The republican utopia: Ideals and realities in the formation of Peruvian political culture, 1871-1919.

摘要

The standard interpretation of Peru's political development is that its "bourgeoise" failed to create strong national institutions in the nineteenth century and that its failure has continued to the present day. The origins of this failure are usually traced to the impact of the guano export boom, from the 1840's to the 1870's, when Peruvian government and economic elites linked their fortunes to the international market. As a result is it argued, the latter paid too little attention to a creation of political institutions and the requirements of sustained internal economic development.; This thesis strongly disagrees with the above interpretation. It argues that there was a long political gestation, during the guano era, that led directly to the origins of a national political project by 1871-1872. The vehicle of change was the Civil Party, and the decisive moment of its appearance was during the crisis of the guano's economy. The Civil Party drew into its ranks a wide-range of leaders: lawyers, merchants, bankers, teachers, bureaucrats, small and large landowners, as well as career politicians. And, my research demonstrates, in contrast to existing generalizations, that this party had strong regional ties and was national in every sense of the word. The party proposed to create "the Republic", an ideal which involved confronting established interests as well as mobilizing the disenfranchised urban elements of the general population. It hoped to become a genuine vehicle of popular power, to represent a new citizenry and to carry out the domestic economic goals that went well beyond depending on the export of fertilizer to Europe.; My evidence consists of political correspondence, records, speeches, memoirs and a wide range of documents from the personal archives of Manuel Pardo, the founder and major leader of the Civil Party in its formative stage. I also draw upon the documents of other prominent figures from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Elias Mujica, Manuel Candamo, Jose Pardo, Luis Felipe Villaran, Jose Matias Manzanilla, Jose de la Riva Aguero, among others. Through this surprisingly untapped material, I have reconstructed not only the ideology and organization of the Civil Party and of its "Republican Project" but also the ways in which a civic culture was forged in Peru. Among other notable changes that have gone unremarked by standard histories of this era were the expansion of the sense of citizenship, the creation of new, urban political issues, and the beginnings of a free political press. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)