Cádiz a debate: Actualidad, contexto y legado

Abstract

In many ways this is the most sophisticated and useful book to date on the Cortes, or parliament, that met in the port city of Cádiz from 1810 to 1814 and produced the first written constitution of the Spanish monarchy in 1812, and the impact of the revolutionary change in political thought that swept the Hispanic world. The volume is a collection of 20 essays first delivered at a 2012 conference in Mexico City marking the 200th anniversary of the Constitution of 1812, and, notably for such a collection, all the essays adhere to the subject closely. Roughly a third of the offerings relate to peninsular Spain—the origins, meaning, and legacy of the Cádiz experience—while two-thirds relate to Spanish America—the reception, implementation, and impact of the constitution.The volume's editor, Roberto Breña, introduces the collection with an essay on historiographical changes since about 1990. José María Portillo Valdés explains that Bourbon imperialization of the Spanish monarchy prior to 1812 laid the foundations for the outbreak of liberal constitutionalism during the crisis of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, from 1808 to 1814. In perhaps the most arresting essay, on Cádiz and the fables of Western historiography, Gabriel Paquette argues that the political philosophy of Spanish American independence was more radical by far than that of the American Revolution, criticizes Anglo and French bias in writing the history of European liberalism, and insists that putting Cádiz at the center shows that the “era of revolutions” is a fable and that the United States is not exceptional (p. 59).In his discussion of “the empire that wanted to be a nation,” Tomás Pérez Vejo discusses who was a citizen under the constitution and shows that since citizenship was based on ethnicity, the Spanish nation was not created as Cádiz imagined it. Federica Morelli considers spatial elasticity in the definition of sovereignty, pointing out that often citizenship was inclusive and ambiguous at the same time. On whether the Cádiz Constitution was a mere copy of the radical French constitutions, José Antonio Aguilar Rivera insists that it was not and that the constitution's dependence on historicism meant that there was no clear demarcation between the new (in the constitution) and the old (in existing Spanish laws and political structures).Discussion of the impact and meaning of the Constitution of 1812 follows, focusing on the creation of elected provincial deputations and city councils, elements that were both old and new, as were the heightened disputes between cities and provincial deputations as they sought preeminence in the new system. There is consideration of the relation between Mexican federalism and the Spanish constitutional tradition, disputes over sovereignty, the role of Cádiz in Central America, and the whole theme of the variable degree of implementation of the constitution in different American territories. It was barely implemented, if even noticed, in Río de la Plata, Chile, and New Granada, because full-fledged wars of independence were underway or had already occurred. Yet it had lasting impact in Mexico.The largest group of essays concerns the permutations of the Constitution of 1812 in New Spain and its influence during the wars of independence, during the first independent regime (1821–1824), and on the Mexican Constitution of 1824. For example, Marco Antonio Landavazo points out that most Mexican insurgents had complaints against Cádiz but also accepted many of its ideas and its language. For the insurgency it was politically impossible to accept the Cádiz Constitution, while it had major influence on the Constitution of Apatzingán. Jaime Olveda emphasizes that Mexican viceroy Francisco Javier Venegas retracted his oath to the constitution. Moisés Guzmán Pérez makes some rather sharp, if not totally clear, criticisms of non-Mexican historians on the subject, while emphasizing that Mexican indigenous communities rarely recognized the constitution, that its implementation was regional only, and that the insurgency must be placed at the center of any consideration.There are even essays on regions of America not often at the center of studies on the influence of Cádiz—particularly Gregorio Alonso's on Vicente Rocafuerte, the president of Ecuador; Andréa Slemian's on the influence of Cádiz on the administration of justice in the Brazilian empire; and Juan Luis Ossa Santa Cruz's on monarchism and republican militarism in Chile from 1810 to 1823.While there are too many to mention them all here, these essays are all innovative and thoughtful. They indicate the substantial changes in historical views of the meaning of the Cádiz experience while illustrating the central role of political thought in the revolutionary struggles for independence in Spanish America. Even if exaggeration must be avoided in favor of nuance and divergence of opinion, the influence of Cádiz cannot be ignored in the history of this most critical era in Spanish and Spanish American history.