In this book, drawn from his doctoral dissertation for the Université de Paris I, Chilean author Cristián Gazmuri offers a historical account of Chile’s new political culture and sociability of the mid-nineteenth century. In it Gazmuri, a student of innovative French historian Maurice Agulhon, combines elements from intellectual, cultural, political, and social history to explain a momentous period of Chilean life when a new liberal political culture took shape.
Gazmuri closely follows the composition and ideological profile of the Chilean “Generación del 48,” made up of a select group of intellectuals and politicians (including several Europeans as well as individuals from other Latin American countries) who played key public roles in the midcentury and afterward. In addition, he examines important historical factors that contributed to giving the actors and events of the “Generación del 48” significant influence over Chile’s subsequent political development. Among such factors, Gazmuri highlights Chile’s particular political juncture (division within the “Pelucón” party prior to a key presidential election), the social growth and political activism of artisans, the California gold rush, and news about the 1848 revolutions in Europe. The latter are considered to have had a major impact on Chile’s social, political, and cultural life in 1848 and afterward.
El “48” chileno goes beyond traditional intellectual history and offers an informative discussion of both the overall shape and character of Chile’s larger society as well as of some features of its popular political culture. For instance, while it looks at the nature and composition of Chile’s politically heterogeneous oligarchy and discusses some collective biographical aspects of the “Generación del 48” and its afrancesado members, it also examines the growth and profile of the artisan sectors. These included over a thousand European immigrants, some of whom, like their Chilean peers, were active in insurgent politics through the 1840s and early 1850s. Similarly, Gazmuri’s work analyzes the artisans’ political ideology, culture, and new forms of sociability. To be sure some such forms, for example the 1850 Sociedad de la Igualdad, incorporated not only egalitarian artisans but also elite individuals, in particular the young Chilean afrancesados, a group of young oligarchs and members of the middle classes either educated in France or under the spell of French literary and philosophical doctrines.
The nature, composition, extension, ideology, and evolution of this Sociedad de la Igualdad are studied at length, for this group played a central role in the political events of 1850 and 1851, which encompassed popular mutinies, military revolts, and a short civil war. In addition, the Sociedad de la Igualdad was the forerunner of a political group created in the early 1860s as its “ideological heir” and continuation—the Radical party, the emergence and membership of which are treated in this book. The Sociedad also preceded and effected two other important “nonpolitical” forms of sociability linked to the new culture that was developing in 1848: the Masonic lodges and the voluntary organizations of bomberos (firemen), both of which emerged in 1850. These two groups of philanthropic organizations, their composition, and their geographic extension, are also discussed in some detail; like many other new political forms of sociability and culture they are considered to have had a long-lasting impact on Chile’s future history. They all strengthened a rationalist, secular, liberal, and progressive view of the world, which molded and “civilized” Chile’s twentieth-century culture, society, and politics.
Gazmuri’s work is a valuable contribution to the unfolding historiography of Latin America’s political culture. It is also a significant addition to the series of case studies by Safford, Gootenberg, Mallon, Gudmundson and Lindo-Fuentes, G. Thomson, Jacobsen, and others that explore the regional and temporal diversity of the liberal experience in nineteenth-century Latin America. El “48” chileno also enriches the field of studies, led by Pilar González, on new forms of nineteenth-century political sociability in the region. A closer dialogue with some of these works would have been desirable. Notwithstanding the thinness of its comparative insights, Gazmuri’s monograph provides a well-documented and clearly written case study. It must be acquired by research libraries in the United States and elsewhere.
