks always in the first person (‘I saw it with my own eyes’, ‘we, the Christians’), but for hundreds of years most of 33 34

35

M.T. Cicero (2005) De officiis, vol. 1, pp. 37, 132. Cf. B. de Las Casas (1992) Apologética historia, in Obras completas, 14 vols. (Madrid: Alianza), vol. 7, pp. 489, 529. On Erasmus’s decorum of preaching and its general influence in early European thought, see G. Remer (1996) Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press). Las Casas fully applies the Erasmian ideal of decorum of preaching to the American decent peaceful peoples in De unico vocationis modo. See Las Casas, Obras completas, vol. 2. Las Casas’ lengthy discussion of Sepúlveda’s thesis is to be found in his Latin Apologia, in Obras completas, vol. 9, which is basically a digression on universal jurisdiction – in divine law, natural law, and civil law – which offers a first typology, at the beginning, of the barbarians so as to reach, at the end, the conclusion that the barbarians described by Aristotle, the men without government, civilization or friendship, the salves of their own passions, cannot be the American Indians.

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these translations rendered Las Casas’ cristianos as Spaniards, paving the way for the claim of moral superiority on the part of the Dutch, French, and English empires, which ironically reproduced the Spanish self-legitimation process against the Indians/Muslims, as in Cortés’ displacement of peoples and places.36 V Las Casas’ critique has a prominent place in the ideology of the SpanishAmerican Independence. The early Proclama a los pueblos del continente colombiano, alias Hispano-América (1801) by Francisco de Miranda echoes Las Casas’ denunciation through the work of the abbé Raynal, Historie des deux Indes (1780), large parts of which were written by Diderot. He also became a symbol of tolerance and humanity in Voltaire’s play Alzire, ou les Américains. The same deliberate symbolic associations are to be found in Juan Pablo de Viscardo y Guzmán’s Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains (1799), published by Miranda just before his own Proclama, which was soon translated into English and Spanish and circulated widely in cheap printed editions throughout the early 1800s.37 The Creole patriots in London and their British allies (James Mill and Jeremy Bentham) cannily framed their mission in South America after the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula as one of loyal resistance against French expansion and usurpation. But with the return of Ferdinand vii the argument went back to its original request for assistance against Spanish despotism. The Mexicans Francisco Javier Clavijero and Servando Teresa de Mier went straight to the source: Las Casas appears in both cases as the key figure in the war against Spanish tyranny and the restitution of Indian legitimacy. In the last chapters of his Historia de la revolución de la Nueva España, Mier was 36

37

B. de Las Casas (1992 [1552]) A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans. N. Griffin with an introduction by A. Pagden (London: Penguin). See also C. Hodgkins (1999) ‘The Uses of Atrocity: Satanic Spaniards and Hispanic Satans from Las Casas to Milton’, Mediterranean Studies 8, 175–192; E.S. Bumas (2000) ‘The Cannibal Butcher Shop. Protestant Uses of Las Casas’s Brevísima relación in Europe and the American Colonies’, Early American Literature 35/2, 109–136, and C. Varela (2003) ‘Tolerancia, denuncia y utilización política de La Brevísima’, in Various Authors (2003) La tolerancia en la historia (Valladolid: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valladolid), pp. 95–121. J.P. Viscardo y Guzmán (1998 [1789]), Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains, facsimile edition in Obra Completa, 2 vols. (Lima: Ediciones del Congreso del Perú), vol. 2, and trans. in W. Burke (1808) Additional Reasons for our immediately emancipating Spanish America (London: J. Ridgway).

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anxious to stress this idea of the restitution of the old Indian Empire, or Anáhuac.38 The idea was also present in José María Morelos and Carlos María de Bustamante.39 Las Casas’ public philosophy became part of the new political culture of the Spanish-American rebels. Las Casas himself, who always uses the Christian utilitas to define the aim of a true political association, would never have condoned a reversion to pagan legitimacy, even though he argued for the restitution of native jurisdiction. He was almost certainly thinking instead of a reversion to an ideal conversation, where missionary work could properly and more effectively be done. Sepúlveda, always more realistic in the ‘affairs of Indies’, and who uses the Latin word commoditas to describe the bond of human association, eventually reaches the conclusion that, in the present circumstances, the Spanish Empire in America was a mixed empire, civilis and erilis, that is to say the convenient mixture of dominion over freemen for their own good and over servants for the benefit of the master. ‘In due time’, he wrote in his last work on political philosophy, De regno et rege institutione, ‘they will be able to govern their lives on their own’, thus in effect bringing to an end three hundred years of European colonialism.40 If the Hispanic interregnum had lasted a few more years, the ideas of the circle gathering at Miranda’s residence in London, and in particular the ideas of its most talented writer and publicist, a man who called himself ‘William Burke’ (very likely James Mill),41 would probably have made unnecessary the new connexion of decorums that were behind the ideas of war against Spanish tyranny as the noblest of all purposes and the pursuit of a new civilized world. This was clearly stated by Burke/Mill, as meaning that 38

S.T. de Mier (1990 [1813]) Historia de la revolución de Nueva España (Paris: Publications La Sorbonne). 39 C.M. de Bustamante (1986 [1821]) Cuadro histórico de la Revolución mexicana comenzada el 15 de septiembre de 1810 por el ciudadano Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, cura del pueblo de los Dolores, en el obispado de Michoacán, 5 vols. (Mexico: f.c.e.). 40 Sepúlveda, Tratados Políticos, p. 33; see also his words in Democractes secundo (p. 120): ‘Nam temporis progressu cum ijdem fuerint humaniores facti, et probitas morum, ac Religio Christiana cum imperio confirmata, liberius erunt, liberaliusque tractandi, mihi enim magnopere placet, semperque placuit magnorum Philosophorum, qui de Repubica conscripserunt, praeceptum, ut etiam in optime instituta Respublica non solum prudentium proborunque virorum, sed etiam multitudinis ration in publicis commodis, et honoribus communicandis habeatur’. 41 Mario Rodríguez has reasonably established Mill’s authorship of these writings. See M. Rodríguez (1994) ‘William Burke’ and Francisco de Miranda. The Word and the Deed in Spanish America’s Emancipation (London and Lanham: University Press of America), pp. 123–153.

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To the credit of the age in which we live, other notions of honour and policy now prevail: and that as justice is almost universally recognized by the civilized world, to be true foundation of honour between nations; so the deepest stain national honour can receive, is from a deliberate breach of the principle which supports it.42 Allegedly, this new program would replace tyranny by communication, conquest by emancipation, taxation by commerce, and dogmatism by Enlightenment. Interest and honour are the two main related arguments against any claim of dominion over the Spanish colonies that Jeremy Bentham put forward during the Liberal triennium (1820–23), which followed the successful mutiny by Rafael del Riego and other army officers in Spain demanding the restoration of the Constitution of Cadiz. Bentham’s first argument was economic: the colonies, far from producing any financial benefit, had only resulted in a great loss for the Spanish economy as a whole. The second, however, was again concerned with the cultural implications of holding or relinquishing the colonies. Bentham argues that only relinquishment would be truly honourable, and the peace and prosperity that would inevitably follow would provide the Spaniards with a ‘glory, of the newest character and purest kind: the glory of political continence; glory of self-mastery and self-sacrifice’.43 Rid yourselves of Ultramaria, the manuscript which Bentham wrote after the victory of the liberal cause, remained unpublished until the twentieth century; firstly because by the time he had completed it most of the Spanish Empire was effectively independent, and secondly because the liberal regime in Spain itself had been crushed in 1823 by a French intervention supported by most of the European monarchies. Notwithstanding, a similar pursuit of this ‘new kind of glory’ was manifest from the very title of the first of Mill’s pamphlets, South America Independence: or the Emancipation of South America, the Glory and Interest of England (1807), which drew a sharp contrast between the principles of conquest and emancipation, the latter of which was, he declared, ‘actuated by feeling of a more dignified policy, from any ignoble motives of enmity or present gain, into an injurious and inglorious opposition, to the best rights and interest of humanity’.44 Furthermore, in the Additional Reasons for our immediately 42 43

44

Additional Reasons, p. 25. J. Bentham (1995 [1822]) Rid yourselves of Ultramaria, in Colonies, Commerce, and Constitutional Law, ed. Philip Schofield, in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 124–125. W. Burke (1807) South American Independence: or, the Emancipation of South America, the Glory and Interest of England (London: J. Ridgway), Preface, s.n.

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emancipating Spanish America, published as a supplement to the first pamphlet, Mill insists on the need to ‘adopt a line of policy commensurate with the new circumstances’. The most relevant of these new circumstances was that ‘Bonaparte met no opposition from the people whose countries he overran, […] who seem to view the fall of their old governments, with the same apathy they would do that of their old houses, when in the certain prospect of having them speedily replaced by new and more commodious ones’.45 In other words Bonaparte, the modern conqueror, had artfully combined his conquests with the ‘all-powerful principle of meliorating the condition of the people’, and by diffusing civilization and happiness over the globe. The universal cause of independence and melioration would be better served in America, however, ‘by creating new, independent, and powerful states, beyond the reach of our enemy, [gaining] so many valuable and lasting friends; and through them, raised in the Western World, and influence, which will serve to hold in equilibrium, the great and excessive power acquired by our rival in the Eastern’.46 VI The conception of the Western hemisphere as a political idea was indeed an ingenious invention, and it was Simón Bolívar, one of the principal actors in the process of dissolution of the Spanish Empire, who was ultimately responsible for attempting to carry out this dream along with the connections between glory and independence, decorum and liberty, in his Reply of a South American to a Gentleman of this Island, generally known as The Jamaica Letter (1815). In this, the most significant and widely known of his writings, Bolívar draws his initial inspiration from Las Casas, ‘that friend of humanity, who so fervently and forcefully denounced before his own government and contemporaries the most depraved acts of that bloodfest’.47 In the first half of the letter, Bolívar’s public discourse is based on just war against the unnatural stepmother Spain, who is held responsible both for the many crimes and tortures suffered from the time of the discovery until the present. In the second it is grounded on the incapacity for government of those – the Creoles – who have gained sovereignty over the American colonies. It is worth noting that 45 46 47

Additional Reasons, pp. 10–11. Ibid, pp. 12 and 18. The Jamaica Letter [1815], in S. Bolívar (2003) El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar, trans. Frederick H. Fornoff with an introduction and notes by David Bushnell (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 13.

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this twofold argument is in no way concerned with the restitution of the legitimacy of an old Inca Empire (as in Mier’s Anahuac or Miranda’s monarquía incaica). On the contrary, his main purpose is to define a new reality. In my opinion, this is the image of our situation. We are a small segment of the human race; we possess a world apart, surrounded by vast seas, new in almost every art and science, though to some extent old in the practices of civil society. I consider the current state of America similar to the circumstances surrounding the fall of the Roman Empire, when each breakaway province formed a political system suitable to its interests and situation [… and] those dispersed members re-established their former nations with the changes demanded by circumstances or events, while we, who preserve only the barest vestige of what we were formerly, and who are moreover neither Indians nor Europeans, but a race between the legitimate owners of the land and the Spanish usurpers -– in short, being Americans by birth and endowed with rights from Europe – find ourselves forced to defend these rights against the natives while maintaining our position in the land against the intrusion of the invaders. Thus, we find ourselves in the most extraordinary and complicated situation.48 According to Bolívar, it is only possible to handle this situation because the New World, that world apart, is to some extent an Old World as far as the manners of civil society are concerned. Bolivar’s reply to the letter which a gentleman from Jamaica had send him, was essentially that ‘the lot of a people who strive to recover the rights with which the Creator, or nature, has endowed them’, has to be based on a restoration of political decorum. With the failure of the Constitution of Cadiz and the return of absolutism, the argument set out in Viscardo’s Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains became pertinent once again, and with it praise for the Castilian Cortes, ‘which represented the different classes of the nation, and were to be the depositaries and guardians of the rights of the people’, that barrière si solide to which the Aragonese Constitution had ‘added the celebrated magistrate named El Justicia, to protect them against every violence and oppression, as well as to repress the abusive power of the kings’.49 Viscardo placed much of his emphasis on the fact that ‘every law which opposes itself to the general good of those for whom it is made, is an act of tyranny; and that to exact observance to it, is enacting slavery; that a law which would directly tend to undermine the foundation of the national prosperity, 48 49

Ibid, p. 18. Letter to the Spanish Americans [1799], in W. Burke (1808), Additional Reasons, p. 109.

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would be monstrous beyond expression’.50 In The Jamaica Letter, Bolívar uses much the same rhetoric about America being cut off from every channel of conversation with other nations, and of its final role in reconciling ‘the extremities of the earth’ and bringing about ‘the happiness of all mankind’ inspired by Las Casas. As we have seen, Las Casas had claimed that political work should be done through patient and persuasive conversation; but Bolívar, an enemy of ‘tolerant systems’ from his early Manifest of Cartagena (1812), looked for the solution to the plight of Spanish America in a public philosophy that was reliant on contentio rather than on sermo. Oddly enough, then, and contrary to Las Casas’ expectations, it is not difficult to recognize in Bolívar the broad outline of Sepúlveda’s public philosophy. Extraordinary situations demand extraordinary measures. In the present circumstances, conversation is not enough. A perfect representative regime is only perfect, in Bolívar’s own words, for a ‘Republic of Saints’. The Constitutions of the new American republics required additional mechanisms for the representation of the general will: a strong executive, a lifetime senate, a republican magistracy, a division of active and passive citizens, love of the country, and last but not least, pursuit of glory as the surest means of regeneration. These are the remedies against degradation which he set out in detail in his Address to the Congress of Angostura (1819). But the New World predicament, so to speak, had already been set out with great clarity in The Jamaica Letter four years earlier. The posture of those who dwell in the American hemisphere has been over the centuries purely passive. We were at a level even lower than servitude, and by that very reason hindered from elevating ourselves to the enjoyment of freedom. Allow me to offer these considerations to place the question in context. Slave states are identified as such by virtue of their constitution or the abuse of it. People are slaves when the government, by its essence or through its vices, tramples and usurps the rights of the citizen or subject. Applying these principles, we will find that America was not only deprived of its freedom but deprived as well of the opportunity to practice its own active tyranny.51 Again, we find reverberations of Sepúlveda’s public philosophy regarding tyranny and mixed empire. Sepúlveda had established that it was possible to reduce or suppress the sovereignty of a state on account of the barbarism of its 50 51

Ibid, p. 99. The Jamaica Letter, p. 19.

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people. Europeans were entitled to conquer the Native Americans because of the superiority of their civilization. Retarded peoples were bound to accept, for their own good, a mixed empire, civilis and erilis, which in due course would allow them to govern their own lives. Of course, Sepúlveda meant the Indians, but Bolívar now has in mind the American Creoles. In other words, Bolívar is saying that the Spanish Empire in America never honoured its pledge. ‘From the beginning’, he wrote, ‘we were plagued by a practice that in addition to depriving us of the rights to which we were entitled left us in a kind of permanent infancy with respect to public affairs.’ In sum, Americans were cut off and, as it were, removed from the world in relation to the science of government and administration of the state. They were kept in a state of permanent infancy. ‘This is why I said’, concludes Bolívar, ‘that we were deprived of an active tyranny, since we were not allowed to practice those functions.’52 In Bolívar’s analysis, at the time of the French invasion of the Peninsula, America had not been equipped to take control of its own destiny, which meant in effect that it was not yet prepared to secede from the mother country. Spanish-Americans were dominated by the vices which all subjects inevitably acquire under the yoke of barbarism: ferocity, ambition, and greed. Facing war and anarchy for want of a just and legitimate government, these vices had thrown them into the chaos of revolution. The Spanish-Americans had made efforts to obtain liberal, even perfect, institutions and civil societies founded on the Enlightenment principles of justice, liberty, and equality. ‘But’, and here comes Bolívar’s final question, ‘are we capable of maintaining in proper balance the difficult undertaking of a republic? Is it conceivable that a newly liberated people can be launched into the sphere of freedom without their wings 52

Ibid. This comes close to Miranda’s final point as he proceeds to undermine the Spanish title to Empire in America. The Venezuelan Scipio Africanus, in the words quoted by Mill in his Additional Reasons from a contemporary admirer (William Thomson’s Military Memoirs), sought to prove in his analysis that the right to secede was based not on the well-known ‘original illegitimacy’ but on the absence of de facto legitimacy, a legitimacy in practice, which indeed depends on the self-legitimation process of the Spanish Empire, as we have seen throughout this chapter. Miranda writes: ‘Si a lo menos os hubieran dado leyes fundamentales sobre la justicia, conformes tanto a vuestro carácter como a vuestros intereses, habríais podido olvidar sus antiguas usurpaciones en favor de su gobierno saludable’: Proclama a los pueblos del continente colombiano, alias Hispano-América [1801], in F. de Miranda (2004) Francisco Miranda y la modernidad en América, ed. and introd. M. Zeuske (Aranjuez: Ediciones Doce Calles/Fundación Mapfre-Tavera), p. 168. In contrast with Bolívar, Miranda never made the point of the alleged incapacity of the American Creoles; he always wanted the Americans to organize and govern themselves through a representative, liberal regimen.

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disintegrating and hurling them into the abyss, like Icarus?’53 Bolívar’s answer to this question revolves around the same pattern of decorum that we have seen in Sepulveda: contentio. He calls for action among his ranks, not for patient conversation. This is the old republicanism, not the new – to use a distinction that would later be created by Benjamin Constant reflecting on the notion of political liberty.54 The very idea of unity of action runs, like an obsession, throughout all his discourses and proclamations, which seek to achieve the difficult task of regeneration. He looked with interest, but also with amused suspicion at the intense devotion to the cause of liberty generated by the Mexicans’ use of sacred oratory,55 but his own search for unity is based on a different model: the Rousseaunian vision of old republics, capable of cultivating the virtues and talents that lead to true glory. ‘I will tell you exactly’, he concludes, ‘what we need to expel the Spaniards and form a free government: unity, of course; however, such unity will not come to us through divine miracle but through sensible action and well-organized effort.’56 VI Bolivar’s dreams turned sour as they confronted circumstances on the ground, and his rhetoric of ‘sensible actions’ and ‘well-organized efforts’ changed rapidly into a bleak prophecy of war and ruin.57 As we know, the search for 53 54

55

56 57

The Jamaica Letter, p. 23. B. Constant (1998 [1819]) The Liberty of the Ancients compared with the Liberty of the Moderns, in Political Writings, trans. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). On sacred oratory in particular, with special attention to the role played by political sermons both in the Hispanic culture generally, and in Mexican independence in particular, see A. Rivera (1963 [1884, 1887]) Principios críticos sobre el virreinato de la Nueva España y sobre la revolución de independencia (Mexico: Comisión Nacional para las Conmemo­ raciones Cívicas de 1963) and, more recently, C. Herrejón Peredo (2003) Del sermón al discurso cívico: México, 1760–1834 (Mexico: El Colegio de México). Ibid, p. 29. Especially when he wrote to General Flores, who would become the first president of Ecuador, ‘(1) America is ungovernable, for us; (2) Those who serve revolution plough the sea; (3) The only thing one can do in America is emigrate; (4) This country will fall inevitably into the hands of tyrants so insignificant they will be almost imperceptible, of all colours and races; (5) Once we’ve been eaten alive by every crime and extinguished by ferocity, the Europeans won’t even bother to conquer us; (6) If it were possible for any part of the world to revert to primitive chaos, it would be America in her last hour’: in Letter to General Flores [1830], in Bolívar, El Libertador. Writings of Simón Bolívar, p. 146.

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emancipation turned into a series of disputes between the various would-be liberators in which each side accused the other of atrocities. Indeed, both decency and horror, like the capacity for representing them, seem to have been distributed fairly evenly. The future of the new nations, destroyed by the unbridled forces of war, was made to depend on whether or not their citizens were compelled by antagonism as final necessities, or whether they were able to eliminate them, or at least to transform them by political methods. The independence in New Granada was brought about by revolutionaries, and in Mexico by former loyalists who declared independence from the Spanish Empire in the name of a new symbolic Mexican Empire. In spite of their very different trajectories, there was a common ground which allowed both of them to turn against the Spaniards, and this common ground has certainly something to do with philosophical legitimacy, but a great deal more with the cultural process of legitimation. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, Domingo Sarmiento, Argentine intellectual and the seventh president of the Republic, made clear in his Facundo (1845) – a critique of the caudillo rule that followed the wars of independence – that the greatest misfortune of the Ibero-American peoples had been that after searching for ‘unity in civilization and liberty, we have found it in slavery and barbarism’.58 He was thinking in terms of the relation between philosophy and culture again. What perhaps Sarmiento failed fully to appreciate was how civilization and barbarism, liberty and slavery, were two sides of a Roman philosophical language that, beginning well before the nineteenth century, had driven Spanish America into its present condition. As Anthony Pagden has rightly argued, America was fatally incorporated into history, in the Hegelian sense, on a presumed right of lordship over the whole world, a predominantly Roman law patrimony which most European monarchies were keen to nurse as part of their self-legitimation process. Accordingly, the newly created American republics, ‘could never fully escape the terms of their creation’.59 ‘The crucial difference’, he writes, ‘between Spanish and British America was, in the end, not so much, as both Bolívar and Jefferson supposed, the different political cultures out of which they had grown. It was rather the kind of republican project which those cultures had led their founders to conceive.’ There is much truth in this statement. As we have seen, Bolívar might have had some vague interest in Las Casas’ politica conversación, but the 58 59

D. Sarmiento (1993 [1845]) Facundo. Civilización y barbarie, ed. R. Yahni (Madrid: Cátedra), p. 60. A. Pagden (1995) Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–c.1800 (London: Yale University Press), p. 9.

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instrument of his public philosophy was, as Pagden says, an appeal to ‘the transformative power of a republic founded upon what Bolívar had called moral power, a Ciceronian “well-ordered” respublica, which would involve all its citizens in the common project of government and defence’.60 If this is true, then, it might be argued that it is not only Cicero, but also Caesar, who informs the notion of ancient republicanism which lies behind that moral power. As Sepúlveda observed, there are peoples who can only escape their grossly indecorous political condition by submitting themselves, or being submitted, to the yoke of imperium, which is also why in his Exhortatio he called upon the Caesar Charles v to make war upon the Turks.61 Much the same could be said of the heroes of the Spanish-American wars of independence, whose minds and hearts had been formed in the same military, cultural tradition. It was Benjamin Constant, as noted above, who was actually responsible for placing the distinction between ancient and modern liberties and decorums at the centre of our political culture. Constant knew that ancient freedom was not based just on popular sovereignty and civic participation. La liberté des Anciens was a form of liberty that required from the individual the strength to dominate his own passions, whereas la liberté des Modernes required the use of manners in order to preserve our most private sentiments. Within the opposition between ancients and moderns, it must be remembered that Constant developed his claims of a more polite or well-bred liberal regime in competition with the Catholics of his time, who like the ancients placed more emphasis on the external dimension of sentiment and belief. To use Weber’s vocabulary again, Constant appears to have been more interested in the quality of legitimacy of those sentiments and beliefs than in the activity of legitimation performed by them, which is precisely what had captured the imagination of the Catholic writers of his own generation. Indeed, the main attribute of Constant’s liberalism, as Helena Rosenblatt has shown, was his lack of concern with the imaginary dimension of politics.62 His main purpose was the translation of the binomial ‘religious sentiment’ versus ‘religious form’ from Protestant theology to constitutional politics.63 But as we have witnessed in the last few years, the relationship between politics and sentiment, far from being settled 60 61 62 63

Ibid., p. 196. See also his Chapter 2, in this volume, and A. Pagden (2015) The Burdens of Empire–1539 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 194–195. De Sepúlveda, Tratados Políticos, p. 13. H. Rosenblatt (2008) Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). B. Constant (1999) De la Religion: considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements, ed. Tzvetan Todorov and Etienne Hofmann (Arles: Actes Sud), pp. 52–59.

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as a matter of private belief, has become, once again, a subject of bitter and sustained public controversy; and this is precisely because questions of sentiment seem to inhabit the enduring realm of political decorum, not the realm of moral legitimacy. Simply put, if what marks modernity is that individuals can claim a formal autonomy to explore their religious, cultural or moral identities, and pursue the answers they find on their own, the real world of political liberty has usually been the outcome of regional strategies employed by nation-states in an attempt to govern the hearts and minds of their citizens so as to engage them in the pursuit of the fame and glory that typically characterize their activities of self-legitimation. This is why the central concept of liberalism – freedom or liberty – still remains an unclear and deeply contested one. Now, from the point of view I have adopted here, there is also good reason to think that public philosophy, that is, philosophy that does not claim to offer us a divided understanding of decorum and liberty, but which uses both metaphor and reason to achieve justice and equality, and cares for the conditions that make global decorum possible as well, forms part of this polemical Spanish-American intellectual heritage inherited from Las Casas.

chapter 5

The American Independences and the Crisis of the Ancien Régime Republic: A Comparative View of the United States and Brazil Cicero Araujo and Gabriela Nunes Ferreira In this chapter we present a working hypothesis and develop some general arguments on a type of constitutionalism that has influenced the independence movements in the Americas. Trying to identify a common thread binding these movements together does not mean that we disregard the profound differences in social background, historical, political, and religious culture that differentiate them. While the long-term prospect of this type of research should eventually cover the Hispanic-American countries as well, the analysis will be restricted here to the independence of the first British colonies in North America – that is, the ‘thirteen colonies’ – and the Portuguese colonies in South America. To put it in a nutshell, the chapter reviews some issues of the debate on republicanism in the ancien régime, particularly the tension between empire and freedom, which guides the comparative analysis of the British and the Portuguese colonial crises. As the British political system evolved towards a quasi parliamentary regime after the Glorious Revolution, the United Kingdom became the most republican of the European polities at that time. However, this also brought about deep changes in the relations of the metropolis with its overseas possessions. Those changes are at the core of the conflicts between the British Parliament and the North American colonies. In Brazil, the return of the Court to Lisbon, some years after its move to America and the elevation of the colony to the rank of a kingdom united to Portugal, ended up as a similar problem, in that the Porto liberal revolution (1820) promoted a downgrading of the king’s role as the guarantor of imperial unity (on this topic see Chapter 7 of this book by Angel Rivero). Taking this type of colonial relations as common ground, the chapter then discusses the contrasting developments of the two crises and their different results. Like so many other elements in the ancien régime, the city-republic was the idealized legacy of a political experience that had reached its zenith in the late Middle Ages. In the eighteenth century, the city-republic was in fact an endangered political species. Its main reference continued to be the few surviving city-republics in northern Italy, like Genoa and Venice. The latter – the

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Serenissima Repubblica – was considered a model for the republican experience, due to its almost millenary existence and stability. These cities were the last survivors of the medieval Italian communes. Their rich political life started to decline in the late Renaissance, when they became surrounded by territories dominated by the signori. Apart from this region, the republican ideal was also exemplified by the municipal experiences in the Swiss Alps, of which Geneva was a good example. Larger political units were viewed with less enthusiasm. We also find federal arrangements such as the Republic of the United Provinces in the Netherlands – a federation of cities and their adjoining territories – and in Poland, which was in fact a federation of feudal lords.1 There was also England, which thanks to the typology and influential analysis offered by Montesquieu, could be considered, in view of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a mixed Constitution, that is, an amalgamation of monarchical and republican institutions. As an analytical tool, the old theory of the mixed constitution was applied to all these cases to measure the chances for developing a ‘regime of liberty’.2 One predominant interpretation of Montesquieu’s work is that republics were doomed to marginality in the modern world.3 In spite of this interpretation, some decades after the publication of The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu was chosen as an intellectual guide by those responsible for the resurgence of the republican ideal on both sides of the Atlantic. How could this be? We know that in some of his remarks Montesquieu seemed to have likened the republican form with the city-republic, for example when he said that ‘it is natural for a republic to have only a small territory, otherwise it cannot subsist for long’.4 But on the whole he saw an overwhelming supremacy in the territorial state, the basis of the modern nation-state. In any case, how can we account for the many thoughts devoted to the republican form in his work?

1 Sometimes, the German Empire was also referred to as a federal republic, but of a very peculiar kind, since it resulted from the loose union of ‘small monarchies and small republics’. See Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1989), The Spirit of Laws (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), Book ix, Chapter 2. 2 A mixed Constitution here refers to a republic as a composite political arrangement between its monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic components, to state it in classical terms. As a whole it should work like a balanced system. It was this balanced interaction that the preservation of a regime of freedom was considered to depend on. 3 Harold A. Ellis (1989) ‘Montesquieu’s Modern Politics: The Spirit of the Laws and the Problem of Modern Monarchy in Old Regime France’, in History of Political Thought 10/4, p. 665. 4 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Book viii, chapter 16.

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It cannot be disputed that the city-republics had become a marginal phenomenon at that time.5 Yet the problem of scale or physical size was just one aspect of a more comprehensive analysis of the republic as a political ideal, and it is difficult to imagine that Montesquieu could have devoted so much space to reflect on the subject had he considered that the crucial issue was limited to size. It seems very likely that Montesquieu was considering alternative ways for the flourishing of republics besides their size. Hence his reference to federative arrangements, such as the Dutch Provinces – which constituted something close to a territorial state – and to England itself, which for Montesquieu was a quasi-republic, and whose status as a territorial state no one would dare to question. In his typology, England represented a kind of anomaly, ‘a nation where the republic hides under the form of a monarchy’.6 In fact, the key issue was related to the compatibility between the republic and the empire as political forms. All the major European powers of the era, including some republics, had overseas dominions in the Americas and other distant provinces. So Montesquieu’s focus was not exactly on size, but rather on the question whether republics can preserve their freedom and yet possess colonial domains. This point had already appeared in his thoughts some years before he wrote The Spirit of Laws, in a work called Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline. Going beyond historical curiosity, this book echoed some worries that dominated his time, and of which he became fully aware when he visited England. His response to this question (as was typical in the eighteenth century) came through the discussion of an exemplary history, that of the Roman Republic, which was seen as the great model for a constitution of liberty. In his view, Rome ceased to exist as a republic when it accomplished its imperial expansion. When the legions crossed the Alps and the sea, the warriors, who had to be left in the countries they were subjugating for the duration of several campaigns, gradually lost their citizen spirit. And the generals, who disposed of armies and kingdoms, sensed their own strength and could obey no longer… The soldiers then began to recognize no one but their general, to base all their hopes on him, and to feel more remote from the city. They were no longer the soldiers of the republic but those of Sulla, Marius, 5 Franco Venturi (1971) Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). In this work, Venturi offers a broad view of the existing republics in the eighteenth century. 6 The Spirit of the Laws, Book V, Chapter 19; see also P.T. Manicas (1981) ‘Montesquieu and the Eighteenth-Century Vision of the State’, History of Political Thought 2/2, pp. 323 ff.

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Pompey, and Caesar. Rome could no longer know if the man at the head of an army in a province was its general or its enemy. … If the greatness of the empire ruined the republic, the greatness of the city ruined it no less.7 Thus, the continuous annexation of peoples and territories became so burdensome for the republican constitution that, after reaching a certain point, its weight broke the basis of its political, military, and social sustainability. Given the principles that guide republican politics, it was impossible to reconcile citizens’ freedom with the imperatives imposed by the possession of a large empire. Either all the subjects of the empire had to become citizens, which meant that each part of the territory should become a republic, or the citizens had to be downgraded to the status of subjects – and then the republic as a whole would cease to exist, changing to a system of authoritarian domination. In other words, either the republic would swallow up the empire, or the empire would swallow up the republic. This analysis was later resumed in The Spirit of the Laws as a crucial dilemma: ‘If a republic is small, it will be destroyed by a foreign force; if it is large, it will be destroyed by an internal vice.’8 How could this deadlock be escaped? For Montesquieu, one possibility was the building of a confederation of republics, so that both their external defence and the preservation of their internal constitution were rendered possible. Considering the experiences from the Classical Antiquity, often precarious and unstable, he did not seem convinced of the viability of this option in the modern context.9 Instead, he tried another line of reasoning, which asserted that ‘the spirit of the republic is peace and moderation’, something that was only possible by refraining from the temptation of territorial expansion. Yet how could a republic realistically keep that course of action and not fall prey to alien powers pursuing their own grandeur? For Montesquieu, this was the greatest dilemma for the regimes of liberty, given the imperialistic character of international relations in the eighteenth century. He understood that the ancien régime offered an alternative to the quest for empire: the absolute state. Montesquieu recognized that absolutism, as a variety of the monarchical form, could coexist with imperialism: ‘The spirit of monarchy is war and expansion.’10 Contrary to what this passage might suggest, 7 8 9 10

Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1965) Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (New York: Free Press), Chapter ix, pp. 71–72. The Spirit of the Laws, Book ix, Chapter 1. See Manicas, ‘Montesquieu and the Eighteenth-Century Vision of the State’, pp. 313–347. The Spirit of the Laws, Book ix, Chapter 2.

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the author is not arguing here for the military superiority of the monarchy, but for the compatibility between this type of political regime and territorial expansionism. Absolutist monarchies tend to apply the principle of subordination to their provinces more firmly than they do to their subjects in the metropolis. If this subordination was moderate at the centre, it could also be the same at the periphery. Of course, absolutism cannot always guarantee moderation, but this was not the main issue: the point is the uniformity of treatment, no matter the region of the king’s domain. By contrast, republics may establish a regime of subordination in the conquered provinces, but they cannot do the same with their citizens in the metropolis. In Rome, ‘liberty was at the centre and tyranny at the extremities’. Hence, the republican government ‘is always odious to subject states. It is monarchical by a fiction; but in truth, it is harsher than monarchy.’11 Perry Anderson, in his well-known study on the rise of absolutism in Europe, saw in it a specific social dynamics that would explain the above-mentioned compatibility. According to him, the feudal heritage of absolutist states made them flexible enough to unite different communities without threatening their political integrity: The categorical object of noble rule was territory, regardless of the community inhabiting it. Land as such, not the language, defined the natural perimeters of its power. The feudal ruling class was thus essentially mobile, in a way that a capitalist ruling class could never be. For capital itself is par excellence internationally mobile, thereby permitting its holders to be nationally fixed: land is nationally immobile, and nobles had to travel to take possession of it. A given barony or dynasty could thus typically transfer its residence from one end of the continent to the other without dislocation (…) Angevin lineages could rule indifferently in Hungary, England and Naples; Normans in Antioch, Sicily or England (…) Habsburg in Austria, the Netherlands or Spain. No common tongue had to be shared between lords and peasants in these varied lands (…) The absolutist states reflect this archaic rationality in their inmost structure.12 In contrast to this, and because of their peculiar political constitution, the cityrepublics were unequivocally related to a particular community. What the passage above highlights is the crucial role of a dynastic house for the identity of 11 See The Spirit of the Laws, Book xi, Chapter 19; and Book x, Chapter 7. 12 Perry Anderson (1979) Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso), pp. 31–32.

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an absolutist regime. An absolute king could rule more than one kingdom simultaneously. With time, those different states could even come together on an equal footing under the auspices of the same monarch, becoming what the political vocabulary of the time called a united kingdom. In an absolutist state therefore, the Crown matters more than the community of subjects that it governs. This was the key to the expansion of monarchic states in Europe after the demise of the feudal world. Driven by a similar dynamics, modern absolutism was able to build colonial empires outside of Europe. The point of dynastic mobility is critical here, because it shows that the place from which the king ruled his domains, although important, was relatively less crucial than in the case of the republics. This type of mobility was assumed to such an extent that historians like Edward Gibbon, writing in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, speculated with the idea that, in case of necessity, that the European establishment – represented by its monarchies and their respective ruling classes – could be transplanted to America without affecting, in essence, its identity and functions. If a savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Germany, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen of Britain; who, perhaps, might confederate for their common defense. Should the victorious Barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world, which is already filled with her colonies and institutions.13 It would not be difficult to view this passage as a premonition of the upheaval that would shatter Europe several years later, but with barbarism coming not from the Tartar deserts but from the lowest layers of the European social order. On the other hand, it is interesting to notice that Gibbon thought of the Atlantic and the New World as an escape route for the continuation of Old Europe. At the time when his book was written (1776–89), the idea was no longer a mere intellectual fantasy but a part of the contingency plans of some imperial administrators at the European courts, as it was indeed in the case of Portugal.14 13 14

Edward Gibbon (1932) Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: The Modern Library), p. 443. See Leslie Bethell (1985) ‘The Independence of Brazil’, in L. Bethell ed., Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 157–196. On the Portuguese plans, more will be said below.

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We should note, however, that the republics of the ancien régime also created empires – and some even had overseas possessions. Yet most of these empires, when they did not go into decline, remained as maritime, not territorial domains. They were empires that controlled portions of the oceans thanks to their sea power, instead of large tracts of land, and whose main interest was not political domination but trade. Not surprisingly, Montesquieu saw them as the by-products of trading republics, not of military republics.15 This distinction probably helped him to explain the balance achieved by empires such as Venice in relation to their internal constitution, at least as long as the Serenissima managed to maintain a competent naval force. Venice’s model guided the discussion in England about the future of its colonial possessions after the so-called Glorious Revolution. Could the new constitutional liberties be preserved in the face of its domains? The advent of the colonial crisis in America would bring this question to centre stage in national concerns.16

The Crisis of British Colonial Rule in America

In view of the foregoing analysis, it is not surprising that in the early phase of the colonial crisis, independence and the setting up of an entirely new republican order had not occurred to the American settlers. The republican option grew only as the crisis unfolded, but in its initial stage this option seemed unrealistic in most of colonial America. As Anthony McFarlane says, ‘for several years, the Anglo-American colonists had appealed to the Crown for having their rights to […] negotiate and keep the [British] Constitution recognized; in principle, they saw themselves fighting for the status quo, not against it’.17 Republicanism in the American North Atlantic could not stabilize without a profound change in the political imagination. This happened only when the problem of erecting a new and unified sovereign state came to the fore, and its founders started to admit that a modern republic had to be something very different from any former version it had – either municipal, confederate, or endowed with a mixed constitution as in England. The transplantation and 15 16

17

The Spirit of the Laws, Book v, Chapter 6. David Armitage (2002) ‘Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma’, in Martin Van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.) Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), vol. 2, pp. 29–46. Anthony McFarlane (2006) ‘Independências americanas na era das revoluções: conexões, contextos, comparações’, in J. Malerba , ed. A Independência Brasileira: Novas dimensões (Rio de Janeiro: Editora fgv).

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rebirth of republicanism in America was thus possible only after the American colonists had questioned its historical background. Within the old European framework, the only option left to the colonies was to achieve a more balanced imperial arrangement. The first phase of the crisis was therefore marked by the attempt to find a political rearrangement with the metropolis that would increase the autonomy in the periphery of the empire, which for the colonial settlers was just a matter of returning to a traditional practice.18 This was perfectly compatible with the preservation of the empire, since its unity depended on maintaining the settlers’ loyalty to the Crown. Such loyalty was also the condition for preserving the link between the different colonies and extending the colonization further West in the continent, a critical issue for the survival of the existing settlements. Although the Royal Proclamation of 1763 had fixed limits on Western territorial expansion in order to avoid further clashes with the Indian nations – a decision that caused much complaint among the white settlers – such limits were only a temporary and tactical move, and they did not express an essential contradiction between the perspectives of the colonizers and the empire on North America.19 In the British case, the major obstacle for an arrangement with the colonists was parliament, not the king. It was parliament and its ministers who were responsible for the fiscal burden that fell on the colonists during the eighteenth century: the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, and so forth. In their protest, the settlers envisioned a legislative system constituted by the British Parliament – to which they granted a supervisory function – and the colonial assemblies. This idea clashed with the post-1688 doctrine that conceived parliament as a sovereign and an indivisible institution for the whole empire. This was precisely the doctrine that the settlers were not ready to endorse. As Wood puts it, By 1774 the leading colonists, including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, were arguing that only the separate American legislatures were sovereign in America. According to this argument, [the British] Parliament had no final authority over America, and the colonies were connected to the empire only through the king.20 18 19

20

See Robert Palmer (1959) The Age of the Democratic Revolution: The Challenge (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 190–197. ‘So confusing was the situation in the West that the British government could never convince the various contending interests that the proclamation was anything more than, in the words of George Washington, who had speculative interests in western lands, ‘a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians’: Gordon S. Wood (2003) The American Revolution: A History (New York: The Modern Library), p. 44. See ibid., p. 44; and Robert Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, p. 160.

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So strong was this perception that, in view of the government’s insistence on the colonists abiding to parliamentary decisions, some of them (including Jefferson) appealed to King George iii, encouraging him to act more independently, and to be ready to deal with ‘an indefinite number of parliaments at the same time’.21 If these appeals were mere rhetoric or diplomacy, it does not matter here. The point is that the colonists were trying to convince European public opinion that their cause should not be viewed as essentially different from the king’s cause. Not surprisingly, parliament reacted by claiming that the colonists were reducing their connection with the mother country to its monarchical component, and that they were not including the seat of national representation. Hence, the British prime minister at the time, Lord North, observed that ‘the [American] argument [is] that of a Tory’,22 that is, the typical argument of those in England who fought the existing system of government, which they called ‘the Whig oligarchy’. In short, the settlers’ complaint was not, in principle, an attack against the existence of the empire, but a critique of the prevailing regime in the metropolis. According to this argument, the imperial regime prevented a fair and balanced relation between the seat of empire and its colonies.23 Implicit to it was the idea that the parliamentary system made the imperial government too mindful of the interests of the metropolis, as opposed to the peripheral communities. The colonists therefore mobilized to their advantage a whole set of literature against this type of regime in Great Britain, which was ambiguously Tory and Republican (‘Commonwealth’) at the same time.24 They complained about the inappropriate collusion of interests between king and parliament under the influence of the Whig oligarchy, and of the predominance of the Court over the Country. This duality somehow reproduced, on a national scale, the duality between centre and periphery of the empire. Since the central criticism focused on the political regime of the mother country, the protests against colonialism could only evolve towards independence if the rebels could envision alternative forms of government for the colonies. Those alternatives necessarily had to give an answer to three critical issues. First, should the new regime unite all the former colonies into a single 21

John G.A. Pocock (1985) Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 84. 22 Ibid. 23 Note that the colonies did not view themselves as a single unit – they saw themselves in the same way as the metropolis did: as a diversity of provinces. 24 Bernard Bailyn (1967) The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, ma: The Belknap Press).

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political entity? Second, which kind of relationship between the components of the new political body could preserve their autonomy and avoid the oppressive tendencies of the parliamentary regime? Finally, how could a new regime maintain the perspective of an empire in the American continent? This last question became an increasing concern for the colonial elite, something that several years later would receive its most complete expression in the federal project of Alexander Hamilton.25 But the quest for a new form of republic was not solved after independence. If the colonies initially strived for a greater degree of autonomy in their relation with the metropolis, the new independent states wanted to preserve their autonomy in relation to each other. If some kind of union was the desired goal, how could then their autonomy be promoted without compromising the integrity and the internal coherence of the new nation? Conversely, could it be possible to build a strong political centre without bringing back the evils of the old colonial relations with the metropolis? Finally, it was necessary to ascertain how the new polity would expand into the American continent, so that the creation of a strong political core committed to this effort would not violate the autonomy of the old and the new territories. To many, a coherent response to all these questions was impossible, since each part of the projected new republic had very different, not to say divergent, economic interests and social compositions. This was particularly clear with the institution of slavery, which was deeply entrenched in some states, but not in others. Should slavery be generally admitted in a modern republican constitution? This issue had already been raised, and set aside, during the debates on the declaration of independence, but it came to the fore and in more practical terms later, when the federal design of the new territories reached the political agenda: should African slavery follow the expansion of the republic to the West?26 Responses were given to this and other specific matters, at the expense of a series of conflicts between the former colonists. But the history of this process does not concern us here. What is important to stress here is that responses were proposed along with a strong revival of the republican ideal. This was perhaps the least likely option, if we take into account the original concerns of the colonists, which aimed at achieving a reformed imperial monarchy. In fact, the original aim seemed less 25 26

Gerald Stourzh (1970) Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press). For a detailed analysis of the ‘North American perspectives’ on the issue from 1780 to 1820, see Seymour Drescher (2009) Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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republican than the existing parliamentary monarchy if we view it from Montesquieu’s perspective, which saw Britain as being endowed with a quasirepublican constitution. For many Europeans with republican sympathies, Britain was the best available regime of liberty in that context. This is why the republican ideal could not have been revived by the colonists except through a semantic subversion of what a republic meant in the Old Regime. Such subversion was strong enough not only to dismantle the main colonial dominion of the most powerful European state at that time, but also to shake off the ideological and social foundations of the ancien régime. This is why Franco Venturi has seen in the independence of the English colonies in America – an apparently peripheral matter – the condensation point of the major events that followed in Europe: ‘With the beginnings of the American Revolution, and particularly with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the decisive crisis began’.27 Our intention for the rest of this chapter is to show how questions similar to those posed by the English settlers in North America would reappear years later in the Portuguese colonies, although leading to a different response.

The Demise of Portuguese Colonialism in Brazil

Our assumption in this chapter is that the independence of Portuguese America is easier to understand if we see it from the perspective that we have just described. Everything that might have happened in the British American colonies, had the original intentions of the settlers prevailed, did eventually happen in the Portuguese South Atlantic.28 At the beginning of the colonial crisis, the most realistic option for the Portuguese colonists in Brazil was to organize their respective provinces around the monarchy. This formula was perfectly compatible with the preservation of the empire in the South American continent. What made this approach more viable in the Brazilian than in the British case was the unprecedented transplanting of the whole metropolitan Court to American soil at the turn of the nineteenth century, 27 Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, p. vii. 28 Except for its negotiated solution with the former metropolis, we could say that the Canadian path was closer to the Brazilian case. Although remaining loyalist after the independence of the thirteen colonies, the remaining British territories in North America ended up with a constitutional arrangement that granted them substantial autonomy while combining it with loyalty to the British Crown. See Chapter 6 by Michel Ducharme in this volume.

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making it the seat of the empire. This event has no historical equivalent even if, as we saw have seen, the idea of transferring a monarchy from one territory to another was not new in itself, given the mobile nature of the European dynastic houses. This was not some writers’ fantasy but a real option for the administrators of the overseas empires. As historians have shown to exhaustion, the Portuguese royal officers had seriously considered this possibility during the eighteenth century, when they saw their country increasingly cornered to one edge of the European continent. By the eighteenth century there was a growing ambition in Portugal to install a King in Brazil and to preserve or restore at the same time the European cradle of the empire. The ‘idea’ of founding an empire in Brazil was asserted with increasing vigour… The mere utterance of ‘settling an empire’, as it was expressed or implied in several documents, when Portugal already had a vast tropical empire, reflected something new. This was not the same empire that had been sung in prose and verse since the sixteenth century, in the sense of large areas of land being conquered or tamed. In the eighteenth century colonial territories became immense. The mines had confirmed Brazil’s wealth, and the intervention of the Crown in America adapted to its political particularities. On the other hand, the luxury of the Court did not erase the sense of inferiority in comparison to the rest of the Old Continent. Portugal was tired of being small. Resuming its transoceanic vocation… it recognized that it could become very large – not only in Brazil, but by anticipating the Brazilian cause.29 An extraordinary letter from the nobleman Dom Luis da Cunha to the Portuguese King Dom João V proposed the transfer of the Court to America and suggested that by doing so the king should assume the title of Emperor of the West. Behind this title was the idea that the Portuguese Crown would be able to legitimate the expansion of the imperial domains into the entire South American continent, without needing to halt at the Spanish borderlands: Spain would tremble for the fate of Peru and all the countries to the isthmus [of Panama], because the rigor with which the wretched native 29

Pedro Octávio Carneiro da Cunha (2003) ‘A fundação de um império liberal’, in Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, ed., História Geral da Civilização Brasileira. Brasil Monárquico: o processo de emancipação (Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil), Book ii, vol. 3, p. 155, our translation.

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people are treated by the Spaniards is known, making the natives prone to throw off their yoke provided help is given. Nor would it be difficult to obtain Chile and all the lands down to the straits in exchange for the Algarve.30 As we know, a portion of these speculations were finally put into practice in 1808 when, as a result of the Napoleonic invasion, the Portuguese Court was forced to escape from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, making Rio the capital of the kingdom. This tremendous political reversal was never accepted by the Portuguese elites, especially by those who remained in Europe. And thus, as soon as Napoleonic rule in Europe collapsed, the relations between Lisbon and its former overseas possessions came to the fore. In 1815 though, the Court was still in Rio de Janeiro and Brazil had been raised to the status of a united kingdom with Portugal and the Algarve. Yet the turning point would only occur some years later, with the Porto Revolution in 1820, called by the Portuguese historians the Liberal Revolution, which declared the parliament (the so-called Cortes) the sovereign authority in the country. King Dom João vi was called back, and then a deadlock occurred. As with the English Glorious Revolution, the Portuguese constitutional king was urged to abide by the resolutions of the parliament. At the same time, the old metropolis became mistrustful of the new overseas leadership and tried to reassert its hierarchical superiority. These developments did not please the Brazilian elites – or at least the part that was closest to the Crown Prince Dom Pedro, King Dom João’s son, who remained in Rio de Janeiro after his father left – who saw in them the loss of their new status and a threat to their newly found autonomy. In a way, the Porto Revolution brought about a tension between the liberal agenda and the political expectations of the colonists: While openly representing an anti-absolutist movement, the 1820 Portuguese Revolution was also, to certain extent and from its first steps, an anti-Brazilian movement. By forcing the return of the Royal House to Lisbon, it tried to remove Brazil from its central position in the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves… In the next phase, when the Cortes were gathered, all the political changes suggested by the French model took place: a Constituent power that aspired to unification at the expense of the traditional prerogatives settled by venerated inequalities, immunities and franchises. In other words, what tends to create a compact and homogeneous national whole, where the freedom 30

Ibid., p. 156.

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of the people is better distributed, refers to regimes in which all parts gravitate around a common axis. Centralization, which in this case was meant to gravitate around Lisbon, was the necessary fruit of the radicalism of the victorious party. What in Lisbon was the work of radicalism, in Rio de Janeiro acquired the flavour of despotism by force.31 Subsequent events highlight certain resemblances between what happened with the Brazilian-Portuguese relationship and the development of the AngloAmerican crisis several decades before. First, we see the Brazilian elites trying to obtain a fairer representation in the Portuguese Parliament. Despite strong divergences within the Portuguese leadership, this demand was finally refused. So there came the expectation that Crown Prince Dom Pedro could protect the American provinces from the new claims of the Portuguese by doing what his father was unwilling or could not do, that is, freeing them from the constraints of the Parliament. By fulfilling this – which meant not accepting the demand of the Cortes to return to Portugal – he would then appear as the independent prince that the English Americans had also expected, but could not have. Dom Pedro eventually became the first monarch of the Brazilian Empire. The definition of the new state as an empire was by no means accidental. It was the result of a monarchy in search of a national identity, an amalgamation of different peoples which to that date had received the generic designation of Brazil,32 but that had been transformed into a new polity in its own right. Such unity was embodied in the person of the emperor. This solution, of course, marks out a big political difference from what happened to the thirteen colonies in North America, and it reminds us of other contrasts between both experiences. Let us sum them up in the following points. First, there is the slavery issue. Compared with other countries in the Americas, the Brazilian slavery system was a very special case, not only in quantitative terms but also because it extended, despite some local differences, to the whole territory and to all types of social interactions. From the first century of colonization, the numbers involved in the African slave trade to Brazil far exceeded all other American regions. To a large extent, this was due 31 32

Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (2003) ‘A herança colonial – sua desagregação’, in S.B. de Holanda , ed., História Geral da Civilização Brasileira, p. 18, our translation. Note that what was then called Brazil amounted, at the beginning of the crisis, to a highly fragmented set of countries formally administered from Lisbon first, and later from Rio de Janeiro. On the Brazilian pátrias at the time of independence, see I. Jancsó (2005) ‘Independência, independências’, in I. Jancsó , ed. Independência: História e Historiografia (São Paulo: Hucitec/Fapesp).

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to the Portuguese control of the main traffic zones along the African shores, which made the Portuguese tradesmen the major promoters of slave transportation. According to Alencastro,33 the preservation of the slave trade and the institution of slavery as a whole was a powerful interest that bound together the Brazilian regional elites on the eve of the independence and for many decades beyond. The Crown appeared to them to be a fit political institution to perform two roles: in internal affairs, as a guarantor of the master–slave hierarchy; in external affairs, as the best representative of their interests before the European states – and before Great Britain in particular, which at that time was strongly engaged in breaking the Atlantic slave trade. Second, there is the issue of territorial integrity. Rather than expansion, the main concern of the former colonists immediately after independence was to uphold and occupy the territory that had been previously acquired by the Portuguese Crown during the colonial era. Historically, the Treaty of Madrid had legally established the main borders of this territory in 1750. Like the slave trade, this huge but empty territory favoured the type of political system that finally prevailed: a centralized monarchy ruling from Rio de Janeiro.34 According to those who argued for this solution, the new monarchy was the best means to defend the unity and integrity of the vast tracts of land inherited from the Portuguese, now Brazilian empire. The need to keep a comprehensive slave system and, at the same time, a large but empty territory helps to explain why, despite the regional disparities and the conflicts among the Brazilian representatives before the Cortes in Lisbon, they finally agreed to a solution that opened the way to independence. As the crisis developed, the Cortes hosted a major dispute between differing national projects, which also involved different types of answers to the overseas issues.35 The main leader of the Porto Revolution argued for an integrationist policy which, in his view, was to put an end to the colonial system itself. The Cortes’ decree of October 1821 was meant to promote this policy. On the one hand, it ordered the return of Crown Prince Dom Pedro to Europe and the closure of all governmental departments created in Rio de Janeiro after the 33

34

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Luiz Felipe de Alencastro (1979) ‘La traite négrière et l’unité nationale brésilienne’, Revue Française d’Histoire d’outre-mer 244/5, 395–419. See also by the same author (2006) ‘Le versant brésilien de l’Atlantic-Sud’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 2/61, 339–382. See Luís Claudio Vilefañe G. Santos (2013) ‘Duarte da Ponte Ribeiro: definindo o território da monarquia’, in Pensamento Diplomático Brasileiro: formuladores e agentes da política externa (Brasília: Ed. Funag), vol. 1, pp. 158–191. On the Cortes’ debates in Lisbon, see Marcia Regina Berbel (2005), ‘A retórica da recolonização’, in I. Jancsó , ed., Independência. See also Chapter 7 by Angel Rivero in this volume.

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arrival of the Portuguese Court in Brazil. On the other hand though, the decree granted an unprecedented degree of autonomy to the different Brazilian provinces by dismissing all the governors appointed by King Dom João and giving new powers to the regional seats (the Juntas Provinciais). This part of the decree attracted the sympathies of the Brazilian representatives from Pernambuco, who were the first to arrive in Lisbon, because of their previous demands of regional autonomy vis-à-vis Rio de Janeiro’s centralism. But this integrationist plan met with significant opposition from Portuguese and Brazilian representatives who, in separate ways, fought for more centralized designs. To many Brazilians, the idea of returning the seat of power to Portugal meant downgrading the status of the American portion of the kingdom. They sensed that, if not in words but in practice, this move would lead to an end of the united kingdom achieved in 1815. From Rio de Janeiro, Crown Prince Dom Pedro picked up on this line and accused the Cortes of bringing Brazil back to the condition of a mere colony. He then decided to disobey the decree of the Cortes and to remain in Brazil. As the deputies from São Paulo arrived in Lisbon in February 1822, under the instructions of José Bonifácio (Dom Pedro’s main advisor), they defended a new plan which kept the union with Portugal but granted the Kingdom of Brazil and Prince Dom Pedro the power to govern it from Rio de Janeiro.36 The decisive step to independence was given when, in June 1822, Dom Pedro called up a Brazilian ‘General and Legislative Constituent Assembly’ meant to gather representatives from all the provinces of the American portion of the empire. The identity of the new polity still would need a more precise definition, which resulted in harsh debates and sometimes in bloody clashes. Immediately after independence, the major challenge was to decide whether the empire should have a centralized or a more federal character. This became one of the main issues for the creation of a regime of liberty in Brazil. As mentioned above, similar debates occurred during the foundational period of the United States of America. In this case, even if the unity achieved with the 1787 Constitution was more centralized than what a part of the American elite wished, a federal arrangement eventually prevailed. This did not happen in

36

One passage of this plan reads: ‘It seems an advisable step to establish a general executive government for the Kingdom of Brazil, to which the different provincial governments will be subordinated under certain limitations’: José Bonifácio (1821) Lembranças e Apontamentos do Governo Provisorio para os Senhores Deputados da Provincia de São Paulo (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Nacional), p. 7 (our translation).

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Brazil, at least not with the same formula.37 The fact that the figure of the king was preserved after the independence eased up, or rather postponed, the problem of creating a new republican order. Even if partially resolved, the political structure of the Empire would remain an open constitutional issue throughout the nineteenth century, and many historians have viewed it as a paradox in the Brazilian process of colonial emancipation.38 The new Brazilian emperor would fulfil, at least partially, the project of building an empire in the South American continent. However, this was a problem-ridden mission, not unlike the one that had troubled the English colonists, namely how to create a political centre for the new empire without reproducing the negative aspects of the relation between the former metropolis and its colonies. How was it then possible to grant a reasonable degree of autonomy to the old and new provinces without affecting the unity of the empire?

Conclusion: Back to the British-American Crisis

Let us return to the British case, which provides us with a guide to better understand the Brazilian process of independence. It is a guide not so much because the North American revolution obviously inspired similar movements in the south but because it reveals the possibilities and limitations for reform within the ancien régime and the impact of these on the imperial domains. Despite the major differences that we have pointed out in the last section, the Portuguese-American independence seems to follow the general line of interpretation offered by the Anglo-American colonial crisis. In political, economical, and military terms, the United Kingdom of Great Britain was by the end of the eighteenth century the most dynamic and advanced version of the ancien régime. This was so because the parliamentary character of the British monarchy represented the model of a feasible republic under the conditions of the times. By the end of the eighteenth century, England had experienced a transformation in its internal politics. It had succeeded in uniting the affluent classes in supporting the Constitution. One of the reasons for this was the rise of parliament to the rank of sovereign authority through a renewal of the kingin-parliament formula. This was the main result of the Glorious Revolution, which not only gave fresh impetus to the reform of the Old Regime in the 37

38

For a recent, and polemical, study on the federal question in the Brazilian Empire, see Miriam Dolhnikoff (2005) O pacto imperial: origens do federalismo no Brasil (São Paulo: Ed. Globo). Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, ‘A herança colonial – sua desagregação’, p. 24.

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British Isles in a way that did not happen anywhere else in the continent, but also raised England to the rank of the great European powers. However, this political impulse in England had a price: increasing tension between the metropolis and the overseas colonies, especially the most prosperous of them in economic and cultural terms. The integration of the king with parliament, though not exactly creating a parliamentarian system, made the Crown more English than ever, and in relation to the overseas colonies, more British than ever, or at least more than it would normally be under a strict absolutist regime. Parliamentary sovereignty forced the Crown to become more attentive to the interests of the political community represented in that institution. While not yet democratized, this system distinguished citizens from subjects in a clearer way than absolutism did. Absolutism, by contrast, did not recognize citizens in the sense that the parliamentary system did, but tended to equalize all subjects under the protection of the king. The quasi-republican structure of the Whig oligarchy regime therefore diminished the ability of the king to mediate between the different parts of the empire. Ironically, the discourse opposing the Whig regime, which has been interpreted by Pocock and other scholars as a republican criticism, presents itself as a commonwealth discourse with a Tory flavour, for it sought to restore the independence of royal authority from parliament, a quest that seemed like a regression to absolutism. But the reverse was also true. The old Tories considered that this was also a necessary condition for the independence of parliament as well.39 This point is critical here, for if the king was to lose his influence as an independent constitutional power, he would also lose his capacity to uphold the symbolic union of the kingdom, that is, as the representation of the union of all his subjects in their many particularities. Still more important, he would also lose the capacity to represent the union of kingdom and empire, its diverse peoples and provinces, including those in the overseas domains. These questions lie at the root of the crises of the ‘first European imperialism’ at the end of the eighteenth century. The crisis deepened as the ancien régime evolved from pure absolutism to an enlightened regime, and then to some form of quasi-republican parliamentary system. This type of parliamentary monarchy was close to what the European Restoration would later call constitutional monarchy. It is therefore not fortuitous that the movement for the independence of Portuguese America reached its full maturity when the metropolis, on account of the liberal revolution, shifted towards a parliamentary regime, thus betraying the expectations of the Brazilian colonists to preserve the balance of power achieved through the transfer of the Court to Rio de Janeiro. 39

We might say that this argument was an avant-la-lettre criticism of the absence of a clear separation of constitutional powers in contemporary parliamentary regimes.

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It would be interesting to extend this perspective to the Spanish-American colonies, a case that is more complex than that of the Portuguese and offers perhaps more alternatives. The liberal revolution also took place in Spain under the siege of the French invasion. From it emerged a system that attempted to give a prominent role to a parliament, the Spanish Cortes, but the one gathered in Cadiz, while it pledged to reform the relationship with the American colonies, created new tensions with them. Following the general pattern outlined here, the Spanish Cortes tried in vain to reconcile the granting of representation to the overseas territories with the proclamation of a new national community. The subsequent movements in favour of colonial independence followed a longer and more violent course than their Portuguese and British counterparts, but this only emphasizes the huge problems that all the former colonies had to face in order to build a regime of liberty in the Americas.

part 3 Varieties of Liberalism

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chapter 6

The Tradition of Liberty in Canada at the End of the Eighteenth Century Michel Ducharme1 Liberty has been one of the most influential political concepts in the Atlantic world since the seventeenth century. From the advent of the English Commonwealth in 1649 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Age of Enlightenment, it has helped reshape the intellectual foundations of the Atlantic world by fundamentally transforming how people conceptualized social and power relations. It also justified a series of revolutions and wars of independence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French empires that had dominated this region since the sixteenth century were seriously shaken and weakened by these revolutionary movements. Ironically, the British Empire, the most powerful in the Atlantic World in the second half of the eighteenth century, was the first to face this revolutionary challenge. On 4 July 1776, its North American colonists declared their independence, heralding the beginning of the Atlantic Revolutions. From the Thirteen Colonies, the revolutionary impulse moved to Europe, affecting the United Provinces of the Netherlands (1783), the Austrian Low Countries (1787), and France (1789). Revolutionary ideals were then spread throughout Europe during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. From the Old Continent, the movement returned to the Americas. The revolts in French Caribbean colonies, including the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (1791) which led to the creation of the Republic of Haiti in 1804, was followed by wars of Independence in Spanish America (1808–25) and the Independence of Brazil (1823).2 Even if these revolutionary or independence movements remained 1 The ideas discussed in this chapter are further developed in Michel Ducharme: Le Concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques (1776–1838) (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). The author wishes to thank Michael Lanthier for his editing work, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc) and the Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l’Aide à la Recherche (fcar) for their support. 2 The idea of an Atlantic Revolution was first developed by Robert R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot in 1955 in ‘Le problème de l’Atlantique du xviiième au xxème siècle’, in Relazioni del x Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche, vol. 5, Storia Contemporanea (Florence: G.C. Sansoni Editore), pp. 219–239. Each then wrote a history of the Atlantic Revolution: Robert R. Palmer (1959–61) The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004299689_008

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distinct and were motivated by different ideals, most of their leaders questioned the legitimacy of the state and power relations in the name of liberty. I By the mid-1820s, the Atlantic world had been totally reshaped. The once allpowerful European metropolises had lost most of their colonies except for a few Caribbean islands. In this context, the British North American colonies that later became Canada were an exception. The British subjects who inhabited these colonies had not joined the American rebels in their revolution. They did not take the opportunity to declare their independence during the French Revolution, nor did they do so during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars or when Spanish-American colonists declared independence. By 1825, they were among the very few people in the Americas living in colonies mainly settled by Europeans who had not issued a Declaration of Independence, adopted a Bill of Rights, or drafted a constitution of their own. They were among the few white inhabitants of the Americas who remained subjected to a foreign metropolis. The fact that these British North American colonists did not participate in these revolutionary movements or adopt grandiloquent founding documents based on a rhetoric of liberty, along with their relative insignificance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, may help to explain why they still have not been integrated into any meaningful discussion about the traditions of liberty in the Atlantic world. This oversight may also be explained by the way historians have approached the issue of liberty over the last half century. Influenced by contemporary definitions of liberty, historians have defined the concept as a series of complementary civil and political rights. According to this perspective, the concept of liberty developed during the Enlightenment, progressively undermined the Old Regimes in the eighteenth century, and

and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press); Jacques Godechot (1963) Les Révolutions (1770–1799) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). See also David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds. (2010) The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.1760–1840 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan); Annie Jourdan (2004) La Révolution, une exception française? (Paris: Flammarion); Wim Klooster (2009) Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press); Martin Malia (2006) History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press); Jacques Solé (2005) Les Révolutions de la fin du xviiie siècle aux Amériques et en Europe (Paris: Seuil). For an overview of the American revolutions, see Lester D. Langley (1996) The Americas in the Age of Revolution: 1750–1850 (New Haven, Yale University Press).

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eventually encouraged philosophers and politicians to adopt revolutionary objectives at the end of the century.3 The supposed connection between the concept of liberty and the Atlantic revolutionary movements has long justified historians in portraying the people who rejected revolutionary ideals as rejecting liberty itself.4 In this context, the evolution of loyal British North American colonies has been portrayed as part of a conservative counter-revolutionary tradition that could not possibly have been based on any concept of liberty.5 It is true that Nova Scotia, Saint-John-Island (today Prince Edward Island), and the Province of Quebec did not join any of the revolutionary movements at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. It is also true that the British Parliament amended colonial constitutions from 1774 to 1791 in order to prevent its remaining North American colonies from falling into an American-style revolution. However, the counterrevolutionary framework does not help us to understand the Canadian experience during the Age of Revolutions. Even if Jerry Bannister recently nuanced this interpretation by arguing that the Canadian counter-revolutionary experience has been based on a strong sense of loyalty to the British Crown and empire as well as on liberal principles, the counter-revolutionary framework itself simply does not seem to be the best way to integrate Canadian history into a meaningful discussion about the traditions of liberty in the Atlantic world.6 More interesting in this regard is the framework developed over the last fifty years by the Anglo-American intellectual historians of the Atlantic world. 3 See for instance John Phillip Reid (1988) The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) and A.C. Grayling (2007) Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights that Made the Modern Western World (New York: Walker and Company). 4 One exception to this approach is Janice Potter-MacKinnon (1983) The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press). For a discussion about the relation between the Enlightenment and the 18th century revolutions, see Thomas E. Kaiser (1988) ‘This Strange Offspring of Philosophie: Recent Historiographical Problems in Relating the Enlightenment to the French Revolution’, French Historical Studies 15, 549–562. 5 S.D. Clark (1962) The Developing Canadian Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), pp. 190–191; Seymour Martin Lipset (1968) Revolution and Counterrevolution: Change and Persistence in Social Structures (New York: Basic Books Inc.), pp. 47–63; Lipset (1990) Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge), pp. 1–18. See also Jason Kaufman (2009) The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press). 6 Jerry Bannister (2009) ‘Canada as Counter-Revolution: The Loyalist Order Framework in Canadian History’, in Jean-François Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds., Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), pp. 98–146.

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Reacting to the liberal individualism which dominated the Western world during the Cold War, Bernard Bailyn, J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Gordon Wood, among others, minimized the influence of liberalism as a source of emancipation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and North America. They reframed the intellectual and political struggles characteristic of this period not as a struggle between revolutionary liberalism (or Whiggism) and counter-­ revolutionary conservatism (or Toryism), but between revolutionary repub­ licanism (also called ‘Country ideology’) and commercialism/liberalism (or ‘Court ideology’). According to this analysis, republicans fought against the European Old Regimes and, later, colonial subjugation in the name of liberty, equality and virtue. C ­ on­versely, commercialists or Lockean liberals defended the right to private property, commercial endeavours and the accumulation of wealth.7 If this intellectual framework opposing republicanism and liberalism had the merit of going beyond the traditional interpretation opposing liberalism and conservatism, it was nonetheless initially based on a more or less Manichean opposition between republican freedom fighters and corrupted liberal merchants and politicians. While historians’ assessment of Anglo-American republicanism has become more nuanced over time, the corrupted nature of commercialism was never seriously questioned by the historians working in this tradition.8 7 See among others: Bernard Bailyn (1967) The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press); J.G.A. Pocock (1975) The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, Princeton University Press); Pocock (1985) Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Quentin Skinner (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Skinner (1998) Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds. (2002) Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Gordon S. Wood (1969) The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press); Gordon S. Wood (1992) The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: A.A. Knopf). 8 For the republican and liberal principles at the basis of the American Revolution, see Isaac Kramnick (1982) ‘Republican Revisionism Revisited’, American Historical Review 87, 629–664; Kramnick (1990) Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in late Eighteenthcentury England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press); Lance Banning (1986) ‘Jeffersonan Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in New American Republic’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 43, 3–19; Banning (1995) The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison & the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press); Thomas Pangle (1988) The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago: Chicago University Press); Joyce Appleby (1992) Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press); Paul A. Rahe (1994) Republics Ancients and Modern, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

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Despite its republican bias, this framework opposing republicanism and liberalism has allowed historians to successfully rethink the nature of the political struggles in the Atlantic world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not only has it been used to reinterpret the Anglo-American experiences, but it was also used to rethink other early modern European as well as Canadian experiences (to a certain extent).9 However, in order to participate Press); M.N.S. Sellers (1994) American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in the u.s. Constitution (New York: New York University Press); Sellers (1998) The Sacred Fire of Liberty: Republicanism, Liberalism and the Law (New York: New York University Press); Mark Hulliung (2002) Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Lee Ward (2004) The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). For the liberal nature of English republicanism, see Vickie B. Sullivan (2004) Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Paul A. Rahe, ed. (2006) Machiavelli’s Liberal Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 9 For England and Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Jonathan Scott (2004) Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); H.T. Dickinson (1977) Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Methuen). For the United States, see among others Lance Banning (1978) The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press); Drew R. McCoy (1980) The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (1993) The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press). For Irish patriots, see Stephen Small (2002) Political Thought in Ireland 1776–1798: Republicanism, Patriotism, and Radicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Some historians have integrated French history into this framework, see Johnson Kent Wright (1997), A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford: Stanford University Press); Merja Kylmäkoski (2001) The Virtue of the Citizen: JeanJacques Rousseau’s Republicanism in the Eighteenth-Century French Context (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang); Keith Michael Baker (1990) Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Keith Michael Baker (2001) ‘Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France’, Journal of Modern History 73, 32–53; Andrew Jainchill (2003) ‘The Constitution of the Year iii and the Persistence of Classical Republicanism’, French Historical Studies 26, 399–435; Raymonde Monnier (2003) ‘Républicanisme et Révolution française’, French Historical Studies 26, 87–118. Gordon T. Stewart and Louis-Georges Harvey were the first to use this analytical framework to interpret Canadian history: Gordon T. Steward (1986) The Origins of Canadian Politics: A Comparative Approach (Vancouver: ubc Press) and Louis-Georges Harvey (1990) ‘Importing the Revolution: The Image of America in French-Canadian Political Discourse 1805–1837’, Ph.D. dissertation (History), University of Ottawa. This dissertation was published in 2005 under the title Le Printemps de l’Amérique française. Américanité, anticolonialisme et républicanisme dans le discours politique québécois, 1805–1837 (Montréal: Boréal). Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith promoted this framework in 1995 in Canada’s Origins: Liberal, Tory or Republican? (Ottawa: Carleton University Press). See also Stéphane Kelly (1997) La Petite Loterie. Comment

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in a discussion concerning the traditions of liberty in the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century, this framework has to be slightly reconceptualized. One way to do so is to reframe these ideologies around the concept of liberty itself. By doing so, not only does the Atlantic intellectual framework take on a new dimension, but historians can now incorporate Canada into a meaningful discussion about the traditions of liberty in the Atlantic world. II Defining liberty is a challenging task, as it does not refer to any specific political or social organization, even if most Western people assume today that it is synonymous with liberal or social democracy. In fact, liberty has been used and can still be used to promote and justify any kind of reform, public policy, or social organization. The problem, of course, is that liberty does not refer to an objective reality. It is instead a subjective way of explaining the nature of power and the social relations within any given society. In this sense, people are free when they think they are, despite the kind of state they belong to or the society they live in. It is therefore important to go beyond the word and understand exactly what people meant when they used it in order to have a fruitful discussion about this ambiguous concept. Intellectuals in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world acknowledged the existence of different concepts of liberty or freedom.10 However, these distinctions progressively disappeared during the Atlantic Revolutions when revolutionaries appropriated the word. By the end of the eighteenth century, for most people revolution and liberty had become synonymous. Once the Age of Revolutions was over and the Old Regimes restored in 1815, the distinction between different concepts of liberty reappeared. In an

10

la Couronne a obtenu la collaboration du Canada français après 1837 (Montréal: Boréal); Kelly (2001) Les Fins du Canada selon Macdonald, Laurier, Mackenzie King et Trudeau (Montréal: Boréal); Janet Ajzenstat (2003) The Once and Future Canadian Democracy: An Essay in Political Thought (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press); Ajzenstat (2007) The Canadian Founding: Locke and Parliament (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press). See for instance Thomas Hobbes (1651) Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 262–268; Jean-Louis De Lolme (1771) The Constitution of England; Or an Account of the English Constitution (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), p. 169–191; Montesquieu (1748), De l’Esprit des lois (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 131–261; Madame de Staël, (1798), Des Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et les principes qui doivent fonder la république en France (Genève: Droz, 1979), pp. 109–112, 243.

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allocution at the Athénée royal de Paris in 1819, Benjamin Constant made a clear distinction between two different and contradictory concepts of liberty. First, there was ‘la liberté des Anciens’. This concept was inspired by classical ideas and principles, and had been developed and popularized in the eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It referred to republican freedom based on popular sovereignty and civic participation in political life. Constant rejected this kind of liberty, claiming that it had been used to justify many atrocities and excesses between 1789 and 1815. Constant’s condemnation of this republican freedom did not mean, however, that he rejected liberty itself. In fact, he denounced this republican concept of freedom in order to promote another kind of liberty, which he called ‘la liberté des Modernes’. This concept of liberty essentially referred to the enjoyment of individual autonomy and rights, including the right to private property. It is not that Constant was opposed to civic political participation, but he saw it as one right among others (and not the most fundamental one). According to this French intellectual, the modern concept of liberty was the only one desirable or possible in a modern society.11 More than a century later, Isaiah Berlin echoed Constant’s distinction between two concepts of liberty in his discussion about the difference between positive and negative liberty. According to Berlin, positive liberty (freedom to) was developed in the eighteenth century by intellectuals and revolutionaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Maximilien Robespierre. It ‘derive[d] from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master.’ For its promoters, individuals could be free only if they act according to their reason rather than their ‘desire for immediate pleasures’. This reason allows them to defend the common good rather than their personal interests. People refusing to submit to the common good (whatever it might be) could be coerced to do so legitimately. In this sense, they could be forced to be free.12 Politically, this concept of liberty was closely associated with the concept of popular sovereignty. If Berlin’s positive liberty resembled Constant’s ancient freedom, his negative liberty echoed Constant’s modern liberty. This concept of liberty (freedom from) was developed from the seventeenth century onward by intellectuals such as John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill, to name but a few. It referred to the existence of a private sphere in society, autonomous from public authority, where individuals could do as they pleased: ‘freedom in this sense is simply the area within which a man can do what he wants’, without external interference. .

11 12

Benjamin Constant (1819) ‘De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes’ in Marcel Gauchet, ed., Écrits politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1997), pp. 589–619. Isaiah Berlin (1958) Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 16–19.

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The promoters of this concept of liberty mainly wanted to limit the power of government (‘curb authority’), but not necessarily to seize control of that government. In this context, ‘the state was reduced to […] the functions of a nightwatchman or traffic policeman’.13 Despite appearances, the opposition between Constant’s ancient and modern liberty as well as Berlin’s positive and negative liberty should not be understood simply as the opposition between the promoters of civil liberties against the advocates of political rights. Even if eighteenth-century promoters of modern or negative liberty fought first and foremost for civil liberties, they did not reject political rights. If some, such as Voltaire, did not place too much emphasis on these rights, many others fought for or defended their existence, at least for the elite. In the British context, these political rights were often understood as birthrights and by the nineteenth century they had been integrated into the discourses of the most influential promoters of the modern or negative concept of liberty, including Constant himself and John Stuart Mill. Conversely, if advocates of ancient or positive liberty organized their discourses around political rights, most did not reject civil liberties, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson always presented civil and political rights as complementary. The American Declaration of Independence (1776) and French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) mentioned both rights. In this sense, the position defended by the abbé de Mably and Rousseau, which did not necessarily include civil rights, was unusual during the Enlightenment. Therefore, what was at stake in this opposition between these two concepts of liberty (modern versus ancient; negative versus positive) was not so much the kind of rights that should be enjoyed by individuals, but rather the priority given to certain rights over others. The partisans of modern/negative liberty prioritized civil liberties over political liberty, even if they generally believed in both; while the advocates of ancient/positive liberty structured their definition of liberty around political liberty, even if most of them also wanted individuals to enjoy some kind of civil liberties. In this context, the opposition between modern/negative liberty and ancient/ positive liberty can help to reconceptualize the opposition between republicanism and liberalism around the concept of liberty itself. From this point of view, it is possible to say that from the seventeenth century onwards, at least two competing and distinct concepts or traditions of liberty coexisted and competed in the Atlantic world. First, there was the modern (or liberal) concept of liberty. It appeared in England at the end of the seventeenth century, where it was institutionalized in the wake of the 1688 Glorious Revolution. First discussed by John 13

Ibid., pp. 7–16 (7, 51, 11 for quotations).

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Locke in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1691), it was developed in the eighteenth century by the first generation of the French philosophes (Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Louis de Jaucourt for instance); British Constitutionalists (Sir William Blackstone and Jean-Louis De Lolme to name the two most important); Scottish thinkers (such as Adam Smith); British Whigs (including both Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox); as well as the American Federalists (we may think of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams). This concept of liberty was based on the idea of individual autonomy and the importance of basic individual rights, including various civil rights (such as the right to private property, the rule of law, religious freedom, habeas corpus, freedom of speech). This notion of liberty also included a certain amount of equality. However, this equality did not go beyond equality before the law. As far as the promoters of this concept of liberty were concerned, social inequalities were normal and desirable as they reflected people’s own merits. In this context, the accumulation of wealth was the sign of freedom being put to good use. To allow such an accumulation of wealth, these intellectuals favoured a commercial society. For them, commerce was the main source of individual and collective prosperity. Politically, they did not generally promote democratic reforms. If most of them were in favour of representative institutions, they never structured their concept of liberty around them. Sceptical of popular sovereignty (which could lead to dictatorship), they structured their political institutions around the concept of parliamentary sovereignty (which implied the competition of diverse private interests within parliament). They also defended the autonomy of the executive power, as a good way to protect freedom against various threats, including legislative encroachments. Not very subversive, this concept of liberty did not allow its promoters to achieve much in the first half of the eighteenth century. It therefore lost its prominence among philosophers and activists in the second half of the century when the republican concept of liberty became their main source of inspiration. Republican liberty had an older pedigree than its modern counterpart in the Atlantic world. Developed by Niccolò Machiavelli in the sixteenth century, it became influential in the Anglo-Saxon world in the seventeenth century when the English Commonwealth-men (including James Harrington, John Milton, and Algernon Sidney) promoted it. Eclipsed in the first half of the eighteenth century by the modern concept of liberty due to British constitutional evolution, it came back on the scene during the second half of the century. By then, this republican concept was articulated by British radicals (such as Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, James Mackintosh, and Mary Wollstonecraft); American republicans (Thomas Jefferson for instance); French Girondins (Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Nicolas Antoine de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges); and French radical republicans (Gabriel Bonnot [l’abbé

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de Mably], Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Paul Marat, Emmanuel-Joseph Sièyes, and Maximilien Robespierre). Even if all these thinkers and politicians disagreed on many issues, they all fought for the establishment of republics based on republican liberty or freedom. Republican freedom was defined first and foremost by citizens’ right to participate in political life. Republicans believed that citizens needed to be more or less socially and economically equal in order to be free and therefore able to participle in political activities. In order to ensure the economic and social equality of citizens, republicans envisioned a society of small landowners, all independent of each other. This economic independence would ensure not only political independence, but also virtue. For republican thinkers, virtue had at least three meanings. First, it meant that a citizen was socially and economically independent, this being the best guarantee that he would remain politically independent and not be corrupted. Second, virtue could be synonymous with simplicity and frugality. Republicans despised the kind of wealth that could corrupt people and the desire for wealth that could encourage people to accept corruption. Third, virtue meant the capacity for a citizen to defend the common good instead of his or her personal interests. In this sense, virtue meant patriotism. Politically, republican freedom was based on popular sovereignty, the primacy of the legislative power over the executive power and the citizens’ right to participate in political life. Quite subversive, this republican concept of liberty inspired the Americans, the French, and other revolutionaries around the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century. III Drawing from the distinction between these two concepts of liberty, it is possible to recast Canadian history into an Atlantic framework at the end of the eighteenth century. It is clear that the British North American colonies which remained under British sovereignty in 1783 were not developed according to the republican concept of liberty. This does not mean that republican principles were not promoted in the colonies during the last decades of the eighteenth century, especially in the Province of Quebec. If the first people to articulate a Country discourse in this colony were British merchants in the 1770s, the most important promoter of republican ideals in the colony at the end of the eighteenth century was a French printer, Fleury Mesplet. Mesplet had been sent to Montreal in 1776 by the Continental Congress to encourage French Canadians to join the American rebels in their struggle with the British government. When the American troops, which occupied Montreal from

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November 1775 to June 1776, left the city, Mesplet decided to stay on. In 1785, he founded the bilingual newspaper La Gazette de Montréal/The Montreal Gazette.14 He used this newspaper to promote republican ideals until his death in 1794. Mesplet’s promotion of republican principles was always indirect and implied, since the newspaper did not include editorial commentaries. The republican bias of the newspaper could be found, rather, in the way Mesplet always talked positively about the French Revolution, omitting its excesses. It could also be found in his numerous references to republican authors (such as Algernon Sidney, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, the abbé de Mably, Joseph-Emmanuel Sièyes, and Condorcet, for instance).15 Republican ideals were also promoted by Edmond-Charles Genêt, the French minister in Philadelphia, in the early 1790s. In June 1793, Genêt published a brochure entitled Les Français libres à leurs frères les Canadiens in which he strongly urged French Canadians to join the French struggle for freedom.16 Despite the fact that republican ideals and principles were promoted directly and indirectly at the end of the eighteenth century in the Province of Quebec, they did not have a lasting impact in the colony at that time. Yet the fact that the province remained loyal to the Crown and the empire does not mean that the colony was not influenced by a certain concept of liberty. In fact, the constitutional and political foundations of Upper and Lower Canada, the colonies created out of the Province of Quebec in 1791 (in the wake of the American Revolution), rested on the modern concept of liberty. This concept, while being different from the notion of liberty at work during the Atlantic Revolutions, still proceeded directly from the Enlightenment. The independence of the Thirteen Colonies in 1783 and the arrival of American refugees (Loyalists) in the remaining British North American colonies in 1784 forced the British government to rethink its general policy towards 14

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On Quebec British merchants, see David Milobar (1995) ‘Quebec Reform, the British Constitution and the Atlantic Empire, 1774–1775’, Parliamentary History 14, 65–88; Milobar (1996) ‘The Origins of British-Quebec Merchant Ideology: New France, the British Atlantic and the Constitutional Periphery, 1720–1770’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24, 364–390. For a biography of Mesplet, see Jean-Paul de Lagrave (1985) Fleury Mesplet, 1734–1794: diffuseur des Lumières au Québec (Montreal: Patenaude). For Algernon Sidney, see La Gazette de Montréal, 1 and 22 January 1789; for Benjamin Franklin, see 13 October 1786, 10 November 1786, 29 December 1786, 3 June 1790, and 30 September 1790; for Paine, see 8 September 1791, 1 and 8 December 1791; for Price, see 17 November 1791; for Mably, see 6 October 1786, and 1 September 1791; for Sièyes, see 20 October 1791; and for Condorcet, see 11 February 1790. Genêt’s text is reproduced in Michel Brunet (1957) ‘La Révolution française sur les rives du St-Laurent’, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 11/2, 158–162.

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its North American colonies. The British focused first on Nova Scotia, which had welcomed the largest influx of Loyalists. As early as 1784, the British government divided Nova Scotia into three autonomous colonies (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Cape Breton Island) and granted representative institutions to all of them (although no legislative assembly was convoked in Cape Breton until its re-annexation to Nova Scotia in 1820). The Province of Quebec presented the British with a more difficult problem, and this helps explain why the British Parliament did not amend the Quebec Act, the colonial constitution since 1774, until 1791. That year, the British Parliament enacted the Constitutional Act (or Canada Act). This legislation was the third attempt made by parliament since 1786 to amend the colonial constitution. The British government’s main objective in 1791 was to appease colonial discontent concerning the constitution that had arisen since the early 1780s in order to prevent a republican revolution from breaking out in the colony. In this sense, it can be said that it was a counter-revolutionary legislation, even if this statement does not say anything about its philosophical underpinning. Although the Quebec Act was a relatively new constitution, it was already outdated by the early 1780s. Adopted in 1774 in an effort to win French Canadian loyalty in the context of American protests against British rule, the Quebec Act had more or less re-created New France in North America. From a local perspective, the two most important clauses of this Act were the official recognition of the Roman Catholic Church and the restoration of the Custom of Paris (including the seigneurial regime) as the basis of civil law in the colony. From the beginning, the Quebec Act displeased the British merchants living in the colony; but since they were so few, they could not force the British government to amend the constitution. However, the end of the American Revolution and the arrival of 12,000 Loyalists in the Province of Quebec changed everything. These American refugees, who had left everything behind in order to remain under the British flag, were appalled to discover that they had migrated to a colony that was French, in fact if not in name. They began to petition the British government and demand constitutional reforms as soon as 1784. Their demands went from the establishment of British civil laws in the colony to the creation of a colonial assembly. With the ultimate goal of making the colony truly British, they were supported by the British merchants in the colony and, to a lesser extent and on specific issues, by some French Canadians.17 17

For Loyalists’ demands, see the Loyalists’ petition signed on 11 April 1785 and the one signed on 15 April 1787, reproduced in Adam Shortt and Arthur Doughty, eds. (1911) Documents concernant l’histoire constitutionnelle du Canada 1759–1791 (Ottawa, c.h. Parmelee), vol. 1, pp. 500–502, 619–620. Loyalists’ demands were supported by Quebec British merchants in the 1770s and 1780s. For their own petitions, see ibid., vol. 1, pp. 337–338 (1774 petition), 517–520

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In this context, the British government’s first objective in crafting the Constitutional Act was to satisfy the Loyalists’ demands for constitutional reforms without depriving French Canadians of the rights they had been granted in the Quebec Act. The solution adopted by the British Parliament in 1791 was similar to the policy adopted toward Nova Scotia in 1784: parliament divided the Province of Quebec into two distinct colonies: Upper and Lower Canada. Upper Canada (which became Ontario in 1867) was mainly settled by Loyalists, refugees from the United States, while Lower Canada (what is now the Province of Quebec) was comprised of French Canadians with an important and very influential English-speaking minority. Thus, the British authorities made sure that the Upper Canadian Loyalists could no longer complain that they were living in a French colony, while French Canadians in Lower Canada could feel less afraid of being outnumbered in their colony, could continue to live under their civil laws, and had the free exercise of their Roman Catholic faith. If the division of the province into two distinct colonies solved one major problem, which was both ethnic (British versus French) and political (old subjects versus new subjects), it was not enough to stop the dissemination of revolutionary republican principles in the province. More fundamental institutional reforms were necessary, especially considering the proximity to the American Republic. The British authorities knew that the only way to prevent the spread of American principles in the Canadas was by making sure their Canadian subjects could not envy the freedom enjoyed by American citizens. As Edmund Burke said during the debate leading to the adoption of the Constitutional Act, ‘the people of Canada should have nothing to envy in the constitution of a country so near to their own’.18 In order to prevent a republican revolution in the colony, the British Parliament created a new system of government which rested on the modern concept of liberty as embodied in the British constitution. William Pitt, the British Prime Minister, was clear on this point: the new Constitution ‘was intended to give a free constitution to Canada, according to British ideas of freedom’, insofar as this was possible given Canada’s colonial status.19 In this sense, the goal of the Constitutional Act was to fight republican freedom with British (or modern) freedom, Rousseauian

18 19

(1786 petition) and 621 (1788 petition). Pierre Tousignant (1971) has demonstrated that French Canadians participated in the movement in favour of representative institutions in ‘La genèse et l’avènement de la constitution de 1791’, Ph.D. diss. (History), Université de Montréal, Chapter 6. See also Pierre du Calvet (1784) Appel à la justice de l’État. Edmund Burke (6 May 1791) The Parliamentary Register (London, 1791), vol. 29, p. 319. William Pitt (11 May 1791) The Parliamentary Register, vol. 29, p. 382. For the limitations of the British constitution in a colonial setting, see Philip Buckner (1985) Transition to Responsible Government: British Policy in British North America, 1815–1850 (Westport, ct: Greenwood Press), p. 47–91.

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freedom with Voltairian or Blackstonian freedom. The geographical situation of the colony, just to the north of the new American republic, did not leave much room for the British government to manoeuvre. The British idea of freedom referred to by Pitt was in part defined by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769). For the British constitutionalist, ‘the first and primary end of human laws is to maintain and regulate these absolute rights of individuals’.20 In theory, British freedom was based on a respect for certain fundamental individual rights. These rights could ‘be reduced to three principal or primary articles: the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty, and the right of private property’.21 Included among these rights was religious freedom, habeas corpus, trials by jury, the rule of law, and the freedom of the press among others. The Constitutional Act rested on these fundamental principles. As an amendment to the Quebec Act, it did not revoke any of the civil liberties that had been granted to the colonists since 1774. It did not question the right to private property as guaranteed by the 1774 constitution. French Canadian property rights in the Saint-Lawrence valley were therefore not affected by the new constitution. However, Upper Canadian colonists were given the right to revert to the British Common law (including its disposition concerning property rights) at their pleasure. They reinstated English private law in the colony as early as 1792. Religious freedom, another right guaranteed by the Quebec Act, was also unaffected by the new constitution. Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters could continue to profess their faith without any civil or political penalty or disability in the colony, something their co-religionists in Britain obtained only in the late 1820s. Even if the Roman Catholic Church’s status and influence was contested in Lower Canada at the turn of the nineteenth century by the Protestant subjects and new French Canadian political leaders, the British government never revoked religious freedom in Lower Canada.22 A third important civil right granted to the colonists in 1784 was habeas corpus. It was officially granted with the promulgation of ‘An Ordinance for Securing the Liberty of the Subject and for Prevention of Imprisonments out of this Province’. Thanks to this legislation, Canadian subjects could not be imprisoned arbitrarily anymore in the colony as had been the case during the American Revolution. Again, the Constitutional Act did not affect this right, even if this 20 21 22

Sir William Blackstone (1765) Commentaries on the Laws of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), vol. 1, p. 120. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 125. On this issue, see Jean-Pierre Wallot (1971) ‘Religion and French-Canadian Mores in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Canadian Historical Review 52, 51–94.

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legislation was suspended in the colonies during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and again during the 1837–38 Canadian Rebellions.23 If the freedom of the press was never officially granted to the colonists, there was no pre-emptive censorship in the colony after 1783. Newspaper editors and reporters could write whatever they wanted, but were subject to libel accusations if they went too far with their criticism. Again, this policy respected the freedom of the press as defined by Blackstone. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, the British constitutionalist had explained that the liberty of the press ‘consist[ed] in laying down no previous restraints on publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published’. He continued: ‘Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public, to forfeit this is to destroy the freedom of the press; but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous or illegal, he must take the consequences of his own temerity.’24 Even if several editors and reporters ended up in jail for libel in the first decades of the nineteenth century in both Canadas (we may think to Pierre Bédard, Ludger Duvernay, Daniel Tracey, and Francis Collins for instance), a certain liberty of the press did exist in the colonies from the end of eighteenth century onward.25 If the British idea of freedom rested first on a certain amount of individual autonomy and civil liberties, it also included some political rights. Politically, British freedom referred to a regime where sovereignty and legislative power belonged to a representative institution: parliament. Following the theory of mixed government, the British Parliament included the king (monarchy), the Lords (aristocracy), and the Commons (democracy).26 Theoretically, the British constitution allowed (and even encouraged) competition between various interest 23

On habeas corpus, see Paul D. Halliday (2010) Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), pp. 275–289. On Lower Canada during the French Revolutionary War, see F. Murray Greenwood (1993) Legacies of Fear: Law and Politics in the Era of the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). 24 Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 4, p. 151. See also De Lolme, Constitution of England, pp. 199–213. 25 For an overview of the question of the freedom of the press, see Gilles Gallichan (2004), ‘La censure politique’, in Patricia Fleming, Gilles Gallichan, and Yvan Lamonde, eds., Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal), vol. 1, p. 349–358; Paul Rutherford (1978) The Making of the Canadian Media (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson), pp. 24–28; Paul Romney (1996) ‘Upper Canada in the 1820s’, in F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright, eds., Canadian State Trials (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), vol. 1, pp. 505–521. 26 If the theory of mixed government has been used by republicans and British constitutionalists in the eighteenth century, it became more of a liberal constitutional feature at the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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groups within each house, and between both houses and the monarch in order to limit the possibility of the state alienating the rights of individuals. These British parliamentary principles were also at the basis of the Constitutional Act. The division of the Province of Quebec was useful not only because it allowed the British Parliament to solve ethnic and political problems, but also because it allowed the establishment of parliamentary institutions. These institutions could not have been created without the division of the province, since French Canadians would otherwise have been able to totally dominate the political life of the old colony, leaving the Loyalists unsatisfied. Unsurprisingly, the British government based the new colonial constitution on parliamentary sovereignty rather than popular or national sovereignty (as in the United States and France) because the former was characteristic of the modern concept of liberty. British authorities also created a colonial system of mixed government, where the king (represented by the governor, or the lieutenant-governor, in the colonies) wielded executive power and the Provincial Legislatures (composed of the governor, an appointed Legislative Council and an elected Legislative Assembly) had legislative authority. The new constitution granted considerable autonomy to the executive power in the colonies. Although the representative of the king (the governor or lieutenant-governor) was given instructions by the Secretary of State responsible for the colonies, he enjoyed more autonomy in his administration than the king enjoyed in Britain, since he was personally entrusted with the executive power and solely responsible for his actions to the British Government. As had been the case in the Thirteen Colonies, Upper and Lower Canada ended up with a constitution that did not include any provision for the creation of local cabinets or any other mechanism that would have allowed the leaders of the Legislative Assemblies to have some influence on the governor in his executive capacity.27 Although Executive Councils were created in both colonies, they were nothing like the British Cabinet. Their members were not chosen among the leaders of the Legislative Assemblies, did not have an inherent right to be consulted by the governor, and were not accountable for their advice. Rather, they were appointed arbitrarily by the governor, or lieutenant-governor, from the colonial elites and served at his pleasure. Naturally, these councillors did 27

For a discussion of the political institutions in the Thirteen Colonies, see Jon Butler (2000), Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press), pp. 89–130; Francis Jennings (2000), The Creation of America: Through Revolution and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Richard Middleton (1996), Colonial America: A History, 1585–1776 (Oxford: Blackwell Publisher), Chapter 16; Eric Nellis (2007), The Long Road to Change: America’s Revolution, 1750–1820 (Peterborough: Broadview Press), pp. 28–30.

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not necessarily have the same interests as the members of the colonial Assemblies. This was especially true in Lower Canada, where the executive councillors were mainly from British origins while the majority of the assemblymen were French Canadians. In other words, if the British Parliament granted a representative form of government to Upper and Lower Canada in 1791, it did not grant a responsible form of government, a form of government that would have included something like a functioning Cabinet.28 Following the underlying principles of the British Constitution, the statesmen crafting the Constitutional Act considered that the House of Assembly should only watch (surveiller) the government, not govern the colony. This is why they included many limitations on popular participation under this new constitution. First, Canadian subjects could only elect members of the House of Assembly (who only made up one-third of the legislature). The governor and legislative councillors (which formed two-third of the legislature) were appointed by the British government. Secondly, no mechanism (written or otherwise) existed to submit the executive power to the colonial Legislative Assembly, with the exception of not voting the budget. This meant that under the Constitutional Act, the executive power was at the centre of political life, rather than the elected Assembly as would have been the case in a republic. In other words, if the system of government conferred on Canadians in 1791 respected the modern concept of liberty and followed the British political system and practices, it did so only so far as the Canadian colonial status allowed. Nonetheless, the similarities between the British and Canadian constitutions were sufficient to allow John Graves Simcoe, the first Upper Canadian lieutenant-governor, to declare to the first Upper Canadian legislature on 15 October 1792 that this province is singularly blessed, not with a mutilated Constitution, but with a Constitution which has stood the test of experience, and is the very image and transcript of that of Great Britain, by which she has long established and secured to her subjects as much freedom and happiness as it is possible to be enjoyed under the subordination necessary to civilized Society.29 28

29

For a discussion of the different definitions ascribed to the expression ‘responsible government’ in British North America at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, see Graeme Patterson (1977), ‘An Enduring Canadian Myth: Responsible Government and Family Compact’, Journal of Canadian Studies 12, 3–16. John Graves Simcoe (15 October 1792), Journal and Proceedings of the House of Assembly of the Province of Upper Canada, reproduced in Alexander Fraser, ed. (1911), Sixth Report of the Bureau of Archives for the Province of Ontario, 1909 (Toronto: l.k. Cameron), vol. 1, p. 18.

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But again, to quote the Prime Minister Pitt, this was the case only ‘as far as the local situation of the colony, and the nature and circumstances of the case would admit’.30 IV In the end, the Constitutional Act was a success in Upper and Lower Canada. By dividing the old Province of Quebec into two distinct colonies, the British government appeased the Loyalists. By granting representative institutions, it gave the colonists a voice in the political process. Admittedly limited, this voice was enough to prevent the spread of republicanism in the colonies. Canadian colonists welcomed the new constitution with gratitude in 1791–92. For instance, the House of Assembly of Lower Canada officially thanked the British government during its first session for its ‘new and liberal Constitution’: We cannot express the emotions which arose in our breasts, on that ever memorable day, when we entered on the enjoyment of a Constitution assimilated to that form of Government which has carried the glory of our Mother Country to the highest elevation. It is a very high satisfaction to us, to have an opportunity of joining in praise and admiration of the system of the government of Great Britain, which gives to it, so decided a superiority and advantage over other nations.31 The members of the Assembly were not the only one who enthusiastically welcomed the advent of a new era. Many Lower Canadians did the same, assuming that they had obtained a free constitution as good and as free as a republican one without bloodshed. This was how Jonathan Sewell (the son of a Loyalist), Samuel Neilson (a Whig reformer), and Fleury Mesplet (a republican) saw the new constitution in February and March 1792.32 30 31 32

William Pitt, The Parliamentary Register, vol. 29, pp. 393–394. ‘To His Excellency, Alured Clarke, December 24, 1792’ (1793) Journal of the House of Assembly, Lower Canada (Quebec: John Neilson), 56. Samuel Neilson and Fleury Mesplet welcomed the Constitutional Act by publishing the same text promoting the new constitution in their respective newspapers: La Gazette de Québec/The Quebec Gazette (23 February, 1, 8, 15 March 1792) and La Gazette de Montréal/ The Montreal Gazette (15, 22 March 1792). Its author, Solon, was Jonathan Sewell, the future Chief Justice of Lower Canada (1808–1838): John Hare (1993) Aux origines du parlementarisme québécois 1791–1793 (Sillery: Septentrion), pp. 46, 131.

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While Lower Canadians were expressing their enthusiasm for their new constitution, Upper Canadians discussed the limits of freedom in the colony by addressing the issue of slavery. Slavery was hardly new in what was now called Upper and Lower Canada. Its origins could be found in New France, where the majority of slaves were Aboriginal (panis).33 If the British conquest in 1760 did not fundamentally change Canadian slavery, the arrival of the Loyalists after the American Revolution ‘gave it a new life’ and changed its demographic reality, since their slaves were mainly from African background.34 The debate over slavery in Upper Canada was instigated indirectly by Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe, who was opposed to slavery on political and moral grounds. Knowing that the abolition of slavery was not possible at the time, he settled for a gradual emancipation act. At his request, the Attorney General John White raised the issue of slavery in the second session of the provincial House of Assembly. The debate led to the adoption of ‘An Act to Prevent the further Introduction of Slaves and to limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude Statutes of Upper Canada’. According to the terms of this Act, the Upper Canadian legislature forbade the introduction of slaves in the colony and declared that children born into slavery after the adoption of this Act would be discharged when they reached 25 years of age.35 This act, which was a compromise between the right to private property and the desire to put an end to the institution of slavery, was somewhat similar to other gradual emancipation acts adopted around the same time in Pennsylvania (1780), Connecticut (1784), Rhode Island (1784), New York (1799), and New Jersey (1804).36 Although little is known about the debates surrounding the adoption 33

34 35 36

On slavery in New France, see Marcel Trudel with the collaboration of Micheline D’Allaire (2013) Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Centuries of Bondage, trans. George Tombs (Montreal: Véhicule Press). This book was originally published in French in 1960 as L’Esclavage au Canada français: histoire et conditions de l’esclavage (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval) and republished in 2004 as Deux Siècles d’esclavage au Québec (Montreal: Hurtubise hmh). See also Brett Rushforth (2012) Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Robin W. Winks (1997) The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), p. 23. (1793) 33 Geo. iii, c. 7 (u.c.) There is a dearth of good studies about slavery in Upper Canada. Winks’ book Black in Canada, originally published in 1970, is still the most authoritative work about this issue. My discussion of slavery in Upper Canada is heavily informed by the first few chapters of this book. On gradual emancipation legislation in the United States, see Sally E. Hadden (2008) ‘The Fragmented Laws of Slavery in the Colonial and Revolutionary Eras’, in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins eds., The Cambridge History of Law in

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of the Upper Canadian gradual emancipation act, it is interesting to note that it was the Crown that initiated the process of emancipation rather than the people, as had been the case in the United States. The dearth of information about the arguments used during the Upper Canadian debates unfortunately prevents a true comparison between the American and Canadian experiences on this issue. But it seems that slavery was one of the issues transcending the distinction between republican and modern liberty at the end of the eighteenth century. Following the example set by their fellow assemblymen from Upper Canada, a few members of the Lower Canadian Legislative Assembly also submitted gradual emancipation bills to the Lower Canadian Legislative Assembly in 1793, 1800, 1801, and 1803. None was adopted. Rather, the institution of slavery in Lower Canada was undermined by certain judges, such as James Monk, Pierre-Louis Panet, and Pierre-Amable De Bonne, who simply refused to acknowledge the legal existence of slavery in the colony. In this sense, the abolition of slavery in Lower Canada was closer to the experience of Nova Scotia. The courts’ involvement in the debate over slavery in Lower Canada meant that the institution of slavery disappeared more quickly in Lower Canada than in Upper Canada, where slavery continued until the 1820s.37 The issue of slavery aside, Upper and Lower Canadians did not much discuss the concept of liberty after the initial outburst of gratitude in 1791–92. For one, Upper Canadians were too busy trying to wrestle a life out of the Ontario forests to really debate the nature of their constitution, at least for few years.38 The context of the French Revolutionary Wars was not conducive to such a discussion in Lower Canada either, the majority of the population being of French origin. The perceived threats to the security of Lower Canada led the local Legislature to adopt in 1794 an Act ‘For Establishing Regulations respecting aliens and certain Subjects of His Majesty who have resided in France, coming into this Province, or residing

37

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America, vol. 1: Early America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 274–279; David Brion Davis (1999) The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolutions, 1770–1823 (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 25–35. On the abolition of slavery in Lower Canada, see Trudel (2013) Canada’s Forgotten Slaves, Chapter 12; Winks (1997) The Blacks in Canada, Chapter 2; Frank Mackey (2010) Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), Chapter 2. For the development of an intellectual life in Upper Canada, see Jane Errington (1987) The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology (Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press); Jeffrey L. McNairn (2000) The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

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therein.’ This Act, which suspended habeas corpus under certain circumstances and expanded the definition of sedition among other things, did not encourage intellectual exchanges about liberty and the nature of the Constitution.39 The threat of indefinite incarceration discouraged public discourse about the nature and limits of liberty. Furthermore, since Frenchspeaking Lower Canadians had never enjoyed representative institutions, they were forced to study the British constitution itself after 1792 in order to understand their new rights and duties within a parliamentary system. The last decade of the eighteenth century was therefore a period of knowledge gathering for French Canadian elites rather than knowledge deployment. In the few years following the adoption of the new constitution, they became avid readers of British constitutionalists, immersing themselves in John Locke, William Blackstone, and Jean-Louis De Lolme’s treatises. These readings introduced them to the modern concept of liberty and its institutional implications. The more they read, the more they assimilated the logic behind their political institutions.40 Although this logic was not republican, it was based on a concept of liberty, a concept that became to be known as liberal freedom. In other words, the Constitutional Act succeeded in preventing the spread of republicanism in both Canadas in part because it forced the colonists to think about colonial issues within a political framework based on the modern concept of liberty. Although the Constitutional Act solved important problems, it also created a new one, especially in Lower Canada, which was at the time the most important British North American colony. It institutionalized in the local political institutions the linguistic, religious and socio-economic opposition between the Lower Canadian elites and the majority of the population. The Lower Canadian commercial elites were mainly English-speaking as well as Anglican or Protestant. Involved in the British imperial trade, they saw their interests as linked to the prosperity of the British Empire as a whole. Thanks to the appointments made by British authorities after 1792, they came to control both the Legislative and Executive Councils (and did so until the late 1830s). They were also well represented on the bench. Elitist, Francophobic, and protective of their vested interests, these elites dreamed of transforming Lower Canada into a real British colony. Their ambitions were bound to meet the opposition of the 39

40

(1794) 34 Geo. iii, c. 5 (l.c.). On this issue, see F. Murray Greenwood (1993) Legacies of Fear: Law and Politics in the Era of the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). On this issue, see Lawrence A.H. Smith (1957) ‘Le Canadien and the British Constitution, 1806–1810’, Canadian Historical Review 38, 93–108.

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majority of the population, which was mainly French-speaking, Roman Catholic, and lived for the most part on the product of their own farms. By the early nineteenth century, their representatives, mainly local professionals such as lawyers and doctors, controlled the majority of the seats in the Legislative Assembly. Because of the limited role ascribed to the elected House of Assembly, the assemblymen were limited in the ways in which they could oppose the oligarchical practices of the Councils, which were often supported by the governor. By 1806, French-speaking Lower Canadian assemblymen had acquired an excellent understanding of the British constitution and their constitutional rights. Well aware of the importance of the balance of power in the context of a mixed government, they became keenly aware of the differences between the British institutions and the new colonial one. First, the Legislative Council did not represent a local aristocracy, since there was no such thing as a Lower Canadian aristocracy.41 Although some provisions in the Constitutional Act allowed for hereditary seats in the Council, they were never implemented.42 Second, the House of Assembly had less power and influence than the House of Commons. This was especially problematic since it had a more popular outlook than its British counterpart, the franchise being broader in Lower Canada than in Britain. Third, the governor was responsible to the British government rather than to the elected assembly. In reaction to the Francophobic discourse of some English-speaking legislative and executive councillors and merchants, French Canadian assemblymen created the first reform movement in the colony in 1806, known as the Parti canadien.43 From then on, they questioned different aspects of the 1791 constitution and demanded specific changes to its operation but not wholesale reform. Despite the seriousness of their concerns, they did not question the principles at the basis of their constitution, at least not until 1828. They framed their demands within the context of modern liberty and mixed government. Inspired by their reading of Locke and Blackstone, they articulated three constitutional demands from 1806 and 1828. Their main goal was to redress the balance of power in the colony which, according to them, unduly favoured the governor and the local elites who controlled the Councils in the colony. 41 42 43

Although Lower Canada had a landlord class under the seigneurial regime, the seigneurs were not considered as aristocrats. (1791) 31 Geo. iii, c. 31 (u.k.), art. 6,7,9,10. On the creation of the Parti canadien, see Jean-Pierre Wallot (1973) Un Québec qui bougeait: Trame socio-politique au tournant du xixe siècle (Montreal: Boréal Express).

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Pierre Bédard, a member of the Legislative Assembly, was the first leader of this reform movement. He proposed in 1807 to transform the Lower Canadian Executive Council into a local cabinet. According to Bédard, such a reform would have allowed the governor and the leaders of the Assembly to collaborate for the common good rather than fight each other.44 Even if Bédard had been inspired by the British constitution itself, his suggestion was quite original since nobody in the British Empire had ever tried to describe the functioning of the British cabinet before 1807 or asked for the creation of a colonial cabinet. Despite Bédard’s best efforts, this demand did not lead to anything, for it was not taken into consideration by the British government. In the following decade, Bédard’s successors focused their attention on the impeachment of judges, such as Jonathan Sewell and James Monk. Their efforts were no more successful than the previous ones. In the 1820s, under the leadership of LouisJoseph Papineau, Lower Canadian reformers shifted their focus to a third potential reform: the transfer of all Crown revenues to the Assembly. As had been the case since 1806, Lower Canadian reformers did not obtain satisfaction on this issue either, at least not until 1831. By 1828, after twenty years of struggles, Lower Canadian reformers had achieved nothing. The same can be said of Upper Canadian reformers who, however, were less numerous and never able to assemble a genuine reform movement. In this context, Lower Canadian reformers progressively discovered republican principles. From 1828 onward, they gradually began to reconceptualize their political struggle with the governor and the executive and legislative councillors according to a republican framework. Some of their Upper Canadian colleagues, under the leadership of William Lyon Mackenzie, were also drawn to republican ideals in the second half of the 1820s.45 The rediscovery of republicanism fundamentally transformed the political dynamics in both colonies. In the 1830s, the political struggles in Upper and Lower Canada progressively took the form of a conflict between the supporters of the status quo based on the modern concept of liberty and the promoters of republican freedom. Although this opposition existed in both Canadas, it created more problems in Lower Canada since the 44 45

See for instance Le Canadien, 24 January 1807; 31 January 1807; 25 June 1808. The ‘Ninety-Two Resolutions’ were the charter of Lower Canadian republicanism. They were adopted by the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada on 21 February 1834. See Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada (Quebec: Neilson & Cowan), pp. 310– 335. ‘The Seventh Report on Grievances’, was the equivalent document for Upper Canadian radicalism. It was adopted by the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada on April 18, 1835. See Appendix to Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada (Toronto: M. Reynolds), vol. 1, A21-1-A21-15.

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reformers, called patriotes, commanded the majority of the seats in the House of Assembly while their Upper Canadian counterparts, called radicals, did so only for a brief period of time, from 1834 to 1836. The institutionalization of this intellectual struggle in Lower Canada between the mainly French-speaking republican patriotes, who had very little power considering the role ascribed to the House of Assembly under the Constitutional Act, and their opponents, the mainly English-speaking elites who controlled the Legislative and Executive Councils for most of the decade, came to paralyze the Lower Canadian mixed government. By the middle of the 1830s, the opposition was political (Assembly versus Councils), socio-economic (peasants and professionals versus merchants), ethnic (French Canadians versus British), and intellectual (republicans versus constitutionals). This alignment, which found its origins in the 1791 constitution, led to the 1837 Lower Canadian rebellion and the subsequent Upper Canadian uprising. The failure of the patriotes and radicals confirmed that the modern concept of liberty would remain at the basis of the Canadian experience. V The meaning of liberty is generally considered self-evident and straightforward in the Western world. Even scholars and academics tend to take the word at face value, as if the concept behind it was easily defined. This was never, and will likely never be, the case. Liberty meant and can still mean different things in different contexts, with those meanings often being at odds with each other. The inclusion of Canada (and of Latin America for that matter) in a discussion of the traditions of liberty in the Atlantic world helps us to better appreciate the complex ways in which liberty was understood and the multi-faceted impact it had in the region during the eighteenth century. By studying ideas of liberty in the British colonies that did not rebel against Britain in the Age of Revolutions, we reintegrate a political space that is often forgotten in the history of the Atlantic world. But perhaps more importantly, we can come to better appreciate the different meanings that the concept of liberty had in the region at that time. This is turn enriches our understanding of the different ways people understood this most important and seminal of ideas in the eighteenth century.

chapter 7

The Portuguese Uprising of 1820: A Forgotten Atlantic Revolution Angel Rivero ‘L’invasion des idées a succédé à la l’invasion des barbares’, Chateaubriand According to a common assumption among many scholars, liberalism was a theory devised in early modernity that was put into practice much later, at the end of the eighteenth century. In this chapter i would like to show, through the example of the 1820 revolution in Portugal, that although political ideas are crucial in social transformations, the social and political context in which these ideas are mobilized are equally central. In fact, sometimes context is more important than ideas in order to explain political transformations. Context can also be the cause of conceptual innovation. In this sense the present chapter illustrates that the arrival of liberalism in Portugal at the beginning of nineteenth century was a direct effect of the operation of the Atlantic world. The concept ‘Atlantic world’ refers to a geographical, political and cultural space created by the discovery voyages of the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and other European peoples. The making of the Atlantic world ushered in modernity by creating a new system of nations connected by commerce, new political modes, military rivalry and conflict, and most funda­mentally, by the cross-fertilization of ideas. Of all the new political currents, liberalism achieved a predominant role in the Atlantic world at the beginning of nineteenth century, and along with a more specifically the British constitutional tradition, established itself as the hegemonic notion for proper political organization in this new context. However, this tells only a part of the story. Republican sentiment, starting with the Revolution of the English American colonies in 1776, and followed by the French Revolution after the execution of King Louis xvi in 1793, was the other key element of the democratic revolutions that ran across the Atlantic world after the turn of the eighteenth century. As I will show in what follows, these two elements, royal constitutionalism and a republican understanding of politics, became crucial in the new world created after the demise of the ancien régime.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004299689_009

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The Enlightenment and the French Revolution usually concentrate the focus of scholarly interest on these events. However, there is a conspicuous gap in the narrative, as the Iberian traditions of liberty are almost completely neglected. A key event such as the Portuguese Revolution of 1820 is generally absent from accounts of the Atlantic democratic revolutions – an absence that will be addressed in following pages. My aim is to show that the Portuguese Revolution of 1820 cannot be explained without the Atlantic world, but also, that it was instrumental in determining certain important and multifaceted political processes in the Atlantic world, especially in relation to Brazil. First, the Portuguese Revolution can be seen as a process of independence, since Portugal remained under British occupation after the Napoleonic Wars. Secondly, it was a move towards the abolition of the ancien régime of the Bragança dynasty. Thirdly, it involved the establishment of egalitarian politics allowing for widespread political participation. Last but not least, it inaugurated liberal politics in Portugal with the proclamation of the 1822 Constitution. From an Atlantic perspective, it could therefore be argued that the Portuguese Revolution of 1820 was paradigmatic along the lines of the Atlantic revolutions.

The Atlantic World, the Atlantic Revolutions, and Portugal

Atlantic history mainly developed as a study of the Atlantic rim from the Age of Exploration to the modern era. Its practitioners tend to see this space as a network of interconnections that developed a life of its own. According to this view, the events occurring in the different regions of the Atlantic world aggregate into wider processes marked by co-determination, interdependence, and even contingency. Within this particular template, the constellations of events culminating in the ‘Atlantic revolutions’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries laid the democratic foundations of modern Western civilization. Although there have been many practitioners of this approach, Bernard Bailyn is perhaps its key advocate. According to Bailyn, Atlantic history, from its inception with the discovery of the New World, is an approach that many historians ‘have found strange, that others said does not exist (…) [and] that at best has no easy or clear definition’.1 As much as it has been contested, no one will deny that there are valuable elements in this approach. If history is to be understood as an expression of 1 B. Bailyn (1996) ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itinerario, 20/1, 3.

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our aims, values, and culture, the political culture of the Atlantic world cannot be ignored. The Atlantic dimension, for instance, is indispensable if one is to study the principles of liberalism and their impact on Portuguese political history. In other words, without making reference to the Atlantic context, liberalism in Portugal cannot be explained. According to Bailyn, the idea of Atlantic history developed during and after World War ii. Before that, imperial history and the history of exploration and discovery were mature disciplines that ‘seemed to invite only incremental contributions to a well-sketched scene, not the exploration of a new kind of understanding’.2 The changes in this historical perspective were due to reasons that lie beyond the realm of historical reflection. The ultimate reason can be traced back to 1917 and ‘the writings of the twenty-seven-year-old Walter Lippmann’.3 By that time, Lippmann was already an influential American public intellectual. He published an editorial that year in the New Republic stating that America’s loyalty in the European war lay with the Allies. America was therefore called to intervene in the war to protect ‘the profound web of interests which joins the Western world together’. This sentiment receives its utmost persuasion when Lippmann goes on to argue that ‘we cannot betray the Atlantic community (…). We must recognize that we are in fact one great community and act as members of it’.4 Lippmann’s expectations of a strong and lasting Atlantic community faded with the isolationism that became the norm in the aftermath of World War i. Atlanticist sentiment was to completely disappear from American intellectual and political circles with the Great Depression of 1929 and the subsequent isolationist turn. After this interlude, Lippmann resumed his old arguments in 1943 by stating that the new post-war order should be dominated by the ‘Atlantic Community’, a region where national differences are but ‘variations within the same cultural tradition’. Lippmann’s vision was soon followed up by Ross Hoffman, Professor of History at Fordham University. In 1945 Hoffman published an essay entitled Europe and the Atlantic Community, according to which the Atlantic Ocean was ‘the inland sea of Western Civilization’. This idea was later taken up again by the famous Columbia University historian Carlton J.H. Hayes, who, after returning from a controversial ambassadorship to Spain, stated that ‘the area of this common Western culture centres in the Atlantic’.5

2 3 4 5

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 6–7. Ibid., p. 13.

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Following Hayes’ decisive intervention, the idea of Atlantic history as a justified field of study spread slowly. It should be noted that the Atlantic, in this context, is understood neither as a geographical dimension nor as political history. Rather, the Atlantic refers to a cultural space created by the interaction of Western European nations, America and Africa from the sixteenth century. The Atlantic world refers thus to explorations, communication, commerce, culture, and political developments. For Baylin, the Atlantic was a distinct space of action in which the profound web of interests that bind the Western world together are displayed. The Atlantic world was ‘the scene of a vast interaction rather than merely the transfer of Europeans onto American shores’.6 While this may be so, Bailyn’s concept of Atlantic history has been criticized for being too Anglo-centric. For instance, Coates states that Bailyn’s Atlantic is ‘profoundly British, and very northern’. He rhetorically states that Atlantic history is ‘as much Spanish as British, as much Dutch as Portuguese, as much African as American’, but in fact his focus is limited to the ‘British or AngloAmerican dimension, in a very specific time lapse, the eighteenth century’.7 In fact all the examples that Bailyn uses are taken from the British-American Empire, with some scattered references to the Spanish world. Thus, ‘it should not come as a surprise to the reader that the Portuguese presence in Bailyn’s Atlantic World is minimal, if not altogether absent’.8 Coates lamented this approach, because a minimum knowledge of the history of the Portuguese expansion in the Atlantic would have rendered a much better work. Coates focuses then on the Portuguese explorers neglected by Bailyn who gave an initial account of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century. But it should be added that there are many other contemporary scholars equally absent in his narration who could have given Bailyn a hint on the relevance and scope of the Portuguese Atlantic: Bethencourt, Chaudhuri, Ramada Curto, Boxer, Disney, Newitt, Russell-Wood, Serrão, Oliveira Marques, Adelman and others are equally essential for the understanding of the Atlantic world. While Portugal is notoriously absent in Bailyn’s version of the Atlantic world, he is not alone in his omission. In Robert R. Palmer’s magnificent account of The Age of Democratic Revolution there is no mention of Portugal either. As stated by the author, the main thesis of the book is that ‘the American Revolution was a great event for the whole Euro-American world’ because ‘its effect on the area of Western Civilization comes in part from the inspiration of 6 Meining quoted in B. Bailyn (2005) Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press), pp. 55–56. 7 T. Coates (2005) ‘Atlantic History: Concept and Contours’, e-JPH 3/1, 60. 8 Ibid.

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its message […], and in part from the involvement of the American Revolution in the European War of American Independence, which aggravated the financial or political difficulties’ of the European powers (Portugal is not mentioned). By that time, states Palmer, all major political events in England, Ireland, Holland, and France ‘were all, in part, a consequence of the American Revolution’.9 This essential role played by the American Revolution was recognized early on by Condorcet, who in 1786 anonymously published his first political treatise with the title De l’Influence de la Révolution d’Amerique sur l’Europe. In this text Condorcet positively values the American assistance to the rest of the (Atlantic) world: ‘Le genre humain avait perdu ses titres (…) il faut que l’homme ignorant ou faible puisse les lire dans l’exemple d’un grand peuple. L’Amérique nous a donné cet example.’10 The above quotation indicates that the American Revolution should be understood in the broader framework of the Atlantic world. It obviously started an Age of Revolution in the Atlantic region that was followed by the French Revolution of 1789. The radicalization of the revolution in France, with the beheading of King Louis xvi and the spread of Terror in 1792–93, paved the way for the exportation of revolutionary violence to the rest of Europe. The war between the revolutionary regime and the traditional European powers headed by Great Britain lasted until 1815. But the defeat of Napoleon was not the end of the Atlantic revolutionary wave. In fact, it had quite the opposite effect. The collapse of the royal authority at the core of the Spanish Empire created a space for the spread of insurgency in the colonies. In the Portuguese Empire, the French invasion and the exile of the Braganças in Brazil ultimately planted the seeds of independence for the colony. In the mainland, however, these events led to the advent of liberalism and to the first constitutional regime. More specifically, the advent of liberalism in Portugal was a reaction to the political deadlock created by a constellation of circumstances that can be termed ‘Atlantic’. In 1807 Napoleon made a decision that would have a profound and lasting effect on the Portuguese imperial system. In November 1806 the French emperor inaugurated a Continental system that prohibited European trade with Britain and its colonies. To implement this system, he pressed Portugal to declare war on Britain and to close its ports to British merchandise. Prince 9 10

R.R. Palmer (1959–1964) The Age of Democratic Revolution, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 139. M.J.A.N. de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (2010) De l’influence de la révolution d’Amérique sur l’Europe. Presentation par Pierre Musso (Paris: Éditions Manucius), pp. 42–43.

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Regent João rejected Napoleon’s pressure and, in retaliation, a French army crossed Spain to conquer Portugal. Lisbon was captured on 30 November 1807. The day before, the royal family and the whole Court (high rank officers, the military and the ecclesiastical hierarchy) had left the country. Some ten thousand to fifteen thousand people in all sailed to Brazil under British escort with the royal treasury, official records, and a printing press. As a result of this unprecedented move, from 1808 to 1821 King João ruled his empire from Rio de Janeiro rather than Lisbon.11 When the news reached the rest of Europe that the Court of Portugal had transferred to Brazil, the political world was in shock: in the political imagination of the age, kings remained at home; there were no state visits; and there were no journeys to the colonies. The transfer of the Court was a totally unheard of and an unwitnessed event.12

The Portuguese Revolution of 1820

As the abbé de Pradt announced, the Atlantic world had entered an unstoppable process of change: ‘le temps avance au milieu des orages; vouloir arrêter son impétuosité serait un vain effort’.13 In his book L’Europe et l’Amérique depuis le Congrès d’Aix-la-Chapelle (1821), Pradt stated that the New and the Old World were immersed in the same process of change, and that this process had shown three main features – la rapidité, la noveauté, l’immensité – and two main results: the expansion of the constitutional order, by then generalized in Europe and America, and the futility of opposing this constitutional order. For him, the most important event in this process was the Spanish revolution of 1820, which was followed by similar events in Portugal and Italy, and had great impact on Iberian America as well. He states that the revolution in the Iberian Peninsula will have a lasting influence on humanity and on politics. In fact he says that it ‘is the greatest event of this century’. To him this revolution is a more important event than the defeat of Napoleon. And the reason he 11 12 13

M.A. Burkholder and L.L. Johnson (1990) Colonial Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 294. J. Couto, ed. (2010) Rio de Janeiro, capital de l’empire portugais (1808–1821) (Paris: Éditions Chandeigne), p. 9. D.G.F.M. de Pradt (1821) L’Europe et l’Amérique depuis le Congrès d’Aix-la-Chapelle, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie de Denugon), vol. 1, p. i.

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gives it that this last event is a great but limited one. On the contrary, ‘this southern revolution, and particularly the Spanish revolution, is the greatest event of humanity, because of its connection with America. This event dominates the history of the world.’14 This bombastic assertion basically meant that the Spanish revolution of 1820 had nurtured the Portuguese revolution of the same year, and by doing so it opened the possibility for an independent Brazil: ‘le Brésil étant separé du Portugal par lui même et par la revolution de Lisbonne, la totalité de l’Amerique du sud se trouvera affrainche de l’Europe, merchant á part d’elle’.15 The wars of conquest waged by Napoleon had disrupted the political systems of southern Europe and its Atlantic colonies. But these countries reacted by mobilizing the political imagination of the Atlantic revolutions. In 1812, and under siege by a French army, the Spanish Cortes (parliament) produced a constitution which would have a lasting influence on southern Europe and Latin America. As Karl Marx stated, ‘the circumstances under which this Congress met are without parallel in history, while no legislative body had ever before gathered its members from such various parts of the globe, or pretended to control such a complexity of interests’.16 According to Marx, this Constitution was seen by the crowned heads of Europe assembled at Verona ‘as the most incendiary invention of Jacobinism’. On a closer analysis of the Constitution, he concluded that: far from being a servile copy of the French Constitution of 1791, it was a genuine and original offspring of Spanish intellectual life, regenerating the ancient and national institutions, introducing the measures of reform loudly demanded by the most celebrated authors and statesman of the eighteenth century, and making inevitable concessions to popular prejudice.17 The Constitution was proclaimed in 1812, abolished in 1814, and re-established in 1820, this time through an openly anti-absolutist revolution. It was this revolution that spread to Portugal and to Italy. In his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci wondered why the Spanish constitution was so influential among the Italian liberals in 1821 and afterwards. He considered first the possibility of it being ‘merely a case of mimicry, and hence of political primitiveness or of 14 15 16

Ibid., vol. 2, p. 127. Ibid., p. 245. K. Marx (1854) Revolutionary Spain, New York Daily Tribune, 9 September–2 December, part vi. 17 Ibid.

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mental laziness’. But he discarded this by quoting ‘Marx’s acute analysis of the Spanish Constitution and the clear demonstration that it was a true expression of historical necessity by Spanish society, and not a mechanical application of the principles of the French Revolution’.18 Although it was Spanish in origin, the Constitution was the result of pressing political demands in southern Europe. At a time of unrest, the Constitution was a response to the collapse of traditional power. The same can be said in relation to Portugal, which in 1820 assumed and proclaimed the Spanish Constitution of 1812. This surprising move – the adoption of the constitution of one country by another – was recommended by Jeremy Bentham to the Portuguese, given the pressing circumstances. Portuguese! You hear me from England. You will have heard of me from Spain. Hear the voice of an unsought, an unrepentant friend. Hear a voice which, for more than fifty years, has been labouring to qualify itself for addressing you as it does now.19 After presenting himself as constitutional advisor for the Atlantic world, Bentham recommended that the Portuguese adopt the Spanish Constitution of 1812 for the following reasons: Take example by your friends in Naples. Do as they did. Adopt it as a mass: time admits not of picking and choosing […] Take it for all and in all, nothing as yet practicable can be so good for you. For them it is good; for you it will be still better: this you will see. To find ready made a work already so suitable, is a blessing too great for expectation; an advantage beyond all price.20 For Marx, Gramsci, and Bentham the Spanish Constitution was an adequate response for making liberty congruent with the conditions of the age. The revolutions in Spain (1808–14 and 1820–23), in Naples (1820), and in Portugal (1820) were part of the revolutions that pervaded the Atlantic world during the previous decades. Thus, in a sense, the Atlantic revolutions of c.1775–1825 can be seen as the culmination of the political culture created by the Atlantic world. 18

A. Gramsci (2011) Prison Notebooks, vol. 3, Notebook 6 (1930–32), ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 142. 19 J. Bentham (1821) Three Tracts Relative to Spanish and Portugueze Affairs; with a Continual Eye to English Ones (London: William Hone), p. 48. 20 Ibid.

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The Age of Democratic Revolutions began with the American Revolution, to be followed by the French Revolution in 1789. These political processes boosted a radical change in Europe and in America, and created a new world of nationstates under the umbrella of liberal ideology. As we will see, the Portuguese Revolution of 1820 only makes sense in this wider Atlantic context. On 24 August 1820 a garrison in Porto rebelled and issued a ‘Manifesto of the Portuguese Nation to the Sovereigns and Peoples of Europe’. In the tradition of the Iberian pronunciamientos, liberty was proclaimed. This type of movement proposes a new political order and reflects not a lack of loyalty but a commitment to the country and its institutions. It should be noted that a pronunciamiento is not a military coup. It is an insurrectional proclamation that issues a political manifesto but – and this is essential – it is understood by its performers as a restoration of liberty. In their view they were patriots, not traitors. On 15 September the revolution reached Lisbon. This time the main actor, for the first time in Portuguese history, was the people.21 The most striking feature of this document is that its first part resembles a declaration of independence, and only at the end of it can it be read as a defence of Portuguese traditional liberty cast in a liberal mould. As Maxwell has explained in dealing with this text, the manifesto ‘reads very much like other such declarations of independence from colonial status’ but, significantly, ‘the only difference was that this manifesto came from rebels in a European city, not rebels across the Atlantic in a colonial port city’.22 The manifesto denounced that ‘the status of a colony to which Portugal in effect is reduced, afflicts deeply all those citizens who still conserve a sentiment of national dignity’.23 How is it possible that an independence revolution took place in Portugal? How can a metropolis long for independence? Who was the colonial power that prompted the mobilization of Portuguese liberals? The answer to these questions is rooted in the striking events that shattered Portugal at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The position of Portugal in the years before the French Revolution was one of compromise with the great maritime and military powers of Europe – Great Britain and France – against the threat of a Spanish invasion. The American Revolution weakened the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance and in 1782 Portugal joined the League of the Neutrals. However, the French Revolution realigned 21 22 23

M. de F. Bonifácio (2010) A Monarquia Constitucional 1807–1910 (Lisbon: Texto Editores), p. 23. K. Maxwell (2000) ‘Why Was Brazil Different? The Contexts of Independence’, John Parry Memorial Lecture, April 25, Harvard University, p. 10. Quoted in ibid., p. 10.

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the country with its old ally, but this had a lasting impact on domestic policy. The Portuguese intelligentsia was heavily influenced by the French Enlightenment and the political ideas of Rousseau. The revolution nurtured the formation of a republican party in Portugal, which can be termed a ‘progressive’ party that was radically pro-French. On the other hand, the conservative party, supported by the Crown, was pro-British. Soon both parties were forced to confront each other. As Leslie Bethell explains: It was after Tilsit (25 June 1807) that Napoleon finally determined to close the few remaining gaps in his continental system aimed at destroying Britain’s trade with Europe. On 12 August, 1807 he issued an ultimatum to António de Araujo de Azevedo, the Portuguese foreign minister: the Prince Regent must close his ports to English ships, imprison English residents in Portugal and confiscate their property, or face the consequences of a French invasion.24 In reply, George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary, threatened to capture and destroy the Portuguese military and merchant fleets in the Tagus, as he had already done with the Danish fleet in Copenhagen, and to seize Portugal’s colonies if Dom João gave in to French threats.25 But it was not only threats that he addressed to the Portuguese: there was also a secret convention that offered British protection to the Portuguese Court in order to transfer it to Brazil. From the British point of view, this was the most satisfactory outcome, because it implied securing Portugal’s loyalty, controlling the Portuguese fleet and, last but not least, retaining Brazil as a destination for British goods (a crucial move at a time of trade blockades). Brazil was already an important market, and it was also the back door to Spanish America. Between the morning of 25 November and the evening of 27 November 1807, some ten to fifteen thousand people left Portugal for Brazil. This included the Portuguese royal family and the Court: members of the council of state, ministers, advisers, justices of the high court, officials of the treasury, the upper echelons of the army and navy, the Church hierarchy, members of the aristocracy, and many others. They were escorted by the British navy in order to avoid attack from Napoleon’s ships. This move saw the beginning of a new AngloPortuguese relationship. In 1808, the recently arrived Court opened the ports 24

25

L. Bethell (1985) ‘The Independence of Brazil’, in Bethell, ed. The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. I3: From Independence to c. 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 168–169. Ibid., pp. 168–169.

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of Brazil to ‘all friendly nations’ (i.e. Britain), and two years later, under the Anglo-Brazilian trade treaty, tariffs were completely lifted from British goods (on the contrary, Portuguese goods were subject to taxes). To summarize, the British had clearly won the day in this new relationship. When the war with France concluded in 1814, the royal family refused to return to Portugal from its new Brazilian abode. In 1815 Brazil was raised to the rank of a kingdom, and João vi, who succeeded to the throne in March 1816, was crowned king of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves. This move was critical because with it Brazil lost its colonial status and became a kingdom on the same footing as Portugal. In a sense, Brazil had been de facto independent since 1808, but in 1815 this situation was made legal and recognized by the international powers of the time. Since the departure of the royal family, Portugal was ruled by a British pro-consul, Beresford, who acted as a foreign tyrant. To put it simply, Portugal had collapsed as an independent nation: it was destroyed by three French invasions, its economy was controlled by British soft imperialism, and politically it was subordinated to Brazil and to England. The Portuguese people found themselves, as the manifesto of 1820 asserted, in a situation comparable to that of slavery. Interestingly, Portugal’s territories in Africa had produced but one steady article of commerce: the slave. And the only purpose of controlling these territories was slaving. In fact, slaving in Angola, Mozambique, and Cabo Verde was the precondition of Brazilian development. Thus, for the Portuguese, the transformation of Brazil from colony to kingdom was seen as a displacement in the role played by continental Portugal. Instead of being head of the kingdom, Portugal was converted into a dependent territory and, in this sense, in a territory without freedom, in a territory of serfdom (based on the Portuguese slave trade). It was in this climate that General Gomes Freire de Andrade attempted a failed military coup in 1817 against Beresford. [He] was the gallant leader of the Portuguese Legion in Napoleon’s army and the head of the French party. The execution of the General and ten of his followers put an end to the diminishing possibility of a peaceful entry of liberty in Portugal by English constitutional methods.26 Gomes Freire de Andrade was an interesting character. He was born in Vienna in 1757 and was a member of the same Masonic lodge as Amadeus Mozart. 26

G. Young (1917) Portugal Old and Young: An Historical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 217.

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He first joined the pro-British party in 1801, but from 1808 on he changed sides, becoming a supporter of French ideas and a member of the Portuguese army fighting in the Russian campaign. In 1815, after returning from Russia, he was elected Grand Master of the Portuguese Freemasons and became leader of the conspiracy against the Beresford’s dictatorship. Soon thereafter he was betrayed by fellow Masons, arrested and found guilty of conspiracy. By order of Marshal Beresford he was hung on the scaffold of the Tower of St Julião da Barra. After the execution of Gomes Freire de Andrade and other eleven conspirators unrest increased, and when Beresford himself went to Brazil to receive new instructions and wider powers from João vi, the revolution started in Porto and spread all over the country. In October a Junta was created in Lisbon. The Spanish Constitution of 1812 was provisionally adopted in order to call for a constituent assembly, which was summoned in 1821, and in this same year the first Portuguese Constitution was proclaimed. This time, the French party had won. The Constitution installed a constitutional monarchy, declared that sovereignty rested in the nation, established the separation of the three branches of government, and provided a catalogue of individual rights. João vi was forced to return to Portugal in 1821 to swear in the Constitution. But his son Pedro, who was loyal to the British, remained in Brazil as his representative. In a bold move, one year later Pedro declared the independence of Brazil. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, João vi had no choice but to recognize Brazilian independence in 1825 (on the demise of Portuguese colonialism in Brazil see Chapter 5 of this book by Cicero Araujo and Gabriela Nunes Ferreira). Portugal, an inaugurator of the Atlantic world, saw itself trapped at the beginning of the nineteenth century in a conflict triggered by democratic revolutions. It was in the midst of this conflict between modernity, tradition, and the new political actors that liberalism reached Portugal.

Conclusion: Two Traditions of Liberty, Portugal and the Atlantic World

In this chapter i have tried to show that the Portuguese Revolution of 1820, although neglected, makes up part of the history of the Atlantic Revolutions. This claim was justified in relation to the context of the Atlantic world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Napoleon, Britain, the Spanish revolutions of 1812 and 1820 were all instrumental in the Portuguese revolution. But this revolution was not only the effect of exogenous processes; it was also the

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result of the constitutional crisis of the Bragança monarchy, it was a revolution that had dramatic consequences for the independence of Brazil, another important player in the Atlantic world. Tradition, in its positive dimension, refers to something that is positively considered and whose value is asserted in relation to the past. In this sense, something is good if it is understood as a continuation and not as an initiation of pre-existing social arrangements. Revolution can be seen as an instrument for the restoration of tradition, but also as a political device to break with it. Regarding liberty, modern Western politics can be grouped into two great traditions: constitutional and revolutionary politics. The first is concerned with the protection of individual liberties whereas the latter’s main goal is socalled public liberty. In the first instance, liberty is concerned with the individual, in the sense that individual liberty is the core value to be preserved. In this tradition, liberty is ‘negative’ in the sense that its protection is articulated through institutional constrains. By limiting the power of society, institutions foster the sovereignty of the individual. The main device for the protection of individual rights is a Constitution with a consensual base. It is called a Constitution because its protective purpose is accomplished through a contract between individuals in order to create a political association. This contract can have a historical foundation – for instance, the political traditions of a group  – but it can also be a written document, a Constitution that by granting liberty to its members creates a political association out of an existing kingdom or nation. Nonetheless, in both instances the main instrument for the protection of individual liberty is the Constitution itself. Constitutional politics can be established by a revolution but it is not revolutionary politics in itself. In the manifesto that followed the Portuguese revolution of 1820 the rebels made clear that they were restoring traditional liberties and not establishing a new political arrangement. Maximilien Robespierre clearly defined the differences between constitutional politics and revolutionary politics in his speech on revolutionary government: ‘The principal concern of constitutional government is civil liberty; that of revolutionary government, public liberty. Under a constitutional government little more is required than to protect the individual against the abuses of the state, whereas revolutionary government is obliged to defend the state itself against the factions that assail it from every quarter… To good citizens revolutionary government owes the full protection of the state; to the enemies of the people it owes only death.’27 27

M. Robespierre, Speech to the National Convention, December 25, 1793.

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These two traditions can be articulated peacefully, but they can also lead to conflict (on the clash between these two traditions of liberty, see Chapter 6 of this book, by Michel Ducharme). When revolutionary politics is seen as a goal above the preservation of individual rights, constitutional politics vanishes: this was the case of ‘Terror’ during the French Revolution. The Spanish Revolution of 1812 presented itself as a restoration of traditional liberty (on the Iberian or ‘endogenous’ character of this tradition of liberty, see Chapter 3 of this volume by Ambrosio Velasco). The Portuguese ‘Manifesto’ of 1820 followed the same lines, showing respect for traditional institutions, such as the monarchy of the Braganças, and calling for the restoration of liberty. The Constitution of 1822 presented itself thus as a renewal of the Portuguese tradition of liberty. At the same time, in an Atlantic world that was fragmented by two great powers in search of hegemony, namely France and Britain, it was not possible to achieve a balance between constitutional politics and revolutionary politics. The French revolutionary party was opposed to Britain and conflict was therefore unavoidable. After the demise of Napoleon and the conservative backlash, constitutional politics also became impossible in Portugal. In the end, the Atlantic world opened a historical period of distress for Portugal which has marked much of its contemporary history.

chapter 8

Liberal Ideas and Patrimonial Practices in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America Francisco Colom González Liberal ideas made an early appearance in the Iberian world. After the American and the French Revolutions, a wave of political change reached the shores of the Iberian empires triggered by Napoleon’s expansionism in southern Europe. The overthrow of the legitimate king of Spain and the escape of the Portuguese sovereign to Brazil altered, in a fundamental way, the relations of the Iberian metropolis with its overseas colonies, eventually leading to the independence of the colonies. Under such extraordinary circumstances, the Spanish and the Portuguese empires went through a constitutional process in order to deal with the political situation and preserve their territorial integrity. However, constitutionalism in the Iberian world was not only induced from the metropolis. The first insurrectional movements in the colonies similarly proclaimed constitutions worded in liberal terms. Liberal ideas not only legitimized the termination of the colonial bond, but also bolstered subsequent attempts to create modern state institutions and made a stormy return at the end of the twentieth century under an economic, neoliberal guise. It is also true though, that the political course of the new independent countries has often been portrayed as a troubled journey. Terms like imaginary, chimerical, incomplete, dreamed, or disenchanted are frequently found in monographs focusing on their political history.1 The strains for creating a new, postcolonial order haunted the governments in the region from their very inception until

* Unless otherwise stated, quotations in English from Spanish sources are my own translations. 1 See, for instance, Fernando Escalante Gozalbo (1992) Ciudadanos imaginarios: memorial de afanes y desventuras de la virtud y apología del vicio triunfante en la República Mexicana (Mexico: El Colegio de México); Antonio Aguilar Rivera (2000) En pos de la quimera: reflexiones sobre el experimento constitucional atlántico (Mexico: cide – Fondo de Cultura Económica); Eduardo Posada-Carbó (2006) La nación soñada: violencia, liberalismo y democracia en Colombia (Bogotá: Norma); Alfonso Múnera (2011) Tiempos difíciles. La república del xix: una ciudadanía incompleta (Cartagena: Plumas de Mompox); Rafael Rojas (2009) Las repúblicas del aire: utopía y desencanto en la revolución de Hispanoamérica (Madrid: Santillana).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004299689_010

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well into the twentieth century. The foundations of the new regimes took a long time to consolidate, and when this occurred the outcomes were often weak and unstable institutional systems.2 Most of the Libertadores – the founding fathers of the new republics – would not live to see their political work culminated, and ended their days in exile or at the hands of their adversaries. The old metropolis did not fare much better. In nineteenth-century Spain, insurrectional movements, military pronunciamientos and strongmen’s rule were also the order of the day. Even if political power was constituted and upheld differently in each country – depending on the local land-owning structure, class relations, and ethnic cleavages – some practices, like patronage networks and praetorianism, were widespread and recurrent. While these features were certainly not unique to nineteenth-century Iberia and Latin America, their intensity and persistence were not equalled in other Western and North Atlantic regions. Attempts to create nominally liberal institutions in the absence of a recognizable liberal political culture have traditionally disconcerted interpreters of the Iberian world. As a result of this perplexity, nation-state formation in the region has sometimes been judged as a historical miscarriage and its liberal tradition disqualified for being allegedly fictitious or little more than a rhetorical exercise to mask the naked contest for power and the defence of encapsulated social privileges. Without reaching this extreme conclusion, Evelyne Huber and Frank Safford have recognized that, Even if we accept a simple formalistic definition of democracy, as a political system with responsible government and high levels of institutionalized contestation and political inclusion, and do not ask any questions about the reality of participation in political power by the masses, it is clear that there are very few countries in Latin America with a democratic trajectory.3 2 For an updated and encompassing view of the state making process in the region, see Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro, eds. (2013) State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Republics of the Possible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Miguel Angel Centeno (2005) Blood and Debt. War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University). For the role of liberalism in this process, Iván Jaksić and Eduardo Posada Carbó, eds. (2011) Liberalismo y poder. Latinoamérica en el siglo xix (Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica Chile); Vincent C. Peloso and Barbara A. Tenenbaum eds. (1996) Liberals, Politics and Power: State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Athens: Georgia University Press), and Marco Palacios (1999) Parábola del liberalismo (Bogotá: Norma). 3 Evelyne Huber and Frank Safford, eds. (1995) Agrarian Structure & Political Power. Landlord and Peasant in the Making of Latin America (Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press), p. 7.

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The regimes that emerged from the revolutionary cycle in Latin America have been sometimes characterized as constitutional oligarchies. In this aspect they were not really different from the type of representative government first established in the United States, France, England, or Spain. Moreover, by 1847, just before the revolutionary wave that shook the foundations of the European Restoration, suffrage in Mexico and El Salvador, for instance, was wider than in the United States and most European countries.4 Such contrasts cannot negate the fact that, on the whole, Ibero-American liberalism was unable to deliver many of the political goods promised by the countless constitutions proclaimed throughout the long nineteenth century. Its core principles were not substantially different from those found in mainstream liberalism: popular sovereignty, representative government, separation of powers, free press, and individual freedom. It was their tempo and political implementation that conspicuously differed. The reasons for the malfunctioning of the early liberal regimes in the area have been alternatively sought in the characteristics of its political culture, in the economic situation and political weakness of institutional systems that were simultaneously trying to create and to curb political power, and in the insurmountable differences between heterogeneous groups with deeply opposed interests and social identities.5 Such interpretations are not necessarily incompatible, but they seem incapable of providing an integrated view of local political traditions, their institutional basis, and the social meanings attached to them. Even if liberal ideas in the region were to be nothing more than an ideological mirage delivered by self-serving cliques, an explanation is still needed for the political functionality of their recurrent and ritual invocation, for however instable or contradictory nineteenth-century Latin American politics were they were systematically worded in the language of liberalism. Therefore, rather than assuming the hagiographic stance of old-fashioned patriotic historiography, which took ideological proclamations at face value, or dismissing the whole regional liberal tradition as fallacious, a more balanced alternative should start by taking ‘those who tried to shape a body of liberal ideas, their texts, and the institutions that attempted to put them into practice seriously’.6 A possible way out of this historiographical dead-end is to approach Latin American liberalism 4 Adam Przeworski (2009) ‘Conquered or Granted? A History of Suffrage Extensions’, British Journal of Political Science 39/2, 296. 5 See Aguilar Rivera, En pos de la quimera; Frank Safford (1992) ‘The Problem of Political Order in early Spanish America’, Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (Quincentenary Supplement), 83–97; and Charles Hale (1973) ‘The Reconstruction of Nineteenth-century Politics in Spanish America: A Case for the History of Ideas’, Latin American Research Review 8/2, 53–73. 6 Jaksić and Posada Carbó, Liberalismo y poder, p. 29.

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not as a mere set of ideas, but as discursive and normatively oriented political practices whose social meanings were embedded into the material conditions of their time. In this vein, I will here maintain that the patrimonial and praetorian practices that so frequently accompanied the creation of a constitutional order in nineteenth-century Spanish America were a result of the material circumstances under which decolonization and state formation took place, but that they also enjoyed a latent legitimacy. Within this general view, I will use the term patrimonialism in a restricted sense, namely to refer to practices of personal clientelism, political co-option, and informal power sharing that typically took place at the margins or beyond the institutional system, and whose normative references – which stemmed from colonial governance customs – endured the new conditions and eventually served new ends. In this political dynamics, access to power was frequently an object of negotiation between the contending parties but it was rarely administered through a formally regulated and open-ended process of political competition. Although the repeal of established governments by acclamation and the delivery of public employment to spoils systems inevitably involved some degree of physical or symbolic violence, the elaborate ritual that accompanied these practices reflected an ingrained legitimacy. The political changes that we call liberalism were experienced through the agency of the social actors of the time (elites, peasants, Indians, freed slaves, etc.), but political power has an additional symbolic dimension that is related to the performative representation of the social order. Accordingly, the meanings of liberal discourse were themselves an arena for conflict that involved shifting legitimacies and an inertia from the past: the new political practices matured within the traditional structures, old prerogatives were used to claim new rights, and new rhetorical turns often embodied old values. The idea of a patrimonial liberalism thus tries to characterize the peculiar interaction between liberal ideas and political customs that marked the foundational period of the Spanish-American constitutional regimes.

Liberalism and the Hispanic World

Unlike the position in other parts of the world, in Spanish America liberal ideas were not an alien transplant. Alongside the obvious imports from the European Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions, they emerged from a specific Ibero-American debate.7 For a long time, Latin 7 There is a vast new bibliography on the topic, mostly in Spanish and centred on the Cadiz Constitution as a pivotal reference. See, for instance, François-Xavier Guerra (1992) Modernidad e independencias. Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Mexico: Fondo de

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American historiography remained confined between the narrow limits drawn by the historias patrias, which conceived of the independence ideology as a continuation of the French and American Revolutions, and a Hispanic alternative associated with conservative positions. Both perspectives are seen nowadays as being out of tune with reality, and it is generally accepted that the European and the Spanish references are not mutually excluding. The implementation of a liberal agenda in the region found different challenges. In Mexico and Peru, as in the old metropolis, the Catholic Church and the military had strong institutional roots that took a long time to vanquish. In the viceroyalty of New Granada – corresponding mainly to modern Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama – the Andean elites had regional and economic interests that were fundamentally different from those of the Caribbean coast, where slavery and ethnic cleavages played a specific role, and for most of the nineteenth century they proved unable or unwilling to carry out a unified political project.8 In the Provinces of the River Plate, the authority of Buenos Aires was for a long time purely nominal, and the antagonism between the territories and caudillos from the interior and the capital city was not settled until well into the 1860s.9 Chile – where Diego Portales was able to orchestrate a lasting and oligarchic presidentialist regime behind the scenes – is usually portrayed as an exception to the pervasive instability that seized the continent after independence. Against this general landscape, liberal and conservative were political labels applied to different oligarchic groups that, while having Cultura Económica – Mapfre); Pedro Cruz et al. (1993) Los orígenes del constitucionalismo liberal en España e Iberoamérica (Seville: Junta de Andalucía); José María Portillo et al. (2006) El primer constitucionalismo hispanoamericano (Bilbao: Servicio Editorial de la Universidad del País Vasco); Roberto Breña (2006) El primer liberalismo español y los procesos de emancipación de América, 1808–1824: una revisión historiográfica del liberalismo hispánico (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica); Antonio Colomer Viadel, ed. (2011) Las Cortes de Cádiz, la Constitución de 1812 y las independencias nacionales en América (Valencia: Universidad Politécnica de Valencia); Joaquín Varela Suanzes-Carpegna (2011) La teoría del Estado en las Cortes de Cádiz: orígenes del constitucionalismo hispánico, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales); Ignacio Fernández Sarasola (2011) La constitución de Cádiz: origen, contenido y proyección internacional (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Consti­ tucionales); Alberto Gullón Abao and Antonio Gutiérrez Escudero eds. (2012) La Constitución gaditana de 1812 y sus repercusiones en América (Cadiz: Universidad de Cádiz). 8 Alfonso Múnera (2008) El fracaso de la nación. Región, clase y raza en el Caribe colombiano (1717–1821) (Bogotá: Planeta), pp. 163 and ff.; David Bushnell (1993) The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press); Carlos Alberto Patiño Villa (2010) Guerra y construcción del Estado en Colombia (1810–2010) (Bogotá: Random House Mondadori). 9 Nicolas Shumway (1991) The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press).

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different sensibilities towards the territorial share of power and the social role of institutionalized religion, had much more in common than in opposition. Such proximity did not prevent the outbreak of several civil wars pitting liberals against conservatives in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, and Chile, but the cleavage dividing both groups was rather a matter of rival political networks and short-term tactics than of insurmountable social differences. The ideological borders were porous and the political actors often interchangeable, with personal and territorial rivalries counting more than doctrinal antagonism. As David Bushnell portrayed the situation, the conservatives were little more than moderate liberals with a stronger inclination to the reinforcement of the executive power and to filter the free expression of the popular will through a system of indirect elections.10 In 1863 Pedro José Rojas, a Venezuelan publicist and politician, when summing up the recent history of his country, observed that Political parties never had a [political] doctrine in Venezuela. Their origins were personal hatreds. Those who labelled themselves liberals found, already done by their opponents, all the liberal reforms enshrined in the modern legal codes. Those who were called oligarchs fought for the exclusion of the former. When they reached power, both governed with the same laws and the same institutions. The difference consisted of the men.11 In spite of the enduring coloniality of the new regimes, any form of continuity between the colonial past and the independent era was denied by official historiography. This perspective replicated the view of the republican elites, who condemned the overall colonial period as an age of obscurantism whose legacy was soon to be overcome by the consequences of modernization. Progress became the token with which to evaluate the adaption of local societies and economies to European and North American standards. The rich baroque culture that flourished during the early colonial period, in which heterogeneous social groups found a precarious modus vivendi, together with the reforms 10 11

David Bushnell and Neill David (1994) The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 34. Quoted in José Luis Romero (1998) El pensamiento político latinoamericano (Buenos Aires: A-Z Editores), p. 201. Marta Irurozqui reached a similar conclusion in relation to the political parties in Bolivia: ‘¿Que vienen los mazorqueros! Usos y abusos discursivos de la corrupción y la violencia en las elecciones bolivianos de 1884–1925’, in H. Sabato, ed. Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones (Mexico: El Colegio de México), pp. 298 and ff.

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undertaken by the last Bourbon administrations – whose original purpose was in many ways continued by the new republican governments – were thus pushed aside in the collective memory. In Germán Colmenares’ insightful view, The insertion of nineteenth century Spanish-American historians in the literary tradition of the Enlightenment first and of liberal Romanticism later, conveyed a sense of alienation from their own societies […] The American Creoles had the feeling that they had to start from scratch. The revolution [of independence] had disclosed to them a new language with which they could recreate their own reality at will. Only after the revolution, a primordial event in the full sense of the term, could the totality of history be rewritten forwards and backwards.12 Putting aside the obvious differences in the social configuration, the emancipative task of liberalism was formally alike on both shores of the Iberian Atlantic. Spain and its overseas dominions had to create representative institutions and new national markets out of the rubble of an absolutist, multiethnic, and mercantilist empire. But unlike the metropolis, where constitutionalism could proceed by submitting royal authority to the rule of law, in America the new state structures had to be created from below, by asserting new centres of legitimate authority over a multiplicity of regions and social groups with diverging interests. The Spanish colonial system in America was organized as a top-down and inside-out political structure.13 It consisted essentially of a continental network of head cities, each with an ample hinterland of dependent townships and specific economic and administrative ties with the Peninsula. The colonial jurisdictions did not really correspond to political units. This heterogeneous system, which Marx equated with oriental despotism and desc­ ribed as ‘an agglomeration of mismanaged republics with a nominal sovereign at their head’,14 revolved nevertheless around the Crown. A patrimonial and ill-defined attribution of competences allowed the monarchy to try to outplay colonial interests by pitting some against others, thus instituting a peculiar system of checks and balances. José María Blanco White, a Spanish liberal sympathetic to the colonial cause, signalled as early as 1812 the advantage that

12 13 14

Germán Colmenares (1989) Las convenciones contra la cultura, 3rd ed. (Santa Fe de Bogotá: Tercer Mundo), pp. 22 and 31. Claudio Lomnitz-Adler (1992) Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 285ff. Karl Marx (1854) ‘Revolutionary Spain’, New York Daily Tribune, 9 September.

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having such ‘a faraway and invisible sovereign’ represented for the inner stability of these territories.15 The collapse of authority at the centre of the empire as a result of the French invasion of Spain in 1808 triggered a simultaneous reaction in the colonies that, as José María Hernández has shown in Chapter 4 in this volume, called into question the legitimacy and representativeness of the alternative institutions established by the Spanish patriots resisting the French in the Peninsula. Shortly after their independence, and in the absence of a legitimate power holding together this heterogeneous and overstrained structure, the American territories fell into a centrifugal dynamic – usually bemoaned as anarchy by the first generation of independence leaders – in which different regional and social interests competed for political hegemony and for participation in the new power structures. In Portugal, the migration of the royal court to Brazil prevented a similar process of balkanization as in Spanish America, but as the chapters on Brazilian independence and the Portuguese revolution in this book show, the tensions stemming from the displacement of the central power of the monarchy doomed the Lusitanian Empire in America to its dissolution no less than in the Spanish case.16 The proliferation of contentious political actors in the new republics was a combined result of the internal contradictions that had accumulated during the late colonial period and of the political scene that the insurrectional situation and the legal changes induced from the metropolis had created. The Constitution proclaimed in Cadiz in 1812, which was drafted with the assistance of a group of representatives from the colonies, did not become effective across all the Spanish dominions but where it was implemented, and however briefly, it swiftly changed the political landscape by extending municipal status to many smaller towns that had formerly lacked a Cabildo (town council).17 The subordinate groups, which constituted the bulk of the insurgent and loyalist armies, also gained stakes in the revolutionary process. In Cartagena, an angry mob of black and mulatto workers and artisans stormed the Cabildo in 1811 and forced the local Junta to sign a declaration of independence. The denial of citizenship to Afro-descendants in the Cadiz Constitution, the insurrectional leanings of many slave owners, and the varied reaction of the slaves 15 16 17

José Mª Blanco White (1812) ‘Ventajas de la resistencia de España para la Europa y América’, El Español 5, 3–27. Jose Murilo de Carvalho (1982) ‘Political Elites and State Building. The Case of NineteenthCentury Brazil’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 24/3, 378–399. José Carlos Chiaramonte (1999) ‘Ciudadanía, soberanía y representación en la génesis del Estado argentino’, in Sabato, Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones, 94–114.

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and the free castes created a complex range of possible strategies and alliances for these groups to advance their interests. But the stance of the subalterns did not always fall on the insurrectional side. For instance, the Venezuelan llaneros – the free mulatto cowboys from the grasslands – became a fearsome royalist force under the command of José Tomás Boves, a Spanish-born rancher turned political caudillo. In New Granada, the Indian communities of the Pasto region allied with the Crown and displayed a fierce resistance against the Liberators’ armies. In a similar vein, the slaves in the mines and estates around Popayán often turned towards the royalist side when their masters joined the insurgents. This type of popular royalism must be understood against the background of the new situation and opportunities that the insurrectional process had created for the disadvantaged groups of colonial society. Depending on their specific circumstances, they allied with one group or another, negotiated with the elites, or opted for an agenda of their own, but the traditional order based on reciprocity and royal patronage – and not only the liberal proclaims of the insurgents – proved able to nurture the expectations of liberty and justice among some of these disfavoured groups.18 The instability created by the propagation of regional power systems and local political bosses that replaced colonial authority was not curbed until the end of the century, when the consolidation of large export economies and the arrival of foreign capital allowed the national governments to increase their fiscal base and to cement their institutional sustainability and military muscle. Only then could the new nations be governed from their capital cities. On the other hand, economic development and the expansion of state capacities also increased opportunities for spoils, which were decried at the time as an empleo­ manía, the fixation with gaining public jobs by political means.19 Between 1810 and 1850 more than sixty constitutions were proclaimed in the new independent republics. Several of the attempted states disintegrated after a short while – for example, the Grand Colombia and the Central American Union. Military uprisings and the violent ousting of governments followed in short succession. This turmoil reflected the inability of the new regimes to re-esta­blish a legitimate and functional political order. Many of these uprisings echoed old territorial and social tensions, and were often inspired by an oligarchic spirit that 18

19

Marcela Echeverri (2011) ‘Popular Royalists, Empire, and Politics in South-western New Granada, 1809–1819’, Hispanic American Historical Review 91/2, 258. See also Marixa Lasso (2007) Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution: Colombia, 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press). José María Luis de Mora (1827) ‘Discurso sobre los perniciosos efectos de la empleomanía’, El Observador, Mexico, 21 September.

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had been present in the hegemonic groups from the very inception of the independence movements. The juntas that had dismissed Crown officials in 1810 were mostly composed of the landed, commercial, and bureaucratic groups of colonial society. In Bolívar’s famous speech in Angostura in 1819, in which he made public his plans for an independent republic in Venezuela, the new political arrangement included a life-term presidency, an indirect representative system, and a hereditary senate. This was all in all a more participative model than that put forward in 1811 by the coastal planters who first seized power in Caracas. The first Venezuelan Constitution (1811), while admitting natives and pardos (multi-racial subjects) into citizenship, clearly biased the possibilities of political influence in favour of the mantuano landed gentry from Caracas. This model offered a sharp contrast to the Mexican constitution of Apatzingán (1814), which removed caste distinctions and envisaged the incorporation of all male adults into the body politic. With the institution of regular elections, the creation of political machineries for the collection of votes often allowed subordinate groups to circumvent oligarchic designs. As the lower classes could tip the electoral balance in one way or the other, their support was coveted and nurtured by different elite sectors. In the city of Mexico, to the dismay of liberal leaders like José María Luis Mora, yorkinos and escoceses – two Masonic lodges that rivalled for political influence during the early years of the independence – were able to rally the urban underclasses behind their respective candidates. Mora decried a system that had bestowed political rights upon some types of persons who, due to their alleged ignorance and lack of independent judgement, ‘easily became blind instruments of those who hope to seduce them and are interested in taking advantage of their candour’.20 In rural areas, the revolts that emerged after 1810 were different from their colonial predecessors, as they involved interclass alliances and addressed both peasant claims and national issues.21 What is interesting for our topic is that, independently of the elitarian or inclusive and egalitarian character of these movements, all resorted to formally similar strategies for the contention of power, its negotiation and sharing. Florencia Malon has sought the origins of these patrimonial and authoritarian features in the type of political dynamics involved. 20

21

José María Luis Mora (1830) ‘Ensayo filosófico sobre nuestra revolución constitucional’, El Observador, 3 March, p. 127. See also Richard Warren (1996) ‘Elections and Popular Political Participation in Mexico, 1808–1836’, in Peloso and Tenenbaum eds. Liberals, Politics and Power, 30–58. Peter F. Guardino (1996) Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State: Gerrero 1800–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 7.

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The explanation of democracy or authoritarianism must be sought in the historically specific forms taken by the interactions and negotiations among evolving regional political cultures, where emerging national elites, politics, and states were constructed in the intersections among and between these multiple negotiations.22

What’s in a Name? Patrimonialism and Modern Politics

There is no single, universally accepted definition of patrimonialism. The notion of a patrimonial state (Patrimonialstaat) was originally devised by the German conservative jurist Karl Ludwig von Haller in the wake of the European Restoration and in opposition to the contractual theories of the state disseminated by the French Revolution.23 According to him, patriarchal states were common across history and were derived from the aggregation of seigniorial house and land rights (Haus- und Grundherrschaft). Max Weber picked up on the term a century later, giving it a new meaning within the wider context of his theory of domination. In Weber’s conceptual scheme, patrimonial power is a form of traditional authority resting ‘on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them’.24 Unlike charismatic and rational-legal authority, which respectively depend on personal charisma and formally rational laws, the origins and limits of patrimonial authority are viewed as legitimate insofar as they rely on the belief in the ‘inviolability of that which has existed from time immemorial’. Patrimonialism, along with patriarchalism, developed as a differentiation from the oikos, the household domain. The distinction between both subtypes of authority was for Weber only one of degree, for patrimonialism involves an administrative staff, while patriarchalism does not. In patrimonial regimes power was exerted on the basis of kin ties, patronage, personal allegiance, or a combination of these, with few formal rules or regulations. In his view, patrimonial 22

23

24

Florencia E. Malon (1995) ‘Authoritarianism, Political Culture, and the Formation of the State: Landowners, Agrarian Movements, and the Making of National Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico and Peru’, in Evelyne Huber and Frank Safford eds. Agrarian Structure and Political Power, p. 69. Karl Ludwig von Haller (1825) Restauration der Staats-Wissenschaft (Winterthur: In der Steinerischen Buchhandlung) and Stefan Breuer (2006) ‘Patrimonialismus’, in Max Webers tragische Soziologie. Aspekte und Perspektiven (Tubingen: Mohr-Siebeck), 80–91. Max Weber (1978) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), p. 215.

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rule inhibits social change and tends to be non-rational, even if its ends can be pursued by rational means. Unlike patriarchal commands, which are predominantly value-oriented, bureaucratic norms are established according to instrumental purposes and have a formal-rational basis. Bureaucratic domination therefore presupposes a cadre of professionally trained administrators, as the enactment of norms is guided by permits and rules that appeal to some sense of abstract rationality and constitute the core of legal authority. For Weber, patrimonial conditions had an extraordinary importance as a historical platform for larger political structures. A patrimonial state emerged when the ruler managed his political authority in the same discretional way as he did with his patriarchal power, that is, as a personal instrument. This type of authority implied the legitimate exercise of jurisdictional power and the enjoyment of certain political rights as if they were private. Historically, patrimonial rule was exercised in the European Middle Ages through the granting of feudal tenure by the lord to the dependants, who could then transmit it to their heirs, or by bequeathing benefits to the office-holders, a prebendal subtype that Weber identified with ancient and Oriental societies. Patrimonial rule is also characterized by a continuous tension between the central authority and the centrifugal tendencies of the subordinate powers, as this mode of subjection is based on customary bonds of reciprocity between the ruler and his/her dependents. Weber’s categories were imbedded in a larger conceptual network and used in complex historical descriptions that did not strictly imply an evolutionary outline. He recognized historical passages connecting one type of authority to the other. For instance, revolutionary movements guided by charismatic leaders could crystallize into a traditional order or bureaucratize into a rational formal organization. Pressed by particular circumstances, such as competition with rival powers and fiscal necessity, he also admitted the possibility that patrimonial domination developed some rational administrative traits, as happened with capitalism in feudal Europe. It was Talcott Parsons, the first translator of Weber’s work into English and his most influential interpreter in the American academy, who transformed these types of authority into a developmental process. After World War ii, the notion of patrimonialism was reshaped by structural-functionalist sociology and linked on one hand to traditional society and, on the other hand, used as an explanation of why some countries were lagging behind in the process of economic and social modernization. Patrimonialism acquired new connotations in the 1960s, when the then emerging paradigm of the civic culture promoted a behavioural approach to the study of politics. This perspective interpreted political change through

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social attitudes and led to the comparison of political cultures in the Americas, a task that was carried out with uneven skilfulness and was eventually transformed into an essentialist and culturalist interpretation of social agency.25 Drawing on Parsons’ belief that Calvinist religiosity – with its egalitarian, individualistic ethos, and its scepticism of state power – had become institutionalized in the United States as a pattern of social values, some authors maintained that in Latin America the combined effects of the Counter-Reformation, patrimonial rule, and colonial dependence had inversely crystallized into a monistic political culture that had outlived its original background and continued projecting its influence on contemporary societies in the forms of charismatic rule, authoritarian corporatism, and bureaucratic paternalism.26 This type of sociological literature is in decline nowadays or has suffered a thorough revision of its categories. Academic preference has migrated to new fields like subaltern and post-colonial studies, which were conceived under different normative and theoretical premises, but whose interpretations are sometimes no less rigid and normatively biased than the now discredited paradigm of the political culture. The use of the patrimonial concept as a tool for the analysis of modern societies was questioned from its inception, as corruption and clientelism might provide political support but do not create legitimacy per se. Against Weber’s original belief though, patrimonial practices are not necessarily circumscribed to traditional forms of sociability. They can be found in most world regions coexisting with modern bureaucratic states and with capitalist economy. State 25

26

For the notion of political culture, see the pivotal work of Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba (1963) The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (New York: Sage). An earlier ground-breaking work in the research of societal values, which emphasized the familial factor in Southern Italy as a source of patronage relations and economic backwardness, was written by Edward C. Banfield (1958) The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: The Free Press). See Howard J. Wiarda (1974) Politics and Social Change in Latin America: the Distinct Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press); Howard J. Wiarda and Margaret MacLeish Mott (2001) Catholic Roots and Democratic Flowers: Political Systems in Spain and Portugal (Westport, ct: Praeger); Howard J. Wiarda (2001) The Soul of Latin America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). In a similar vein, see Glen C. Dealy (1968) ‘Prolegomena on the Spanish American Political Tradition’, Hispanic American Historical Review 48/1, 37–58; and (1974) The Public Man: an Interpretation of Latin American and other Catholic Countries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press); Claudio Véliz (1980) The Centralist Tradition in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press), and (1994) The New World of the Gothic Fox (Berkeley: University of California Press). For an incisive critique of Wiarda’s essentialist bias, see Alan Knight (2001) International Affairs 77/4, 1031–1032.

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formation is usually described as a process in which the old solidarities linked to corporate bodies, villages, guilds, and personal ties are transferred to the nation-state as the primary focus of loyalty. In this process, however, the weakness of the state can give rise to a need for allies or to a capture of its institutions by those very same groups that it was addressed to control and incorporate. This is precisely the space for the modern forms of political patrimonialism. This term is still commonly used in sociology and political science, but has lost most of its evolutionary and culturalist connotations.27 In the broad sense that I will use it here, patrimonialism refers to a set of practices – such as patronage, co-option, and personal rule – for wielding power against the background of weak state institutions. Patrimonialism, on the other hand, also entails a certain social imaginary. In Charles Taylor’s definition, a social imaginary is not just a set of ideas. It is rather What makes people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others […], the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations […] The social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.28 In brief, patrimonialism involves an ideological justification that can shape the collective organization of political conflict and solidarity. Its pervasiveness in nineteenth-century Spanish-American must be sought in the conditions in which state-making took place, a process that was systematically hampered by militarization, intra-elite competition, and social contestation by the subordinate groups. The military caesarism of the first decades after independence was eventually replaced by a patrimonial type of liberalism. Such circumstances prevented the creation of a professional civil service and of stable state institutions, while in turn stimulated the proliferation of political machines, extra-institutional negotiations, and spoils systems. The role of elections within this scheme was usually meant to give public sanction to the pacts of reciprocity between the different elite groups. Successful electoral bosses or caciques were able to organize extensive patronage networks through the

27 28

See, for instance, Julia Adams and Mounira Charrad, eds. (2011) ‘Patrimonial Power in the Modern World’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 636. Charles Taylor (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, nc and London: Duke University Press), p. 23.

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dispensation of favours and benefits to certain social groups in a process that mixed the private and the public spheres.29 As we have seen, the subaltern studies approach has shed new light on the groups that were usually excluded from the political arrangements of early liberalism, if only to show that the strategies they followed did not substantially alter the overall predominant features of the political process. The groups discriminated for their social or ethnic condition fought the arbitrary power of the state and struggled for their participation in the new political scene, frequently opting out of it when they did not succeed. In this context, voting was usually mobilized through clientelistic networks or controlled by outright manipulation. Violence was a constitutive part of the whole process. As Hilda Sabato has described, The exercise of violence was seen as something legitimate not only against an external enemy, but also internally […] when it was considered that the central government violated the Constitution or the premises upon which its legitimacy was based […] The participation in these types of actions involved large portions of the population, often substantially larger than those that took part in the elections.30 This type of reaction replicated similar situations in colonial times. The usual tactic involved rebelling against bad government in the name of the king. When the Indian peasants in the villages considered that the king’s officials allowed an infringement of natural law and custom, ‘in their eyes they became fair targets of action to restore justice, including violence’.31 As a collateral reaction, beleaguered governments in the republican period systematically resorted to emergency powers that were ill defined in the Constitutions, thereby placing the political agency of the state outside the law.32 As Diego

29

For an illustrative comparison of patronage practices in nineteenth-century Spain and Argentina, see Claudia E. Herrera and Agustin E. Ferraro (2013) ‘Friend’s Tax. Patronage, Fiscality, and State Building in Argentina and Spain’, in Centeno and Ferraro eds., State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain, pp. 157–180. 30 Hilda Sabato, ed. (1999) Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones: perspectivas históricas de América Latina (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica), p. 25. For a reconstruction of the social dynamics that accompanied the electoral processes in Bolivia, Marta Irurozqui Victoriano (2000) ‘A bala, piedra y palo’: la construcción de la ciudadanía política en Bolivia, 1826–1952 (Seville: Diputación de Sevilla). 31 Guardino. Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, p. 26. 32 Aguilar Rivera, En pos de la quimera, pp. 43 and ff.

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Portales bluntly confessed in Chile, ‘that lady that they call the Constitution has to be violated whenever the circumstances are extreme’.33

Traditional Social Imaginaries: Natural Law and the ‘Common Good’

There are few explicit mentions of Latin America in Max Weber’s work. However, the Estado indiano – the colonial state that emerged after the Conquest – bears some characteristics of what he described as patrimonial authority.34 Created at the onset by the private initiative of military entrepreneurs – the Conquistadores – who tried to impose their personal rule on the domains gained for the Crown, at their own expense, the colonial state soon developed into a more cohesive and centralized structure. Spanish colonization was originally devised for the exploitation of mineral resources through forced labour and for the tributary exaction on the native peoples. Society was soon organized into a caste system that displayed some formal similarities, but also profound differences, with the matrix society in the Iberian Peninsula. Spaniards and Indians were thus obliged to live in their own repúblicas or communities, but the deep dependence that existed between them was controlled by a Creole elite under the distant surveillance of the Crown. Within this ethnocorporative system, economic entrepreneurship heavily depended on the avai­ lability of indentured labour. Unlike the fiefdom and the corvée institutions 33 34

Letter to Antonio Garfias, 6 December 1834, . Max Weber’s writings were made available to the Spanish-speaking public relatively early, thanks mainly to their precocious translation by a group of Spanish republican exiles in Mexico. The first (partial) translation of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft into Spanish was published by Fondo de Cultura Económica in 1944, three years before the also incomplete English translation by Talcott Parsons. However, for many years the repercussions of his work on the regional social sciences were unnoticed. It took several decades before the Weberian apparatus was integrated into interpretations of Latin America. On this topic, see Álvaro Morcillo Laiz (2012) ‘Aviso a los navegantes. La traducción al español de Economía y Sociedad de Max Weber’, Estudios Sociológicos 30/90, 609–640, and (2008) ‘Historia de un fracaso: intermediarios, organizaciones, y la institucionalización de Weber en México’, Revista Sociológica 67, 149–192. On the use of patrimonialism for social analysis in Latin America, see Magali Sarfatti (1966) Spanish Bureaucratic-Patrimonialism in America (Berkely: Institute of International Studies, University of California); Gina Zabludovsky (1989) ‘The Reception and Utility of Max Weber’s Concept of Patrimonialism in Latin America’, International Sociology 4/1, 51–66, and Horst Pietschmann (1982) ‘Burocracia y corrupción en Hispanoamérica colonial’, Nova Americana 5, 9–37.

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in Europe, the encomienda and the repartimiento, which had some indigenous precedent, like the mita system in the Inca Empire and the coatequitl among the Aztecs, were not a mode of servitude entailed to the tenure of the land. They were temporary grants of native workforce bestowed by the Crown to private individuals for their personal service or to community-driven projects. Both types of service were prebendal, that is, they fell under royal discretion and could not be transmitted by the beneficiaries to their descendants. Despite the pressure of the Encomenderos on the Crown and their occasional display of violent protest, they were unable to transform their privileged status into that of feudal nobility. It has been noted that the condition of the Indians who surrendered to the Crown was to some extent similar to that of the aljamas in medieval Spain, in which the Moors and Jews living under Christian rule enjoyed some jurisdictional autonomy and were accorded special fiscal status.35 By the mid-sixteenth century the Indian tribute was monetized, formally putting the relationship between the natives and the encomienda holders on an equal footing with the pecheros (peasant tributaries) from Castile and their feudal lords, with the significant exception that the communitarian status of the Indians formally prevented their escape from their subaltern condition. This neo-feudal structure has been sometimes described as tributary despotism.36 However, if some practices of the colonial regime displayed clear patrimonial characteristics, other features, especially after the Bourbon reforms in the mid-eighteenth century, which reinforced the role of central authority, brought it closer to what Weber labelled a rational type of administration.37 Colonial rule made use of ad hoc administrative bodies – like the Council of the Indies in the Peninsula and the Audiencias and Cabildos in America – and developed a corpus of local jurisprudence, such as the derecho indiano, which was first compiled in 1680. However, instructions emanating from the Crown did not automatically generate obedience overseas. They had to be balanced against the varied interests of colonial society. In the absence of any substantial 35 36 37

Patricia Seed (1995) Ceremonies of Possession. Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492– 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 85. Enrique Semo (1993) The History of Capitalism in Mexico: The Origins 1521–1763 (Austin: University of Texas Press). On the sale of public office, see Mark A. Burkholder and Dewitt. S. Chandler (1972) ‘Creole Appointments and the Sale of Audiencia Positions in the Spanish Empire under the Early Bourbons’, Journal of Latin American Studies 4, 187–206. Claudio Véliz has observed that centralist rule falls under the rational type of domination, whereas lineage, heritage and personalism typically are features of patrimonial rule. The Centralist Tradition in Latin America, p. 7.

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degree of political representation or of a constitutional separation of powers, the combined effect of ill-defined competences, overlapping jurisdictions, and venal administrative practices helped the Crown to counterbalance the different local interests and to exercise some remote control on colonial authorities. The result was a malleable system of governance that allowed colonial society ample space for adaptation, bargaining, and outright corruption.38 The maxim ‘se acata, pero no se cumple’ (the order is complied with, but not implemented), usually applied to the laws arriving from the Peninsula which were deemed inappropriate for the American context, or contradictory to the real interests of the Crown, discloses the value-oriented rationality that underlay the whole colonial administrative system. This is a type of substantive rationality – wertrationales Handeln, in Weber’s terminology – which strives for goals that may not be formally rational in themselves but that are nonetheless pursued by rational means. Its features are easily recognizable in the colonial legal corpus, which was characterized by its lack of systematism, its casuistic approach, and its ultimate reliance on natural law. The Bourbon reforms somewhat altered the governance of the American territories, but the reinforcement of central authority did not necessarily make the whole structure more homogeneous. The neo-feudal character of Spanish institutions in America becomes more evident against the background of European feudalism. This consisted of a dense network of transactional obligations within which the status of the king in relation to the nobility was little more than that of first among peers. In this environment, a body of legal norms gradually appeared that attempted to settle feudal disputes and to organize the different layers of authority. In order to reaffirm the authority of the monarch, absolutist theories tried to codify royal sovereignty as a contractual system. Natural law served this end. Europe was thus the first region in the world to witness the emergence of a pattern of political relations based on statutory rights and on the legal control of sovereign power. The predisposition to constitutional rule in Europe was nevertheless the contingent result of a combination of elements, such as the balance of powers between the nobles and the Crown, the decentralization of military structures, the survival of Germanic parliamentary customs, and the resilience of peasants’ rights.39 Liberal institutions, such as parliaments and charters, draw their roots from the contractual customs of an evanescent feudal world 38 39

John L. Phelan (1960) ‘Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy’, Administrative Science Quarterly 5/1, 47–65. Brian M. Downing(1989) ‘Medieval Origins of Constitutional Government in the West’, Theory and Society 18/2, 213–247

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in tension with the nascent practices of absolutism. The manner in which these strains were resolved gave the different liberal traditions their particular brand. Moreover, many of the political categories that emerged from this process had a recognizable religious background. This is the reason why, as Carl Schmitt saw it, the normative core of absolutism derives from political theology.40 English liberalism, the first to emerge, stemmed from the reaction of the gentry and its political allies against the prerogatives of the Crown. Texts like those written by John Locke depicted what political practice had established in England after the Civil War. The English liberal matrix, permeated as it was by Protestant individualist values, viewed private property as a safeguard for civic autonomy and an expression of social competence.41 In France, the materialization of liberty as civil equality and national sovereignty was mainly the result of a cultural process that questioned the traditional sources of political legitimacy. Even if the French theories on the popular origin of sovereignty can be traced back to the late sixteenth century with the Monarchomaques, it was the rationalism of the Enlightenment that prepared the path for the Rights of Man and the Revolution. German liberalism was somehow belated in comparison with its English and French counterparts, due to a large extent on the tardy unification of the country. The theory of the Rechtsstaat, as established in Kantian and Hegelian legal philosophy, offered a different, predominantly juridical approach to political legitimacy. Accordingly, the formal rationality of the law was seen as a bulwark against arbitrary rule, whereas the ethical responsibility of the state as an agent of civil peace was brought to the fore.42 Even today, German Ordoliberalismus, unlike Anglo-Saxon Neoliberalism, emphasizes the juridical and political responsibility of the state for ensuring an adequate environment for economic competition, in collaboration with the capital and labour organizations. The history of liberal ideas in the Iberian world is somewhat different. Spanish absolutism did not emerge from the suppression of internal religious wars but from territorial expansion, first in the Peninsula and then in America. 40 41

42

Carl Schmitt (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge: The mit Press). This normative core, which has attracted much of the conventional Marxist critique of liberalism, was famously formulated by C.B. Macpherson (1988)The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). This aspect of the German liberal theory conspicuously contrasts with the equivalent task attributed to the market by the Scottish Enlightenment and its ‘commercial humanism’. See J.G.A. Pocock (1988) Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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The repression and ultimate expulsion of religious dissenters spared the Spanish sovereigns many of the obstacles that in other European regions hampered the full assertion of royal authority. The extemporaneous resort of sixteenth-century Spanish political theory to Thomism – a medieval reformulation of Aristotelian philosophy after all – has been attributed to the particular situation of Iberian society at this time in history.43 After the crisis of medieval universalism, the expanding Spanish Monarchy needed to conciliate the political rationale of absolute sovereignty with a new ecumenical order that could incorporate the peoples of the New World into Christian, and more specifically Catholic civilization. Natural law provided a propitious template for this task. The categories of natural law are nevertheless far from constituting a homogeneous body. Catholic and Protestant legal theorists defined individual rights, sovereign authority, and the constitution of society in recognisably different manners. According to Richard Morse’s seminal intuition, the AngloAmerican settlers had developed a Lockean, namely pluralist, understanding of their social bonds, whereas the Spanish colonists adhered to the hierarchical worldview of their Catholic background. The Latin-American spirit tends towards a comprehensive and unifying view [of society], whereas the Anglo-American is more empiricist. These features help to explain the importance granted to natural law and to the general will – in its pre-Rousseaunian version – in Latin American political culture, and the extraordinary significance that the Anglo-Americans attribute to universal suffrage. What is at stake is the organizing principle of the body politic: a society based on contract in contrast to an organic society, a levelling or individualist principle in contrast to a hierarchical or architectonic one.44 The idea of the common good, as systematized by Thomas Aquinas and later developed by Iberian scholasticism, played a pivotal role in Catholic natural law. For Aquinas, rationality has a theoretical and a practical dimension. 43 44

Richard M. Morse (1982) El espejo de próspero (México: Siglo xxi). Ibid., p. 56. See also (1972) ‘A Prolegomenon to Latin American Urban History’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 52/3, 359–394. Other meaningful works by Morse were (1954) ‘Towards a Theory of Spanish American Government’, Journal of the History of Ideas 51/1, 71–93; (1964) ‘The Heritage of Latin America’, in Louis Hartz, ed. The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World); and (1989) New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas (Baltimore, md: The Johns Hopkins University Press).

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Speculative reason guides the knowledge that is not conveyed to us by nature, as in the pure sciences, and it does so by starting from indemonstrable but naturally known principles. Practical reason, in its turn, determines the particularities of human legislation, which may sometimes derive from custom, but must always proceed in accordance with the precepts of natural law.45 Accordingly, there are for Aquinas different types of laws: human, natural and eternal or divine. Whereas natural law is that which allows us to discern good from evil and is accessible to man through natural reason – ‘an imprint on us of the divine light’ – human law is ‘nothing more than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community’.46 More precisely, the law is ‘a dictate of practical reason emanating from the ruler who governs a perfect community’.47 Legal rationality has then a material purpose, for the law must be addressed to the common good, but it also exudes a patrimonial character, since it is entrusted to the keeper of the community. For Aquinas, monarchy – the community justly ruled by a single authority – was thus the best possible regime. All these ideas show a remarkable family resemblance to the normative self-perception of patrimonial authority as described by Weber. The normative affinity of sovereign power to patriarchal authority is even more obvious in the work of Jean Bodin and Robert Filmer, the earliest theorists of absolutism, who portrayed the adroit administration of the family household as a model for the governance of the polity by the sovereign.48 Spanish legal philosophers like Francisco Suárez, Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, and Luis de Molina assumed the Aristotelian/Thomistic view of society as an organic hierarchy. Within this topological and teleological worldview, political authority does not emanate from naked force or arbitrary rule, but from its natural position in the hierarchical order of society. In a similar way, subjective rights are not conceived as immanent to human beings; they depend on a substantive moral order that transcends them. This is the ultimate origin of the Catholic tenet according to which unjust laws cannot 45

46 47 48

As Aquinas puts it, ‘certain things came into custom by reason of their utility; afterwards these things which emanated from nature and were approved by custom were sanctioned by fear and reverence for the law’. Thomas Aquinas (1985) Summa Theologica [c.1265], (Franklin Center: Franklin Library) First Part of the Second Part, Treatise on Law, Question 91, Article 3. Ibid., Question 90, Article 4. Ibid., Question 91, Article 1. Robert Filmer (1991 [1680]) Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press); Jean Bodin (1992 [1576]) On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. and translated by J.H. Franklin (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press).

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arouse obedience and dissolve the moral bond of the community. As José Antonio Maravall made clear, this philosophical view had practical consequences. For the political theory of the Spanish Golden Age, The legal order is not the result of a decision or a rule […]. Rules and decisions do not create order. It is within a given, pre-established order that their ruling function is ascribed to them […]. Social structure derives from natural law, and without it society cannot achieve its ends.49 Spanish Thomism rejected the Calvinist principle that made political authority dependent on the grace of God. Even if the ultimate source of authority was to be found in divine law, sociability was conceived as a natural attribute of men, not as a heavenly grace. It is therefore society as a whole, not the isolated individuals, which possesses the attributes for life in common through a pactum associationis. The common good, however, refers to something qualitatively different, if not quite opposite, to the simple addition of individual interests. According to the doctrine established by Francisco Suárez in De legibus and in Defensio fidei catholicae, God did not directly bestow political authority to the sovereign, but did it through the intermediation of civil society. Authority originates in the natural capacity that human beings have to associate and make laws. This primordial power was originally conferred to the ruler by the community as a whole through a pact of subordination (pactum subjectionis) that could be reversed if the sovereign betrays his natural political function. In Catholic legal philosophy then, political authority serves a clear purpose: the preservation of the common good, understood as the harmony of society with a natural moral order. It has often been noted that some representations of early Iberian constitutionalism, particularly those curbing the authority of the monarch, reflected contractual notions emanating from this Neo-Scholastic tradition.50 This 49 50

José Antonio Maravall (1997) Teoría del Estado en España en el siglo xvii (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales), pp. 124–125. This thesis, originally referred to the roots of the ideology of independence, was first discussed by Argentinian historians. See Guillermo Furlong Cardiff (1960) Los jesuitas y la escisión del Reino de Indias (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu); Tulio Haperín Donghi (1961) Tradición política española e ideología revolucionaria de Mayo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria); and Otto Carlos Stoetzer (1966) El Pensamiento político en la América española durante el período de la emancipación (1789–1825) (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos), and idem (1979) The Scholastic Roots of the Spanish American Revolution (Bronx: Fordham University Press). For a more updated approach, see José María Portillo (1998) La nazione cattolica (Manduria: Piero Lacaita Editore). Joaquín Varela Suárez-Carpegna has distinguished three doctrinal tendencies in the constitutional conventions of Cadiz

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should come as a surprise to no one, since scholars and public officials were usually trained in the tradition of natural law, which served for many years as the main theoretical template for the moral and political self-perception of Iberian societies. In Chapter 3 of this volume, Ambrosio Velasco shows how the normative power of scholastic philosophy was articulated very early by missionary clergymen for vindicating the rights of the American Indians. Political ideas, after all, are not dead words. They merge and interact with local cultures, thereby assuming new meanings and contributing to the accruement of political experience. The image of the social contract would reappear during the early stages of the colonial crisis in 1810, when in the absence of the legitimate king Ferdinand vii – who had been kidnapped by Napoleon and forced to abdicate – the American juntas and municipalities made use of it to claim the reversion of political authority to them.51

Patrimonial Liberalism

The conflicts stirred by the introduction of secular and centralized forms of government have been common to all societies submitted to the strains of modernization. As Shmuel Eisenstadt remarked in his reconstruction of the multiple paths to modernity, the main normative challenges to it are to be found in the tension between the procedural legitimation of power as civil adherence to the rules of game on the one hand, and the substantive modes of legitimation relying on diverse religious or secular elements on the other.52 The transition from social structures organized upon hierarchy and privilege, transactional loyalties, and local identifications, to new patterns based on social mobility, secular self-­government, and cultural homogenization was a historical change of unimaginable dimensions. In functional terms, liberalism can be understood as the normative universe that helped legitimize such a transition. In Latin America, as everywhere else in the world, liberal institutions had to adapt to the circumstances that conditioned the formation of national states.

51

52

in 1810 and of Lisbon in 1821: a liberal party, a scholastic or historicist faction, and a group of American representatives that favoured colonial autonomy; see idem (2012) ‘El primer constitucionalismo español y portugués: un estudio comparado’, Historia constitucional, No. 13, 99–117. A primeval defence of the compatibility between the liberal creed and Thomism was written by Joaquín Lorenzo Villanueva (1811) Las angélicas fuentes o el tomista en las Cortes (Cadiz: en la imprenta de D. Diego García Campoy). Francisco Colom González (2005) ‘El trono vacío. La imaginación política y la crisis constitucional de la Monarquía Hispánica’, in Relatos de nación. La construcción de las identidades nacionales en el mundo hispánico (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuert), 23–50. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (2000) ‘Multiple Modernities’, in Daedalus 129/1, 1–29.

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However, the normative expectations aroused by the independence movements lay far ahead of the institutional capacity of the new regimes, whose social structure was still substantially the same as in the colonial period. The perceptible gap between the recurrent resort to liberal discourse and the patrimonial features of down-to-earth politics can be explained if the population was somehow able to recognize in them some type of affinity to legitimate social meanings. The persuasive power of liberal discourse not only depended on the prevalence of the elites; it had to be perceived and accepted as reasonable or fair by the people. This was not then just a struggle between the oligarchies and the subordinate groups for political hegemony. The predominant values played a role as well. During the early nineteenth century, it was common belief that the constitutions were responsible for the happiness of peoples. This type of political fetishism reflected the perception that good laws create fair institutions, and that these in turn elevate the moral and political standards of society. In a similar vein, military charisma, as expressed in caudillo rule, often incarnated the desire of conveying a common purpose to the nation. This is why leaders such as Santa Anna in Mexico described their accession to power – to which they were often called by the people – as a personal sacrifice for the sake of the country.53 Such view overlooked the internal conditions of society as a key element to its governance, and relied instead on the effects of applying an external normative pattern to it – a constitutive outside, to put it in Derrida’s philosophical terms.54 The devise of a system of neutral and legally enforceable rules that could foster political compromise between opposing views and interests was generally ignored. This perception was not too far from the traditional worldview that conceived social integration in terms of a substantive moral order to which society should conform. Díez del Corral, in his classical description of nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism, maintained that The state, for an extreme liberal, could not consist of a combination of concrete or historical elements, but of the straight and immediate realization of an absolute logos. A logos which, for its absolute character, did not need social channels or the expression of support. A single individual could proclaim it. The instigator of a political uprising did not have to make an effort to convince. It sufficed with pronouncing his opinion, as a prophecy that would shine in all its truth.55 53 Lomnitz-Adler, Exits from the Labyrinth, pp. 289ff. 54 Jacques Derrida (1988) Limited, Inc., trans. S. Weber (Evanston: North-Western University Press). 55 Luis Díez del Corral (1945) El liberalismo doctrinario (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos), p. 481.

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Bolívar himself reproduced this normative intuition. His political language, emblazoned with the rhetoric of classical republicanism, expressed an idea of liberty that was closer to that of the ancient republics than to modern complex societies. For him the new patrias, in order to fulfil their emancipating duty, had to be created ex nihilo, breaking with the past and leaning exclusively on the civic virtue of the individuals. Much like the Jacobins during the Terreur, Bolívar attributed the failure of the new republics to the corruptive effect of the colonial legacy. Under such circumstances a too liberal legislation could only create repúblicas aéreas, political bodies with no substantial hold. The only alternative was to instil the principles of freedom under the supervision of a paternal government; but for him personally it was too late. By the end of his life he bitterly confessed in a letter to general Flores in Ecuador that serving a revolution was like ploughing the seas, and declared Spanish America to be ungovernable and on the verge of falling ‘into the hands of the unrestrained multitudes, and then into the hands of tyrants of all races and colors’.56 In Spain, the continued political function of the Crown during most of the nineteenth century made a difference with its former colonies. In this case the problem derived from the need to fabricate parliamentary majorities that were favourable to the executive branch, whose head was appointed by the king. In 1833, at the death of Ferdinand vii – the felon king who had first nominally accepted and then betrayed the constitutional regime, thus aggravating the colonial crisis – his widow María Cristina was appointed regent. She became the legal guardian of her under-age daughter Isabella, whose dynastic rights were challenged by her uncle Don Carlos, the brother of the deceased king supported by the absolutist, soon to be named Carlist party. This legitimist opposition would stay at the margins of the institutional system for most of the century, a period during which it instigated two major civil wars. On the other hand, the regency established an alliance with the heads of the moderate liberal party, whose members were mostly in exile, but it excluded the exalted or progressive liberals from the political circuit. This only left the Progressives the recourse to insurrection, with the occasional support of the army, in order to press the Crown to bring their faction into government. Once in power, the conditions for legitimizing a de facto situation were easily at hand. This scheme counted on the preventive reaction of the Crown, which countered every insurrectional assault on power by bestowing its confidence on the successful rebellious faction. With the calling of new elections and the fabrication of an 56

Simón Bolívar (2003) Letter to General Flores [1830], in El Libertador. Writings of Simón Bolívar, trans. Frederick H. Fornoff, introd. David Bushnell (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 146.

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ad hoc parliamentary majority, the constitutional system was reinstated, thus initiating a new cycle that in the long term tended to re-establish the hegemony of moderate governments.57 This pattern repeated itself with little variation for over forty years, during which time it included a short-lived dynastical change and a failed republican experiment. The restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in 1874 inaugurated a rotational spoils system by which the Liberals and the Conservatives, after a ritual of pre-arranged elections, peacefully took turns in government, bringing their clients to public office. The first century of Ibero-American liberalism thus reveals a general blockade of the formal mechanisms for political succession. Rather than a system of rules for open political competition, what we usually find are extra-­institutional modes of political mobilization and informal agreements between the contending groups for the sharing of power. Behind this patrimonial pattern it is possible to recognize the rationale of a system that basically prolonged some traditional practices. Violent political change and ad hoc legal rearrangements could be perceived as legitimate from the perspective of the political and intellectual tradition in which Iberian liberalism was ingrained. Society was perceived as serving a collective purpose and as being something more than a mere addition of its individual components seeking their self-interest in the market; its internal structure had to correspond to certain principles of justice. In the absence of such conditions, the established order became illegitimate and could be resisted. This was the normative logic running deep under the recurrent political uprisings. The pronunciamientos somehow reproduced the contractual basis upon which the new liberal order was imagined. Antonio Annino has explained how in Mexico the new independent state did not inherit its sovereignty directly from the Spanish Crown but from a range of territorial bodies – the pueblos or municipalities – whose representative character had been recognized by the Cadiz Constitution. The new municipal status of the old repúblicas de indios granted them constitutional recognition, but withdrew from them many of the corporative legal instruments that had permitted the natives ample space for negotiation with the colonial officials. Liberal constitutionalism thus allowed non-Indians and mestizos to meddle in the villages’ internal politics and communal property. Accordingly, during most of the nineteenth century the Mexican pueblos felt free to break their subordination to the national governments whenever they saw fit. This view was fully coherent with the doctrine of Catholic natural law on intermediate moral bodies, which saw the municipalities as naturally self-sufficient communities that unite in order to create a larger body politic. From this perspective, 57

Miguel Artola (1973) Historia de España: la burguesía revolucionaria (1808–1869) (Madrid: Alfaguara).

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The act of constituting the nation [in Mexico] is not the sovereign act of a constituent assembly. The nation already exists in its natural state and expresses itself through other representative bodies, whose reciprocal contract antedates the constitutional norm and imposes an imperative mandate upon the constituents by means of the plan [insurrectional program].58 The dependence of the new constitutional arrangements on the corporative imagination of traditional society may explain why uprisings enjoyed such a high degree of legitimacy and were hence accompanied by an elaborate ritualization. A pronunciamiento typically denounced the existing state of affairs, publicly declared the commitment with a new political project, and invited the citizenry to join the initiative, which generally aimed at the reconstitution of the nation.59 This normative logic was not very different in the old motherland: A pronunciamiento consisted [in Spain] in organizing the moment in which a military high rank, together with a group of patriots, would rise up in any part of the country and read a manifesto in favour of the Constitution. To their eyes, this gesture sufficed for igniting, like a trail of powder, the uprising of all the liberal focus ready for it. National insurrection would follow as a natural consequence of this public announcement.60 Conclusions Nineteenth-century liberalism was never able to fully universalize the political message of individualism in the Iberian world. Liberal ideas in this region helped to establish volatile constitutional regimes, declared a variable range of civil and political rights, and advanced representative forms of government. 58

59

60

Antonio Annino (1999) ‘Ciudadanía versus gobernabilidad republicana en México’, in de Sabato ed., Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones, p. 80. On the role of the municipalities in Mexican state building, see Mauricio Merino (1998) Gobierno local, poder nacional (Mexico: El Colegio de México). The extent to which this practice became common is attested by the eleven volumes in which the Mexican insurrectional programs have been compiled; see Guadalupe Jiménez Codinach et al. (1987) Planes en la nación mexicana (Mexico: Senado de la República). Irene Castells (2000) ‘José María Torrijos. Conspirador romántico’, in Isabel Burdiel and Manuel Pérez Ledesma, eds. Liberales, agitadores y conspiradores (Madrid: Espasa Calpe), p. 81.

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At a deeper level though, political practices retained many of the patrimonial features of traditional society. This type of patrimonialism tended to fade away by the turn of the century with the upsurge of mass politics, even if some of its core features were reproduced by modern populist regimes. Appealing to the common good of the nation as a reason to delegitimize and overthrow an extant government, or seeking social unity through norms sanctioned by an imagined moral order, were coherently ingrained in a worldview that had been hegemonic for several centuries. Betham’s utilitarian philosophy, for instance, whose introduction in Colombia had been promoted in 1824 by the independence leader Francisco de Paula Santander, was rapidly taught with the methodology of natural law, and the idea of maximum utility expediently transmuted into the traditional formula of the common good.61 The role assigned to religion in the new catalogue of personal liberties is also revealing. During the constitutional debates in Cadiz in 1810–12, the absolutist or servile faction in the Cortes questioned the possibility that the nation could be the depositary of the constituent power. According to this view, the continued existence of a sovereign authority, a legal corpus, and a homogeneous religion bore witness to the material constitution of the Spanish Monarchy as a civil body. The liberal faction in the parliament was finally able to impose its view. However, the result was a normative constitutional structure that reaffirmed a predominantly organic view of the nation as bearer of rights. The Cadiz Constitution was therefore liberal in a specific sense, mainly in that sovereign power had to be exercised through laws and was conceived as a representation of the will of the nation, but it was not a modern legal code based on individual rights and political accountability. The executive power stayed with the king and was not accountable before parliament. Representation was organized through several layers of intermediation, and at some point it included random sampling. There was no explicit declaration of rights, and religious freedom was certainly not one of them. José María Portillo has put it clearly: The nation is the strong subject in the Cadiz [constitutional] system. The nation necessarily enjoys a supra-individual status and the Constitution therefore defines it in political, geographic, and religious terms. This system did not completely reject the notion of individual rights, but it integrated them in a different way from what is usual for the Atlantic, American, and French constitutional cultures.62 61 José Joaquín de Mora (1825) Catecismo de Economía Política (London: Ackermann). 62 Portillo, La nazione cattolica, p. 83. For a comparative view of the first Atlantic constitutions, Mónica Quijada (2008) ‘Una constitución singular. La carta gaditana en perspectiva comparada’, Revista de Indias 68/242, 15–38.

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The first wave of Ibero-American constitutions established Catholicism as state creed and limited the range of religious freedom in the catalogue of individual rights. Juan Egaña for instance, the father of the Chilean constitution of 1823, when responding to the critiques for not recognizing the freedom of creed and worship in it, blatantly explained that there could be no uniform civism without a homogeneous religion.63 With time, the liberal ideology of Iberian societies from both sides of the Atlantic assumed different itineraries. The old scholastic philosophy was commonly perceived as a cultural burden that needed to be substituted in order to instil new airs to society. In Argentina, Juan Bautista Alberdi introduced the type of doctrinarian liberalism that prevailed in France during the Bourbon Restoration, the same ideology that supported in Spain the establishment of a Royal Charter – a limited, mixed form of constitutional government – by the regency after the death of Ferdinand vii. In 1843, the Spanish government sponsored the study tour of Julián Sanz del Río, a university professor, to Germany, with the purpose of importing a new public philosophy that better suited the political needs of the nation. The long-term outcome of this initiative was somehow ironic, for it resulted in the introduction of Krausism, the philosophical system developed by Karl Christian Krause, an obscure disciple of Hegel scarcely known in the rest of Europe. In Spain, however, Krausism became a civic pedagogy and a decisive instrument for the ideological revamping of the liberal elites. It ultimately helped establish, against the fierce opposition of the Catholic Church, the foundations for the renovation of the educational system during the Second Republic (1931–39). In Latin America, on the contrary, the desire to do away with the cultural reminiscences of the colonial past moved the intellectual elites to adopt positivism as an official philosophy, a step that supplied them well into the twentieth century with an ideological frame to deal with the concerns on the modernization of their countries. Not surprisingly, Mexican positivist liberalism soon developed a patrimonialist bent, when the científicos – a political clique inspired by positivistic ideas – became the technocratic support of Porfírio Díaz’ long and allegedly modernizing dictatorship.

63

Juan Egaña (1825) Memoria política sobre si conviene a Chile la libertad de cultos (Santiago: Imprenta de la Independencia), p. 15.

Index Absolutism 10, 27, 81, 102, 112–114, 126, 187, 189 Act to Prevent the further Introduction of Slaves and to limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude Statutes of Upper Canada 149 Adams, John Quincy 4, 116, 139 Additional Reasons for our Immediately emancipating Spanish America 98, 101 Adelman, Jeremy 158 Address to the Congress of Angostura 51, 54, 56, 103, 178 Africa/Africans 1, 2, 24, 27, 29, 32–33, 35, 37, 50–52, 59, 95, 118, 122, 149, 158, 165 Age of Democratic Revolutions, The 3, 88, 158, 163 Alberdi, Juan Bautista 197 Alegre, Javier 68, 73 Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de 123 Alexander vi, pope 70, 94 Algarve 121, 165 Alps 110–111 Altepetl 78 Alvarado, Pedro de 76 Alzate, José Antonio 68 Alzire, ou les Americaines 98 American Revolution 3, 5, 37, 53, 67, 119, 125, 141, 142, 149, 159, 163, 173 American War of Independence 5, 48 Anarchy 104, 176 Ancien Régime 10, 55, 107, 109, 112, 115, 119, 125–126, 155–156 Ancient Republics 10, 55, 57, 193 Anderson, Perry 113 Angevin Dinasty 113 Anglican Church 151 Angola 26 Annino, Antonio 194 Antioch 113 Apatzingán, Constitution of 64, 82, 178 Aragon 40–41, 46, 51, 58, 102 Aranda, Count of 47–48 Araujo de Azevedo, António de 164 Argan, Giulio Carlo 34, 37 Argumentum Apologiae 69 Aristotle 19, 34, 70, 94, 96

Athénée Royal, Paris 137 Atlantic History 1–2, 5, 156–158 Atlantic World 1, 3, 5, 12, 17, 22, 131, 133, 135–136, 138–140, 154–160, 162, 166–168 Audiencia 74, 85, 185 Augustine 96 Austria 48, 113, 131 Avecindados 52 Avila, Affonso 27 Avila, Alfredo 67 Ayuntamiento 74–75 Azcárate, Juan Francisco 75 Aztec Empire 50, 69, 72, 185 Bahia 15, 27 Backlanders 16–18 Backward 8, 16–17, 24, 27, 37–38, 175 Bailyn, Bernard 1, 134, 156–158 Balbuena, Bernardo de 40 Bandeirantes 25 Barbados 44 Barbarism 2, 16, 23, 45, 96, 103–104, 106, 114 Barker, Rodney 91 Baroque 8–9, 16–18, 25, 27–28, 33–39, 72, 81, 174 Basque country 59 Bastide, Roger 33 Bastos, Tavares 24 Bédard, Pierre 145, 153 Belgium 59 Belgrano, Manuel 53, 54, 60 Benjamin, Walter 33–34 Bentham, Jeremy 98, 100, 162 Beresford, William 165–166 Berlin, Isaiah 86, 137–138 Bethel, Leslie 164 Bethencourt, Francisco 158 Biblioteca Mexicana 73 Bildung 19 Bill of Rights 7, 132 Blackstone, Sir William 139, 144–145, 151–152 Blanco White, José María 175 Bodin, Jean 189 Bolivar, Simón 6, 28, 49–51, 53, 56–58, 101–107, 178, 193

200 Bolivia 174 Bolton, Herbert E. 1 Bonifacio, José 124 Bonne, Pierre-Amable de 150 Bonnot, Gabriel (Abbé de Mably) 139 Bourbons 40, 63, 79 Boves, José Tomás 177 Boxer, Charles Ralf 158 Brading, David 64–66, 71–73, 76–77 Bragança, House of 156, 159, 167–168 Braudel, Fernand 1, 33 Brazil 4, 6–11, 15–39, 50, 109–127, 131, 156, 159–161, 163–165, 167, 169, 176 Brazilian Empire 37, 122–123 Brazilian Republic 15 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre 139 British Constitution 115, 139, 143–145, 147, 151–153, 155 British North America 4, 10, 132–133, 140–141, 151 Buenos Aires 83, 173 Buffon, Georges Luis Leclerc, Comte of 25, 74 Bulls of Donation 70, 94–95 Burke, Edmund 137, 139, 143 Burke, William 99 Burrus, Ernest J. 70 Bushnell, David 174 Bustamante, Carlos María 68, 76, 99 Cabildo 65, 78, 85, 176, 185 Cabo Verde 165 Cacamatzin 76 Cadiz, see Spanish Constitution of 1812 Caesar, Julius 58, 107, 112 Caltzonzi 76 Calvinism 181, 190 Campillo y Cossío, José de 44–47 Campomanes, Pedro Rodríguez de 45–47, 50, 56 Campos, Haroldo 27 Canada 45, 131–154 Canadian Subjects 11, 143–144, 147 Lower Canada 4, 11, 141, 143–144, 146–154 Lower Canadian Legislative Assembly 148 Upper Canada 4, 11, 141, 143–144, 146–150, 153–154 Caneca, Joaquim do Amor Divino, Frei 37 Canning, George 164

Index Canudos 15–17, 25, 38 Cape Breton Island 142 Caracas 3, 178 Cárdenas, Alonso 43 Caribbean 3, 93, 131–132, 173 Carlista party (The party of the legitimist candidate to the throne of Spain) 193 Carpeaux, Otto Maria 27 Carpentier, Alejo 8, 28 Casa Grande & Senzala 28 Casas, Bartolomé de las 30, 65, 67–73, 79, 95–99, 101, 103, 106, 108 Castile 40, 43, 46–47, 53, 58, 69, 185 Catalonia (Aragon) 59 Catholic Church/Catholicism 4, 27, 34–35, 42, 63, 85, 107, 142–144, 152, 173, 188–190, 194, 197 Caudillos 106, 173, 177, 192 Cuauhtimitzin 76 Charles iii of Spain 41, 45, 47, 49 Charles iv of Spain 49, 86 Charles V Emperor (Charles I of Spain) 29, 41, 47, 69, 107 Chateaubriand, Francois-René, vicomte de 53, 155 Chaudhuri, Kirti 158 Chaunu, Pierre 33 Chiapas 69 Child, Josiah 42–43, 45–46 Chile 51, 54, 57, 60, 121, 173–174, 184, 197 Chilean Constitution of 1823 197 China 40 Chust, Manuel 67 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 84, 88, 94, 96–97, 107 Cisneros, Cardinal 68 Cities 16, 25–26, 36, 37, 90, 110, 175, 177 Citizens 8, 17–18, 20–21, 23–24, 29, 38, 54–56, 58, 79, 103, 106–108, 111–113, 126, 138, 140, 143, 163, 167 Citizenship 52, 79, 176, 178, 195 Civil War 3, 22, 59, 174, 187, 193 Civilizing Process, The 21 Civilization 8, 15–16, 18, 24–25, 28, 30, 56, 68–69, 71, 73–74, 96–97, 99–101, 104, 106, 114, 147, 156–158, 188 Clarendon, Earl of 43 Clavijero, Francisco Javier 68, 73–74, 98 Clientelism 172, 181 Coates, Timothy 158

201

Index Coimbra 22 Cold War 1, 134 College of San Nicolás 76 Collins, Francis 145 Colmenares, Germán 175 Colombia 173–174, 196 see also New Granada Colonialism 3, 6, 8, 17, 59, 79, 99, 117, 119, 166 Columbus, Christopher 29, 42, 93 Commentaires on the Laws of England 144–145 Composite Monarchy (Spanish Monarchy) 6, 8, 40, 46 Condorcet, Nicolas Antoine de 139, 141, 159 Connecticut 149 Conquest 42–44, 63, 68–69, 74, 76, 80, 92–93, 100–101, 149, 161, 184 Conquistadores 44, 184 Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline 111 Constant, Benjamin 8, 52, 55, 57–58, 91, 105, 107, 137–138 Constitution/Constitutionalism 4–8, 10–12, 16, 24, 37, 41, 52–56, 65–68, 76–77, 79–82, 86–90, 100, 102–103, 107, 109–113, 115, 118–119, 121, 124–126, 132–133, 139, 141–142, 145–149, 151–153, 159–162, 165–169, 171–172, 175–178, 183–184, 186, 188, 190, 192–197 Constitutional Act 143–144, 146–148, 151–152, 154 Constitutional Oligarchies 171 Continent states 60 Continental Blockade (also Continental System) 5, 159, 164 Cooper, Frederick 32 Corporations 36–37, 75, 90 Corruption 58, 96, 140, 181, 186 Cortés, Hernán 28, 93, 98 Cortes de Cádiz (Spanish Parliament summoned in Cadiz) 52, 86–87, 102, 127, 161, 196 Cortes (Portuguese Parliament) 121–124 Cosmic Race 28 Council of Castile 47 Council of Indies 95, 185 Counter Reformation 27, 34, 181 Courrier francais 57 Couty, Louis 24–25, 39

Creole patriotism 63–65, 67–68, 71, 73–74, 77, 80–81, 98 Creoles 3, 6, 9–10, 50–53, 60, 63–64, 68, 71–73, 75–77, 79–80, 88–89, 91, 101, 104, 175, 184 Cruz, Juana Inés de la 68, 72 Culture 8–9, 18, 22, 27–29, 31, 34, 51, 69, 71–72, 80–81, 89–90, 106, 109, 157–158, 162, 174, 191 Cunha, Euclides da 15, 17, 25 Cunha, Dom Luis da 120 Cupiditas 20 Curto, Ramada Diogo 158 De Dominio Infidelium et Iusto Bello 69–70 De Indis 69 De iustitia distributiua et acceptatione personarum ei opposita discrepatio 72 De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes 55, 107, 137 De legibus 190 De Officiis 84 Declaration of Independence 118–119, 132, 138, 163, 176 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen 138, 196 Decorum 9, 83–108 Defensio fidei catholicae 190 Despotism 98, 122, 175, 185 Destruction of the Indies, The 97 Democracy 5, 17, 21, 38, 69, 136, 145, 170, 179 Democratic Revolutions 3, 88, 155–156, 158, 163, 166 Derrida, Jacques 192 Dictatorship 57, 58, 139, 166, 197 Díez del Corral, Luis 192 Discurso sobre la educación popular 46 Disney, Anthony 158 Divino Narciso, El 72 Dolores 65, 79 Dominicans 30, 41, 94, 95 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos 26 Du Contrat Social 57 Dutch Empire 43, 98 Duvernay, Ludger 145 Echeverría, Bolívar 28 Ecuador 173, 193 see also New Granada Egaña, Juan 197

202 Eguiara y Eguren, Juan José 68, 73 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 191 El Salvador 171 Elias, Norbert 21, 92 Emancipation Acts 149 Empire 1, 4–7, 9–10, 12, 23, 25, 26, 30, 37, 40–60, 64, 69, 79, 82–83, 88, 93, 98–99, 101–104, 106, 109, 111–112, 114–120, 122–126, 131, 133, 141, 151, 153, 158–160, 169, 175–176, 185 Encomenderos 71, 185 Encomienda 185 England 5, 10, 16, 92, 100, 110–111, 113, 115, 117, 125, 126, 134, 138, 159, 162, 165, 171, 187 English Civil War 187 English Commonwealth 60, 117, 126, 131, 139 Enlightenment 4, 54, 63–65, 68, 73, 80, 88, 97, 100, 104, 131–132, 138, 141, 156, 164, 172, 175, 187 East India Company 42 Eurocentrism 2, 5, 22, 68, 70 Europe and the Atlantic Community 157 Exploration Voyages 156–158 Exposición del Conde de Aranda al Rey Carlos iii sobre la conveniencia de crear reinos independientes en América 47 Facundo 106 Faoro, Raymundo 23 Feijoo, Jerónimo Benito 68 Federación Iberoamericana 60 Ferdinand, King of Aragon 94 Ferdinand vii of Spain 52, 85–86, 88, 98, 191, 193, 197 Filmer, Robert 189 First America, The 64–66, 89 Flores, General 193 Fox, Charles James 139 Français libres à leurs frères les Canadiens, Les 141 France 5, 7, 11, 16, 23, 38, 43–44, 46–47, 59–60, 68, 79, 86, 92, 114, 131, 142, 146, 149–150, 159, 163, 165, 168 Franco, Francisco 59–60 Francophobia 151–152 Franklin, Benjamin 141 Free trade 43, 47, 87 Freemasonry 166 French Canadians 140–143, 146–147, 154

Index French Constitution 1791 161 French Revolution 5, 30, 38, 63, 80, 89, 141, 145, 150, 155–156, 162–163, 168–169, 172, 179 Friedrich, Carl J. 33 Freyre, Gilberto 28, 32 Furlong, Guillermo 66 Furtado, Celso Gomes 27 Gadamer, Hans George 18–19 Gazette de Montréal, La/The Montreal Gazette 141 Geertz, Clifford 50, 92 Genet, Edmond-Charles 141 Genoa 109 George iii, King of England 49–50, 117 Germany 59, 114, 197 Gibbon, Edward 114 Ginés de Sepúlveda, Juan 29, 68, 70, 95 Girondins 139 Globalization 83 Glorious Revolution 10, 109–110, 115, 121, 125, 131, 136 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur 25 Gold 25–26, 42, 46 Gomes Freire de Andrade, General António 165–166 Gouges, Olympe de 139 Gramsci, Antonio 161–162 Granada 42 Gran Colombia 54, 60, 98, 173, 174, 177, 196 Great Britain 5, 7, 9, 44, 46, 48, 59–60, 114, 117, 119, 123, 125, 144, 146–148, 152, 154, 159, 163–166, 168 Great Depression 157 Great Khan 44 Greece 48 Greenblatt, Stephen 93 Guadalupe, Virgin of 71, 74, 76, 81 Guedea, Virginia 67 Guerra, François-Xavier 89–90, 92 Habeas corpus 71, 74, 76, 81 Hamilton, Alexander 118, 135 Hamnet, Brian 77 Hapsburgs 5, 40 Haiti 3, 38, 131 Haller, Karl Ludwig von 179 Harrington, James 139 Hatzfeld, Helmut 33

Index Hauser, Arnold 33 Hayes, Carlton J.H. 157–158 Hegel, Wilhelm Friedrich 4, 19, 21, 106, 187, 197 Hidalgo, Miguel 64–65, 68, 75–76, 80, 85 Histoire du soulèvement, de la guerre et de la révolution d’Espagne 87 Histoire des deux Indes 98 Historia antigua de México 74 Historia de la Revolución de la Nueva España, antiguamente llamada Anáhuac 76, 99, 102 Historias patrias 4, 173 Hobbes, Thomas 67 Holland 159 see also Low Countries and Netherlands Honneth, Axel 21 House of Commons 54 House of Assembly 147–149, 152, 154 Huber, Evelyne 170 Humanism 6, 63, 68–69, 71, 75–77, 81, 95 Hungary 113 Iberian Peninsula 6, 40, 83, 98, 160, 184 Ideal types 19 Identity 27, 31–35, 39, 44, 46, 50, 58, 60, 65, 71–74, 77–78, 80, 113–114, 122, 124 Immigration 24 Inca Empire 50, 54, 102, 185 Indigenous peoples 9, 27–31, 33, 35, 60, 63, 70–73, 90, 185 Individual Rights 7, 18, 139, 144, 166–168, 188, 196–197 Infante Francisco de Paula 53, 196 L’Influence de la Révolution d’Amerique sur l’Europe 159 Informe sobre la ley agraria 47 Interests 8, 18, 20–27, 31, 36, 38, 48, 57, 79, 80, 92, 100, 102, 105, 115, 117–118, 123, 126, 137, 139–140, 145, 147, 151, 156–158, 161, 171, 173, 175–177, 185–186, 190, 192, 194 Isabella, Queen of Castile 94 Isabella, Queen of Spain 193 Isolationism 157 Italy 3, 40, 74, 109, 160–161 Iturbide, Agustín de 81–82 Iturrigaray, Viceroy 74–75 Ius gentium 93 Ius publicum 47

203 Jacobinism 161 Jaucourt, Louis de 139 Jamaica Letter, The 50, 101–103 Japan 40 Jefferson, Thomas 38, 64, 106, 116, 117, 138, 39 Jesuits 30–32, 63, 73, 77, 81, 94 Jews 32, 42, 185 Joao V, King of Portugal 170 Joao vi, Portuguese King (also Prince Regent Joao) 121, 124, 160, 164–166 Jovellanos, Gaspar de 47, 56, 68 Junta de Valladolid 29, 69, 95 Juntas 9, 75, 83, 85, 87, 124, 178, 191 Kant, Immanuel 20, 90, 187 Kingdoms 6, 40–41, 46–47, 51–52, 54, 58–59, 68–69, 85, 90, 93, 109, 111, 114, 121, 124–126, 165, 167 Krause, Karl Christian 197 Krausism 197 Kulturnationen 51, 53 Lacan, Jacques 89 Language 8, 11, 15–39, 50, 84, 106, 113, 171, 175, 193 Latin America 4, 9, 11, 28, 59–60, 64, 66, 154, 161, 170–171, 181, 184, 188, 191 Legitimating Identities 91 Lettre aux Espagnols-Américains 98, 102 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 31, 33 Lezama Lima, José 8, 28 Liberal Party (Spanish Parliament) 87–88 Liberalism 4–5, 7, 10–11, 12, 53, 55–56, 83, 86, 100, 104, 108, 127, 138, 155, 163, 169, 197 American 57 British 57, 86, 133 Brazilian 16, 23–25, 37, 126 Canadian 133–136, 148, 151 Doctrinarian 197 Neo-liberalism 169, 187 Ordoliberalismus 187 Spanish 52, 63, 65, 67–68, 79–80, 86, 100, 104, 127 Patrimonial 172, 191 Portuguese 109, 121, 126, 155–157, 159, 161, 163, 166 Libertador, El 57 Libertadores 170 Libertarianism 16

204 Liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes, De la 55, 107, 137 Liberty 55–57, 83–109, 110–113, 119, 124, 127, 131–154, 156, 162–163, 165–168, 177, 187, 193 Lippmann, Walter 157 Lipset, Seymour M. 4 Lisbon 109, 121–124, 160–161, 163, 166 Lissón, Carlos 53 Locke, John 2, 4, 20, 58, 64, 134, 137, 139, 151–152, 187–188 Lolme, Jean-Louis de 139, 151 Lombroso, Cesare 25 López Rayón, Ignacio 68 Louis xvi, King of France 155, 159 Low Countries 48, 131 see also Holland and Netherlands Loyalism 4 Lucayan Archipelago 93 Macao 40 McDowell, John 19 Machado, Lourival Gomes 27 Machiavelli, Nicolo 4, 21, 139 Mackenzie, William Lyon 153 Mackintosh, James 139 Madariaga, Salvador de 60 Madison, James 64 Madrid 3, 45, 87 Treaty of Madrid 123 Malintzin 28 Manifest of Cartagena 103 Manifesto of the Portuguese Nation to the Sovereigns and Peoples of Europe 163, 165, 167–168 Marat, Jean-Paul 140 Maravall, José Antonio 8, 33, 190 María Cristina, Regent of Spain 193 Marin, Louis 36 Marius, Gaius 111 Market 5, 17–18, 25–26, 37, 46, 83, 93, 175, 194 Márquez, Pedro José 68, 73 Martinique 44 Marx, Karl 21, 161–162, 175 Masonic 165, 178 Maximilian Emperor of Mexico 53 Maxwell, Kenneth 163 McFarlane, Anthony 115 Medieval traditions 34, 110, 185

Index Mediterranean Sea 1, 93 Meinecke, Friedrich 51 Mesplet, Fleury 140–141, 148 Messina 40 Mestizos 16, 24, 29, 33–36, 74, 81, 194 see also Mulattos Metropolis 3, 5–6, 9–10, 46, 48–51, 74–75, 83, 109, 113, 116–119, 121, 125–126, 132, 163, 168, 170, 173, 175–176 Mexican Positivism 197 Mexico, City of 76, 85 Mexico 7, 30, 49, 51, 53, 59–60, 64–70, 72–77, 80–81, 85, 93, 106, 171, 173–174, 178, 192, 194 see also New Spain Michelena, José Mariano 75 Michoacán 75, 77 Mier, Servando Teresa de 64, 68, 74, 76, 79, 98–99, 102 Military Republics 115 Mill, James 98–101 Mill, John Stuart 57–58, 137 Milton, John 139 Minas Gerais 25–26, 37 Miranda, Francisco de 54, 60, 98–99, 102 Miscegenation 17, 25, 27–29 Missionaries 9, 30–31, 35, 94–95, 97, 99, 191 Modern Republics 9, 55, 115, 118 Modernidad e independencias 89 Modernity 3–4, 8, 12, 15–39, 108, 155, 166, 191 Molina, Luis de 189 Monarchy 5–8, 10, 24, 30, 40–43, 46–47, 49–54, 58–60, 67, 69, 79, 80, 82–83, 85, 88–90, 111–113, 119–120, 122–123, 125–126, 145, 166–167, 176, 188–189, 196 Monarchomaques 187 Monarquía católica 40 Monarquía incaica 102 Monarquía incásica 54 Monarquía Indiana 72 Monk, James 150, 153 Montaigne, Michel de 30 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de 10, 42–43, 45–46, 57–58, 110–112, 115, 119, 139 Montezuma or Moctezuma 28, 76 Montreal 140, 141 Moors 93, 185 Mora, José María Luis 178 Morelos, José María 64–65, 68, 76, 80–82, 99

205

Index Morse, Richard 66, 188 Mother country 48, 54, 59–60, 104, 117, 148 Motolinia, Toribio de Benavente, nicknamed 70 Mozambique 165 Mulattos 26, 52 see also Mestizos Mumford, Lewis 33 Naples 41, 113, 162 Napoleon Bonaparte 5–6, 9, 40, 49, 52, 57, 65, 86, 89–90, 159–160, 164–166, 168, 191 Napoleonic Wars/Invasion 9, 40, 52, 74–75, 83, 89, 98, 121, 131–132, 145, 156, 161, 164, 169 National identity 58, 65, 73, 122 Native Americans 2, 28–32, 35, 42, 44–45, 69–72, 78, 81, 92, 95, 99, 102, 104, 120–121, 178, 184–185, 194 Natural law 9, 66, 69, 71, 76, 80, 94–95, 97, 183, 186, 188–191, 194, 196 Natural slave 96 Naturales 74 Navarre 51 Negative liberty 137–138 Neilson, Samuel 148 Neo-Scholastic 66, 190 Neo-Thomism 30, 33, 37 Netherlands 41, 53, 110, 113, 131 see also Holland and Low Countries New Brunswick 142 New France 5, 142, 149 New Granada 54, 106, 173, 177 see also Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela New Jersey 149 New Republic 157 New Spain 9, 63, 65, 68–69, 72, 74, 75, 77–78, 80–81, 85 see also Mexico New York 149 Newitt, Malyn 158 Normans 113 North, Lord 117 Nova Scotia 133, 142–143, 150 Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América 44, 45 O’Gormann, Edmundo 65 O’Higgins, Bernardo 57 Oligarchy 117, 126

Olinda 26 Olivares, Count Duke 41 Oliveira Marques, António Henrique Rodrigo de 158 Ontario 143, 150 Ordem e Progresso 28 Origins of Mexican Nationalism, The 64 D’Ors, Eugenio 33 Other Rebellion, The 78 Ouro Preto 26, 37 Paine, Tom 53, 138, 139, 141 Paiva, Eduardo França 26 Palmer, Robert R. 3, 158–159 Panama 120, 173 see also New Granada Panet, Pierre-Louis 150 Panofsky, Erwin 33 Papineau, Louis-Joseph 153 Paris 4, 16, 137, 142 Parsons, Talcott 180–181 Parti canadien 152 Patrimonial State (Patrimonialstaat) 179–180 Patrimonialism 11, 172, 179–180, 182, 196 Patriotes 154 Patriot’s Movement 4 Paz, Octavio 8, 28, 67 Pauw, Cornelius Franciscus de 74 Pedro i, Dom, Emperor of Brazil (King of Portugal) 37, 50, 121–124, 166 Pedro ii, Dom, of Brazil 24, 37 Pennsylvania 149 Pernambuco 37, 124 Peru 50–51, 53–54, 60, 72, 75, 93, 120, 173 Philadelphia 141 Philip ii of Spain 40–41, 46, 97 Philip iv of Spain 46 Philipines 5, 46, 52, 59 Pietri, Uslar 28 Pitt, William 143–144, 148 Plan de Iguala 81, 82 Pocock, John G.A. 3, 126, 134 Political elites of Brazil 16, 17, 22 Political participation 23, 24, 38, 137, 156 Political parties 174 Pompa, Cristina 36 Pompey 112 Popayán 117 Portales, Diego 173, 184

206 Portillo, José María 196 Porto Revolution 11, 109, 121, 123, 156, 161–163, 166, 176 Portugal 4, 6–7, 9–11, 22, 40, 95, 109, 114, 120–122, 124, 155–166, 168, 176 Portuguese Constitution of 1821 121, 166 Portuguese Court 121, 164 Portuguese Crown 9, 123–124, 169 Portuguese Elite 121 Portuguese Empire/Colonies 8–9, 25–27, 30, 109, 119–120, 123, 131, 155, 158, 159, 166, 169 Portuguese Legion (Napoleon’s Army) 165 Portuguese Parliament 122 Portuguese Revolution of 1820 see Porto Revolution Positive liberty 137–138 Post-colonialism 181 Povo Brasileiro, O 28 Pradt, Dominique Dufour de 49, 53–54, 160 Price, Richard 138–139, 141 Priestley, Joseph 138–139 Primo de Verdad, Francisco 75 Prison Notebooks 161 Proceso Ideológico de la Revolución de Independencia, El 64, 77 Proclama a los pueblos del continente colombiano, alias Hispano-América 98 Progress 28, 163, 174, 193 Pronunciamiento 163, 170, 194–195 Protestantism 34, 97, 107, 144, 151, 187–188 Public opinion 57, 144 Quebec 133, 140–143, 146, 148 Quebec Act 143–144 Quetzalcoatl 74 Race 24, 28, 32, 37–38, 51, 79, 102, 193 Radicalism 122, 139, 154, 164 Raynal, Abbé, Guillaume-Thomas 47, 98 Rawls, John 93 Reason 8, 18–23, 25, 31, 33, 35–36, 38, 90, 189, 192 Rebellion 3–4, 9, 15, 75, 77, 145, 154 Rebellion in the Backlands 15, 38 Rechtsstaat 187 Recife 26

Index Reflexiones sobre el comercio español a Indias 45, 47 Regency Wars 16, 23, 38 Reinos de Indias 41 Reino Unido del Río de la Plata 54 Religion 34–37, 42, 72, 76, 144, 174, 196–197 Renaissance 2–3, 34, 68, 84, 110 Repartimiento 185 Representación nacional de las colonias. Discurso filosófico 75 Republican Manifesto 24 Republican virtues 54, 56–57, 105, 134, 140, 193 Republicanism 9–11, 16, 37–38, 53, 55–56, 60, 65, 67, 69, 105, 107, 109, 115–116, 134–135, 138, 148, 151, 153, 193 Repúblicas de Indios 78, 81, 194 Restoration (of the House of Bourbon in Spain) 88, 194 Restoration (of Monarchy and the House of Bourbon in France) 197 Rhode Island 149 Ribeiro, Darcy 28, 32 Riegl, Alois 33 Riego, Rafael del 100 Rio de Janeiro 6, 9, 23, 26, 32, 53, 121, 123–124, 126, 160 Río de la Plata 54 River Plate Provinces 173 Robespierre, Maximilien 137, 140, 167 Robertson, William 74 Rodríguez, Jaime E. 67 Rojas, Pedro José 174 Roman Catholic Church 142–144, 152 Roman Empire 23, 40, 93, 102 Roman Republic 58, 111 Roman Senate 54 Rome 58, 111–113 Rosenblatt, Helena 107 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 4, 9, 20, 30, 37, 54–57, 64, 105, 137–138, 140, 143, 164, 188 Royal patronage 12, 170, 177 Royalist 177 Russell-Wood, Anthony John R. 158 Russia 114, 166 Saavedra Fajardo, Diego 41–42 Sabato, Hilda 183

Index Safford, Frank 170 Sahagún, Bernardino de 70 Saint-Domingue 131 Saint-John-Island (Prince Edward Island) 133 Saint Juliao da Barra 166 Saint-Lawrence Valley 144 Salamanca, School of 4, 63, 65–70, 75, 79–81, 94–95 Sánchez Vázquez, Adolfo 64 Santa Anna, Antonio López de 192 Santander, Francisco de Paula 196 Sao Paulo 15, 25, 124 Sarduy, Severo 8, 28 Sarmiento, Domingo 106 Savages 29 Servile Party (Spanish Parliament) 87, 196 Schmitt, Carl 187 Scholastic 4, 63, 66–67, 69, 72, 76, 95–96, 188, 190, 191, 197 see also Neo-Scholastic Second Nature 19, 21, 96 Second Treatise on Civil Government 139 Secular Age, A 21 Sellars, Wilfried 18–19 Sentimientos de la nación 76 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 29, 68, 70, 95–96, 99, 103–105, 107 Serrao, José Vicente 158 Seven Years War 5 Seville 87, 97 Sewell, Jonathan 148, 153 Shelburne, Lord 48 Sicily 41, 113 Sidney, Algernon 139, 141 Sièyes, Emmanuel-Joseph 140–141 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de 68, 72 Silver 42, 46 Simcoe, John Graves 147, 149 Skinner, Quentin 30, 134 Slavery 2, 3, 10, 16–17, 24, 28–29, 32–33, 35–36, 38, 96, 102, 106, 114, 118, 122–123, 165, 172–173, 176–177 Smith, Adam 48, 137, 139 Soares de Souza, Paulino José 23 Sobrados e Mucambos 28 Social imaginaries 184 Soto, Domingo de 66–67, 69, 80, 189 South America 25, 50, 53, 60, 98, 109, 119, 120, 125

207 South America Independence: or the Emancipation of South America, the Glory and Interest of England 100 Spain 4–9, 12, 40, 42–49, 54, 58–60, 67–68, 72, 74–75, 77, 79–80, 82–83, 85–86, 88, 92, 95, 100–101, 113, 120, 127, 157, 160, 162, 169–171, 175–176, 185, 193, 195, 197 Spanish Constitution of 1812 52,65, 67–68, 76, 79–80, 86–89, 100, 102, 127, 161–162, 166, 168, 176, 194, 196 Spanish Empire 40, 42, 45–46, 48, 59, 64, 83, 88, 89, 99–101, 104, 106, 159 Spanish Monarchy 5, 8, 40–41, 43, 46–47, 50, 53–54, 67, 79, 85, 88–90, 188, 196, Spanish Nation 52 Spanish Revolution of 1820 80, 82, 100, 160–162 Spanish Second Republic 197 Spinoza, Baruch 21, 32 Spirit of Conquest 44, 46 Spirit of Laws, The 110–112 Staatsnationen 53 Stamp Act 116 Stoetzer, Carlos 66 Suárez, Francisco 37, 66–67, 81, 86, 94, 189–190 Subjectivity 20 Sulla, Lucius Cornelius 111 Talamantes, Melchor de 64, 75 Tapié, Victor 33 Taylor, Charles 21, 29, 182 Tea Act 116 Teatro de virtudes políticas 72 Tenochtitlan 76 Terrae irredenta 93 Terrae nullius 93 Terreur 193 Theodoro, Janice 27 Thirteen Colonies 141, 146, 109, 122, 131 see also United States of America Tocqueville, Alexis de 4, 24, 58, 137 Tonantzin 74 Toreno, José María Queipo de Llano, Count of 87 Torquemada, Juan de 72 Tory 4, 117, 126, 134 Toussaint-Loverture, François Dominique 3

208 Tracey, Daniel 145 Trading Republics 115 Traditions of Liberty 5, 132, 133, 136, 138, 154, 156, 166, 168 Tupi 30 Turgot, Anne-Robert 48 Tutino, John 77 Union of Arms 41 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland 59, 109, 125 United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves 114, 121, 124, 165 United Kingdom of the River Plate 54 United States of America 4, 7, 11, 16, 37, 38, 47, 51, 53–54, 59, 109, 124, 143, 146, 149, 150, 171, 181 see also Thirteen Colonies Uruguay 23, 60 Uti posseditis 54 Utopia 2, 37 Uztáriz, Jerónimo de 43 Van Young, Erick 77–78 Vargas Llosa, Mario 15 Vasconcelos, José 28 Vázquez de Quiroga y Alonso de la Cárcel, Vasco 70 Véliz, Claudio 28 Vendée 15 Venezuela 49–51, 54, 85, 173–174, 177–178 see also New Granada Venezuelan Constitution of 1811 178 Venturi, Franco 119

Index Vera Cruz, Fray Alonso de la 9, 65–69, 71–73 Victims 31 Vieira, Antonio 30 Villaurrutia, Xabier 75 Villoro, Luis 64–65, 67, 75, 77 Violence 17, 22, 25, 29, 31, 35, 68, 95, 102, 159, 172, 183 Viscardo y Guzmán, Juan Pablo de 98, 102 Vitoria, Francisco de 41, 66–67, 69, 80, 94 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 30–31, 35 Volonté general 57 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet 47, 98, 138–139 Washington, George 58 Weber, Max 11, 19–21, 84, 90–92, 107, 179–181, 184–186, 189 Wertrationales Handeln 186 West 1, 5, 18, 21, 25, 28, 37, 101, 116, 118, 120, 133, 136, 154, 156–158, 167, 170 West Indies 43 Whig 7, 117, 126, 134, 139, 148 Whites 3, 25–26, 29, 31, 35–36, 50, 116, 132 White, John, Attorney General 149 Wiarda, Howard J. 64 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 18 Wollstonecraft, Mary 139 Wood, Gordon S. 116, 134 World War i 157 World War ii 1, 60, 157, 180 Xicotencatl 76 Zapata y Sandoval, Juan 68, 72, 74