“We live like we’re nostalgic for a lost paradise”, Henning Mankell
In the first part of this series I analyzed the case of Russia, where powerful, cruel and autocratic characters such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were admired and imitated by various tsars and by communist leaders such as Lenin and Stalin. It is common for memory to be biased when recalling the past, so its flaws are minimized and its achievements magnified.
It is interesting to highlight the few cases where it was wanted to break with the Russian historical absolutism. In the first part of this series, I discussed the case of Tsar Alexander II, whose reforms were reversed by his successor. More recently, Michail Gorbachev sought to break with the past, without achieving his goal. Gorbachev assumed the position of Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1985. Through his functions as Secretary of the Farmer and member of the Politburo, he was aware of the serious shortage problems that afflicted the Soviet Union, so he tried to carry out several reforms. His policies “Glasnost” (opening) and “Perestroika” (restructuring), gave a 180 degree turn to the policies of his predecessors, but ended in a coup attempt and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Despite this, these measures failed to eliminate long-standing vices of the past. His successor, Boris Yeltsin, promised to transform the Russian economy into a market economy, but the privatization process was surrounded by corruption. He resigned in 1999, leaving the presidency in the hands of his Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, who has been in power for 22 years, seeking to perpetuate it and has returned Russia to its autocratic past.
Another house is that of France. After several centuries of the absolutist monarchy of the Bourbon dynasty, King Louis XVI brought France to the brink of bankruptcy. Clinging to the past, he had tried to suspend the National Assembly and became isolated until he was totally oblivious to the reality that his people faced (in a similar way to Tsar Nicholas II in Russia two centuries later). In 1789 the French Revolution began, in the hope that the principles of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” would materialize. The revolutionary movement began with a constitutional monarchy that was abolished in 1792, when the First French Republic was established, led by the Jacobin party. Its leader, Maximillien Robespierre, supported by Marat and Dantón, created the “Committee for Public Salvation”, a body that began a dictatorial control very alien to the principles of the Revolution. In this period known as the “Reign of Terror” religious freedoms were revoked and thousands of people were imprisoned and beheaded. The authoritarian past returned to France.
A few years later, Napoleon Bonaparte knew how to capitalize on the wishes of a society fed up with the anarchy and disorder of the revolutionary decade. In 1804, after dismantling the opposition, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor. The democratic essence that inspired the French Revolution was again distorted. After its fall in 1814, the victorious countries restored the Bourbon monarchy, naming Louis XVIII, who ruled from 1814 to 1824. His successor Charles X was overthrown in the so-called July Revolution of 1830, skillfully portrayed by Victor Hugo in his work Les Miserables, while his successor Louis Philippe I was expelled during the Revolution of 1848. At that time, France tried to leave its autocratic past with the establishment of the Second Republic, electing Louis Napoleon as president. The new republic did not last long, Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew led a coup in 1851, going from being president to proclaiming himself emperor. In this way, Napoleon III founded the Second Empire, with which France returned to the past again.
The Third French Republic began in 1870 and lasted until 1940. It was characterized by constant fighting between the different factions, a fact that divided the country and unleashed great political and economic uncertainty. At the end of the 19th century, France was divided by the “Dreyfus Affair”, an issue that polarized society. Even when France was victorious in the First War, the years that followed were not easy. In the 1930s, the political struggle between the right and the left caused the fall of various governments, triggered a wave of strikes and a series of currency devaluations that seriously affected investment and economic activity. After the German invasion in 1940, Marshal Philipe Petain, a military hero of the First War, created the Vichy government, which supported Germany as the occupying power of half of French territory. Petain obtained executive powers that had no precedent, disrupting French democracy and violating the rights of minorities, in complicity with Nazism. In this way, France returned to its autocratic past in one of its worst expressions.
Mexico in the 19th century was characterized by nostalgia for the autocratic past. After several centuries of an extremely authoritarian Aztec culture, where the emperor or Tlatoani was considered a divine incarnation to which one could not even look at, our country lived almost three hundred years of the viceroyalty. An attempt was made to break this absolutist tendency in 1810 with the beginning of the struggle for Independence. However, only eleven years later our country returned to the past. In 1821, the successful General Iturbide, who had fought for the royalist army and had switched to the independent side, entered Mexico City with the Trigarante Army. This character, admired by the people for having achieved Independence, proclaimed himself Emperor in 1822.
After the First Empire, the Constitution of 1824 was established with a fragile republican regime, which had to face constant military coups. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had led, together with Guadalupe Victoria, the rebellion against Iturbide, was the one who benefited from this fragility. Santa Anna, adored by the people, was president eleven times between 1833 and 1855. It is notorious that even after the loss of Texas in 1836 and the mutilation of half the territory in 1848, Santa Anna was called again in 1853 with the “noble commission of saving Mexico from its ruin.” There is no doubt about our country’s holding on to the past, turning to a strong and charismatic leader. As Enrique Krauze points out in his book Siglo de Caudillos: “The Mexican caudillos had something that went beyond mere charisma: a religious halo, linked at times to providentialism, others to idolatry, sometimes to theocracy.”
Benito Juárez took office as interim president in 1858, in accordance with the 1857 Constitution. In 1861, forced by the difficult conditions he faced after the War of Reform, Juárez declared a moratorium on foreign debt payments, a fact that resulted in the French Intervention in Mexico. Given the interest of France to set foot permanently in America and take advantage of the fact that the United States was facing the Civil War, Napoleon III wanted to reestablish the monarchy in Mexico, convincing Maximilian of Habsburg to govern our country. The naive emperor arrived with his wife Carlota in 1864. During his brief reign he ruled confident that the Mexican people acclaimed him, in addition to being convinced that by being a “liberal” he could attract dissidents from the Liberal Party upset with Juárez, who in 1865 he extended his presidential term for the second time. The Second Empire was short-lived. When Napoleon III realized how difficult it was to pacify the country and stabilize finances, he ordered the withdrawal of his troops in 1866. Maximilian decided to remain in Mexico and was shot a year later. The Second Empire, which was only an idealization of the past, ended in complete failure. In the words of King Leopold of Belgium, Carlota’s father: “In America you need success, everything else is poetry and loss of money.”
A little-commented fact in official history is that Juárez was criticized for not wanting to leave power. His rivals accused him of ruling by decree in a “democratic dictatorship.” Juárez ruled for almost 15 years, extending his mandate in 1861 and 1865 and reelecting himself in 1867 and 1871. He died in the National Palace in 1872.
With Porfirio Díaz, power was again concentrated in a single man. The military leader of the War of Reform and of the French Intervention, fought against Juárez in the elections of 1867 and 1871. An ironic fact is that Díaz took up arms in 1871 with the slogan “Effective Suffrage, no reelection.” However, already in power, Don Porfirio modified the Constitution three times to be able to govern the country almost uninterruptedly for more than 30 years. For many Mexicans of the time, Diaz was “the necessary man”, for others he was “the irreplaceable president.”
The 19th century in Mexico was characterized by recurring attempts to return to the autocratic past. Even when the idea of placing all power in one person proved to be an unfounded hope, it is still a deeply rooted custom that continues to this day. Hence the importance of having solid institutions that serve as counterweights to authoritarian acts of power.
In the third part of this series I will analyze the case of China and its failed attempt to establish a democracy at the beginning of the last century. I will finish this series of three parts, analyzing the idealization of the past in our country today.
* The opinions of the author are personal and reflect his interest in learning from history.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx