These short monographs address the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the governor of Buenos Aires almost throughout the period 1829–52, providing new and fascinating detail on the period of the French blockade at the end of the 1830s. French naval intervention, meant ostensibly to ensure that French citizens and French commerce were accorded treatment equal to British, plunged Buenos Aires into commercial depression and encouraged uprisings and invasion by Rosas’s enemies, the “Savage Unitarios.” Following prolonged crisis, the French failed to achieve their objectives as Rosas rode out the blockade and defeated his enemies. The blockade of March 1838–January 1840 triggered the rural uprising known as the Revolución de los Libres del Sur in November 1839 and indirectly provoked two spates of political assassination by Rosas’s supporters in Buenos Aires in October 1840 and April 1842.As Jorge Gelman shows, numerous estancieros in areas close to the southern frontier, who had hitherto supported the Rosas regime, enlisted in the rural revolt. The rebellion marked cattle ranchers’ reaction to the disruption of exports and illustrated how the blockade affected state finances by forcing Rosas to impose higher land taxes and change the land laws. The movement lasted only two weeks before loyalist forces defeated the insurgents and executed their leaders. As Gabriel Di Meglio shows, the urban repression was tied in the first instance to the invasion of the province of Buenos Aires during the blockade by Unitarios led by General Juan Lavalle, and in the second instance to a brief Unitario takeover of the neighboring province of Entre Rios in the blockade’s aftermath. Rosas’s secret police, known as the Mazorca, assassinated his alleged opponents by cutting their throats. Most of the murders occurred in the homes of the victims at night, but on occasion, particularly during the second episode, the victims met their fate in the streets in broad daylight.The crimes of the Mazorca forged the reputation of the Rosas regime as a terrifying tyranny. Readers may wish to compare the scale of repression under Rosas in the early 1840s with that of the late 1970s under the so-called process of national reorganization. The similarities lay in the existence of state-orchestrated but secretive organizations and in their often random actions and victims. The differences lay in scale and duration. In the early 1840s, the executions by the Mazorca occurred during two months separated by an interval of around a year and a half; Di Meglio estimates their victims numbered fewer than 50. The repressive episodes of the late 1970s, by contrast, lasted for more than two years and at a minimum claimed ten thousand dead.Di Meglio and Gelman both assess the popular components of the Rosas regime (including the role of African-Argentine associations) but arrive at different conclusions. Di Meglio focuses on the Sociedad Popular Restauradora, viewing the Mazorca as a component of the Sociedad although also linked closely to the police. He discerns a strong popular component in rosismo from its beginnings, tracing its origins partly to the Revolution of May 1810 and partly to associations formed during the struggles of the 1820s in Spain between conservatives and liberals. In addition to some detailed analysis of the period 1838–42, he provides an adept description of the political battles of 1833 in Buenos Aires, when Rosas briefly abandoned office and the Sociedad was formed with the support of Encarnación Ezcurra, the ex-governor’s wife. By contrast, Gelman, whose focus is rural, argues that rosismo developed a strong popular emphasis only after 1840 following the rebellion of Los Libres. In his view, the regime’s popular support became a substitute for that of the rural elite, whose loyalties had proven fickle during the blockade. To Gelman, partly inspired by the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon by Karl Marx, the evolution of the Rosas regime appears reminiscent of that the French Second Empire, although few similarities existed between French rural society and the province of Buenos Aires.Both authors make excellent, original contributions to the political history of the Rosas era. Di Meglio illuminates the activities of the innkeepers and storekeepers known as pulperos and documents the way a few of them joined the Mazorca. Gelman illustrates the role of the jueces de paz in rural counties. Both books contain innovative data on local government institutions as well as on the police and the militia; both historians have worked, with excellent results, with original or rarely utilized sources in the archives of Buenos Aires. Di Meglio’s book reads smoothly and marks out its author as a historian of narrative and analytical skill. Gelman, another very talented archival historian, relies too much on authorities such as Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Pierre Bourdieu and fits them into his interpretation with difficulty.