"We Are Now the True Spaniards": Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808-1824 / Edition 1 available in Hardcover, eBook
"We Are Now the True Spaniards": Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808-1824 / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0804778302
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804778305
- Pub. Date:
- 06/06/2012
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0804778302
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804778305
- Pub. Date:
- 06/06/2012
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
"We Are Now the True Spaniards": Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808-1824 / Edition 1
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Overview
It was Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 that led to the Hispanic Constitution of 1812. When the government in Spain rejected those new constituted arrangements, Mexico declared independence. The Mexican Constitution of 1824 affirms both the new state's independence and its continuance of Spanish political culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804778305 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2012 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 520 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.50(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
"We Are Now the True Spaniards"
Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808–1824By Jaime E. Rodríguez O.
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7830-5
Chapter One
A Shared Political Culture
TO UNDERSTAND the formation of the new nations of America, among them México, it is necessary to examine the nature of the Antiguo Régimen. Many erroneously believe that the Spanish Monarchy was highly centralized, confuse absolute with autocratic rule, and equate the modern concept of colony with pre-nineteenth-century governing practices. As a result of these misconceptions many have assumed wrongly that the representative political structures established in the postindependence period were alien systems imported from Great Britain, the United States, and France. That is not correct. To comprehend the nature of political culture in late eighteenth-century New Spain, it is necessary to dispel misperceptions about the political system of the Spanish Monarchy and the political theory and practice that supported it. The following sections, therefore, will examine the characteristics of the Antiguo Régimen, the nature of representation, the formation of American identity, and the eighteenth-century reforms.
The Antiguo Régimen
Throughout their history, the Spanish possessions in America constituted part of the worldwide Spanish Monarchy—a confederation of disparate kingdoms and lands that extended throughout portions of Europe, Africa, Asia, and America. The great Jesuit scholar and writer, Baltazar Gracián acknowledged that reality in 1640 when he compared the French with the Spanish Monarchy:
There is a great difference between founding a unique and homogeneous kingdom within a province to constituting a universal empire with different provinces and nations. There [in France] the uniformity of laws, the similarity of customs, one language and a uniform climate, which unite it, also separate it from foreigners. The same seas, mountains, and rivers are for France a natural boundary and a rampart for its preservation. But in the Spanish Monarchy where the provinces are many, the nations different, the languages varied, the interests in conflict, [and] the climates divergent, great ability is required to conserve and even more to unite.
The Catholic faith played a fundamental role in uniting the Spanish Monarchy. Although the people of its various realms retained their languages, laws, and customs, they were all required to be Catholics. The "one true faith" defined Hispanic society. After the defeat of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada and the expulsion of Jews in 1492, non-Catholics could not reside in the lands governed by the Spanish rulers who, starting with Isabel and Fernando, began calling themselves "los reyes católicos" (the Catholic kings). The great political theorist Juan de Mariana recognized that reality when he declared: "religion is the bond of human society and by it [religion] alliances, contracts and even society itself is sanctioned and sanctified." Moreover, as Tamar Herzog indicates, the fact that the Hispanic world "was by definition a Catholic community was rarely discussed. It was so obvious to contemporaries and so consensual in nature that there was no need to spell it out." However, it is important to remember that in the Spanish Monarchy the Catholic Church was not autonomous; it was subordinated to the kings who had obtained administrative control over the Church, patronato real (royal patronage), as a result of the papal donation of 1493 and the papal bulls of 1501 and 1508.
As was true in other Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim lands, religion permeated all aspects of life. Although religious ceremonies and the ringing of church bells punctuated the daily life of Hispanics, few lived in a world dominated by prayer. Individuals within the Church, like their secular counterparts, had multiple social, economic, and political roles and interests. Therefore, it is not surprising that members of the clergy frequently participated in secular activities, including politics, and at times held views that conflicted with official Church policy. Moreover, the Catholic Church in the Spanish Monarchy was not a monolithic institution controlled by the pope. Rather, it was highly fragmented and decentralized. At the broadest level, the Church was divided between the secular clergy and the regular orders. The secular clergy, as the name suggests, served the needs of the laity. They were organized geographically into areas administered by archbishops and bishops selected by the king and appointed by the pope. The territories administered by the prelates were divided into parishes administered by curas (pastors of parishes). They were the "magistrates of the sacred" who ministered to their parishioners and had the most contact with society at large. The regular orders were organized vertically and responded not to the archbishop or to the bishop, but to their own authorities and ultimately to the pope. Nevertheless, within the Spanish Monarchy, the regular orders were also administered by the king. Orders, such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits, played a major role in the acculturation and conversion of non-Catholic peoples in Iberia and later in the Indies. However, it was the policy of the Spanish Monarchy to assert authority quickly over new regions by placing these areas under the jurisdiction of the secular clergy.
In essence the Hispanic Church responded to the king and became one of the monarchy's mainstays. Churchmen held numerous government posts, including the position of viceroy. The practice of appointing clergymen to government office was so common that in 1665 the quiteño (native of Quito), Fray Gaspar de Villarroel, referred to the Hispanic Church as one of the king's two swords. When acting as government officials, churchmen represented the king, not the pope. The clergy, particularly the members of the regular orders, also dominated higher education and provided most social services. Moreover, many clerics were lawyers who practiced in civil as well as in clerical courts. Ecclesiastics in their nonclerical capacity are generally indistinguishable from their secular counterparts since both often studied the same subjects at the same institutions. They were not ignorant, fanatical priests as John Adams and other prominent Protestants believed. On the contrary, many were distinguished scholars and scientists who addressed topics that today are considered secular. The great constitutional scholar Francisco Martínez Marina, for example, was a man of the Church. Moreover, the Jesuit Juan de Mariana advanced radical political ideas that included the principle of tyrannicide.
A major segment of Occidental civilization, the Hispanic world drew upon a shared Western European culture that based its political concepts on ancient classical thought and on late medieval Catholic theories. This heritage and three events in the sixteenth century contributed to a major transformation in the nature of Hispanic political thought.
A great political revolution, the Rebelión de las Comunidades de Castilla (Rebellion of the Cities of Castile) erupted in the Spanish Peninsula during the years 1518-1521. Taking advantage of the coronation of King Carlos I, who had been raised in Flanders and had few direct ties with Castile, the representatives of the cities and towns with self-government, or comunidades, of Castile attempted to assume power and establish a new constitutional order. They formed a Junta General de las Comunidades de Castilla (General Junta of the Cities of Castile), which insisted that the cities represented the patria (homeland), that the king was their servant, that they possessed the right to elect Cortes on a regular basis, and to defend their liberties with force if necessary. They also maintained that the will of the people and the consent of the governed had to be recognized and insisted not only on liberty but also on democracy. The movement, which has been called the first modern revolution, was ultimately defeated by the forces of the Crown in the battle of Villalar on April 23, 1521. Thereafter, the Cortes continued to function in a traditional form. Nevertheless, the rebellion became the foundational myth for the revolutionaries in the Cortes of Cádiz three centuries later.
The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation also contributed to the expansion of the concept of popular sovereignty among Hispanic political theorists. When Martin Luther advanced the principle of the divine right of princes in order to reject similar papal claims, the Catholic theorists of the School of Salamanca responded to Luther's arguments with the principle of potestas populi (sovereignty of the people). Francisco Suárez directly refuted Luther's claims of the divine right of princes. He and others, such as Francisco de Vitoria, Diego de Covarrubias, Domingo de Soto, Luis de Molina, Juan de Mariana, and, most important, Fernando Vázquez de Menchaca, "helped to lay the foundations for the so-called 'social contract' theories of the seventeenth century.... [Moreover], Mariana ... [advanced] a theory of popular sovereignty which, while scholastic in origins and Calvinist in its later developments, was in essence independent of either religious creed, and was thus available to be used by both parties." As the English historian Quentin Skinner has shown, the Hispanic neoscholastic theorists provided "a large arsenal of ideological weapons available to be exploited by the revolutionaries" of later periods.
Subsequently, the provinces, or states, of the Netherlands relied on these and other political theories to challenge the authority of the king of the Spanish Monarchy, Felipe II. In 1579, they signed the Union of Utrecht, by which they became "united states" and agreed to cooperate with each other in their opposition to higher taxes, the persecution of Protestants, and the elimination of their medieval representative governing structures. Later, in 1581, they issued their Act of Abjuration, their declaration of independence, from Felipe II. Then in 1588, they established the Dutch Republic. Naturally, those insurgents justified their revolt against the king, to whom they owed allegiance in numerous treatises defending their right to self-determination, religious freedom, and representative government.
Among the concepts advanced by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hispanic legal commentators, such as Fernando Vázquez de Menchaca and Francisco Suárez, two would become significant in the early nineteenth century—the principle of popular sovereignty and the notion of a compact (pactum translationis) between the people and the king. Some of the Hispanic theorists' ideas, particularly those of Vitoria, Covarrubias, and Vázquez de Menchaca, entered English and French political thought through the works of Johannes Althusius and Hugo Grotius.
Many Hispanic intellectuals, like some of their counterparts in other parts of Europe, believed in the ideal of a mixed government. Based upon the political culture of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Italian Renaissance states, mixed government was a regime in which the one, the ruler, the few, the prelates and the nobles, and the many, the people, shared sovereignty. Mixed governments were considered the best and most lasting because they established severe limitations upon arbitrary or tyrannical power of the king, the nobles, and the people. Moreover, as John Pocock has demonstrated, Niccolò Machiavelli's thought influenced significantly the concept of mixed government in England and elsewhere in the Atlantic World. Educated Hispanics on both sides of the Atlantic turned to Aristotle, Polybius, and Machiavelli to understand the nature of classical republicanism.
Natural law theories of government also were widely accepted in the Hispanic world. Joaquín Marín y Mendoza, appointed by King Carlos III to the chair of law at San Isidro, for example, published Historia del derecho natural y de gentes in 1776. He and other professors of law introduced their students to a number of European authors who developed natural law and contract theories of government, among them Gaetano Filangieri, Christian Wolf, Emmerich de Vattel, and Samuel Pufendorf. These lesser-known authors, rather than the more famous Jean Jacques Rousseau, prepared several generations of Hispanic students to reinterpret the relationship between the people and the government.
During the late eighteenth century, nationalists in the Peninsula reinterpreted history to create a new national myth. Enlightened Spaniards argued that the early Visigoths had enjoyed a form of tribal democracy. Supposedly, these Germanic ancestors forged the first Hispanic constitution. Later, in the twelfth century, Spain developed the first parliament in Europe, the Cortes. According to this interpretation of history, medieval Spain had enjoyed democracy only to have it destroyed by the despotic Habsburg kings. Although earlier Cortes represented individual kingdoms, such as Aragon and Castile, not the entire nation, eighteenth-century reformers had a unified body in mind when they spoke of reconvening a Cortes. Their ideas culminated in the works of Spain's foremost legal historian, Francisco Martínez Marina, whose massive Teoría de las cortes implied that the restoration of a national representative body was necessary to revitalize the country.
In the 1780s, the University of Salamanca became a center of liberalism and its graduates would later become revolutionary leaders in the Cortes of Cádiz. They were influenced by the Synod of Pistoia and two prominent theologians Pietro Tamburini and Giuseppe Zola who favored a less centralized Church and greater Episcopal authority. Politically, these concepts translated into representative government with a weak executive branch. The ideas of Anglophone intellectuals from England, Scotland, and the United States—among them John Locke, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Benjamin Franklin—were also widely discussed. This intellectual interchange was a continuation of an ongoing dialogue that began in the sixteenth century. British ideas, particularly the principle of mixed government, exemplified by the unwritten English Constitution, merged well with Hispanic thought because Hispanic theorists, such as Vázquez de Menchaca, had influenced earlier British thinkers, like Thomas Hobbes.
The scientific thought of the Enlightenment did not suddenly transform the neoscholastic intellectual climate of Habsburg Spain and America. Change began in the 1670s and 1680s when some Hispanic scholars started questioning aspects of scholasticism. These individuals, who are known as eclectics, introduced modern philosophy, as it came to be called, to the Hispanic world at the end of the seventeenth and early decades of the eighteenth century. The new critical approach was widely disseminated through the writings of Benito Gerónimo Feijóo who sought to introduce and popularize the scholarly and scientific achievements of the age. He insisted that the Spanish Monarchy required modern science, arguing that it did not clash with religion. Starting in 1739 with the nine-volume Teatro crítico universal, Feijóo discussed art, literature, philosophy, theology, mathematics, natural science, geography, economics, and history. Subsequently, he published five additional volumes of essays titled Cartas eruditas. His approach was critical, exposing the fallibility of physicians, false saints, and miracles, and consistently advanced the cause of modern analytical thought. Feijóo, as Richard Herr has observed, "never questioned the greatness of Spain's former intellectual figures or expressed a view that he believed was the least opposed to the Catholic religion." However, he upheld the experimental method of Protestant English science and rejected the highly theoretical systems and materialist philosophy of some of the French authors. Although Feijóo's publications aroused great controversy, his works became extremely popular, appearing in countless editions in subsequent decades. Indeed, they were the best sellers of the age second only to Cervantes's Don Quijote. Feijóo's works have been found in most colonial libraries in Spanish America, particularly those in New Spain. In 1750 King Fernando VI issued a royal decree prohibiting criticism of Feijóo because his writings merited "the royal pleasure."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from "We Are Now the True Spaniards" by Jaime E. Rodríguez O. Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface xiii
A Note about America and Americans xvii
Terms Used in the Text xix
Introduction 1
1 A Shared Political Culture 7
The Antiguo Régimen 7
The Nature of Representation in New Spain 17
The Emergence of an American Identity 21
The Bourbon Reforms 24
2 The Collapse of the Spanish Monarchy 34
The Crisis of the Spanish Monarchy 34
The Effects of the Crisis in New Spain 38
The General Juntas of 1808 42
The First Golpe de Estado 60
3 The Events of 1809 68
The Emergence of Representative Government 68
The Elections to the Junta Central 69
The Instructions from New Spain 79
The Valladolid Conspiracy 89
4 Two Revolutions 97
The Political Revolution 97
Convening a Parliament 98
The Elections of Suplentes 100
Elections in New Spain 102
The Armed Revolution 110
The Bajío 112
The Great Insurgency 118
Other Movements 142
The Nature of the 1810 Revolutions 146
5 The Cádiz Revolution 149
The Cortes of Cádiz 149
The American Question 153
The Constitution 160
The New Constitutional Order in America 165
The First Constitutional Elections 166
Elections in Mexico City 169
Elections in Yucatán 172
Elections in Nueva Galicia 175
Elections in the Provincias Internas 178
Ayuntamiento Elections in New Spain 179
Elections to the Cortes and Provincial Deputation in New Spain 181
The New Constitutional Regime 186
The Constitutional Regime in Guadalajara 188
The Significance of the Constitutional Order 191
The Collapse of Constitutional Government 192
6 A Fragmented Insurgency 195
Counterinsurgency 197
Toward an Organized Insurgency 198
The Insurgency in the South 205
Puebla and Cuautla 207
The Government of the Nation 211
The Insurgent Regime in Oaxaca 213
The Collapse of the Suprema Junta 219
The Urban Conspirators 220
The Congress of Chilpancingo 221
The Continuing Insurgency 232
7 Separation 235
The Restoration 235
The Constitution Restored 238
The Second Constitutional Period in New Spain 241
The Cortes 246
The Plan of Iguala 253
The Treaty of Córdoba 263
8 The Mexican Empire 268
The Rise of Iturbide to Prominence 268
The Sovereign Provisional Governing Junta 270
Elections to the Mexican Constituent Cortes 277
The Convocatoria 278
The Elections 282
The Mexican Cortes 287
The Junta Nacional Instituyente 300
The End of the Empire 301
9 The Formation of the Federal Republic 305
The Junta of Puebla 305
The Sovereign Cortes 306
Who Is Sovereign? 308
The Junta of Celaya 317
Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Oaxaca 319
The Second Constituent Congress 325
Conclusion 335
Notes 347
Sources 445
Index 481