Some French readings of the Spanish- American independence processes

Abstract

This paper analyzes documents produced by French or Frenchified authors, in which America and its independence processes, particularly Spanish-American processes, occupy center stage. An important documentary corpus was found including books and periodicals. Some of these materials were used in French primary and secondary schools, others circulated among scholars and university professors. Some texts from Americanist acts of commemoration are also analyzed, such as speeches by legatees or personalities with political or scientific prestige, as well as literary texts that competed in a variety of events related to Independence celebrations and acts of commemorations. Based on these documents, five lines of reflection are proposed. First, from the perspective of social, political and cultural representations of Spanish-American independence processes, the research interest is focused more on what is said to have happened and less on what actually happened. Second, the reiteration of the category of influence to approach the nineteenth-century relations between America and France highlights the originality of the Enlightenment ideas and the French Revolution; by contrast, the Spanish-American revolutions would represent one of its consequences, more or less distorted on this side of the Atlantic. Third, the hermeneutic language of what is said to have happened created modern political myths, directly linked with a successful, egalitarian, libertarian and fraternal revolution. Fourth, in the world context of political modernization dynamics, “the French” should be construed as a part of modernity globalization processes. Fifth, the social and cultural examination of the intellectual production considered here sheds a critical light on national (France, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, etc.) or continental (Europe, America, Latin America, etc.) histories, which allows modernization-related processes to be better understood.