The Intellectuals and the Crisis of Modern Peruvian Nationalism: 1870-1919

The modern history of Peru dawned in the last decades of the nineteenth century. During the crucial decade of the 1870s, a crucial decade owing to the magnitude of its political and economic events, articulate social groups, mainly in Lima, began to discuss critically Peru’s backward and stagnant institutions. Constituting the educated elites, these groups clamored for change, for the need to unify and modernize Peruvian society. Thus modern-tempered social criticism appeared in Lima at a time of national crisis. Like nationalism in other lands modern Peruvian nationalism evolved out of an era of troubles and change.

Intellectuals, first as individuals and later as organized groups, made up the most vigorous social group pointing to the crisis of the 70s. This essay is an attempt to explain their social participation as a historical process. Inasmuch as that process involved a deeply felt ideological preoccupation with the idea of the nation, it may be called “the crisis of modern Peruvian nationalism.” But the crisis of modern Peruvian nationalism involved more than criticism of society in ideological terms; it also involved the personal crises—moral, intellectual, and political—which individual intellectuals faced as a result of their social criticism. Willy-nilly, social criticism turned the intellectuals into not only critics but also militant opponents of the “men of power” who governed Peru. Traumas of conscience, moreover, also beset many intellectuals because of the moral-intellectual implications of their social criticism.

The intellectuals’ commitment to a modernizing nationalism involved a dual conflict. Partly or entirely, they opposed traditional Peruvian social values which largely rested on authoritarian religious and philosophical assumptions like natural law. Colonial Peru’s Christian-scholastic idealism provided not only a religious but also a social catechism for society. Yet the breach between such values and actual social practices could not have been greater, so that social criticism ultimately involved questioning the moral bases of society as well as proposing the means for secularizing Peruvian social thought. Understandably many intellectuals could not bring themselves to challenge religious beliefs.

More important, many also persisted in confronting great problems in terms of the moral incantation of debe ser, unable to make the analytical leap from a metaphysical why to an empirical how.¹ Also the intellectuals’ passionate denunciation of the gap between avowed ideals and social practices resulted in profoundly negative interpretations of the past and present. Vehement denunciation of the past, in turn, produced a near obsession with that past. The past and present, in fact, came to dominate the writings of the intellectuals. As Leopoldo Zea has remarked perceptively, while “the rest of the world marched forward, progressed, and made history, . . . Hispanic America continued to be a continent without history, without a past, because the past was always present.”²

All these elements helped to shape the intellectuals’ nationalistic theses of reform and revolution in the twentieth century. Gradually too intellectuals developed a group consciousness; indeed, the initial stages of modern Peruvian nationalism evolved largely as a function of the intellectuals’ growing self-consciousness. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century intellectuals had not looked upon themselves as a discrete social group, and the term does not seem to have appeared in Peruvian writings until 1905.³ Nationalistic social criticism was initially the work of individuals in Lima; only slowly did intellectuals in provincial capitals such as Trujillo, Arequipa, and Cuzco become aware of a national crisis.

There was much in the Peruvian environment of the 1870s to predispose the intellectuals toward change. With its emphasis on empiricism and progress Positivism, either directly or in the guise of literary realism and naturalism, affected Peru’s creative writers, as well as some professors at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Of course, Positivism also contributed to the fragmentation of the intellectuals, for the application of its concepts and methods to social, political, and cultural issues could not possibly lead everyone to similar conclusions. In particular, Positivism influenced differently the two intellectual groups that ultimately evolved: the literary or left intellectuals and lawyers and the scholars.⁴ Although few in number, these groups developed important divergencies even within themselves. Nevertheless, they all shared a deep concern for nationality, and they emerged as the most important generations of Peruvian intellectuals in the entire republican period: the “Generation of 1900” and the “Generation of 1919.” Their social, political, economic, and cultural propositions provided the basic assumptions of modern Peruvian nationalism.⁵

In the beginning the intellectuals responded mainly to political events. The Partido Civil, which took its name in reaction against the military caudillaje politics of the past, appeared in 1871. It captured the presidency during the following year, and its founder and leader, Manuel Pardo, became the first opposition candidate ever to win a presidential election in Peru. Once in power, however, the civilistas encountered grave difficulties arising from the economic crisis of the 70s. Predictably economic pressures forced the Pardo regime to undertake austerity measures which in turn produced social unrest in Lima. In 1876 Peru turned once again to an army officer, General Mariano I. Prado, for national leadership.

Peru’s troubles of the early 1870s pale, however, when compared to the crisis at the end of the decade. President Prado faced an even greater challenge: war with Chile. The War of the Pacific, essentially a conflict between Peru and Chile, ended with Peru’s complete defeat. During the fighting the government fell into disarray, while the military, with a few notable exceptions, performed incompetently and ineffectively. If the civilista insurgency of the early 1870s had created a temporary climate of reformism and hope, the events which followed dampened hope and fostered despair. The War of the Pacific, in particular, mobilized the intellectuals and awakened them to a nationalism qualitatively different from that which had existed before.⁶

The literary or left intellectuals preceded the lawyers and scholars in expressing the new nationalism. At first, Manuel González Prada was their leading figure. Neither a university intellectual nor a lawyer, González Prada did share his social origins with some of the lawyers and scholars. His grandfather had held an important administrative post in the last years of the viceroyalty, and his father, Francisco González y Marrón de Lombera, had grown up as a decided partisan of the king’s cause. González Prada himself was reared in an intensely Catholic and antiliberal household. As a youth, however, the poet-rebel deliberately struck the aristocratic de from his name, thus repudiating both family and class.

Brooding and withdrawn in his early years—the perfect youth for a Latin American poet—González Prada nonetheless revealed a practical and utilitarian side to his personality. After his father’s death, he left Lima to spend the next six years in Tutumo, a small family hacienda. During this solitary period he built a chemistry laboratory for experimenting with local plants, and eventually he developed a starch formula with commercial value. There he also received books, journals, and newspapers from Europe and matured as a poet.⁷

Years before, González Prada had traveled to southern Peru and the central sierra around Cerro de Pasco. Through his readings and his wanderings in the countryside, he became aware of Indian and mestizo campesino life and developed a view of Peruvian society outside Lima. Finally in 1879 González Prada spoke out for the first time against Peru’s men of power in a prologue written for a friend’s book of poetry, Cuartos de hora. His attack on the Peruvian ruling class and the Catholic Church caused a literary sensation on the eve of the war with Chile.

During the war González Prada served in one of the reserve regiments that fought on the outskirts of Lima. After the Chileans routed the Peruvians, he returned to his home and defiantly refused to step outside its doors until the Chilean occupation ended. During his years of self-imposed seclusion he occupied his time with reading, writing, and pondering Peru’s national destiny. At the same time he drew close to other writers distressed by the national debacle. Luis M. Márquez initially organized a group of socially militant writers into a society known first as the Bohemia Literaria and after 1886 as the Círculo Literario.⁸ Upon Márquez’ retirement from the presidency, González Prada became the group’s leader. In accepting the post he declared prophetically: “I see myself, from this day on, at the head of a group destined to become the radical party of our literature.”⁹

For the writers of the Círculo, literature provided more than an aesthetic experience. They felt that literature should forcefully confront social issues, and as librepensadores they welcomed the more advanced ideas of the time. When González Prada pronounced their destiny as that of becoming the “radical party of our literature,” they were in fact on the threshold of their encounter with public life. On the memorable night of July 28, 1888 (national independence day), they began to translate their thoughts into action. The public reading of one of González Prada’s fiery essays provided the occasion. Known as the Politeama manifesto, the essay boldly asserted that narrow economic interests dominated Peru’s ruling class and that a corrupt Church and military establishment not only tolerated but abetted the ruling class. Protest and dissent against a corrupt past and present characterized the manifesto.

González Prada also proclaimed other themes which soon were to become the leading issues of radical dissent in Peru. Peru’s central dilemma, he wrote, involved the Indian, who must be integrated into a national culture and society. By couching this problem of acculturation in terms of social justice, González Prada foreshadowed a socially militant indigenismo. Secondly, he emphasized the need for uprooting the authoritarian Roman Catholic intellectual tradition. Drawing on his Positivism, he scorned religion and advocated instead “a positive science which in only one century of industrial application produced more benefits for humanity than entire millenia of theology and metaphysics.”¹⁰ Finally, González Prada entrusted Peru’s youth with the historical mandate of building a nation. He called upon the younger generation to create a new society, free from dogma. The peroration ended with the famous defiant cry: “¡Los viejos a la tumba; los jóvenes a la obra!”

The government tried unsuccessfully to prohibit publication of the Politeama manifesto (so called from the name of the theater where it was first read). Instead in October, González Prada brought out another strident anti-government essay, and in 1889 he published still another essay, Propaganda y ataque, in which he formulated, as he saw it, the public duty of radical writers. As keeper of the collective conscience, he wrote, the writer must “counteract the pernicious influence of the public man” through “propaganda and attack.”¹¹ Given the writer’s limited resources and the general illiteracy surrounding him, there was little else he could do.

Other members of the Círculo shared González Prada’s ideas. Literary realism and Positivism had been the main topics of discussion of the literary salon of Juana Manuela Gorriti in the 1870s, and in the following decade Clorinda Matto de Turner received the capital’s leading literary cénacle.¹² On October 5, 1889, Matto de Turner, an ardent nationalist, published an essay in El Perú Ilustrado calling for a national literature. Taking her own advice, in the same year she published her celebrated naturalist novel, Aves sin nido, which depicted the tragic lives of the sierra Indians and mestizos in the region of her native Cuzco. She also insisted vehemently that Indians and mestizos be integrated into a national community. In Aves, one of the most influential Peruvian indigenista novels, she portrayed the Indians at the mercy of the clergy, of the highland hacendados, and of the governmental authorities. In the final analysis, she believed, the government in Lima must accept a militant civilizing mission and bring the Indian into a national home.¹³

But if Matto de Turner looked to Lima for redress of the Indian’s plight, another novelist, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera (Blanca sol, 1889, and El conspirador, 1892) described Lima as indifferent and heartless. Cabello de Carbonera, perhaps the most brilliant Peruvian novelist of the period, reflected the influence of French realism, especially Zola, when she examined the Peruvian ruling class with clinical detachment. Her novels traced the scheming and corrupt lives of a man and a woman seeking the riches and power that Lima’s society yielded for a price.

Whereas Matto de Turner had revealed the problem of the Indian and the need for government action, Cabello de Carbonera questioned the likelihood of reform by revealing the corruption of power in Lima. Clearly the only alternative was political action. Indeed, in 1891, the Círculo reorganized itself as a political party, the Unión Nacional.¹⁴ The Union’s program called for a vague federalism, for the vindication of the Indian, and for militant opposition to the civilista and military oligarchy. But internal and external circumstances prevented the Unión from evolving beyond ideological protest. In a society with high illiteracy the Unión relied on a small group of writers whose major political weapon was the printed word. Since they totally disagreed with the prevailing political system, they could not bring themselves to take part in it. Ideological politics had little appeal in a system which could be characterized euphemistically as a “limited democracy”; here power factors were almost the only political determinants. The military held a near-monopoly of coercive power, for only Nicolás de Piérola, the charismatic caudillo of the Partido Demócrata, was capable of organizing effective populist insurrections. The other major political group, the civilistas, relied on their economic leverage and their cleverness at political intrigue. Recognizing the obvious, González Prada departed for Europe during the same year that the party was founded. He spent seven years abroad, mainly in France and Spain, where he familiarized himself with current ideologies. European socialism in particular remolded his vague radicalism, hitherto shaped by creole liberalism and Positivism.

Returning to Peru in May 1898, González Prada made his first political pronouncements to the Unión, treating two principal problems, his party’s future and national politics. During his absence the leadership of the Unión had moved closer to the Partido Liberal of Augusto Durand, using the venerable criollo argument that only political alliances would increase their influence. As critical as ever of Peruvian political customs, González Prada was bitingly sarcastic about such alliances: “[The civilistas] have been successively and even simultaneously, pradistas, calderonistas, iglesistas, caceristas, bermudistas, cívicos, coalicionistas y demócratas.. . . Thus for many the Partido Civil is today the art of eating at all the tables and of putting your hands into other people’s pockets.”¹⁵ Characterizing the so-called Limanean “Revolution of ’95” as more appropriately a civil war, he said: “Everywhere revolutions come as painful but fecund gestations of entire peoples: they spill blood, but they create light; they annihilate men, but elaborate ideas. [But] not in Peru. . . . Yet nowhere else is a profound, radical revolution needed more.”¹⁶ Exhorting the Unión to seek the “greatest liberty” for the individual through social rather than political means, he ended by calling for a social revolution.

With compelling reasoning, in his new ideological phase González Prada embraced anarchism.¹⁷ Like nineteenth-century liberals, he exalted individual liberty above all else. Through anarchism, however, he was able to give full vent to political passion which liberalism, committed to constitutional reform, tended to depreciate. González Prada held much in common with European anarchist leaders and thinkers; he harbored, for example, a deep distrust of constituted authority, and he always shone brightest when on the attack. Like some of the leading European anarchists, he came from an aristocratic background. He also assigned great importance to the revolutionary task of educating the people.¹⁸

In 1902 he abandoned the Unión, which soon disintegrated, and set out to collaborate with Lima’s incipient working-class movement. Unable to play the role of mass leader, he wrote for working-class newspapers instead—alone, for the writers of the Unión had dispersed, their militancy dampened by fin de siècle modernismo. Until 1918, the year of his death, González Prada concentrated on the political indoctrination of workers and university students through his writings and through a discussion group, Luz y Amor, which met at his home.

By 1904 he was also writing for Los Parias, a Lima anarchist newspaper.¹⁹ Deeply committed to anarchism, he defined it as “a new Christianity . . . without Christ,” and its ideal as “unlimited freedom and the greatest well-being for the individual with the abolition of the state and private property.”²⁰ Yet he did not see the coming revolutionary struggle as a class struggle. He wrote that the “emancipation of the working-class must be simultaneous with the emancipation of the other classes” and declared that the revolt and imposition of one class over another would only parody social justice. Significantly, he also rejected the thesis of historical materialism.²¹ Instead, the heart of González Prada’s anarchism lay in one of his deepest convictions: “Given the general inclination of man to abuse power, all government is evil and all authority means tyranny.”²² In the end a profound skepticism about man and society inhibited him from formulating a constructive, nationalist program.

González Prada’s skepticism, which stemmed largely from his moral nature, lingered in his mind and haunted him. For example, on May Day 1905 he delivered to the Federación de Obreros Panaderos, the most militant anarchist group, an important address, “El intelectual y el obrero,” later a seminal tract of Peruvian radical politics. Here, in effect, he posited a revolutionary strategy, namely, that the intellectual and manual workers must unite in a common struggle, for “revolutions come from above, but are made operative from below.” Yet almost in the same breath he went on pessimistically that “every revolution once successful tends to become a government of force, every victorious revolutionary degenerates into a conservative.”²³

In spite of his skepticism González Prada nevertheless contributed some central ideas, a terminology, and objectives to Peruvian radical nationalism. The first Peruvian intellectual of note to discuss a social revolution, he wrote about the intellectual as a mass leader, and postulated certain crucial national issues. In the last analysis he placed his hopes for a better future on science and education. His protest seemed so heretical that he usually looms as a solitary figure in the intellectual twilight of the nineteenth century. But as noted earlier, Positivist ideas influenced not only González Prada and the literary intellectuals but also the professors at San Marcos.

San Marcos University was the most important focal point of Positivism in the late nineteenth century.²⁴ Although few professors committed themselves completely to the materialist assumptions of Positivism, its emphasis on scientific method, order, and progress did have considerable impact. One of the earliest evidences of Positivism at San Marcos was Professor Juan Federico Elmore’s Inaugural Lecture of 1871 to the Law Faculty, in which he called it a new and important intellectual influence. Three years later José Antonio Barrenechea, dean of the Law Faculty, mentioned Herbert Spencer in his annual Faculty Report. After another three years a student submitted a thesis entitled “Origen, carácteres y tendencias de la civilización contemporánea.” While not in complete agreement with Positivist premises, he acknowledged that the idea of progress had great importance in contemporary culture.²⁵ The war with Chile brought ruin to San Marcos as it did to Lima, but in its aftermath Positivist ideas reappeared with new vigor. Clearly the principles of order and progress had a strong ideological relevance for a society bent on reconstruction.

During the 1880s a better understanding of Positivism was evidenced in Professor Adolfo Villagracia’s Inaugural Lecture to the Facultad de Letras (1884). Villagracia began by rejecting German philosophy as eminently abstract and metaphysical. He then indicated a guarded predilection for Comte’s Positivism, which, he maintained, posited the absolute as inaccessible and thereby precluded metaphysical speculation. Comtean Positivism, he explained, emphasized the observation of particular scientific facts and the postulation of general laws through inductive reasoning. Finally he set forth the fundamental principle of the new philosophy—“everything that exists is material or the movement of the material.”²⁶

A specific outcome of Positivist influence at San Marcos was the establishment of the first chair of sociology in 1896. Its first holder was Mariano H. Cornejo, a Spencerian who a decade earlier had presented a student thesis entitled, “El progreso indefinido.” The faculties of Law, Letters, Political Science, and Medicine in particular felt the influence of Positivism.

By the first decade of the new century an important group of Positivist professors was lecturing at San Marcos. Javier Prado y Ugarteche, son of the general and ex-president, Mariano I. Prado, shone as its leading figure. A cultivated gentleman whose home housed a remarkable collection of Inca and colonial art, he taught history and philosophy. Carlos Wiesse, another notable professor, lectured on history and geography and emphasized the “sociological aspects of historical evolution.” Mariano H. Cornejo, already mentioned, published a two-volume work entitled, Sociología general (1908-1910), reputedly highly influential throughout Spain and Spanish America. In law Manuel Vicente Villarán applied Positivist concepts and emphasized history and comparative law in his lectures and writings. And in economics, José Matías Manzanilla absorbed Positivist ideas—indeed he even flirted with socialism.

These men were among the most prestigious at San Marcos and in Lima society. They taught and deeply influenced the “Generation of 1900”; they led the progressive wing of the civilista party. All were lawyers, and with the exception of Wiesse, they were men of power, as well as ideas, for in their legal offices, the most important of the day, they negotiated many of the leading commercial contracts of the times. Their firms represented the corporate interests of England and the United States, so that they were linked both financially and culturally to those two countries.

These lawyer-professors attempted to reinvigorate the Partido Civil with the dynamic, progressive principles of its founder, Manuel Pardo. Democrats in their political advocacy, they had little if any contact with the urban clases populares, and even less with the Indian and mestizo peasantry. Ideologically they adhered to a vague reformist-liberalism and seemed to believe that Positivism implied a certain degree of progress but without sacrificing the status quo. Committed to the necessity of industrializing their economy and developing a capitalist, free-enterprise system, they assumed that this process and system could be adapted to Peru. For Prado and Villarán, in particular, the United States exemplified the model modern nation.

Educational reform stood out in the remedies for the national crisis prescribed by Prado and Villarán. Prado, a man of moderation, of the Aristotelian golden mean, felt a deep commitment to the idea of progress, and in his view education held the key to progress and to true nationhood for Peru. “People,” he declared, “are only worth as much as their education, and the most intense mission of any state is essentially educational.”²⁷

At one time or another Prado received almost all of the offices and titles which Lima’s elite society bestowed upon its favorite and most talented members. In October 1917 San Marcos students proclaimed him Maestro de la Juventud. On that occasion he lashed out against the pessimists who believed that the nation’s problems had no solution. Exuding optimism, he called for reform in three major areas: 1) the integration and democratization of public institutions; 2) the “conservation, impulse, and development” of the population, as well as its economic betterment; and 3) a national educational effort.²⁸ He failed to state, however, how or when such reforms were to come about.

Villarán felt a similar commitment to the idea of progress and to education as the means for attaining it. As an intellectual and political activist, he too represented what Manuel Pardo might have thought the ideal civilista type. One of his earliest public pronouncements, an inaugural lecture at San Marcos in 1900, stressed education as the means by which Peruvian society could shape its future. For him an educated citizenry meant the development of an enlightened society with technological capabilities. Peruvian attitudes toward education, however, betrayed a colonial mentality, for the upper classes still considered education largely as decorative. Theology, literature, Latin, history, and philosophy ruled supreme in the university. A school of engineering existed, but “agriculture, commerce, navigation, and the industrial arts” received no attention.²⁹

Five years later, Villarán modified his thesis, and posited economic development as a “condition for the greater development of [our] . . . educational capacity.”³⁰ But he neglected to analyze clearly the socio-economic basis of education, and he failed to point out, for example, that the prevailing socio-economic structures in fact deprived most Peruvians of educational opportunities. In the final analysis, both Prado’s and Villarán’s educational proposals were essentially hortatory.

Even these proposals aroused opposition to mass education. Another distinguished San Marcos professor and lawyer, Alejandro O. Deustua, offered a radically different pedagogical viewpoint. Deustua, a professor of aesthetics and also a civilista, feared social leveling and placed all of his hopes on the formation of an enlightened elite. Arguing with Villarán, Deustua pointed to the fallacy of borrowing a priori foreign educational formulas and imposing them upon quite distinct cultural settings. He decried the civilistas’ educational strategy of the 1870s, when imported French educational ideas had had woeful results, and predicted that Villarán’s sympathies with United States educational methods would also end badly. In contrast to Prado and Villarán, Deustua’s educational ideas were influenced by a pronounced racist bias.³¹

Through the writings and teachings of these men, the University of San Marcos exercised its principal influence on the “Generation of 1900,” as represented by its three major figures: Francisco García Calderón Rey, José de la Riva-Agüero y Osma, and Víctor Andrés Belaúnde.³² Born in the early 1880s and coming of age during the depressing postwar years, they shared an intense desire to help reconstruct their country. Riva-Agüero, the leading figure, belonged to an aristocratic and powerful civilista family. Garcia Calderon’s father, a prominent lawyer and an important civilista, held the presidency briefly during the Chilean occupation. Belaúnde came from a prominent Arequipan bourgeois family, fervent partisans of Piérola. The three men maintained close relations throughout their lives, one a historian, another an essayist, and the third an orator, essayist, and diplomat.

They differed from their professors, the lawyers, in their deep concern with the Peruvian past. This historical-mindedness stemmed in large part from their search for a national identity and the bases of national solidarity. Balaúnde, in fact, spent the greater part of his life casting about for a cultural definition which would explain his elusive postulate of Peruanidad. In varying degrees all three felt the influences of Positivism during their university years, although both Riva-Agüero and Belaúnde quickly returned to the Catholic fold with the intensity of counterreformation militants. Positivism may have had a deeper effect on García Calderón, for he was less religiously inclined and lived almost his entire adult life in western Europe. His arguments in favor of a modernizing technology, European immigration, and the development of a progressive middle class made him appear the most modern-tempered of the three.

Belaúnde once declared that Piérola and the revolution of ’95 represented the most important inspiration of his generation.³³ At San Marcos Positivist ideas temporarily and superficially won them over. Concerning Professor José Matías Manzanilla (who attributed great causal importance to economic factors in society) Belaúnde later wrote: “By temperament and intuition, I found repugnant the explanation of social phenomena by simple economic factors.” He recognized the importance of economic factors, but denied them “exclusive or even principal causality.”³⁴ Indeed, he sought refuge in Arequipa during the university holidays of 1902-1903 in fear of losing his faith, for “the subtle venom of the Positivist and lay ambient of San Marcos” was “infiltrating” his spirit.³⁵

Initially Riva-Agüero seemed more deeply influenced by Positivist ideas. In an early public lecture, “El dualismo y el monismo” (1903), he pronounced scholasticism a “phantom from a dead world.” Biology, sociology, physiology, chemistry, and psychology were the vibrant intellectual currents of the times; science, he dedared, formed the pedestal upon which rested the grandiose concept of evolution.³⁶ The young Riva-Agüero favored a reformist program of industrialization, immigration, and a modern and utilitarian education. Indeed his first major historical work, Carácter de la literatura del Perú independiente (1905), finished when he was but 19, even revealed traces of González Prada’s influence. Like the poet-rebel, he subscribed to the Black Legend of Spanish colonial rule, the source of all Peru’s misfortunes.³⁷

Riva-Agüero and García Calderón, close comrades from their early years, shared common intellectual interests. The latter many years later reminisced how as young men they hurried home from school to discuss their private readings. After García Calderón had attended San Marcos with Riva-Agüero, however, he left Peru in 1906 and, prompted by his father’s death and other personal reasons, moved to Paris, where he spent the greater part of his life as an expatriate nationalist. Thereafter his writings reflected the changing intellectual tides of the Gallic tradition. Away from Spanish America he attained a remarkable detachment toward his native culture. These characteristics are obvious in two of his classic works— Le Pérou contemporain (1907) and Les démocraties latines de l’Amérique (1912)—both published originally in French, an indication perhaps of his ambivalent nationalism.

García Calderón never actively involved himself in Peruvian politics. Nevertheless, his early writings show a distinct and at times intense preoccupation with the Peruvian crisis—for example, Le Pérou contemporain, published when he was 19. In Le Pérou García Calderón tried to grasp the enduring historical influences affecting contemporary Peru. Focusing on religion, for example, he attempted to analyze its social functions. Departing from the premise that the sixteenth-century Spanish state was theocratic, he noted that the conjunction of a state religion and secular law resulted in the emergence of an archetypal Spanish leader, characterized by prominent mystical and authoritarian qualities.³⁸ Moreover, a democratic environment produced such a leader, with the Spanish commune its fullest expression. Borrowing a current concept from the Portuguese historian, Oliveira Martins, he then pointed to “democratic caesarism’’ as one of the driving forces of Spanish history.

After independence, continued García Calderón, Spanish America rejected the monarchical form of government, but could not reject its substance. From this he derived a law of Spanish American history—that dictatorship was the proper form of government to “create internal order, develop wealth, and unite inimical castes.”³⁹ In Les démocraties latines, García Calderón sang hymns of praise to the achievements of the Argentine strong-man, Manuel Rosas, the Venezuelan, Antonio Guzmán Blanco, and the Mexican, Porfirio Díaz, nation-builders all.

But García Calderón recognized an alternative to democratic caesarian in an enlightened elite. Citing Gaetano Mosea obliquely, he claimed that Peru could evolve toward democratic-republican government through the efforts of an informed oligarchy.⁴⁰ He also proposed a national development program favoring French and Italian immigration, reform of the country’s parasitic bureaucracy, and decentralization of government administration. Also he wanted to develop private enterprise so that “self-made men” could set the example for the masses and establish a secular and utilitarian educational system. In his father’s party, the civilistas, he saw a reformist elite committed to a struggle against militarism. That party stood for the supremacy of the civil element in government and for “order as the basis of progress.”⁴¹

The apparent progressive climate after the “revolución del ’95” convinced García Calderón that a “Positive economic period” had begun. The time had come, he wrote, for “work, order, optimism, and general wealth.”⁴² Brushing aside González Prada’s critique as negative carping, he offered enthusiasm instead, for national life appeared to be taking definitive directions. An ideal was being shaped, he declared; at last “there exist the elements with which to form the destinies of a Peruvian nationality.”⁴³

Between 1895 and 1910, this confidence in the nation’s future dominated Peruvian society. “Reform” and “renovation” were the leading slogans of the time; the need to modernize Peruvian culture became a national imperative. This “spirit of ’95” prevailed intact almost to the end of José Pardo’s first administration (1908). During that time the powers and at least some of the intellectuals—the lawyers and the scholars—collaborated in charting the future course of the nation.

At San Marcos, a nationalist consciousness pervaded the faculties of Law, Letters, and Medicine, and the principal university publications, the Revista universitaria and Anales universitarios, frequently carried articles on university reform. Pedro A. Labarthe, for example, in a 1904 inaugural lecture, enthusiastically recommended Germany as the model for technical education in Peru and North America for “social and democratic education.” Student theses reflected the nationalist spirit of the times, and curiosity about the national origins stimulated a renaissance in anthropological, historical, and literary studies.⁴⁴ In 1905 the government established the Instituto Histórico del Perú and the Revista Histórica, assumed responsibility for the protection of the Inca ruins, and founded a Museum of Natural History.

San Marcos was a focal point for the nationalism of these years. As student leaders Riva-Agüero and Belaúnde exhorted their fellows to demand change both inside and outside the university. Belaúnde later reminisced that in 1904 there existed “an enthusiasm and universal euphoria” and that the “undisputable law” of the moment was the law of progress.⁴⁵ When the first Latin American university student congress met in Montevideo (1908), he emerged as the leading orator of the San Marcos delegation, enunciating a vigorous progressivism. As he wrote later, the Montevideo congress gave the final touches to the nationalist profile of his generation. Thereafter, with increasing frequency, student groups began to propose a mission for the university in the outside world. During 1909 the Revista universitaria carried an article by Luis Miró Quesada, scion of the powerful civilista family which owned the important newspaper El Comercio. Miró Quesada exalted the mission of the university in the following terms: “In the present epoch, the universities must create the national ideals . . . and place themselves at the service of the country’s interests.”⁴⁶

As a result of the Montevideo congress, students founded the Centro Universitario on September 23, 1908, with Oscar Miró Quesada as president. Under his leadership the Centro’s most important project involved a university extension program. By 1915 the University Council had approved the project, and university professors began lecturing to the Confederación de Artesanos, a government-subsidized labor group, on national culture, social welfare, medical care, and civil law. Students also expressed concern for institutional reforms. In a lecture of 1909 Carlos E. Paz Soldán presented to the Centro a plan for academic reform of the medical faculty. Before concluding, however, he proposed that students should “intervene in the directive procedures of the university,”⁴⁷ thereby anticipating the later student demand for cogobierno. And while students at San Marcos discussed a strategy for the university reform movement, the provincial universities of Arequipa and Cuzco introduced what was to be one of the main tactics in the future. Students in Arequipa organized the first university strike in 1907, and in 1909 Cuzco students repeated the action.

Meanwhile, on the national scene the demócrata-civilista coalition established in 1895 was breaking apart. Beginning in 1903 the civilistas surreptitiously undermined the demócratas’ influence in the electoral process, only to their own decline with the presidential election of Augusto B. Leguía in 1908. The pierolistas, lacking any apparent alternative, attempted a palace golpe against Leguía’s government in the following May—a desperate move with only a handful of people. Three years later Guillermo Billinghurst, the demócrata running without aid from Piérola, managed to mobilize lower-class support and won the presidency. His triumph was short-lived, for in February 1914 opposition political leaders collaborated with military conspirators to oust him, thus ending Peru’s second important experiment in democratic politics.

In September 1911 the government arrested Riva-Agüero for writing a vehement antigovernment article which demanded amnesty for the participants of the 1909 golpe. The article made him into a public figure, and within hours after his arrest demonstrations erupted on his behalf. After he had gained freedom, he and Belaúnde continued their efforts to influence national politics. A highly tense political situation existed in 1914, the year of the anti-Billinghurst military coup, and Belaúnde analyzed the crisis in an inaugural lecture at San Marcos. Stating that the optimism of García Calderón’s Le Pérou, contemporain was now untenable, he attributed the crisis to the “personalist polities of the executive”—a reference no doubt to Leguía and Billinghurst and a strange criticism from the man who so admired Piérola. Personalist presidents might threaten the parliamentary system, but economic pressures on the middle class and the moral crisis of the ruling elite also threatened political stability. Lamenting the decay of the national reform ideal, he concluded with the dramatic nationalist cry: “¡Queremos patria !”⁴⁸

In 1915, disillusioned with the parties, the generation of 1900 organized their own Partido Nacional Democrático. After severely indicting both past and present, their manifesto pledged a program of “legality and economy,” constitutional and electoral reform, labor and Indian legislation, and defense of the national integrity. Like the Unión Nacional, however, the PND had little following among the people.

By this time, Riva-Agüero’s nationalist perspective had changed. On a prolonged trip to the southern sierra in 1912 he visited many of the historical sites so familiar to him through his studies. Traveling by horseback, deep in thought, he was profoundly moved by what he saw, and his later impressions of the journey appeared as Paisajes peruanos, perhaps his best work. In the sierra, Riva-Agüero truly discovered the past, both the monumental Inca ruins and, to a lesser extent, Spanish colonial remains, which filled his heart with a nationalist emotion. In Paisajes, he wrote that “the sierra is the cradle of the nationality, the spinal column of its life, the principal region of Peru.” Here he discovered a paradox—that the future of Peru lay in its past.

Paisajes stands as the dividing line between the younger and adult Riva-Agüero. Surrounded by the Andes, Riva-Agüero not only became convinced of the grandeur of the Inca and Spanish empires, but from then on committed himself to the ideal that the traditions and values of that past must be defended and conserved. The sierra kindled his commitment to a militant aristocratic-religious conservatism, and he forgot Positivism and his former admiration for science.

Beláunde too had changed. At 23, his thesis La filosofía del derecho y el método positivo (1906), clearly marked him as a Positivist. By the time he took a chair at San Marcos six years later, his philosophical interest had begun to shift to Bergson. By 1917, his disengagement from Positivism was complete. Now he ridiculed it as a false movement which had failed to analyze the living national reality and only burdened Peruvian scholarship with exotic bibliographies.⁴⁹

Riva-Agüero’s three beautiful and scholarly contributions to Peruvian historiography constitute his nationalist testament. Prom 1905 until his death, as Porras Barrenechea has suggested, he was “the magistrate of Peruvian culture.” Alone, surrounded by his books and manuscripts, he embodied the disciplined and committed aristocrat. After the collapse of the civilistas in 1919 and the insurgency of Peruvian middle classes under Leguía, Riva-Agüero left the country in self-imposed exile to the Mediterranean, where eventually he embraced fascism.

Belaúnde, Peru’s outstanding nationalist orator in the early twentieth century, became a fervent internationalist. In his youth the defender of the national ideal, he became in adult life a respected and much admired diplomat, attaining an international success denied him within his own country. Throughout his life Belaúnde lived in the shadows of the powers, of the state and of the Church.

The collapse of Peru’s second experiment with a modernizing reformism in 1919 inaugurated a new historical epoch. Mariano Lino Cornejo had submitted to San Marcos 17 years earlier a doctoral thesis entitled “El socialismo contemporáneo.” Although he was unaware of its prescience, the thesis suggested highly significant implications for the nationalist crisis, the intellectuals, and society. Socialism, he wrote, recruited its legions not only from the working class, but from the universities. Academic degrees not rewarded with professional placement and status dehumanized many intellectuals and turned them to the socialist cause. “Medical doctors, lawyers, and engineers without clients, professors without chairs, artists and writers without a public . . . feel an implacable hatred toward a society that cannot or will not offer them positions, and at times they feel inclined to destroy it.”⁵⁰ Cornejo’s sociology might be oversimplified, but he did correctly point to important social grievances.

In the following years discontent and alienation increased among the intellectuals because of changes in social structure, the influence of González Prada, university reform, and international events, especially the Mexican and Russian revolutions. Student enrollment at San Marcos rose from 789 in 1907 to 1,331 by 1917,⁵¹ as students from the less privileged social strata—the petite bourgeoisie—began entering the university. And it was no coincidence that the student rebellion at San Marcos in mid-1919 developed parallel to the movement which carried Leguía to power.

Indeed the circulation of elites within San Marcos reached a high point on July 15, 1917, when the Centro Universitario gave way to the Federación de Estudiantes del Perú (FEP). The appearance of the FEP indicated the growing national scope of organized student action, for it became the Peruvian national union of students and reoriented their militancy. When labor groups in Lima organized a “general strike” during December 1918 and January 1919 in their struggle for the eight-hour day, their meetings took place at the FEP offices. The FEP also voted a student delegation to march with the workers in the street demonstrations of January 1919.

The new student militancy made San Marcos the center of the nationalist crisis as it entered another phase after 1919. That year brought forth a new group of intellectuals, the “Generation of 1919,” whose principal figures were to be José Carlos Mariátegui and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. As a young journalist Mariátegui urged on the labor and student strikes of 1919, so that between 1919 and 1923 the literary intellectuals, the workers, and the university student leaders arrived at a critical junction.

In helping to transform the university student and labor movements, Mariátegui echoed the radical manifesto of 1905 in which González Prada had called for an alliance of intellectuals and manual workers. As a Marxist nationalist, Mariátegui formulated an enduring analysis of Peruvian society and laid the organizational bases for radical nationalist politics in Peru. Ultimately Haya, the nationalist who emerged from the university, became the leader of the first mass nationalist, political movement in Peru. But as the new stage of the nationalist crisis began to unfold, the nature of the crisis did not vary essentially.⁵²

Author notes