Why They Fought

An open cabildo discussed the legitimacy of the viceroy and the new local government that replaced him.

On 20th May 1810, the third day of the “Semana de Mayo” in which Argentina began its fight for political independence from Spain, revolutionaries decided to stage a production of Voltaire’s ‘Rome Saved’. The alternate title of the play, and its most dramatic figure, was Catiline—the Roman politician who urged his fellow-conspirators to murder Cicero and Cato, burn the city, break up the corrupt Senate, and take back power for the people.

One might have expected main actor and revolutionary Morante to take the part of insurgent Catiline. In fact, he did just the opposite—playing Cicero, who executed these conspirators without due process. The chief of police, aware of the potentially unpleasant repercussions which might fall out from any treatment of tyranny no matter who wore which tights, requested Morante to feign illness and not appear, so a last-minute production of the German ‘Misanthropy and Repentance’ might be subbed in. (Perhaps a counter-move wanting in subtlety.) Morante took the stage regardless; his compatriots cheered him on; cries rang out for the freedom of Buenos Aires, and a skirmish with authorities began.

But the puzzle persists. Why did the revolutionary choose to play the incumbent and conservative leader? (“We want a chief, a warrior, a dictator,” at one point Morante cried.) And why did so many of the revolutionaries’ writings call for a powerful central government, at times even a monarchy? According to priest and scholar Guillermo Furlong, the solution to these mysteries is that the struggle for independence was never waged by or on behalf of ordinary Argentine individuals at all—instead, the revolutionaries’ objective was to replace ineffective Spanish central power with a native version of the same, sustaining authority in more effective form.

‘The Golden Key’

Furlong wasn’t the first or last person to put forward this notion, but he was one of the most dedicated to tracing precisely the ideas behind events. Born in 1889 in Santa Fe, the son of Irish immigrants, he followed his Jesuit training in Córdoba with studies at the Monastery of Veruela in Aragón, Spain; at Georgetown University, in Washington D.C; and, after a period teaching Argentine history at the Colegio del Salvador in Buenos Aires, at a theological institute in Barcelona. The fruit of years of solitary reading and writing in his spartan room (bare except for high-stacked piles of books), as well as snumerous trips around the world to dig through archives, was an astounding 2000 works—the most famous his 759-page doorstopper ‘Nacimiento y desarrollo de la filosofía en el Río de la Plata 1536-1810′.

Guillermo Furlong at his study

Furlong’s work challenged the traditional account, which claimed that the roots of the Argentine fight for independence lay in the two revolutions in France and the United States championing individual rights and a contract-based society. Rousseau in particular was often cited as an influence on Argentine revolutionaries—an idea still so current that in this weekend’s edition of Clarín’s magazine supplement, the popular historian Felipe Pigna simply puts it forward as an assumption in his column. For Furlong, however, the idea of Rousseau as an influence was absurd. Not only did the revolutionaries never argue for a social contract between sovereign individuals, they may not even have had access to Rousseau’s texts at all. (The first edition of the ‘Contrat Social’ was published in Paris in 1762, but only reached Argentina in 1810, months after the revolution had already occurred.)

And yet Furlong was firmly committed to the idea of intellectual—not simply economic—influences. For him there was most definitely a “philosopher of the revolution,” the identity of whom the title of one of his articles leaves little room for doubt: ‘Francisco Suárez Fue el Filósofo de la Revolución’. “It was the Spanish philosopher and not the French philosopher,” he writes, “who gave men in 1810 the golden key to open the gates of liberty.” If, today, Suárez’ name doesn’t ring familiar in Western ears the same way that (say) Locke or Hobbes does, it is true that for a vast stretch of the 16th to 18th century he was a theologian and jurist of considerable importance, widely taught in Europe. (Leibniz inveighed bitterly against his influence in German universities.) Suárez was referred to as the Doctor Eximio, and was a scholastic—but unlike many scholastics, wrote in elegant prose and concerned himself with the practicalities of politics.

What attracted Argentine revolutionaries to Suárez’ work—and the reason why his ‘Defensio Fidei’ was burned in London on the order of James I—was its injunction against divine right and absolute monarchy. This didn’t imply democracy. Instead, Suárez based his argument on the idea of a pre-existing pact between a government and a (naturally social, family-based) people, eternal and arranged by God. Any temporal ruler could fill the place, and no particular leader had a divine blessing; the ruler was less important than the existence of the pact itself. Following Suárez’s theory, then, the Argentine people had a pact with Spain, and would have remained happy with any Spanish governor so long as he served as an efficient coordinating force. It was only when Spain couldn’t uphold its end of the bargain that Argentines were forced to fill the void.

Far from being an effective authority, in 1810 Spain was putting on a poor show as colonizer, dealing distractedly with its overseas holdings. There were problems enough to deal with at home, as French invasions during the Napoleonic Wars threw the country into chaos. England seized the advantage to attempt naval claims on the Rio de la Plata, an ideal market for the flush of goods produced by the industrial revolution. When Spain failed to come to Argentina’s defense, the latter was forced to fend for itself; the sacred pact was broken. In a way, then, the assertion of Argentine identity was a matter of convenience—with Spain weak, Argentine élites needed to replace the country’s authority, as it indeed did with its first government (the “primera junta”).

To put it another way, Argentina became Spain, became its own imperializer, and even used the Spanish philosophy of Suárez to justify itself. As Furlong writes, the Argentine revolutionaries were “more Spanish than the Spanish”; the Semana de Mayo was “less a fight between slaves and owners, than a transfer of power between gentlemen.”

Francisco Suárez is considered the most brilliant and influential early-modern philosophers. He wrote on metaphysics, theology and epistemology.

Appraisals

Does Furlong’s theory make sense? Suárez never visited the country in person, but he did have a strong influence in Latin America through the activities of Spanish missionary priest José Aprieta. His books were well represented in libraries in Argentina’s major cities during the revolutionary period, even when Cartesianism rather than scholasticism began to dominate, and even after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Argentina (which Furlong also attributes to the philosophy of Suárez). In the claustros of Córdoba, revolutionaries “read avidly and commented arduously” on the ‘Opera Omnia, Disputationes Metaphysicae, De Legibus’, and other texts. The currency of these ideas on the continent was of course even stronger—when Belgrano traveled with Rivadavia through Europe, he absorbed them fully, and grew convinced that a Suárez-esque monarchy with a single, replaceable leader was the country’s best option. Somewhat romantically, he envisioned this scenario in Argentina as a recreation of the Incan empire.

Others are not so convinced of the importance of Suárez. Perhaps Furlong worked too hard to justify Jesuit ideas in arguing for scholasticism as a revolutionary movement; perhaps he attached too much weight to Spanish intellectual influences. His ‘Nacimiento y desarrollo’ was published in 1952 by the Fundación Vitoria y Suárez, formed in Buenos Aires under the sponsorship of the Institución Cultural Española; the edition was published “with the generous help” of the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica in Madrid.

Or perhaps the theory might be taken as another representative in the genre of clever, involuting metaphysical accounts. In “La Revolución,” the first volume of his series ‘La Evolución de las Ideas Argentinas’,” José Ingenieros alludes to the claims of Argentine paleontologist Florentino Ameghino for human origins in South America—in a sense, European conquistadores were actually the genetic descendants of the Indians, and in the New World simply “discovered” themselves. Similarly, for Suárez (popularized through Furlong), revolutionaries may have appeared to be overthrowing Spanish leadership—but in reality were simply acting the colonizer, replicating the structure.