In this heavily documented narrative of the shordived revolutionary movement that began on May 25, 1809, in Chuquisaca (Sucre), Just Lleó argues that it was, in fact, a revolution that never was. From the time he became president and arrived in Chuquisaca in 1796, to his imprisonment in 1809, the Audiencia president, don García de León Pizarro, constantly sparred with the oidores over matters of jurisdiction, power, and even etiquette. The municipal council also entered the fray. Pizarro gained a great ally and friend in the archbishop, don Benito María de Moxó, a true-blue peninsular. The oidores, peninsulares themselves, kept a vigilant watch for any hint that either the president or Moxó was trying to abridge their authority, and they made every effort to demonstrate that Pizarro was unable to govern. At best, the creole-peninsular rivalry was muted. Just Lleó suggests that these years of political bickering and clashes of personalities played out in that fateful year, 1808.
The crisis of the Spanish monarchy, coupled with the discovery of a “plot” to deliver Upper Peru to the Portuguese Queen Carlota, gave way to protopatriotic activism. Informal social gatherings (tertulias), which both creoles and peninsulares attended, then became a springboard for the formation of a junta. The Audiencia and the radicals among the anti-Pizarro factions became strange bedfellows, but they won the propaganda war that drew the “plebeians” (the author’s word, not mine) temporarily to their cause. Accused of being sympathetic to Carlota’s dubious claim, Pizarro was consequently imprisoned, while the Audiencia assumed power and dutifully proclaimed its loyalty to Ferdinand VII.
Pacification came swiftly upon the arrival, in December 1809, of a new president, don Vicente Nieto, who promptly issued arrest warrants for the “revolutionaries,” most of whom came from the elites. Thanks to the royalists’ preemptive actions and show of force, the self-styled emissaries of the Audiencia failed to infect other cities of Upper Peru. The hoped-for mass uprising existed only in the minds of the so-called revolutionaries. Therefore, Just Lleó disputes the argument, common in the historiography of the period, that the “revolutionary” movement included a loyal following among the popular masses. According to Just Lleó, the ideology of this movement was merely a response to the crisis of the monarchy; it was also steeped in scholasticism—without a king they were on their own and they would never submit to French, let alone Portuguese, rule.
Thus we have a top-down revolution that never was, partly because it only served as a sounding board for elite aspirations and ambitions and partly because the “plebeians” were hardly a factor in such intraelite squabbling. This is a masterful political history that contains a thick description interwoven with a thoroughgoing analysis. And perhaps its three hundred pages of documents will also be of interest to scholars of the period.
