by Tom Anderson
However, he had two possible approaches to consider that might deliver French hegemony over Spanish America. Firstly, renew the Bourbon Family Compact, help Spain quell the rebellion, and use this as a foothold towards drawing the Spanish Empire towards France. Secondly, support the rebels against Spain and gain influence over any succeeding rebel state. Both of these involved sending French troops to Spanish America, and so the order to do so was proclaimed long before the indecisive Louis had made any clear decision on which option was to be taken—or, for that matter, informed the Spaniards.
It is hopeful but possibly incorrect to believe that the resulting comedy of errors can no longer take place in our time, with our Photel[91] and other innovations in the area of communications. In any case, in 1782 a French fleet under the Duc de Noailles and Admiral de Grasse was sent out from Quiberon, with the intention of landing troops “in the Viceroyalty of Peru, and linking up with our allies”, orders which were understandably ambiguous in just who those allies would be, but were rather less excusably ambiguous in just where in the vast Viceroyalty this was supposed to happen.
This meant that in August 1782, owing to what we nowadays would call crossed wires, the French expeditionary force was under the impression that Spain was the enemy and the native Indian rebels should be supported—this being the favoured option before the fleet left. Meanwhile the King had changed his mind and his ministers had concluded a new Family Compact with Charles III, with the Spanish Government believing that the French were their allies. The results were predictable. Repeating the British attempt of a generation earlier, Admiral de Grasse’s fleet sailed up the River Plate and took Buenos Aires as a blow against Spain—at the same time that the propagandists of the Spanish colonial authorities in the region were trumpeting the invented successes of their French allies against Tupac Amaru II. Rumours of the French ravaging Buenos Aires, inflated from a few scattered incidents, served to unite the entire Criollista movement against France and in alliance with the Indians, who otherwise they might have seen as enemies: after all, many Criollistas had liked the idea of confiscating Indian lands and moving into them. But the French blunder had unified what otherwise might have been disparate groups prone to infighting into a coherent resistance outraged by the ‘betrayal’.The whole of the Plate region, supported by the Captaincy-General of Chile from early 1783, rose in revolt. The Second Platinean War had begun.
The great rebellion could perhaps still have been contained, but Britain and Portugal entered the war on the side of the rebels. Portuguese support was largely clandestine, with war being undeclared on the Iberian frontier, and was secured in return for the rebels promising to make several border adjustments favourable to Portuguese Brazil. An Anglo-American force under Admiral Howe defeated de Grasse’s fleet at the mouth of the River Plate, then landed an army commanded by the American General George Augustine Washington. While the people of the Plate were still suspicious of the British from their experiences in the last war, after the British participated in the rebel capture of Córdoba, they were accepted and Washington was treated to a parade through the streets of that city. This event, a great irony considering the events of the next century, was captured in oil on canvas by Antonio Vilca. Vilca was a former apprentice of Marcos Zapata, the last great artist of the hybrid ‘Cuzco School’ in which native South American Indians painted (largely) religious works according to Spanish instruction, but added their own cultural influences. These paintings were characterised by the recurring figure of the ángel arcabucero, a warrior angel depicted in then modern clothing and wielding an arquebus as his weapon. Vilca portrayed Washington and his men in a style clearly influenced by these long-established figures and neatly expressed his own sympathies that the Americans, no matter their own Protestant faith, were fighting on the cause of God. The original painting Los Libertadores was later acquired by the Washington family and now hangs in the Fredericksburg Museum of Art. Vilca was far from alone, however, and his sudden fame overseas meant he somewhat unintentionally founded a new school of art which would come to symbolise the distinct artistic heritage of the rebels and their eventual nation: the Escuela Cordobés or Córdoban School.
Although the French remained in control of the city of Buenos Aires until the end of the war, they were unable to break out of their initial pockets of control. A joint Franco-Spanish fleet was assembled at Cadiz in late 1783, with the intention of punching through the Royal Navy blockade of South America and landing reinforcements to support the Duc de Noailles’ army. However, another British fleet under Admiral Augustus Keppel met them off Cape Trafalgar. The combat was a shock defeat for the British; although the Franco-Spanish fleet slightly outnumbered the Royal Navy ships, the British were accustomed to being able to fight above their weight at sea. The combat exposed serious flaws in how the Royal Navy had been handled after the Third War of Supremacy, eventually leading to a great shipbuilding programme under the latter half of the Marquess of Rockingham’s first term as Prime Minister, but for the moment tempers were salved with the court-martial and disgrace of Keppel.
While Trafalgar was a British defeat, Keppel’s forces had managed to sink several Franco-Spanish transport ships and the fleet was forced to return to Cadiz. Also, the shock victory had convinced the overly impressionable Louis XVI that now was the time to seize control of the English Channel and invade Britain herself, something which France’s strained treasury was simply not capable of funding. The French forces were still pointlessly moving into position in Normandy for the hypothetical, impossible invasion at the time of the Treaty of London in 1785. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy licked its wounds and was desperate to mend its reputation with a victory, facing strong criticism in Parliament. The bold Captain Philip Anson, son of the politically disgraced Admiral George Anson,[92] acted on intelligence reports suggesting that the Franco-Spanish were preparing to pre-emptively occupy Malta, at the time still under the somnambulant rule of the ancient Order of the Knights of St John. Whether there was any truth to these reports remains unclear even to this day, but Anson decided to strike first and took control of the strategically valuable island in March 1784, with barely a shot being fired in the process. The act proved controversial across Europe and, while Malta remained British at the Treaty of London, Anson the younger had not chosen a good way to try to repair his father’s mistakes: he would die a decade later after being reassigned to the death sentence of the Fever Islands in the West Indies.
Back in South America, the Spanish had finally achieved a decisive victory over Tupac Amaru at the recapture of Lima in 1784, but by now Criollista rebel control over Platinea[93] and Chile was virtually uncontested. A relief army from the Criollistas prevented the Spanish from pressing further into the lands held by the Indian rebels. The surrender of La Paz and Havana in 1785 marked the end of the war and the punishing Treaty of London, whose provisions were as follows:
Spain to acknowledge the loss of Cuba to Britain, to recognise Britain’s claims to Gibraltar and Falkland’s Islands, and to accept the independence of the entire Viceroyalty of Peru and Captaincy-General of Chile under the rebel provisional government (as yet unnamed).
France to cede the northern hinterlands of Louisiana to the Empire of North America. An Anglo-American siege of New Orleans in 1784 was successfully resisted by the French, meaning that the French kept the more densely populated southern heartland. The dividing line was intended to approximately conform to the thirty-fifth parallel north, although this was never hard and fast and would later be subject to change.
Some lands in Upper Peru and Platinea to be ceded to Portuguese Brazil by the rebel provisional government, a government which would eventually become the United Provinces of South America (not established until the Convention of Córdoba in 1790).
Thanks to a Québecois rebellion in support of France (1784-5), a second Great Expulsion would see all the remaining French colonials in British North America deported to French Louisiana or France itself, at least on
paper; in practice many remained in Canada by paying lip service to Anglicanism and speaking English. The former laws giving limited protection to the French Canadians and protecting them from English colonisation were torn up. Canada was opened to settlement from the Confederation of New England; protests from the other Confederations saw the eventual Act of Settlement (1794), by which New England ceded its claimed westward territories back to the imperial government in return for Canada being formally added to New England as a new series of provinces and territories. Disputes over legal ambiguities concerning the New England western cession would cause headaches in Fredericksburg for decades afterwards.
The Treaty would lead to trouble for all its participants later on, but for the present, to say it was a shock to Spanish society was an understatement. The lands of the Spanish Empire, it was said, had been granted by God, and if He were to take them away, what did that say about the state of Spain and her governance?
Charles III had already been forced to flee the country once thanks to food riots in 1766. Now he fled again, as street riots ruled Madrid and Bernardo Tanucci was killed by a mob. Controversially, Britain supported Charles’ return to Spain, believing that the alternative might be Louis achieving his Franco-Spanish Union after all. However, Charles was forced to adopt far more liberal methods of government under chief minister José Moñino y Redondo, conde de Floridablanca, who had previously been known for assisting with the expulsion of the Jesuits and reform of the Spanish education system. Under his ministry, the powers of the Spanish Cortes were somewhat extended and the Audiencias in New Spain and New Granada[94] were reformed, giving them more independence and authority to respond to rebellions, lest Spain lose the rest of its American empire.
The young United Provinces of South America was characterised from the start by radical ideas, although they expressed themselves in odd ways. Possessing a population that was almost entirely strongly Catholic, the country nonetheless made a break with Rome, beginning rather unofficially in the 1790s thanks to Spanish domination of the Papacy meaning that the Pope condemned the UPSA and refused to appoint new bishops for its sees. The UPSA’s religious position was formalised after the passing of the Dissolution Act of 1802, which disestablished the Roman Catholic Church in the country. Jansenist ideals, popular with many European Catholic dissenters in the eighteenth century, were embraced and became associated with the intellectual classes. Many radicals from other nations whose ideas were suppressed at home moved to the UPSA to take advantage of its religious and social freedoms, including the British republicans Thomas Paine and Joseph Priestley.
The UPSA’s population was also boosted by deserters from Noailles’ army, including Noailles’ own son, who had fled after his father’s disgrace and suicide, and a young captain named Jean-Charles Pichegru, who eventually became Marshal-General of the UPSA’s military, the Fuerzas Armadas de las Provincias Unidas. From the very beginning, the UPSA was known to be a place where the usual European laws did not apply, and a place where oppressed groups might be able to settle in piece. The Casta system was abolished, and certain areas were set aside for native Indian or other non-European settlement, while others were reorganised and exploited. Radical positions were staked out on abolishing slavery and giving rights to the Africans who had been at the bottom of the Casta system: however, in the short term, what improvements actually materialised were rather limited and half-hearted. This issue would return to affect the politics of the UPSA many times.
From the beginning, the government was republican, its Cortes Nacionales modelled on the Dutch Staten-Generaal; it was the Dutch United Provinces, and their rebellion against Spain two centuries earlier, from which the country’s name had taken its inspiration. One thing the name ‘United Provinces of South America’ did not readily allow was a short demonym to describe the identity of the citizens of the new country; ‘Sudamericano’ and ‘Provinciaunidense’, two early suggestions, hardly rolled off the tongue. The name that eventually stuck was ‘Meridian’, derived from how maps of the time (still largely labelled in Latin) called South America ‘America Meridionalis’.
In addition to the Cortes Nacionales, a directly elected head of state, the President-General, was created. At the time the role was poorly defined in the Constitution, something that would also cause political difficulties later on.
The symbols of the new nation were visible from the beginning. The Silver Torch of Liberty, present on the final form of the national flag, referenced the irregulars who had stormed colonial forts by night bearing such torches. The Golden Sun of Córdoba, borrowed from the symbolism of the Tahuantinsuya and other natives, referred to the sun coming out from behind the clouds when the delegates stepped out of Córdoba’s town hall to announce the final form of the Constitution. More metaphorically, it also stood for the UPSA’s example shining out on and enlightening the world. The Torch would become a significant enough symbol that it would eventually find a place on the national flag. However, the flag adopted by the UPSA in the immediate aftermath of its revolution instead drew upon two more simplistic predecessors from the conflict. In the early years of the war, some Platineans had sought to express loyalty to the Spanish colonial cause while standing against the actions of the present government. They had taken the red ‘ragged cross’ of Burgundy on a white background, the colonial flag used throughout the Spanish Empire, and simply reversed the colours. Later, other groups had chosen a more radical golden banner with ‘¡LIBERTAD!’ (their battle cry, ‘Freedom!’) written across it in red. The first flag of the UPSA simply combined these two, the inverted cross of Burgundy in the canton and the golden field with its proud battle cry. Later, the flag would evolve as the legacy of the Spanish colonial past disappeared altogether and the battle cry of the past was expanded to the more orderly motto Libertad e Independencia (‘Freedom and Independence’). The Torch was added, and though the Sun was not, the golden colour of the flag’s field remained in an oblique hint of that alternative symbol, the two shining upon the world together.
In days to come, the UPSA would change the world by its own direct efforts, but for now, that enlightening republican example alone—that, and the expenses suffered in a failed attempt to halt its birth—would have decidedly dark consequences for the Kingdom of France...
EXCERPTED FROM “THE REGISTER ATLAS OF THE WORLD, 2nd EDITION”
Flag plate #4
3. Flag of the Platinean Revolt (early period). Lacking much in the way of unifying symbols—and in part deriving from colonial forces opposing a French attack—the early Platinean rebels simply took the Cross of Burgundy used in Spain’s colonies and inverted the colours, producing a banner of a white ‘ragged’ cross on a red field.
4. Flag of the Platinean Revolt (later period). Plain yellow (or golden) flags were used by more radical rebel groups; these were married to the earlier inverted cross and bore the battle cry of ‘¡LIBERTAD!’
5. Flag of the United Provinces of South America (adopted 1792). The ‘ragged’ look of the inverted Cross of Burgundy is preserved but the Cross itself is converted to two lines bearing the name of the country. The Torch of Liberty is added to the yellow field in red together with the motto Libertad e Independencia.
Part 13: Before the Storm
From: “Exploration and Discovery in the Later 18th Century” by Francois Laforce (originally published in French 1961, authorised English translation 1968)—
The modern student of history, his views being unavoidably coloured by ideological matters in these trying times, must feel the temptation to regard the second half of the eighteenth century as merely a time in which two radical revolutions occurred that would change the world—that of the UPSA and that of France. To do so is both disingenuous and misleading. Many other important breakthroughs and changes occurred in this period which have certainly had a significant effect on shaping the modern world in their own right. The case of the often overlooked[95] constitutional foundations of the Empire of North America is
by now well publicised, but what of the voyages of exploration and discovery that opened up the world to new vistas, scarcely less than in earlier ages did the journeys of Columbus and Magellan?
The official ‘discovery’ of the sixth continent in 1788 is a case in point. In fact the land then known to English speakers as ‘New Holland’ was already well known on maps of the period, its barren northern coast having been mapped by the Dutch more than a century earlier, but dismissed as holding no interest. It took a Frenchman, though, Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, to discover the parts of ‘New Holland’ that were actually worth possessing. A remarkable Frenchman indeed...
La Pérouse was already a respected naval war hero, which in pre-Bonaparte France were few and far between. He had defeated a British frigate in the West Indies during the Second Austrian War[96] and then gone on to play a role in the Second Platinean War. At the celebrated Franco-Spanish naval victory over Augustus Keppel’s fleet at Cape Trafalgar in 1783, La Pérouse was captain of the ship of the line Saint-Esprit.[97] Having received a minor wound at that battle, La Pérouse did not take part in the rest of the conflict, though some writers of speculative romance have argued that he might have turned the tide at later battles. It is debatable as to whether this is anything more than hero worship.
