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The French Revolution and Latin America
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16032 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
1,654 Words |
| Author
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Luis E. Aguilar
Luis E. Aguilar is professor of history at Georgetown
University. |
The French Revolution has often been credited with fanning the revolutionary flames that swept through Latin America at the turn of the nineteenth century. It thus seems logical that the struggle against Spain was conditioned by the ideas and events that caused the upheaval in France, and that the great liberators of the continent, men like Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin, were inspired by political tremors from across the sea.
Yet a careful study of the Latin American uprisings--placed against the nineteenth-century backdrop and amid the influences of the American Revolution, several English authors, and the writings of some "liberal" Jesuits--makes the French connection rather difficult to discern. The scholar must also distinguish between the influence of the famous "critics" of the ancien regime--Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and the encyclopedists--and the impact of the guillotine. In Latin America, the first carried much more weight than the second.
Placing the whole period in historical perspective, it is safe to say that French Jacobinism produced a negative reaction among most Latin revolutionary elites. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Creoles--a powerful white minority born in the colonies--were undergoing a cultural crisis. Taught that their mother countries were glorious and powerful empires, they realized Spain and Portugal had become second-rate powers, far beneath mighty England and enlightened France.
Seeking cultural independence, the Creoles learned economic liberalism from England and political liberalism from France--along with near mystical faith in the power of a constitution, popular sovereignty, and the evils of absolutism. Ideologically armed, they aimed their criticisms against the "obsolete" policies of Spain and Portugal.
Although increasingly chaffing under colonial rule, and impressed by these new ideas, the Creoles were far from revolutionaries. They wanted to curtail their monarchs' authority and become equals to the Spaniards and Portuguese without violent upheaval. Surrounded by seemingly docile Indians, black slaves, and mestizos, most Creoles worried that any political turmoil would provoke a disastrous racial conflict. The Indian rebellions of 1791 in Peru (which had drawn the Creoles to the Spanish side), and the heroic, successful black revolt in Haiti in 1794 (the one Latin American uprising directly connected to the French Revolution) gave credence to this worry.
The writings of
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