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Two Revolutions: France 1789 and Mexico 1810

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Jaime E. Rodríguez O.
Jaime E. Rodríguez O.*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California
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Extract

It is sometimes alleged that “history is written by the victors.” Perhaps, it is more accurate to say that “history is written by the rich.” The wealthy nations of the North Atlantic world, which have tended to dominate scholarship in modern times, have molded events in their own image. Thus, when considering the eighteenth century transformations, scholars with “global” vision such as Peter Gay, Jacques Godechot, and R.R. Palmer have interpreted the “Enlightenment” and the “Age of Democratic Revolutions” broadly, including both the experience of the United States and of select Western European nations. Yet these cosmopolitan scholars find no place for Spain or Latin America in their works. Gay describes Spain as the “other side of the eighteenth century,” while both Godechot and Palmer end the age of revolutions in 1799, thus excluding the Spanish and the Spanish American revolutions which occurred in the early nineteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , October 1990 , pp. 161 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1990

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References

* This is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association held in San Francisco on December 27–20, 1989. I am grateful to Linda A. Rodríguez, William F. Sater, Virginia Guedea, and Timothy Tackett for suggestions for improving this work.

1 Gay, Peter The Enlightenment: An Interpretation 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1967–1969);Google Scholar Godechot, Jacques France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799 (New York: Free Press, 1965);Google Scholar Palmer, R.R. The Age of Democratic Revolutions: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–1964).Google Scholar

2 According to Gay, “the best place to study the other side of the eighteenth century—the victory of stagnation and clerical conservatism—is Spain.” Unfortunately, he failed to study it; he writes from ignorance and displays the bigotry which the Enlightenment opposed. Gay, , The Enlightenment, 2, 593.Google Scholar

3 See, for example, Higonnet, Patrice Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Jaime, E. Rodríguez, O. “Introduction” in The Independence of Mexico and the Creation of theNew Nation, Jaime, E. Rodríguez, O. (ed) (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1989), 1–12.Google Scholar

5 Kautsky, John H. Patterns of Modernizing Revolutions: Mexico and the Soviet Union (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1975), 5.Google Scholar

6 Labrousse, C.E. “The Crisis of the French Economy at the End of the Old Regime,” in The Economic Origins of the French Revolution, Greenlaw, Ralph W. (ed), (Lexington: Heath, 1958), 64.Google Scholar

7 TePaske, John Jay “The Financial Disintegration of the Royal Government of Mexico during the Epoch of Independence,” in Rodríguez, , The Independence of Mexico, 63.Google Scholar

8 Skocpol, Theda States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar After a careful examination of the complex process of rural change during the Revolution, P.M. Jones concludes with the following evaluation of the achievements and limitations of the rural transformation: “Overall, then, the revolutionaries did little to alter the prevailing agrarian balance, but they did enough to seed the political myth that the revolution gave the land to the peasants.” Jones, , The French Peasantry during the Revolution, 269.Google Scholar Citing Anatolii Ado and Albert Soboul, Peter McPhee has recently argued that: “If capitalist agriculture was slow to develop in the nineteenth century, it was not because of small-holding and landless peasants tenaciously defending communal practices and archaic routines but because of the failure of small and middling peasants to achieve their goal of more land during the revolution.” McPhee, Peter “The French Revolution, Peasants, and Capitalism,” American Historical Review, 94:5 (December, 1989), 1273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar These views appear to confirm my conclusion that the rural conflict in New Spain was more “radical” than the one in France.

My colleague Timothy Tackett, however, has pointed out that peasant revolts continued sporadically throughout the French Revolution and that the rural “counterrevolution” may be considered a continuation of the peasant’s revolt. In his view, the rural movement was more revolutionary than I have depicted here. (Personal communication, December 4, 1989).

9 The values of the sans-culottes and other populists were, of course, ascendant for a short time. Nevertheless, the point I wish to emphasize here is that middle class values ultimately triumphed.

10 Archer, Christon I. ‘“La causa buena’: The Counterinsurgency Army of New Spain and the Ten Years’s War,” in Rodríguez, , The Independence of Mexico, 86.Google Scholar

11 Guedea, Virginia “Comentario a las ponencias de María del Refugio González, Jaime E. Rodríguez O., y Christon I. Archer,” Paper read in the session “The Emergence of Independent Mexico” at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Washington, D.C., December 30, 1987.Google Scholar

12 Tutino, John From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 229–241.Google Scholar