The cultural and political leaders who emerged in the first decades of Venezuela’s twentieth century conceived of their projects both within and against the logic of textual custodianship and possession established in the nineteenth century by Felipe Larrazábal, the O’Learys (father and son), and the state. Aspiring to direct the political course of Venezuela, these individuals came to view themselves in relationship to Bolívar and to his writings, and understood the labor before them as one of bringing Bolívar and other protagonists of independence forth to steer intellectual and political discourse. They performed this function in the context of Venezuela, particularly as this regarded the country’s history of civil war, military insurrections, and dictatorship, as well as in the context of Latin America, the United States, and Europe, where interest in independence and Bolívar surged subsequent to the Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1898.
They were José Gil Fortoul, an historian, diplomat, senator, and one of several presidents who served Juan Vicente Gómez during his dictatorship (1908–1935), guaranteeing the appearance of constitutionality of his regime; Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, the figure most identified with the Gómez administration for his work as editor of the regime’s official newspaper, his 1919 Cesarismo democrático (Democratic Caesarism), a text that endeavors to justify dictatorship, even using toward this end Martí’s counsel to the political elites of the Americas in “Our America” that they produce governmental models that are original and useful, and for his role as president of the Congress for 20 years during the Gómez period; Vicente Lecuna, an engineer by training who went on to become president of the Venezuelan National Bank (1915–1954), director of the Archivo del Libertador, founder of the Bolivarian Society of Venezuela in 1937, and an historian of Bolívar’s battles and military strategies; and Rufino Blanco Fombona, a fiction writer, historian, and essayist. The first two were actors in the Gómez regime, performing a variety of roles in or for his administration, and constituting the nucleus of the distinguished group of learned figures who surrounded the leader. Lecuna was connected to Gómez’s regime, but he held no governmental position. In contrast, Blanco Fombona, whom we discussed in the first chapter in reference to Ángel Rama , was the regime’s most well-known critic, a figure who throughout his career spoke freely against despotic power in Venezuela; he was jailed in 1910, and subsequently exiled. For all four, Bolívar’s writings were, on the one hand, a source from which they could draw to produce their narratives, and, on the other hand, a body of material that could authorize the particular fields of knowledge they sought to institute.
For Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz, the field in question was history, which they arrived at through their engagement with the figures of the conservative European movement known as positivism, and through the academic disciplines that sat at the pinnacle of this European movement—sociology, criminology, and race theory. From Auguste Comte (French) to Hippolyte Taine (French) and Ernest Renan (French), and from Cesare Lombroso (Italian) and Gabriel Tarde (French) to Gustave Le Bon (French) and Herbert Spencer (English), the scholars of this mostly French movement took from the leading spaces of knowledge, the empirical sciences and mathematics, to build systems based on cause and effect in order to explain the working of society, of the human mind, of language, as well as of literature and history. This included the idea of the environment or milieu as having a powerful effect on the individual.
The European Revolutions of 1848 and the French Commune of 1871 were critical moments for many of them. The 1848 revolt, France’s first experience of upheaval since the 1830 July Revolution that replaced the House of Bourbon with the House of Orléans, saw liberals and socialists revive the republican tradition of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité. Elections were finally agreed upon, with the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, becoming president. This was France’s Second Republic. In a coup d’etat in 1851, Charles-Louis declared the Second Empire. He was now Bonaparte III. The other moment, 1871, had the dimension of a civil war and similarly saw the revival of the republicanism of the French Revolution by liberals and socialists. The context was the French-Prussian war. It had come to an end after the capture of Bonaparte III, the immediate termination of his Second Empire as a result of his capture, the subsequent declaration of the Third Republic, and with the French government still not submitting to Bismark, the siege of Paris by Prussian forces that resulted in Parisians starving. A treaty was signed, ending this short war. The German Empire was born. But in France a battle ensued between the French Left and French monarchists, with 10,000 Parisians (national guardsmen and others under the direction of the Commune) killed by the French army.
Of particular importance are the responses of Renan and Taine, the one to the events of 1848 and the other to those of both 1871 and 1848. Both turned to history through the lens of sociology to intervene in the political discussion. Renan produced The Future of Science: Ideas of 1848 in 1849, though not publishing the work until 1890 after taking from it throughout his career for individual publications. For his part, Taine wrote The Origins of Contemporary France (1875–1893), doing so in multiple volumes over some 20 years. Creating conservative historical visions, they purported to move beyond politics by revealing unseen social forces at work, forces that showed France’s eighteenth-century philosophers who helped produce the conditions for the French Revolution were themselves prejudiced, overly immersed in their own republican visions and unable to see the larger historical continuities and specific realities that defined France. Republicanism, which they constructed around the dual dates of 1789 and 1848 and 1789 and 1871, respectively, was either a historical stage or a deviation in what was a larger story of social and institutional evolution and change.
For Taine, the French Revolution resulted from the privileged social classes abandoning their representative positions in society. The old feudal lords became part of the decadent centralizing machinery of Louis XV and Louis XVI, with the result that the natural attitude of deference on the part of the peasant classes toward the purported superior classes disappeared. A social fabric that had taken 800 years to develop was split apart by the court, with the entirety of France, as Taine dramatizes, transformed into one massive drawing room. The neglect of the state and of the upper classes, in short, the breakdown of a moral system based on patronage that had been the foundation of the society: here were the causes of the revolution, not the world of ideas.
The science which will govern the world will not be politics. Politics, that is, the way to govern humanity like a machine, will vanish as a special art as soon as society shall cease to be a machine. The master science, the then sovereign, will be philosophy, that is to say, the science which will investigate the aim and conditions of society. “In politics,” says Herder, “man is a means, in morality he is an end.” The revolution of the future will be the triumph of morality over politics.1
Comte, who died in 1857, supported Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851; he then turned away from him to celebrate Czar Nicholas I. Comte undertook to fuse different forms of knowledge in a teleological manner, conceiving of history as moving from a theological stage to a metaphysical one and finally to one based in the natural sciences. Society would be improved by scientific knowledge; it would make politics unnecessary. For Comte, Renan, and Taine, the new political order was to consist of scholarly elites educating the masses rather than political parties competing for the vote of citizens, who were seen as uninformed.
In Latin America, in what was a key moment in state formation, not only Venezuela but virtually all the countries in the region having been sites of civil wars and political instability, intellectuals in the final two decades of the nineteenth century undertook the creation of their own positivist visions in dialogue with these figures, desirous of supporting their political leaders in state formation while perceiving themselves as intellectual vanguards. Of the philosophers and academics embraced, the most well known is the Frenchman Auguste Comte, central to national projects in Mexico and Brazil and whose words celebrating order and progress without reference to liberty becoming the mantra for the hemisphere. In Mexico, Comte served as the basis for a formal national educational project, as symbolized by the establishment of the National Preparatory School, a training ground for Mexico’s new technocrats of knowledge. Some came to be advisors to Porfirio Díaz in the fields of finance, jurisprudence, industry, and education during his long authoritarian rule (1876–1911). The most powerful was Finance Minister José Yves Limantour who had been born into the Mexican oligarchy. In Brazil, Comte inspired the new secular religion that was the nation, with actors from the military using Comte’s figure to declare the republic in 1889 as they broke with Brazil’s constitutional monarchy, and with figures like Cândido Rondon carrying, as Todd A. Diacon has demonstrated, the spiritual banner of Comte’s vision forward in the decades ahead with his extension of the telegraph through the Amazon and his defense of Brazilian indigenous tribes.
In Venezuela, where centralization of the state came later than it did in Mexico and Brazil, or in stages if we also include the period of Guzmán Blanco, as scholars do, positivism did little to improve the material conditions of the country. The scientific and technical institutions and schools as well as the public buildings and public works that were produced in Mexico, and that had begun to be produced by Guzmán Blanco, did not materialize in Venezuela. Nor did a liberal republican tradition of the kind in Brazil arise. As for the international oil industry over which Juan Vicente Gómez presided from the late 1910s forward, this was a private affair. The money from the concessions awarded to Schell and Standard Oil went to Gómez and his cronies.
If in Venezuela positivism ended up having few material effects on the country, its function was still profound, even more profound than elsewhere depending on the measure. It created a new political culture as shaped by the context in which Venezuela found itself in the wake of its civil war of 1901–1903. In that war, the Revolución Libertadora (Liberating Revolution), which pitted the federalist model against the centralist and that resulted in the death of tens of thousands of people, Manuel Antonio Matos and other regional caudillos raised large militias in an attempt at holding on to their financial and commercial prerogatives, prerogatives that had been the basis of the state financial system and that were being challenged by the new head of state, Cipriano Castro, who had marched successfully on Caracas in 1899.
In two years’ time, Castro and his minister of war, Juan Vicente Gómez, prevailed, breaking the financial system Matos had presided over, with Matos himself being forced into exile. Throwing their hat in with Castro and later with his military lieutenant who unseated him—Juan Vicente Gómez—Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz offered their services, deploying positivist ideas to legitimize a unified as opposed to a federal state, to redefine the role of the intellectual from party or caudillo affiliate to public administrator and scholar, to place limits on constitutionalism, and to close down the possibility for political action by producing narratives representing the country’s Conservative and Liberal parties as belonging to the past, Venezuela having arrived at the purported truth that what was needed was strong executive authority. For these figures, periodization would now be the rule: histories that told the story of Venezuela across time.
The horror that was race theory was a central component of positivism’s vision of modernization, with whites presented as standing as civilizers over less civilized races. But unlike earlier figures in countries such as Mexico and Argentina, including the historian Bartolomé Mitre who used race to justify the marginalization and “erasure” of indigenous peoples and their traditions to clear the way for modernity, Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz deployed the category progressively, just as their counterparts in Brazil did. In particular, in what was an important move in their goal of redefining the terms of discourse in the public sphere from one of politics to one of knowledge in the service of economic (and infrastructure) progress and the state, they placed the Venezuelan white elite against other racial groups, defending indigenous and Afro-descended Venezuelans as subjects to be affirmed as equal citizens. This was a new citizen-making project that blended authoritarianism with progressiveness, with history being the place in which Venezuelans could see themselves reflected, moving forward in time, and furthermore, with the social class that had run the towns and regions of Venezuela, put into a new framework, radically reducing its moral authority by virtue of its connections to slavery.
The idea of the old political nation was to be no more. The task of the intellectual was to produce forms that meet the needs of society as defined by the interpreter. Gil Fortoul and Vallenilla Lanz drew from the positivist notions that the nation state is an organism with its own social laws; that it has an evolution that must be understood as such; that there is a material reality underlying that of ideas knowable through cause and effect; and that order and progress are the most important values. The binary opposition that supported all this was defined by that which is real and true, on the one hand, and that which is imaginary, fictional, and untrue on the other. This was the discourse of realism. Source work provided the foundation for their assertions. Troubling though their attack on politics was at the level of the new conservative political order they sought to legitimize in their desire to open the way for development, Venezuelan positivism is the foundation of the country’s intellectual and cultural tradition, the categories it produced defining the terms for political discussion in the country for the rest of the century while making their way across the Americas.
José Gil Fortoul had long been drawing from the field of sociology. In the 1880s and 1890s, from the sites of his diplomatic missions in France, Switzerland, and Great Britain, he produced sociological essays in which he reflects on Venezuela’s elites and the country’s constitutions, as well as a treatise on criminology in which he argues that best practices would result from Venezuela’s federal states adopting and trying their own codes and comparing experiences. Now, as he went on to write a history of Venezuela from the site of his new diplomatic mission, Berlin, Germany, he had much to consider, including several important histories written earlier in the nineteenth century. He would make use of a vast range of materials and include an impressive array of historical characters, all connected to one another as if in a novel. Bolívar would be one historical character, one hero, but he would stand out. How would he portray him? Before Gil Fortoul was a Bolivarian legacy that included works that were critical of Bolívar, if not denunciatory, particularly outside Venezuela, and the majority within Venezuela that were celebratory. The two tomes of Felipe Larrazábal that sought to give Venezuela a new footing on the world stage in the wake of the Guerra Federal of 1859–1863 were among the most important. Through classicism and the specifically nineteenth-century discourse of culture and civilization, Larrazábal, as we saw in Chap. 3, presents Bolívar as standing for the ideals of abolition, constitutional liberalism, executive leadership, and self-cultivation.
Gil Fortoul with his two-volume 1907–1909 Historia constitucional de Venezuela (Constitutional History of Venezuela) that was hailed at the time by the US scholar and explorer Hiram Bingham as an impartial history of the Venezuelan state—a model, just as Gil Fortoul would have hoped, for the kind of history that should be produced across Latin America, free of the politics that gripped intellectual production—constructs Bolívar not as the promise of a Venezuela with a strong, liberal, and wise executive, but rather as the linchpin in the linear political and socioeconomic history he tells of his country, one going from the colonial period to independence and the Gran Colombia, and from the Gran Colombia to the republic with race and social class major categories of analysis.2 But, positivist that he was, he offers not only a history of an evolving democratic nation, appropriating the word “democratic” for his story, just as Vallenilla Lanz would, but also new critical knowledge to guide and educate Venezuelans, an outline of sorts of what the human sciences can be. Through the record of real time he claims to produce, Venezuelans will learn how to view certain historical figures, moments, and issues.
That critical knowledge was based on an analysis of all the major factors that define the social organism: individuals, social classes, congresses, constitutions, public opinion, political parties, insurrections, and so on. Gil Fortoul drew from the principle of historical investigation defined by the founder of the modern practice of history, German historian Leopold von Ranke, a principle that had been embraced by many, including one of his models, Taine, who made use of the diaries of the French upper class. Ranke called for historians to examine particular time periods in a nation’s history by seeking out primary sources rather than regarding those time periods simply as chapters in, let us say, a centuries-long story. Gil Fortoul lists only a few of the myriad sources he consults—a fact lamented by Bingham who hopes that in a future edition he will provide a full account of them—but Gil Fortoul gives full weight to the periods of time he studies, concerned to bring them forth according to their own conditions. With regard to the colonial period, he details the monstrosity of the slave trade and its organic links to the creole class and the Basque-owned Royal Guipuzcoan Company of Venezuela (1728–1785) that managed colonial commerce for the crown. In his account of the new period that is the republic, he is also concerned to use the Rankian method of primary source work. In his analysis of the interaction between social classes, government, and infrastructure projects, he shows when progress and order are successful and when they are not, and which factors are to be considered. Insurrections, for instance, create not only instability, but also have a financial cost for the economy, an effect not always considered by the public he is educating. Of the 17 years of the conservative oligarchy there are really only 13 to consider, he explains, since a total of four of those years were taken up by armed conflict. Also to be tallied are the effects of those insurrections on the treasury, which had to supply millions to reestablish order.3 Congresses also can be obstacles to development when their individual members stand in the way of needed infrastructure projects.
With regard to Venezuela’s constitutions, which will be his central concern, he formulates a new vision of how to measure their value and importance. Instead of seeing them as standing alone in a tradition of reflection coming down from Montesquieu, he presents them according to the criterion of their social effectiveness: do they reflect the needs and realities of the social order in place? He does not see them in accordance with the ideas of the Enlightenment from which they emerged, namely that a constitution must protect the citizenry from tyranny or, more radically, as stated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, that where the citizenry is not protected there is no constitution.
To construct his history of Venezuela that engages with the social, economic, and political realities of the Venezuelan nineteenth century, Gil Fortoul provides details of constitutional reform by the government and the elites together with information about the resurrection of the figure of Bolívar at the hands of Páez and others in the 1830s and 1840s. He starts by assigning Venezuela’s 1811 constitution a new place. On the one hand, he celebrates it as Venezuela’s first constitution, modeled on the US Constitution and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, but on the other he presents it, in accordance with his desire to speak across Venezuela’s periods, as having its true ideological basis in the colonial social reality. Bolívar, whom Gil Fortoul celebrates not only as a military leader, but also as a political thinker and as an intellectual—his role as constitution writer elevated—is an authority. But Gil Fortoul performs his own analysis of the document, placing it in the context of the realities of the Venezuela of the time. It reflects, he tells us, not only the new federalist ideas that Bolívar dismissed for their impracticality in the 1812 Cartagena Manifesto and that he had been criticizing from his perch in Caracas’s Sociedad Patriótica (Patriotic Society), but also class interest, which in colonial times were regionally based. To show this, he goes beyond the authors of the constitution to speak of the elites who pushed the document through as signatories, individuals whom he names. But forget the idea of holding the constitution responsible for the fall of the republic, a position that Bolívar takes. We are told that the constitution had no effect on the society of the times—the masses not made aware of it and individual cities enjoying autonomy as they always had from colonial times. He also compares the constitution to the later iterations of it, which are the 1830 and 1857 constitutions. The first, we are informed, enables the rise of the Venezuelan republic, the second pulls it down.
The story Gil Fortoul fashions about constitutions and the economics of social class is also one about the individual, which he frames according to a variation on Thomas Carlyle’s great man theory. Bolívar is at the center of it, the figure who drove the military and political process forward before the founding of the 1830 republic and who can be viewed as a force unto himself, standing above the other actors who competed with him. Gil Fortoul constructs that history as one that is Hegelian, in the sense that each period has actors who rise to the status of being historical and ones who do not—the former invested with the legality that characterizes that defined role, the latter marred by their own illegality. Each situation is different.
Bolívar is an historical actor. At first he must contend with a people that are not ready for independence, but he brilliantly lends a sense of legality to his 1813–1814 dictatorship, or what is called the Second Republic, through the eloquence of his oratory, and then fully shows who he is as a leader in 1817 when he establishes the Third Republic. Bolívar made mistakes. The decision to declare the War to the Death was incorrect, Gil Fortoul reports, but Bolívar was the only leader of the times who possessed not only great military ability, but also political prowess, unlike leaders such as Santiago Mariño or Manuel Píar.4 On the subject of his decision to execute Píar (October 16, 1817), he states that Píar had undertaken to be a leader among the creole oligarchy and that if he had the project of leading mestizos and pardos in Guayana against whites, that only existed in his imagination, his true interest being to seize leadership from Bolívar. Gil Fortoul performs an analysis of Píar’s racial qualifications for that leadership role as well, speaking of the uncertainty of his lineage, some saying that he was the illegitimate son of a European prince and a lady of the Caracas elite and that a mulatto woman raised him. Providing more information, he includes a physical description of him made by his prison guard that gives no indication of his being pardo, which Gil Fortoul in contrast to John Lynch is defining as not including lower-class white: “normal height, blue eyes, beardless, somewhat pinkish complexion.”5 Further, he states as evidence that he never actually intended to organize the pardo community the fact that he gave up his own mixed-race soldiers to another commander. Píar, whom he further describes as impulsive and aggressive, was one more actor vying for power within the oligarchy. This was the reason he led a revolt against Bolívar’s leadership.6
Gil Fortoul is seeking to put to an end the view of Píar as the representative of the pardo community. With this, he is also seeking to reduce the protagonism of that community in the period of independence. Bolívar does not hold back pardos; he does not stand against pardocracia, the word he invented. Case closed. Gil Fortoul does the opposite with regard to the white oligarchy. He tells the reader of the opinion of the US special commissioner, Alejandro Scott, who wrote at the time of the First Republic that the population of “gente de color” (pardos), made up of a mix of whites, Indians, and blacks, is superior to creoles in courage and corporal courage and that they are destined to lead the country.7 Gil Fortoul does not dispute Scott’s characterization of the importance of the pardo community. He states that pardos will be the clear majority after independence. But he takes the opportunity to affirm the leadership role of creoles for independence. In fact, he refers to them using a racial term. He writes, “The white creoles, authors of the revolution, were its first victims.”8 He goes on to list the names of creoles who, as he puts it, sacrificed for the cause of the war, identifying individuals, families, sisters. Gil Fortoul is building a history that is based not on race conflict but the purportedly natural progression in which races assume their positions in society and in history. Bolívar is the natural representative of white creoles.
But if Bolívar is a great man, this does not mean that he does not have faults or that he always prevails. He has successes and failures, is both democratic and autocratic, and is alternately egotistical and generous. The hard-hitting realist Gil Fortoul who is using his rigorous source work to transform history into positivist facts does not tolerate what he calls idealizations of the past. Larrazábal tells of the Gran Colombia that could have lived on. Gil Fortoul, always positing specific causes, speaks of its impracticality in the end, of its decomposition, and of Bolívar’s physical decline; he dies of tuberculosis, not of a broken heart. He also speaks of Bolívar’s federation, referred to as his Andean Confederation: Bolívar fails to realize it and also fails to become the arbiter of an international order. Psychologically, he thought in terms of all or nothing, and at the end of his life this psychological fact caught up with him. He could not negotiate. Bolívar was hardly perfect, as we can see, nothing like the figure the state had constructed and that Venezuelans admired so, and nothing like the symbol of perennial liberation.
As for Miranda, Gil Fortoul argues that this figure celebrated by many as one of the major intellectual forces behind independence in Latin America never becomes an historical actor. On the one hand, this is not his fault; the people are simply not ready for independence. But, on the other, it is. Miranda lacked political sense—not able to read on-the-ground realities, blinded by his fanciful imaginings. He also lacked courage. His decision not to attempt to take back the Puerto Cabello fort in 1812, after Bolívar lost it, is a demonstration of cowardice that has fateful consequences. His cowardice in this instance is opposed to the arrogant temerity Bolívar demonstrates in the face of Boves’s forces a year and a half later.9 In short, Miranda is made to stand for positivism’s negative values.
It is true, Gil Fortoul goes on, that Miranda is appointed dictator of the First Republic, but not even the possession of such authority is sufficient when the conditions are not right and his own leadership abilities flawed. Bolívar alone is the great man of independence, the one with extraordinary talents as both a military leader and a political figure.
As for Páez, Gil Fortoul tells us that he too is an historical actor. However, this is not Páez the military leader, or the one who leads the secession movement from the Gran Colombia. Rather, this is the figure who holds political power in the republic because he has understood that the proper course to follow after the dissolution of the Gran Colombia—which he helped to bring about—is to ally himself with the oligarchy, the most educated of all the social classes, as we are told. As far as Páez’s political talents go, though, Gil Fortoul is certain to distinguish them from Bolívar’s. Páez’s direction of the sociopolitical order was different from Bolívar’s.
The other nineteenth-century figure who is key to Gil Fortoul’s reconfiguration of the time period is José Tadeo Monagas, who is often seen in tandem with his brother, José Gregorio Monagas, the two standing plainly and simply for the values of liberalism, as they are made to by Larrazábal. Gil Fortoul drives a wedge in that pairing. Speaking of the fact that José Gregorio ultimately clashed with José Tadeo after his brother’s multiple moves to remain in the presidency, breaking their agreement on alternating, Gil Fortoul reminds us that José Gregorio opposed not only his brother’s initiative to reconstitute the Gran Colombia as a confederation (in opposition to a centralized state) but also, then, his new constitution. Gil Fortoul shatters the unity of the Monagas dynasty—still an important discursive site in Venezuelan politics—while driving a wedge in the political categories of Liberal and Conservative. According to the new moral standard he is seeking to institute, there is nothing liberal about the Liberal José Tadeo; in fact he was conservative when judged by his autocratic tendencies.
Breaking the political labels down in this way to question their utility as categories—the barometer of individual character trumping ideology—is not all Gil Fortoul does. He also produces a new period category of Venezuelan history which he bases on the constitutions of 1830 and 1857, the latter which removed the anti-reelection clause for the office of the president of the 1830 constitution. With that act, José Tadeo, we are told, betrays the republican political tradition, sending the country into a series of military uprisings that cannot be defended against—one revolution occurring after another with no leader able to hold on to power, whether it was Julián Castro, who rose up against Monagas, Carlos Soublette, or Páez. Rather than judging the constitutions of 1830 and 1857 against their political content, he speaks of them in terms of their effectiveness in managing a sociopolitical reality that since the 1830s had seen uprisings against the established government, including both Monagas and Páez who failed in their attempts at toppling the government at different moments. The constitution of 1830 resisted them all, we are told; that of 1857 and the one that followed in 1858—both of which Monagas had approved without adequate participation of both political parties—resisted none. Counting forward from 1830, all the revolutions had failed: that of Monagas in 1831; that of Gabante in 1834; that of the Reforms in 1835; that of Farían in 1837; that of the Gusmancist Liberals in 1846; that of Páez in 1848 and 1849; those of Conservatives and Liberals in 1853 and 1854 were easily defeated by the constitutional government. In the six years that follow the usurpation plan of 1857, the opposite happens: the March revolution triumphs over Monagas; the battalion of Casas defeats Castro in 1859; the Praetorians of Echuzuría depose Pedro Gual Escandón and proclaim the dictatorship of 1861; the Federation finally defeats the dictatorial government of Páez in 1863; and other revolutions will continue to triumph. There can be no doubt that when the 1830 constitution was torn apart, there was a profound moral shock that disoriented the oligarchy to the point of its disappearance, and opened the way for Venezuelan democracy to fluctuate for many years between anarchic tumult and despotic order.10
To advance his argument about social order and politics and to make José Tadeo Monagas into his antihero, Gil Fortoul compares Monagas to Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte III (Napoleon III) in a reading that could have been inspired by Karl Marx’s 1852 Eighteenth Brumaire. Both leaders, we are told, betray the republican tradition through which they are elected when they act against their constitutions. Napoleon’s nephew refuses to accept that he cannot be reelected, so he declares the Second Empire. Likewise, José Tadeo Monagas—who during the 1850s had been searching for ways to get around the 1830 constitution, even putting in motion, as we have mentioned several times, a state initiative to reconstitute the Gran Colombia, with Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador to have their own constitutions in what he conceived not as a union but as a confederation—engineers the passing of a new constitution that allows for reelection. In what Gil Fortoul calls Latin Europe, civil society is strong enough to survive a political departure from republicanism, as seen in the French who continue their traditions in spite of the Second Empire. In contrast, in Latin America, as exhibited by the fact of the violence and depravity unleashed in Venezuela by virtue of Monagas’s act, it is not.11
Barbarism as the opposite of civilization—the binary that authorized so many political projects in the nineteenth century—is now ever so close to the surface. A prime example is Páez, who, we are told, had educated himself through his association with the oligarchy but who now “regresses” to his so-called barbaric or uneducated self when he takes revenge on two incarcerated federalist generals for acts of depravity committed by others against Conservatives.12 A civilized order produced by a social class that is no longer hegemonic has disappeared as illustrated by this act of Páez, who evidently was a student only of the wealthy of his country—the elites of New York City whose company he enjoyed during his two exiles, the first time before the Federal War, and the second time after, having had no effect on him.
A scholar of the Atlantic avant la lettre, Gil Fortoul, with these volumes, which, as suggested by Bingham could have been influenced by his long residence in Germany, was responding not only to events in his own country, but also to the sudden transformations in the Americas of the moment. In a mere few years everything had changed in the nations of the Caribbean, Central America, and northern South America. There was the Cuban-Spanish-American War of 1898 that Martí started in 1895 and that the United States entered three years later; it seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spain, the first two territories which, Gil Fortoul tells us, Bolívar had been poised to free in 1826. There was the Colombian War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902) that tore the country apart with some 100,000 deaths. There was the 1901–1903 Revolución Libertadora that saw Castro and Gómez consolidate a new vision of the Venezuelan state with modern military weapons against Matos’s alliance of regional caudillos and with tens of thousands killed. There was the 1902 US military intervention in Panama to bolster local elites as they took advantage of the moment to become an independent state, the territory having been a province of Colombia since 1821, with Wall Street plans to build the Panama Canal propelling all this. There was the 1902–1903 international blockade of Venezuela by the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy to affirm European commercial authority in the region, with the powers in question calling loans made over several decades by so-called German and British citizen creditors to Venezuela, loans that Castro had used to support Liberals in Colombia’s civil war, and most significantly, to fight Manuel Antonio Matos who had major holdings in the New York & Bermúdez Company; the German entity that built Gran Ferrocarril de Venezuela; and the French company, de Cable Interoceánico.13 And, finally, capping all this off was the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904.
Nothing speaks more eloquently to this context than Gil Fortoul’s comments on Bolívar’s sparsely attended 1826 Panama Congress. How he reconstructs the congress is important, as he does so in explicitly military terms, speaking of the possibilities that would exist had there not been conflict in and among the Hispanic American countries, and had treaties been signed. What would have materialized in his utilitarian vision is nothing less than “an army of 60,000 infantrymen and cavalrymen, and a fleet of twenty-eight ships, with the goal of defending against Spain,” with those forces prepared to cross the sea to march on Spain should it not accept peace.14
Gil Fortoul does not say anything about the Bourbon military occupation of Spain from 1823 to 1828, but had the diplomatic military union Bolívar sought to achieve been successful, including a liberated Cuba and Puerto Rico, the military and political circumstances in which Hispanic America found itself at the beginning of the twentieth century would have been different from what they were. The “Spanish Americas” would not be subordinate to the hegemony of the “English Americas.”15
Gil Fortoul was sending a clear message, namely that Latin Americans must understand their position in the world so that they can ward off threats from the “outside.” With regard to Venezuela, the subtext was the new threat of the Roosevelt Corollary, which was a direct response to the European blockade of Venezuelan ports. The corollary was the doctrine of a new US economic imperialism stating that the United States could take over the debt of Latin American countries when European countries were creditors and threatened them, and that it reserved the right to invade purportedly less civilized countries. Bolívar possessed immense political knowledge of the international world, but that knowledge has been lost. No institutional structure existed in which to hold and transmit it. Venezuelans needed to defend themselves on the international stage.
Gil Fortoul is building a critical apparatus to transmit that knowledge to the present, breaking down Bolívar’s acts and writings while distributing them among the disciplines he names such as to define them not as a single entity but as distinct objects of knowledge, actionable only within the series to which they are made to belong. Literary history is one such field, conceived to contain figures like Felipe Larrazábal whose republican Bolívar similar to Solon, Cincinnatus, and Washington he hoped to divest of political relevance. Gil Fortoul locates him under this rubric to reduce his authority, the literary signifying for positivists the unreal, fiction.16 At the same time, true to his commitment to truth, he indicates Larrazábal’s important role in correcting Bolívar’s much-attacked record. Oratory, public speaking, is another field invented for the Venezuelan context by Gil Fortoul, and to it he assigns many of Bolívar’s writings including his “explosive” Jamaica Letter . This letter in which Bolívar speaks of breaking with the present, that is, with the Spanish colonial system, to establish a new future, had become a rhetorical wellspring for Venezuela’s nineteenth-century tradition of military pronouncements with its unending liberational discourse. Gil Fortoul celebrates Bolívar for his writing style, saying that it surpasses that of all his contemporaries in its efficacy and splendor. Bolívar’s writings, he wants his readers to see, do not represent an absolute truth but are rhetorical vehicles for persuading the public of certain ideas in the moment.
Latin American and Venezuelan constitutional thought or political science is still another discipline he creates. In it he places Bolívar’s Bolivian Constitution, disconnecting it from the specific project of state formation that it defined. There is also the area of international treaties and accords, where he lodges the event about which we have just spoken, Bolívar’s Panama Congress of 1826. Latin American nations, he underlines, still need to establish a form of organization to protect their interests in the face of the United States.17
The Gran Colombia is of particular interest with regard to both the history Gil Fortoul is constructing and his project to transform the Bolívar legacy into material to serve as a foundation for his moral and scholarly project. Far from desiring to present the Gran Colombia, as we said above, as a utopia to return to (as Larrazábal and other Liberals in the nineteenth century do, particularly José Tadeo Monagas), Gil Fortoul constructs it as a worthy and admirable moment in the larger story of the Venezuelan nation, a knowable period that simply concludes, no longer, then, in an oppositional relationship to the republic that came into being by seceding from it. It is a foundation for the stable historical knowledge he seeks to create for dissemination. But politics and other factors must be accounted for. He tells us that Bolívar at the 1828 Ocaña Convention had wanted to end the Gran Colombia but that his own deputies prevented the aging and sickly leader from doing so. We see Bolívar making contradictory statements. Taking advantage of a weakened leader, one of his lieutenants discourages him from ending the state by speaking of the ignominious manner in which San Martín left the continent, retiring. Does Bolívar want to conclude his military and political career in the way the Argentine liberator did? Bolívar was still a realist but he was manhandled. Here, Gil Fortoul is demonstrating the purportedly clear causes that explain Bolívar’s behavior, starting with his physical condition and vulnerability. This is not the Rousseau-inspired Bolívar who, as we saw in his 1828 letter to Páez cited at the beginning of Chap. 1, states that he will not submit to the general will as represented by Santander’s state. The actions of Gil Fortoul’s Bolívar are not based on ideas but rather what is happening in his body and mind as determined by his physical state, psychological make-up, and environment. Even the creator of the Gran Colombia, which would be so important discursively in the nineteenth century, did not believe in his state in the final years, according to Gil Fortoul.
In this effort at sealing off and monumentalizing what, let us repeat, John Lynch sees only as a necessary military structure, Rodríguez O. as a reflection of Bolívar’s dictatorial tendencies, Jeremy Adelman as a symptom of the dissolution of the Spanish empire, and Elliott as an outgrowth of Enlightenment thought, Gil Fortoul has one aim: to protect Bolívar in his role as a rational head of state, and thus to maintain his legality. Gil Fortoul thus explains the complex politics that, he argues, causes the June 1828 Ocaña Convention to fail, forcing Bolívar to declare a dictatorship after having already called upon the special powers afforded him by the Cúcuta Constitution. As for the execution of his would-be assassins, he excuses him again by saying that he was pressured in his weakened state to do so by his generals. But Gil Fortoul also justifies Bolívar’s controversial provisional dictatorship of 1828–1830 as a necessary response to major threats to the union’s dissolution. Those threats consisted of the Gran Colombia’s abrogation of its constitution at the Ocaña Convention, prior to reaching an agreement on a new one; Venezuela’s continuing policy of not recognizing the authority of Bogotá, Páez described by the authorities in the state’s capital as illegally breaking with the Gran Colombia; and the fact that an ungrateful Peru, having been liberated by the Gran Colombia, then attacked it on its southern borders.
Gil Fortoul wants us to see the passage from the Gran Colombia—which he is presenting as a state destined to fail—to Venezuela just as it is. One order is coming apart. Another is coming into being. History moves forward within the boundaries of legality and illegality, the state always legal because it is the state. But if his critical framework for understanding change is tautological, not all new regimes obtain the status of legality. The United States of Venezuela that comes into being after the Federal War with the 1864 constitution has no validity as a structure, the result of military pronouncements in the name of already accomplished political values. The Gran Colombia, then, is a crucial discursive site for the national history that he is constructing and that revolves around social classes, institutions, and constitutions. It is one of three states, including the colonial and republic, all part of the story of an evolving nation.
At the heart of the republican period of Venezuela are the constitutions promoted and promulgated. Gil Fortoul does not only speak of the particular social realities behind those constitutions, realities that reflect the interests of social classes, he also seeks to create a constitutional tradition for Venezuela that is autochthonous. He does this by positing new beginnings for Venezuelan Constitutions, starting with the one Francisco de Miranda wrote in London in 1808 and celebrating the constitution Bolívar wrote for Bolivia in 1826.
Such was the enthusiasm with which his admirers received it that one of them wrote the following: “This is not only the constitution of Bolivia, it is not only a constitution but a summary of all the good that men have known in the science of government, the germ of an immense happiness that will develop in the midst of those societies that have the good fortune to adopt it.” Exaggerated lyricism, no doubt: but, with all that and without leaving the theoretical sphere, a lyricism that is not that far away from the truth, because, yes, it can be affirmed that the constitutional projects of Bolívar, that of Angostura and that of Lima, are the most notable political-philosophical speculation in South American history.18
The idea of happiness as a criterion in and of itself for judging constitutions, we know, was the brainchild of the British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham whom Bolívar met in 1810 and with whom he corresponded in 1823 and 1825; Bolívar himself uses the idea of maximizing happiness to authorize his vision in the Angostura Address. But now, Gil Fortoul is slyly dressing the constitution up to reflect Bentham’s and his disciple John Stuart Mill’s concept of happiness for the majority, without stating anything about the categories of liberty or social reform that were important to both thinkers. To elevate it in this new way, he also explains its brief life as a constitution. For Gil Fortoul, the positivist, what matters in the end, as we have seen earlier, is not only whether a constitution is good in and of itself, but also whether it is effective, meaning whether it is accepted as corresponding to lived reality. Bolívar had hoped to have it serve as the blueprint for his Federation of the Andes, which, we know, never materialized. Gil Fortoul, though, is only interested in the national iteration of the constitution, not the massive regional one that Bolívar outlined in letters. To this end, he writes not about Bolívar’s publicity campaign in connection to the Federation of the Andes but rather of the circumstances that saw the constitution introduced in Peru and Bolivia, then rejected. First, he underlines that Peru and Bolivia initially looked upon it with absolute admiration. Then, he explains the circumstances under which it was rejected. There were two factors. One was the level of education of the actors in power: legislators and leaders, whom he characterizes as “ignorant caudillos” and who for this reason were myopic in their views. The other was the politics of the moment. Gil Fortoul tells his readers that the new state functioned successfully under Sucre until Peruvian armed forces entered the country to seek reunification of the two Perus.19
But the times having changed, Venezuela now purportedly on the cusp of having stability and a political elite capable of understanding the document’s merit, Gil Fortoul makes the Bolivian Constitution available as a model that can be an alternative to Venezuela’s US-based constitutional political tradition, providing, as he says it does, for the autonomy of the branches of the legislature and the courts without the possibility of politicizing them—a foundation for a system of civil law. The Venezuela at the turn of the twentieth century was different from the Bolivia of the late 1820s. Venezuela could draw on seven decades of history for the purpose of defining a proper form of national government. The Bolivian Constitution with its lifetime president offers a model for that lived reality of those seven decades. Instructive was the long tenure of the Monagas brothers and of Antonio Guzmán Blanco who stayed in power through proxies.20 It is a constitution that he places against the nation’s first constitution—the matrix of all to follow—playing on the binary of originality and imitation so important in European and Latin American thought in the final decades of the nineteenth century. He had written earlier in Volume I: “And in the end the imitation of the American system, with some variations, triumphed.”21 In opposition to that system, he is making the Bolivian Constitution available not only as something that is unique, an expression of Venezuela’s new post-Guerra Federal needs, but also as a constitution that can stand on its own as something approaching a republican document.
Gil Fortoul did not see himself, then, as indicating a brand new path for the state, but as providing a political form that channeled the Venezuelan political will while perhaps also legitimizing what Cipriano Castro, to whom he dedicates the volumes, had already done with his 1901 and 1904 constitutions, the first proclaimed after he took Caracas, the second after he defeated Matos. In the first constitution, Castro lengthened the presidency to six years, removed direct and universal suffrage, and terminated the Federal Council consisting of one representative for each state. The latter two had been established by the 1893 constitution. In the place of direct and universal suffrage, the 1901 constitution called for the municipalities to elect the president while the 1904 constitution called for an electoral college. In what was another innovation, there would be two vice presidents, also to be voted by the electoral college. The two constitutions looked a lot like the Bolivian Constitution. In this new constitutional moment for the country, caudillos would no longer need to leave their estates with their militias to dispute or manage a presidential election as there would no longer be popular elections.
Importantly, in the documents section at the end of Gil Fortoul’s 1907 Volume I, he includes both Miranda’s 1808 constitution with its proposal for Roman censors and Bolívar’s 1819 Moral Branch that is subsumed in the 1826 Bolivian Constitution. He is presenting Venezuelan actors with models to consider as they look for ways to outfit their constitution with positivist features bearing on morality and education. In his Angostura Address, Bolívar said that a well-oiled political system is not enough. There must also be men of character to lead and a strong educational system. Gil Fortoul envisions a state that has the right to preside over the spiritual and moral well-being of its citizens with less concern for liberties and rights.
Gil Fortoul would come out with a new version of Historia constitucional de Venezuela in 1930, at the time of the centenary celebration of Venezuelan independence from the Gran Colombia and of Bolívar’s death. These volumes, as we will see in Chap. 7, will be quite different.
Vallenilla Lanz directed Latin American positivism down a distinctly dark reactionary path. As early as 1910, just two years after Gómez took power, he wrote Influencia del 19 de abril en la independencia sur-americana (The Influence of April 19 in the Independence of South America), winner of a competition for best national history organized by the governor of Caracas and a work he dedicated to Gómez.22 Here he mocks the constitution of 1811 as a mere imitation of that of the United States, saying nothing of the triumvirate and nothing of the oligarchy that, according to Gil Fortoul, it served. He asserts that had the drafters actually thought about what a proper constitution for Venezuela should look like instead of simply using that of the United States, they would have realized that the idea of federalism, that is, of a country with self-governing provinces forming part of the larger state, was a fiction when the only political unit that had had significance for the population was that of the municipality. Citing from the work of the Venezuelan historian Rafael María Baralt, he tells of how in 1556 Venezuelans reverted to this unit on the orders upon his death of a Spanish governor, Licenciado Villacindio, who instructed them to govern themselves in this way until a new governor was appointed.
But what was a privilege under special circumstances quickly came to be perceived by ambitious mayors as a right subsequent to the king’s decision to issue a written order on December 8, 1560, that formalized the order given by Villacindio. The king did this, we are told, subsequent to entreaties from a representative from the town of Trujillo who had gone to the court to request favors for his province, which the king granted. Jump forward 250 years. On April 19, 1810, Venezuelans revert to the unit of the municipality, forming local governmental bodies. Their example inspired peoples of the Spanish-American colonies to do the same.23
Vallenilla Lanz turns the story of Spanish Americans forming cabildos or juntas inside out, primitivizing that act as ethnically determined. Further, in Venezuela the distinguished founding fathers move quickly, too quickly, not understanding the phenomenon before them. With the 1811 constitution, ratified just months after the declaration of independence on July 5, they elect to divide the country into states. The drafters of the 1830 constitution correct the error by dissolving those states and placing the municipalities directly under the authority of Caracas. As for Bolívar, in the 1812 Cartagena Manifesto he shows that he does not understand this history, incorrectly attributing the fragmentation he observes to the 1811 constitution, that is to the modern political idea of federalism, rather than to Venezuela’s now ethnically defined colonial history.24 Vallenilla Lanz goes on to say that the civil wars of the nineteenth century, not only those of Venezuela, but also those of all Spanish-American countries, can be explained using these critical terms.
The competing groups in those wars break down as follows. On the one hand, there are the Spanish-American municipalities and their provinces that subsequent to the collapse of the colonial state revert to their primitive instincts, instincts that drive them anew to be sovereign with federalist thought providing a cover for what is in fact a pathology. On the other, there are the lettered elites who seek to impose on their countries constitutional models from outside Latin America. The error on the part of the elites is that they assume these constitutions to have universal value when they are really products themselves of particular national evolutionary histories. The constitution of the United States that is thought to be universal is really the product of a specific social evolution.
Vallenilla Lanz continues this line of argumentation in his famous 1919 work, Cesarismo democrático, where he presents Bolívar as a sociologist avant la lettre, as he had in previous writings, writings laced with sociological and race paradigms coming out of Europe and of which he proclaimed mastery.25 He claims that Bolívar was a leader worthy of emulation for the present on account of the caudillo-like position he assumed upon his return from Peru. Constructing an inside and an outside, one defined by the mission of liberation, and the other by that of government, Vallenilla Lanz tells us that this is the moment at which Bolívar frees himself of the myopia into which he plunged when he was outside the Gran Colombia, the Enlightenment principles of reason and culture to which he subscribed being the content of that myopia, and embraces social order as an ideal that is superior to that of liberty.
Bolívar’s texts remain important to Vallenilla Lanz, only now in the context of the categories of unruliness and criminality he calls upon to define Bolívar as a leader concerned about the Venezuelan population’s proclivity to disorder. Going to them, he cites moments in which Bolívar addresses the challenge of creating a citizenry out of whole cloth, moments both before the defeat of the Spanish in 1825 and afterward. One case cited is from Bolívar’s 1815 Jamaica Letter , where he addresses indiscipline among the creole elites to help explain the fall of the Second Republic. His argument is that members of that class had lacked the discipline necessary to prevail because they had had no experience in public office. The Spanish Crown had denied them the possibility of holding administrative positions. In Vallenilla Lanz’s hands, the textual moment becomes something else—not a Bolívar defending independence by pointing to the problem of a colonial population with no administrative experience, but rather a Bolívar concerned about disorder among the masses, raised to the level of criminal unruliness.
Social order, then, just as in the case of Gil Fortoul, is the concept around which Vallenilla Lanz builds his critical discourse. Attacking Venezuelan white elite subjectivity in a way similar to how Gil Fortoul does in his discussion of the colonial period, he speaks of a slave-holding creole class, the mantuanos, that in the 1790s and 1800s sought to exclude the rising pardo class from public life, the Spanish colonial state supporting the pardo community and free blacks in order to diminish its authority. In his attack on the upper-society creoles, he goes on to speak of the war of independence in Venezuela as a civil war, which of course it was in part. Vallenilla Lanz is seeking to undo an historiographical tradition pitting independentist creoles against Spain with the former the principal protagonists of Venezuelan history. This is a tradition with a long history, promoted by Felipe Larrazábal, then by Guzmán Blanco with the 1810 narrative he instituted, and the publication of O’Leary’s volumes. It is a tradition that comes out of Bolívar’s key texts such as the Jamaica Letter . But in calling the conflict a civil war, Vallenilla Lanz also has as his target royalist creoles who opposed independence and who looked to the 1812 Spanish Constitution.
One source to which Vallenilla Lanz goes to recover the purported facts of Venezuela’s perpetual civil war is, interestingly enough, the letters of the enemy, Spanish General Pablo Morillo, el Pacificador, collected by O’Leary. Vallenilla Lanz has Morillo stand as an impartial commentator on the lack of union among the creoles, and in particular, on the protagonism of royalist creoles in the cause of defending the Spanish imperial state, in this way drawing from the Archivo del Libertador in a manner unexpected. Royalist creoles were the most violent among the enemies of the independentist creoles, not Spanish soldiers.26 The message from Vallenilla Lanz is that we are not to heed Bolívar when he describes Spaniards as violent—Venezuelans are.
With this, Vallenilla Lanz is not only disabusing his readership of what he wants to reduce to myth—Bolívar’s own texts and Larrazábal’s biography having falsely created the idea of a unified creole class that fought the Spanish—but is also establishing an anchor for his social history of a population absolutely unmoored when the decision was made to separate and when royalist creoles returned after independence to form part of the new republic, bringing with them their resentment, many having lost their lands. The truth of division and violence continues after the independence period, contaminating the republic. Venezuelans would seem doomed.
The key moment that he is elevating is not July 5 or December 21 of 1811 but April 19, 1810, which he now describes even more dramatically than he does in 1910 as the beginning of an undefined, parochial revolution in Latin America, the opposite of Guzmán Blanco’s glorious Liberal revolution. In Spain, which interestingly he ties to Venezuela as part of one and the same historical process thrust upon the Hispanic world, the sin of fragmentation came not as a decision but as an imposition.27 The all-important date to which he returns again is 1808, the year of the Napoleonic invasion. Vallenilla Lanz speaks of the period of the Napoleonic occupation, the house arrest of Fernando VII, and the Cortes as years when Spain saw no more than disconnected military action against Napoleon in the towns and cities of Spain under the leadership of five different regional leaders.
With this, he entirely sets aside parliamentary tradition, newly established in 1810, describing Latin Americans and Spaniards as sharing the same tendency toward parochialism or what he defines as federalism, a form that he reduces to localism, whatever ideology might fuel it, and whose existence, furthermore, trumps all else, particularly the project of making a single nation. From the time of Fernando VII’s death in 1833, the constitutional movement of the Cortes with its roots in the years of 1810–1814 and 1820–1823 faced off with both Carlists, who sought to return to an absolute monarchy, and progressive and radical groups that were offshoots of the Cortes, finally taking a more stable form under the complex maneuvering of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, whose idea to rotate the position of prime minister between himself and a Liberal counterpart in the years going from 1874 until 1897 proved successful. Spain’s constitutional history is represented as having no reality, no efficacy. In the stark terms with which he sought to manipulate discourse, the story of Spain, like that of Latin America, is one in which instinctual forces of disintegration have dominated ever since the Napoleonic occupation.
As one would imagine he would, Vallenilla Lanz also did much with the War to the Death. He speaks, as we have said, of the royalist creoles who return with their resentment. But there is a larger narrative. Taking advantage of Bolívar’s War to the Death pronouncement on June 15, 1813, he tells a story of dissension and violence going all the way forward to the Federal War of 1859–1863. He finds not only violence, but also illegality everywhere. He calls into question Bolívar’s claim to have unified the creoles in Venezuela in the 1820s, while he declares that the creators of the constitution for the Gran Colombia at the Congress of Cúcuta legislated illegally, two of the regions, Venezuela and Ecuador, still not free. He characterizes the creators of the 1811 constitution in the same way. In the period of the republic he dismisses the relative peace that the republic had obtained from 1831 to 1858, telling of the suppressed and concealed resentments to which we have pointed, tendencies toward violence, as well as of profoundly problematic lineages that trump one’s ideology. None other than the founder of the Liberal Party, Antonio Leocadio Guzmán, was a highly contradictory figure when considered in the context of his biological lineage. According to the critical terms he has constructed using theorists from the time, such as Gustave Le Bon, lineage is destiny. He reveals that Guzmán was in fact descended from a father who had been a Spanish captain.28 Here was reality. What he became as an adult was theater.
By such troubling ploys, Vallenilla Lanz was delegitimizing an individual as well as a party. His target was not only the Liberal Party, but also the Conservative, the former founded by Guzmán in 1840, the latter in response to it a few years later, with the members of the latter said by Vallenilla Lanz to subscribe to liberal ideology in the same way that Liberals did. There was no justification of the two parties at the level of political principle. Add to this that members of the parties did not choose them but inherited their affiliations: Liberals consist of individuals who are descendants of royalists; and Conservatives of descendants of patriots. There was more. He also addressed the discord and violence in the country during the Federal War, particularly on the side of the conflict that belonged to Liberals. They were not the result of the political principles fought over, the values, that is, of liberty and equality that were championed by Liberal leaders from Leocadio Guzmán to Felipe Larrazábal. How could liberty and equality be the root cause, he submits, if the conditions for propagandizing did not exist? Ideas, in the end, must be communicated. On the one hand, the public, he states, was illiterate; on the other, there were not enough newspaper print runs to ensure that copies would be available to the few who were literate. Here was the evidence that this book- and written-word centered intellectual was creating using sociological models—models that did not recognize orality as a space of transmission. The conclusion: Liberalism—which, with its different emphases, had been accepted as the driving force behind the Guerra Federal—could not have played that role for the reason that the material conditions necessary for it to be properly consumed by the population at large were inexistent. Political declarations and military uprisings aside, in its nineteenth-century Venezuelan iteration it was a fiction, with urban intellectuals who wrote in newspapers to incite the masses literally only speaking to themselves. There were only the “superior classes,” as he calls them, who did not care about principles.29 Once again, positivism was producing its Other. The issue was not that something happened. It was how it happened.
What was the cause of the mass mobilization that resulted in the death of more than 100,000 people if not the political parties of lore and their partisan intellectuals who had neither the ability to propagandize (printing press runs severely limited), nor a public to propagandize (the illiteracy rate high)? Drawing upon the French criminologist Gabriel Tarde, Vallenilla Lanz asserts that it was a tightening and rationalization of the legal order at the hands of an emerging state that, under the control of the Conservative Party, unrealistically challenged the impunity to which the popular classes had grown accustomed—examples of their crimes being cattle rustling and robbery at gunpoint. The expectation of impunity had deep roots, insists Vallenilla Lanz, the result of 15 years of war in which military leaders offered their soldiers and recruits the promise of others’ property, and one, for this reason, that could not be reversed overnight without consequence.30
The law could not work. Enlightenment could not work. The specific people Vallenilla Lanz names are the legendary plainsmen, whom he defines as uneducated and incapable of making their own decisions, available always to be led, but who are historically necessary, representing the awakening of a people. These men again come to form part of Páez’s troops after he assumes the presidency in 1830. He presents the caudillo, furthermore, as being one of them, representing not a force standing in the way of modernization, but on the contrary, a new modern subject—the figure who raises himself up from the lower classes to occupy power, legitimately representing that power by virtue of having at a psychological level the support of the majority. For Vallenilla Lanz, with his incorporation of liberalism’s language of minorities and majorities, that first caudillo is Páez, the product of a Venezuela transformed by the independence process, with new social actors in power, a Venezuela whose modernity consists not in the incorporation of ideas from outside of Venezuela—the paradigm he seeks to defeat paradoxically in the name of the conservative post-1871 Paris Commune models he calls upon and to which he accords universal authority—but in the belief in social mobility that had arisen within the struggle for power. “From that moment the pyramid was definitively inverted.”31
Páez had escaped the worst of the violence during what Vallenilla Lanz calls Venezuela’s civil war, 1813 and 1814. This is important as he cannot allow Páez to be seen as one more person caught up in his decades-long struggle defined by violence. Páez joined Bolívar’s ranks in 1818, and therefore never had to enter into battle against his Venezuelan brothers since the fighting in Venezuela following 1814, with Fernando VII’s reconquest, had been increasingly against soldiers from Spain. Páez could, for this reason, stand symbolically for the ideals of peace, order, and national community. The leader is different from the people, from the masses.
The question of how property is acquired is erased, as the fact is that leaders need it. It is a law of state development. Páez was wealthy for a reason based on first principles or axioms, as was Juan Vicente Gómez. There was nothing to challenge, nothing to think about. Vallenilla Lanz continues to rebuild Páez for national consumption.And, instinctively, giving in this way a more solid foundation to his political superiority, he became the most powerful landowner of the country, as if he had guessed that famous aphorism of John Adams, one of the founders of the United States, proven time and again by the history of all peoples. “Those that possess land have in their hands the destiny of their nations.”33
to be organized instinctively around the strongest and wisest one, the person around whose personality the popular imagination had created the legend, which is one of the most powerful psychological components of prestige…and from whom was expected the most absolute protection, the most complete impunity to which they were habituated.34
Forget, then, the jackets and ties in which Páez and his successors dressed and that could lead one to think that it was liberal principles that organized the country, or the fact that Páez governed with a congress that he never dismantled. One needed to see beyond that to bring into focus his non-rational essence as caudillo, the figure to whom the majority responded and who was untainted by violence in a manner that other leaders were not. This was the real Páez, the iteration of his figure that was politically effective, born of a process that had razed the old to prepare the way for the new, his figure the only one that could lead a country horribly fragmented, with no group or social class able to be hegemonic but with the posited totality of those individual groups and classes representing Venezuela’s new democracy. Other Latin American countries, Vallenilla Lanz argues, saw the creole elites resume their social and political authority after independence. In Venezuela, where the social world had been re-making itself, the country’s elites did not. The mistake was that Páez was not allowed to be himself, that is, to exercise civil authority in the way he had exercised military, governing without the legal apparatus he found himself having to implement subsequent to the coming into being of the republic in 1831, having himself lived by the law of impunity, leading the plainsmen against established authority, then leading Venezuelans against the Gran Colombia, in what is described as Venezuela’s democratic revolution, a revolution that was, Vallenilla Lanz underlines, legitimate.
In this last formulation, Vallenilla Lanz is using Páez to position Venezuela in relationship to the political idea of democracy that had for the entire history of the republic been the key political concept. It had been promoted by the United States, and figures across the Americas had been adapting it to their own needs by constructing national traditions in the name of democracy even when that meant, as it often did, using the concept as the basis for an explicitly hierarchical vision of the modern public sphere.
An example of such positionings of the concept can be seen in the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó, who in his widely read essay of 1900, Ariel, calls upon some of the same French sociologists and historians used by Vallenilla Lanz. Rodó argues that democracy is both necessary and insufficient; that while the value of equality is the essential condition for access to education, the goal of Latin American society must be high culture, by which he means a civil and political community informed by what he calls justified differences and hierarchies rooted in education, the arts, and the professions. In Vallenilla Lanz’s version of this question, Páez is the strongest of the strong and the wisest of the wise who is the product of the new democratic spirit unleashed by the social forces of independence, a person from the lower social class who rises to be the most meritorious in a world that, through the first two decades of the twentieth century, has still not progressed enough to operate in accordance with the imperatives of the liberal state but that must still rely on the figure of the caudillo to shepherd the country. Here was a vision, let us emphasize, that was entirely different from what other historians would tell us. John Lynch, for example, presents Páez not as the representative of a new social class but simply as the individual appointed by the white elite to do its bidding as president of the republic; and also Gil Fortoul, for whom Páez is the guarantor of the republican system representing the principle of authority for Venezuela’s pre-modern, aristocratic elites.
But if Vallenilla Lanz fashions Páez by making the act of secession from the Gran Colombia into a veritable rebellion with sweeping and definitive social class implications, it is important to underline that he does not pit Páez against Bolívar, much less speak of Bolívar’s expulsion. He does, though, link Bolívar to Venezuela’s aristocratic world of ideas, as defined by republicanism saying that he is only an intermediate historical figure who cedes, as he must, leadership of the country to Páez in 1827. In presenting Bolívar as a figure who represents republicanism as a form of political aristocratism, Vallenilla Lanz also shields him, as if Bolívar and his state from which Venezuelans seceded were different. He submits that Venezuelans did not revolt against his figure. Rather, referring once again to that uncontestable force that lies below reason as a first principle and that therefore is more real, Vallenilla Lanz tells us Venezuelans followed Páez instinctively.
Vallenilla Lanz takes, however, a completely different view on the so-called rebellion in New Granada, going so far as to criminalize those involved in the attempt to assassinate Bolívar on September 25, 1828, in Bogotá, the capital of the Gran Colombia. Páez’s “rebellion” against the Gran Colombia is celebrated, foundational in the formation of the modern state and therefore necessary. In contrast, the conspiracy of New Granadan intellectuals, coming as it did from above as opposed to below, as Vallenilla Lanz maintains according to his rhetoric of high and low, is utterly without merit, a fact that justifies retaliation from Bolívar and Urdaneta. Colombia’s liberal tradition is lawless, he asserts, deserving of being repressed by the state.35
Later in the work appears a chapter entitled “The Bolivian Law.” Here Vallenilla Lanz lays everything out for his Venezuelan and international readers. He praises two of Bolívar’s texts: his 1812 Cartagena Manifesto , where he critiques the 1811 constitution; and his Bolivian Constitution, which Vallenilla Lanz describes as prescient. From the Bolivian Constitution he isolates what he defines as the Bolivian law: the executive who names his successor.36 But there is more. Vallenilla Lanz sees that law as the de facto model for the successful leaders of the nineteenth-century Latin American states, from the Argentine under Juan Manuel de Rosas and Julio Argentino Roca to the Ecuadorian under Gabriel García Moreno to the Mexican under Porfirio Díaz to the Colombian under Rafáel Núnez.37 For Vallenilla Lanz, the Bolivian Constitution is the document that most closely reflects the model of the caudillo that he recoups through French positivism as gendarme and which he sees already embodied in his canon of nineteenth-century personalistic heads of state who through their power are the true and effective constitutions of their countries. As for Bolivia, the country for which Bolívar wrote the constitution, he states that it has never had “prestigious caudillos and true men of government,” which explains its instability.38 Gil Fortoul in 1907 and 1909 was trying to make the constitutional tradition work. Vallenilla Lanz, in 1919, had gone in the opposite direction, declaring its utter uselessness. One had to attend to reality.
Why this historian who labels his vision the “Bolivian law” and uses that so-called law to support and legitimize authoritarian government in Latin America would think to construct a defense of Gómez by way of the figure of the caudillo by now should seem obvious. In a country where caudillo politics held sway through the Revolución Libertadora, 1901–1903, and beyond, with Gómez having to be concerned about insurrections from different quarters, it makes sense that Vallenilla Lanz would want to model his authoritarian executive on a political form that non-Venezuelans could regard as either antiquated or strategically doomed, the more common cover for authoritarianism being republicanism. Defining the caudillo as a gendarme, meaning policeman from the French word of the same spelling, he elevated that figure born in Venezuela’s, and more generally, Latin America’s nineteenth century by dressing it up in the image of the French sociological models of the day, models that conceived of the polis as a space to be administered by intellectuals serving a strong executive, with knowledge and order privileged over democracy, and with the latter, what we might call institutionalized democracy, coming in the course of a nation’s evolution.
As for the state models Vallenilla Lanz draws upon from contemporary Latin America, we see him in an endnote at the conclusion of Cesarismo democrático call upon the example of the major regional and world event of the 1910s, the Mexican Revolution. At the time of the writing of the document, the Mexican Revolution was in the throes of uncertainty, there being no clarity about what would follow the first revolution of the twentieth century that had come in reaction to the 30-year rule of Porfirio Díaz, the most well-known period of Latin American positivism. Vallenilla Lanz turns the moment of the Mexican Revolution to his favor, capitalizing on the sense of dreams dashed to recover the figure of Porfirio Díaz whom he names as part of his canon. The sense that all had failed was so much evidence that the political structure exploded by the forces of the revolution was, in the end, the correct one for modernizing Latin American states, and in particular Venezuela.39 He also pays tribute to the Mexican positivist Francisco Bulnes, one of the intellectuals who helped build the theoretical justification for the Porfirian regime.40 What Latin America still needed, as it had in the nineteenth century, were caudillos capable of imposing order on their respective peoples not through constitutions or the law but through their own personalities. This was the remedy for what he describes as anarchy and rampant individualism, circumstances that could not be overcome by constitutions when constitutions, as they were in Venezuela’s nineteenth century, changed so often and/or were not upheld.
This was a vision Vallenilla Lanz extends to Europe in 1925, celebrating Mussolini in Italy and Paco de Rivera in Spain. Trying to bring the French and British political traditions into the orbit of the Venezuelan and citing the work of French conservative authors, he states that the French are really led by an unelected official in the person of the president of the Council of Ministers and that England, the country that has given the world the concept of oppositional parties, is a society in which voters elect individuals on the basis of their personalities as proven by their love of biographies.41 The reflections of Edmond de Fels and Émile Boutmy are made to fit into his attack on so-called paper constitutions and his celebration of organic ones.
At the end of Cesarismo democrático, he offers to Venezuelans and non-Venezuelans the following formulation: whereas for Latin America Bolívar is the symbol of the republican ideal, for Venezuela he is “the sacred symbol of its nationality and the motherland.”42 What exactly is the republican Bolívar’s historical place in Venezuela? He states that Bolívar ascended to the apex of Venezuelan history. But in the final years of his career he understood the country’s racial composition as creating the conditions for anarchy and that there was a need then for leaders who were not wedded to constitutions or laws to control disorder. He realizes that the organism that is society takes precedence over the world of ideas. On the subject of leadership, Vallenilla Lanz says more. He explains further that Bolívar’s purpose as a leader was to make way for national caudillos, which New Granadans had not been able to see when they precipitously sought to assassinate him, criminally transgressing the evolutionary laws of nations. Finally, Vallenilla Lanz’s nation- and race-based model of governance that replaces Enlightenment-based models, just as that of the French historian Hippolyte Taine does, is borne out by the history of independence as he tells it, a history he presents as one of maturation going from unmoored idealism to realism, from the 1811 constitution to the model of the caudillo as discovered in the figure of Páez at the end of the independence period, with lessons taught, from, we might also say, high to low. Was history going backward or forward?