The Paternal Obligation to Provide: Political Familialism in Early-Nineteenth-Century Chile

Abstract

In the short term, Carrera and his family controlled “the bayonets,” but for decades separatists battled both royalists and each other to control these multiple presidencies. The Chilean elite, which had proven remarkably cohesive throughout the eighteenth century owing in part to intermarriage, split into factions in the early nineteenth. Across the socioeconomic scale, moreover, families broke apart as armies mobilized husbands, sons, and fathers for military service and relocated civilians from the south to prevent their aiding occupying troops. Throughout the country, both Spanish and Chilean authorities confiscated properties of suspected enemies, depriving households of their livelihoods. When any faction of separatists gained the upper hand, they arrested, exiled, or executed their local rivals, this last a fate suffered by Carrera and his two brothers. Only after wielding their bayonets against external enemies, Peru and Bolivia from 1836 to 1839, did Chilean elites begin to reunite under a more stable government. In 1841, independence war hero Jose Ignacio Zenteno wrote with relief to a former comrade in exile that Chile had held its