Jan Bazant’s latest book is a remarkable biography of a minor, but picturesque, figure of Mexico’s romantic generation, the generation of the Reforma and the French intervention. It is an unpretentious work, without conceptual apparatus or explicit interpretation, modestly presented in hopes that it might “divert and perhaps in a small way instruct the reader.’’ It does both, many times over. Bazant chose Haro, he tells us, because Haro kept appearing in his research over the years, and because he found Haro’s life and career intrinsically interesting. Bazant is at once detached from and exceptionally engaged in his subject.
Haro y Tamariz was a rich landowner from Puebla, educated in a Jesuit college in Rome, who entered politics as a fervent admirer of Antonio López de Santa Anna and served three times as his minister of finance (1844, 1846, and 1853). Haro was an unsuccessful contender for power following Santa Anna’s downfall in 1855. Ignored by the victorious liberals, he turned against them to lead a conservative-clerical rebellion which held Puebla for two months in early 1856. After military defeat by his former schoolmate, Ignacio Comonfort, Haro escaped to Europe, squandered a fortune of 600,000 pesos in three years, and then returned (out of financial necessity) with the French army in 1862. Politically overlooked by the French and by Maximilian, he finally left Mexico ill in 1866, and entered the Jesuit Novitiate of Rome a year before his death.
This is the story of a political loser; a civilian power seeker in an age of military presidents; an aristocrat who moved easily in the tertulias of the elite, but who had little popular appeal; a man attached to persons and indifferent to ideas during a period (after 1846) of increasing ideological polarity. His friendships ranged over the entire political spectrum; yet he alienated both liberals, as the bearer of Lucas Alamán’s famous letter to Santa Anna in 1853, and conservatives, by his support of moderate anticlerical measures in 1846 and 1853. Bazant characterizes Haro as a naive “amateur conspirator,” who subjected himself to scorn and ridicule, and who even estranged his closest friends, for example, Mariano Riva Palacio.
Bazant’s previous work on the alienation of church wealth, the foreign debt, the textile industry in Puebla, land and politics in San Luis Potosí, and the legacy of Hernán Cortés, all touch on Haro’s life and career, and Bazant draws on this wealth of material to provide clarification and contextual richness throughout the book. He has also searched an impressive variety of archives and publications for traces of the elusive Haro. Bazant works closely from the documents, by precis or by quotation, but constantly inserts interpolations, witty or ironic asides, explanations, and speculations, all of which reveal a shrewd and mature observer of human nature, as well as of Mexican politics and society. From scanty evidence, Bazant discerns that Haro essentially abandoned his wife and child to pursue political adventures in Mexico and possibly amorous adventures in Europe.
The work is full of valuable insights. We read of the intimate ties between aristocratic families like Haro’s and the church. We learn in detail the finances of unsuccessful military rebellions. We get added evidence on the fluidity of political positions in the pre-Reforma period and a fresh picture of the complex five-way struggle for power at the onset of the Reforma in 1855. We get new information on the complications of the textile industry in 1843-44.
In a more general sense, this book should be required reading for those who would overemphasize either ideas or class interests in explaining political alignments in nineteenth-century Mexico. Bazant does not provide an explanation, but he does amply remind us that there are no easy answers.
