by John Lynch
The political and intellectual movements of the time were marked by diversity rather than unity. The concept of a single Atlantic revolution inspired by democracy and nurtured on the Enlightenment does not do justice to the complexity of the period, neither does it discriminate sufficiently between minor currents of revolution and the great wave of change unleashed by the most powerful and radical movements of all. The age of revolution was primarily that of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, a ‘dual revolution’ in which Britain provided the economic model to change the world, while France provided the ideas.21 Yet this conceptual framework does not accommodate all the liberation movements of the time, and it cannot provide an obvious home for the movement led by Bolívar.22
As Bolívar’s ideas of revolution developed, they did not conform exactly to political trends in Europe. Even the most liberal of Spanish Americans were guarded towards the French Revolution and its potential for political violence. As Francisco de Miranda observed in 1799, affected no doubt by his own tribulations in France, ‘We have before our eyes two great examples, the American and the French Revolutions. Let us prudently imitate the first and carefully shun the second.’23 Bolívar was too young to feel the first shock of the events of 1789, but the French Revolution in its imperial phase cast its spell over him and he was impressed by the achievements, if not the titles, of Napoleon. Moreover, he saw that indirectly, in terms of military and strategic consequences, events in France carried a warning for Spanish America, first in 1796 when they drew the hostility of Britain on France’s ally Spain, thus endangering the Atlantic crossing and isolating the metropolis from its colonies, then in 1808 when France invaded the Iberian peninsula and deposed the Bourbons, thereby precipitating in Spanish America a crisis of legitimacy and a struggle for power.
Bolívar was conscious of the influence of Britain, not so much from reading as from experience. The Industrial Revolution found a valuable outlet for British textiles and other products in Spanish America, whose underdevelop–ment made it a captive market. Moreover, it had a vital medium of trade, silver, so Britain valued its trade with Spanish America and sought to expand it, either via Spain and the Caribbean or by more direct routes. During times of war with Spain, while the British navy blockaded Cadiz, British exports supplied the consequent shortages in the Spanish colonies. These were precisely the years when Bolívar began to be conscious of the wider Atlantic world. He saw a new economic metropolis displacing Spain in America. As a young Venezuelan planter and exporter, Bolívar experienced the frustrations of seeking freer commerce against the rules of Spanish monopoly and the constraints of British blockades. It would be an exaggeration to say that British trade undermined the Spanish empire, or made revolutionaries out of opponents of monopoly, but the stark contrast between Britain and Spain, between growth and depression, left a powerful impression on Spanish Americans. And there was a further twist to the argument: if imperial Britain could be evicted from America, by what right did Spain remain?
Bolívar and the Enlightenment
As Bolívar surveyed the European and Atlantic worlds in the years around 1800 and tried to make sense of politics and policies in an age of revolution, what intellectual resources could he draw upon? What ideas were appropriate to the age? What were the ideological roots of his responses? Spanish Americans, unlike the North American colonists, had no experience of a free press, a liberal tradition going back to the seventeenth century, or local assemblies where freedom could be practised. But they were not isolated from the world of ideas or from the political thought of the Enlightenment. Bolívar was not the first or the only Spanish American to glory in the age of reason. His own Venezuela was a pioneer in political speculation. The publications inspired by the conspiracy of Gual and España included a translation of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in its more radical 1793 version; it was Miranda who propagated Viscardo’s revolutionary Letter to Spanish Americans across northern South America; already before 1810 a translation of Rousseau’s Social Contract, probably undertaken by José María Vargas, was known in Venezuela, as was William Robertson’s History of America.24 Liberal and republican ideas were there for the reading, and readers were growing bolder. But reading was not the same as action, and active revolutions of the kind recently seen in North America and France, while they were known as potential models for Spanish America, did not have direct impact there.
Bolívar and other leading creoles were familiar with theories of natural rights and social contract and their application to government. From these they could follow the arguments in favour of liberty and equality, and some would go further along the road of Enlightenment to insist that these rights could be discerned by reason, and reason, as opposed to revelation and tradition, was the source of all human knowledge and action. Ideas of hierarchy, custom and submission were giving way to belief in personal freedom and private virtue. A few would venture into further reaches of eighteenth–century thought to declare that intellectual progress should not be hindered by religious dogma and to identify the Catholic Church as one of the principal obstacles to progress. Bolívar shared the anti–clericalism of the Age of Reason and regarded the Church as another agent of the old regime. In 1812 he would blame religious fanatics and their allies, soon, he believed, to be reinforced from Spain, as yet further enemies of the young republic: ‘The religious influence, the empire of civil and military power, and all the prestige they can use to seduce the human spirit will be so many more instruments available to them to subdue these regions.’25 As secularism challenged religion, many saw the object of government as the greatest happiness of the greatest number, happiness being judged to a large extent in terms of material progress achieved through human agency.
Hobbes and Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau, Payne and Raynal, all left their imprint on the discourse of independence. But did these thinkers exert an exclusive influence? An alternative interpretation insists that the doctrinas populistas of Francisco Suárez and the Spanish neo–scholastics provided the ideological basis of the Spanish American revolutions, with the corollary that Spain not only conquered America but also supplied the arguments for its liberation. In arguing for independence in 1811, a number of Bolívar’s contemporaries, graduates of the University of Caracas, employed the argument of ‘popular sovereignty’, which insists that power reverts to the people when the sovereign tyrannizes or abandons them.26 This idea, while similar to the doctrine of Suárez, was not peculiar to any one school of political thought and did not exclude a pact of a Rousseauan kind. A variant of the argument suggests that neo–Thomism was a vital component of Hispanic political culture, the basis of the patrimonial state and an ideological accompaniment of independence. There is no sign of these influences in the thought of Bolívar, which was characterized by derivations from classical republicanism and the Enlightenment, and showed no evidence of reading in Catholic sources. In the early nineteenth century Catholic emphasis on tradition and authority did not sit easily with the kind of liberty that preoccupied Bolívar.
Classical republicanism tripped easily off the tongue of Bolívar, fed by rapid reading of the classical texts in French translation, especially Caesar and Tacitus, rather than a profound analysis of the ancient world and its institutions, which for him were sources of useful quotations rather than basic principles. It was the French authors of the Age of Reason who unlocked the minds of Americans and infused the thinking of Bolívar. This did not mean that Bolívar was an uncritical disciple of Enlightenment thinkers. The chronology and the depth of their intellectual influence are difficult to determine.27 His approach to knowledge was empirical, not metaphysical, and he was not interested in creating a new philosophy. He could quote from Voltaire, Rousseau and the philosophes, but he did not follow them into purely intellectual speculation and he could be scornful of theories. Place, conditions, circumstances, these set the limits of theories and the limits of Bolívar’s enlightenment. His realism always held back the fu
ll flow of ideas. Analysis of his own writings show that he was just as familiar with ancient and modern treatises of the art of war as he was with the stars of modern writing.28 The basic objectives were always liberation and independence, but liberty did not mean simply freedom from the absolutist state of the eighteenth century, as it did for the Enlightenment, but freedom from a colonial power, to be followed by true independence under a liberal constitution.
The texts of liberty were at the heart of Bolívar’s reading programme in the years 1804–06, and John Locke led the way as a guide to natural rights and social contract. Citing Acosta, Locke argued that the original inhabitants of the Americas were free and equal and placed themselves under government by their own consent. He also argued that people lose the freedom and independence gained by contract ‘whenever they are given up into the power of another’.29 This was an argument for freedom but not specifically for freedom from colonial power. Montesquieu was a favourite source for Spanish American intellectuals, and most of them were familiar with his statement that ‘The Indies and Spain are two powers under the same master, but the Indies are the principal one, and Spain is only secondary. In vain policy wants to reduce the principal one to a secondary one; the Indies continue to attract Spain to themselves.’30 Montesquieu seemed not unsympathetic to the idea of a nation establishing colonies abroad, as long as it was a free nation and exported its own commercial and government systems. But this did not deter Bolívar, who drew on Montesquieu throughout his political life, and for whom L’esprit des lois was a constant work of reference. The debt can be seen in his analysis of the forms of government and the characteristics of a republic, in the insistence on the separation of powers and admiration for English government. In the Jamaica Letter he used Montesquieu’s concept of oriental despotism to define the Spanish empire, and his entire political thought was imbued with the conviction that theory should follow reality, that institutions are really agencies of survival and not expressions of abstract principles, that legislation should reflect climate, character and customs, and that different peoples required different laws.31 But even Montesquieu did not go all the way that Bolívar wanted.
Rousseau provided some of the leading texts of the Enlightenment and had many readers among educated creoles, as they struggled with concepts of liberty. Could reason not only justify freedom but even compel men to be free? Could a state created by the will of its citizens enforce obedience on them?32 Bolívar was familiar with the principal ideas of Rousseau – the social contract, the general will and the sovereign people – though it is difficult to believe that he accepted, or even followed, the theoretical arguments by which the French philosopher reached his conclusions. Although he did not name Rousseau among the unrealistic philosophers whom he so scorned, the Frenchman fits the bill, and Bolívar made it clear that an idealized Sparta or Rome provided no model for Spanish American society. Even if Bolívar accepted that man is born free, he recoiled from the idea of absolute liberty or that authority is contrary to nature. As for equality, while he knew the difference between social and legal equality, he did not believe that an absolute social equality should exactly balance natural inequalities. And we can only conjecture what he made of Rousseau’s search for ‘a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before’, a search so unreal that it amounted to establishing an organic whole without its parts being subordinate to one another.33 In some respects Bolívar identified with Rousseau’s secular view of life, and he was probably captivated, as many were, simply by the philosopher’s personality and prose.34 Particular details had less appeal: whether he accepted the argument that man originally lived in a purely natural paradise of happiness and goodness, exempt from servile work, and without trace of original sin or inclination to evil, is doubtful. And he had no time for Rousseau’s idea of a state–created religion as a prop to public order. The liberty of the philosophes was not enough for Bolívar. Liberty could be an end in itself and stop short of liberation. This was the belief of the Spanish liberals in the Cortes of Cadiz, who subscribed to the freedoms of the Enlightenment and offered them to Spanish Americans, but with equal determination refused them independence. The Enlightenment, in other words, could be invoked to grant greater freedom within a Hispanic framework, to justify reformed imperialism. Was the Enlightenment, then, a source for independence as well as for liberty? European intellectuals of the eighteenth century were blind to the existence of nationality as a historical force. The cosmopolitanism of the philosophes was inimical to national aspirations; the majority of these thinkers disliked national differences and ignored national sentiment. They seem to have been totally unaware of the possibility of new and embryonic nationalities, of the need to apply ideas of freedom and equality to relations between peoples, or of any right of colonial independence. Rousseau, it is true, made a gesture to the theory of nationality, arguing that if a nation did not have a national character it must be given one by appropriate institutions and education. Rousseau, moreover, was the leading intellectual defender of political freedom against the despotic monarchies of the eighteenth century. But even he did not apply his ideas to colonial peoples. And the fact remains that few of the eighteenth–century progressives admired by Bolívar were revolutionaries. Neither Montesquieu, nor Voltaire, nor Diderot went to the logical conclusion of advocating revolution; even Rousseau stopped short of sanctioning violent political change.
None of them, of course, had seen a colony at first hand or witnessed the social inequality and racial discrimination endemic in Spanish America. Humboldt had the advantage over other leading liberals of having travelled extensively in these societies and spoken to their people. Yet even Humboldt did not direct his thoughts towards the issue of independence. It is true that in private he was extremely critical of colonialism. In Guayaquil in 1803, for example, he noted: ‘The colony is a land in which one claims to be able to live in freedom because one can mistreat one’s slaves without fear of punishment and can insult the whites as long as they are poor.’ He observed that ‘the idea of a colony is itself an immoral idea, this idea of a land which is obliged to pay dues to another country, a land which should only attain a certain degree of prosperity and in which industry and enlightenment are only allowed to spread to a certain degree’. But during his time in America Humboldt did not express his criticisms in public; he confided them to his diary or to close friends, presumably in order not to jeopardize his relations with Spain, on which his researches depended.35
Instead, Humboldt posed a different question. How could a minority of European Spaniards hold on to so vast an empire for so many centuries? He argued that they did it by pre–empting the creole majority: ‘The European party in all the colonies is necessarily augmented by absorbing a great mass of Hispano–Americans.’ These reject the cause of independence because they prefer security and peace to violence. Some see in revolutions nothing but the loss of their slaves, the spoliation of the clergy and the introduction of religious toleration. Others are too committed to their property and privilege to want to share them or confer rights on others; they prefer Spanish rule to an authority handed over to Americans of a lower caste: ‘They abhor every constitution founded on equality of rights.’ Yet others, living on their country estates and untouched by the authorities, would no doubt prefer a national government and full freedom of commerce to colonial status, but this desire is not strong enough to exceed their love of peace and an easy life or to induce them to undergo long and painful sacrifices.36
These questions also exercised Bolívar and he would address them in his Jamaica Letter, where his answers focused on Spanish oppression and American identity rather than pre–emption and indifference, and his language bore a harder edge than that of Humboldt. ‘During my time in America,’ Humboldt later wrote, ‘I never encountered discontent; I noticed th
at while there was no great love of Spain, at least there was conformity with the established regime. It was only later, once the struggle had begun, that I realized that they had hidden the truth from me and that far from love there existed deep–seated hatred.’37
The Enlightenment, therefore, did not reach the point of applying the idea of freedom and equality to relations between peoples, and did not produce a concept of colonial liberation or war of independence. It needed the makers of North American and Spanish American independence to do this. In most parts of the Atlantic world post–Enlightenment liberalism was not in itself an effective agent of emancipation. Jeremy Bentham was one of the few reformist thinkers of the time to apply his ideas to colonies, to advocate independence as a general principle, and to expose the contradictions inherent in regimes which practised liberalism at home and imperialism abroad.38 But Bentham was exceptional, and most liberals, reflecting the interests of the new bourgeoisie and their desire for captive markets, remained no less imperialist than conservatives. Bolívar, therefore, would find little direct inspiration for ideas of emancipation, either from European or from Hispanic sources. Like the authors of the North American revolution, he had to design his own theory of national self–determination, which he did in the course of the struggle for independence, and this was a contribution to, not a derivation from, the age of revolution. Bolívar was a prime example of one lesson of the Enlightenment, think for yourself, and of Rousseau’s encouragement to be yourself.
