Final Remarks

The underlying theme of this book has been the weakness of government and its incapacity to extend its effective authority across the entire country. I have viewed this problem in the context of the economic and financial difficulties experienced by an ethnically heterogenous society. During the half-century between the outbreak of the Revolution for Independence in 1810 and the Liberal victory in the Civil War of the Reform by 1861, many of the implications of creating a distinct State, separated from the Hispanic Monarchy, were explored in Mexico. I have examined the tensions in the Republic at the provincial and local levels, at a time when loyalties to community, locality, town, province or region, and the readiness to defend ethnic identities and linguistic differentiation remained vibrant.

Neither of the two parties emerging in Mexico during the broader period between 1824 and 1867 was sufficiently strong or coherent to take control of the country on a lasting basis. The two civil wars of 1858–61 and 1862–7 weakened both of them. Neither grouping had organisation, hierarchy, structure, formal membership or regular financing. They remained shifting agglomerations of factions, often focused on personalities or small groups of individuals agreeing on a number of issues and policies. Factionalism and fragmentation lay so deeply embedded that they could not be uprooted.

The question might be posed: why could moderates not join together and provide a working basis for government from ‘the centre’, leaving the radicals of both parties out on a limb? There may be two explanations for this. The first may lie in the importance attached to the religious question by Conservative moderates and those opposing Liberal measures against the Church; the second may lie in support for federalism by moderate Liberals in the regions, mistrusting Conservative inclinations towards centralism.

When the Liberals took power in Mexico at the national level, it was usually through cooperation with military chieftains and sections of the army. Liberal administrations, in 1834, 1853, 1858 and 1863, lost power in the capital city by the same means. It is important to recognise that Mexican Liberalism in origin, character and objectives was not a peasant movement or rural-based party. In the strictest sense, it was not democratic. When it used the term ‘democracy’, it meant constitutional government by a process of indirect election conducted through tier stages. The essential problem for the Liberals was how to preserve the new institutions and prevent them from being subverted, watered down or reversed by their conservative and clerical opponents. In other words, the Liberals could not risk the results of future elections turning over power to the Conservative Party.

The precarious hold on power by Liberal administrations in 1833–4 and 1846–53 exposed the need to extend the popular and rural base. That raised the question of what relation, if any, the Liberal factions had to the localised, rebellions of the 1840s and 1850s. The historiography has already put forward the view that deep divisions within the elites, evident from the later 1820s, enabled popular action to bear weight in decisions at provincial and even national levels. Cross-class alliances sometimes resulted. Government authority did not extend effectively into the localities due to the parlous nature of Mexican finances. The scale of discontent at local and rural levels could neither be ignored nor repressed. Since the Liberal generation of the Reform era intended to restructure the institutions and practices of the country – and make this transformation permanent, they needed popular support and active participation.

In 1855–7, the Mexican Liberals, for the first time, took power as the consequence of an insurrection. They pushed through a preliminary series of measures in 1855 and 1856, and, subsequently, made a concerted attempt to legalise and constitutionalise their position of power through the election of a Constituent Congress in 1856. This Congress produced the Federal Constitution of February 1857. Elections followed and a Constitutional Congress opened in September 1857. The government of Ignacio Comonfort was thereby given an ex post facto legitimacy. In January 1858, the Liberals, wracked by division, were forced out of power in Mexico City by Zuloaga’s military intervention in alliance with the Conservatives and clericals.

The string of Liberal defeats in the Civil War of Reform demonstrated the folly of entrusting armed forces, mainly National Guard units, to the command of lawyers. Faced with skilled army commanders such as Osollo, Miramón, Mejía and Márquez, the Liberals would have to build effective armies of their own. They did so by 1860, when we see the actions of Jesús González Ortega, Leandro Valle and Ignacio Zaragoza, architects of the final Liberal victory.

The arrival of successful army commanders on the Liberal scene altered the character of the movement. It provided party factions with rival candidates for political hegemony – González Ortega in 1861 and 1865 and Porfirio Díaz in 1867, 1871 and 1876. Commanders originating in the states, confronted national government over differing interpretations of the implications of federalism. This victorious Liberal army would, after 1877, provide the foundation of the Porfirian army until the Revolution of 1910–11.

In the Liberal view, the juridical status of the Church would have to be sacrificed if a reconstructed relationship with the State were to be made viable. This objective, rather than a concerted plan for the secularisation of Mexican society lay at the heart of mid-nineteenth century Liberalism. Liberal assertion of the supremacy of the civil power certainly involved a considerable degree of laicisation. Even so, it did not entail an attack either on religion or on the historic role of the Catholic Church in Mexico. It did abandon the exclusivity of the Catholic faith and it did presage a plurality of religious beliefs in the country.

The Liberal Reform movement terminated any attempt to establish the Republic of Mexico as a Catholic State. This explained the sense of frustration among the ecclesiastical hierarchy and Catholic polemicists after the promulgation of the second Federal Constitution in February 1857. A body of opinion among the clergy believed that Mexican Independence after 1821 had liberated the Church from control by the State. That explains ecclesiastical resistance to post-Independence ‘National Patronage’ replacing the colonial era Royal Patronage. The Church saw itself as the spiritual custodian of the State, which, in turn, owed it protection.

The compelling issue which arose from this idea was whether Catholicism was an obstacle to the development of national sentiment, as many Liberal leaders came to see it in the Reform era. Prominent Conservatives argued that the Catholic religion represented the natural expression of Mexican nationhood. The Conservative Party, from its inception in 1849, sought to channel Catholic hostility and suspicion of Liberal objectives into its own ranks. For leading churchmen, such as Bishop Munguía of Michoacán, the prime issue became opposition to extended state control over the Church in Mexico. For this reason, the episcopate sought to bind the Mexican Church more and more closely to the Holy See.

The omission of state recognition of the exclusive position of the Catholic Church as the country’s religion in the Constitution of 1857 hastened the descent into civil war. The declaration of separation of Church and State by the Juárez administration in Veracruz in 1860 finished off any possibility of a Catholic State in Mexico by reducing the Catholic Church to one unit among several other Christian alternatives through a policy of religious tolerance. That was why the ecclesiastical hierarchy opposed it so consistently. Toleration of other churches undermined, in the bishops’ view, the historic character of Mexico as it had developed since the Conquest. They took issue with the Liberals over the character of the Mexican nation. This was a battle in which the interpretation of Mexico’s history was the prize. The past was not dead but a living issue of contention.

After 1867, Liberals of one description or another would hold power for the rest of the century. Despite their final military triumph in 1867, the Liberal coalition of diverse forces still lay on an unstable base. It failed to become a coherent governing party. The Liberals were unable to overcome factional and personality divergences, ideological splits, region-centre polarities, cliental and private networks of power. In fact, their party was constructed of such disparities. Political power in Mexico after 1876 would be open to exploitation by powerful and skilful individuals. Above all, they consistently failed to build an effective party apparatus, as the Partido Nacional Revolucionario would do, in different circumstances, after 1929 and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, essentially its variant and continuation, after 1946.