Conclusion

The conclusion suggests avenues for future research on family and politics during the independence period throughout Latin America and analyzes later trends in Chilean history. In the 1850s, confident that public and domestic order had been reestablished, legislators codified laws regulating sequestration, pensions, and family maintenance that marked a subtle but significant shift from a postwar emphasis on paternal responsibility to patriarchal authority and control over patrimony. By reaffirming the property rights of all who had been subject to sequestration, regardless of their opposition to independence, the 1853 consolidation of the internal debt secured the inheritances of elite families. Comprehensive regulations of military pensions, which reinstated the requirement of state approval for marriages and their restriction to higher-ranking officers, reversed expansions of eligibility from the previous decades. Finally, the Civil Code made the recognition of paternity largely a prerogative of fathers and emphasized filial obedience over paternal provision of care.