Which People Shall Rule?
I
n Western Europe and the Americas, a popular press, the lifeblood of any democratic government, proliferated in the late eighteenth century where political writings were read aloud in cafes, bars, coffeehouses, and political clubs. By the time the French Revolution began in 1789, there were over 500 newspapers in Paris alone. Often enough, from 1796 to 1815, the hero and villain of these late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century news reports was Napoleon Bonaparte. Between 1796 and 1804, the man who had grown up in Corsica and attended French military schools went from being an unknown and relatively inexperienced young general fighting in northern Italy to becoming the Emperor of France. One thing that helped him make his name and solidify his power was his early recognition of the importance and utility of printed newsletters and newspaper articles. As he reminded his troops in a motivational proclamation distributed to them in 1796, "You have won battles without cannon, crossed rivers without bridges, made forced marches without shoes, camped without brandy and often without bread . . . only republican troops could have endured what you have endured."1
With the wealth Napoleon gained as a result of booty he collected on military campaigns as Commander of the French Army in Italy, he financed two newspapers directed largely at his troops, and used them as sounding boards:2 "All of you are consumed with a desire to extend the glory of the French people; all of you long to humiliate those arrogant kings who dare to contemplate placing us in fetters; all of you desire to dictate a glorious peace, one which will indemnify the Patrie [Fatherland] . . .; all of you wish to be able to say with pride as you return to your villages, 'I was with the victorious army of Italy!'"3 Realizing that war was not limited to the battlefield and that "four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets,"4 he extolled his own virtues and promised his troops to lead them "into the most fertile plains in the world. Rich provinces, great cities will be in your power. There you will find honor, glory and riches."5 Using his reputation as a general and his political alliances in Paris, he overthrew the Republic in 1799 and he became the dictator and then the Emperor of France, taking care to control the press at home and in all the countries that he subsequently conquered.
When Napoleon conquered Spain and put his own brother on the throne in 1808, he was probably unaware of existing multiracial democratic movements in Spain's Latin American colonies. The invasion of Spain launched three separate but interlocking democratic movements. In the absence of the King who had been forced to abdicate, former Spanish advisors, aristocrats, members of the military, and representatives from Spanish cities gathered to form a government of their own. In 1810, this ill-defined group joined by various representatives from Latin America organized a Cortes and began writing a liberal constitution that was completed in 1812. The constitution established a representative government, reformed the tax system, created a civil service, and, most importantly, established a free press and the ideal of equality before the law for themselves and their colonies.
Across the Atlantic and the Pacific, local Spanish officials continued to demand their right to rule Spain's colonies in Latin America and the Philippines. But even prior to the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, local landowners and merchants in Spanish America had been attempting to replace the Spanish authorities with their own governing committees or juntas, and indigenous people and those of African descent had attempted to secure more rights for themselves. Members of both groups argued that Bonaparte's seizure of power severed any remaining ties between Spain and its colonies. For example, in 1810, the Mexican priest Father Miguel Hidalgo joined indigenous people in the area surrounding the town of Dolores and called for outright independence from Spain and the abolition of slavery. Although Hidalgo was soon captured and executed in 1811 by the Spanish authorities, the struggle he began to wage continued. Another local Mexican priest, the Afro-Mestizo, Jose Maria Morelos, assumed Hidalgo's mantle and reiterated his call for the abolition of slavery, an end to racial and class distinctions, and free elections for all male citizens. Demanding the confiscation of property of all those who remained loyal to Spain, Morelos excoriated "the wealthy nobles and the employees of the ruling elite . . . who are the enemies of the nation and the adherents of tyranny."6 To turn the tide, he helped launch a constitutional congress in 1813 that created a constitution the following year. But Morelos's
In 1810 in the town of Dolores, Father Miguel Hidalgo calls for Mexico's independence from Spain, thus launching a wave of revolutions that by 1825 freed most of Spain's Latin American colonies. The painting by Juan O'Gorman, which hangs in Mexico City's National Historical Museum, shows Hidalgo leading indigenous people, peasant farmers, and many of Mexico's most prominent nineteenth-century political leaders all assembled under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mestiza Madonna. Although no one recorded Hidalgo's revolutionary proclamation on September 16, 1810, he is often quoted as saying, "Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to bad government!" The Granger Collection, New York
assassination in 1815 precluded the reforms he helped shape from coming to fruition. By midcentury, a liberal government headed by Benito Juarez was among the first governments to grant universal male suffrage, although for many years rigged elections robbed the franchise of its significance.
The final defeat of Napoleon by the combined forces of Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia and the re-imposition of a reactionary order through the Congress of Vienna in 1815 attempted to crush any democratic reforms that had been instituted since 1789. But even the repressive force unleashed by reactionaries led by the Russian Tsar Alexander I and the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire Prince Klemens von Metternich could not entirely crush the secret societies and revolutionary groups burrowing beneath the surface.
One of the unlikely sources of democratic ideals came from young Russian aristocratic veterans of the war against Napoleon. Many young Russian officers sent to enforce the tsar's reactionary policies became conscious of disparities between Western Europe and their homeland and embraced the democratic goals of the French and American revolutions. Pavel Pestel, who had been educated in Dresden, had been influenced by egalitarian goals that he identified with the French Revolution. In his study Russian Truth (Russkaya Pravda), Pestel argued for the abolition of feudalism and the end to the class system that sentenced serfs (feudal peasants) to be permanently tied to the land on which they were born. Instead, he wanted to abolish serfdom and nationalize the land so that the state could achieve "the greatest possible happiness of the greatest number."7 These rather schematic ideas became a preliminary program for the transformation of Russia that Pestel and several other radical officers attempted to put into action.
These young men set out to reform Russia along the lines of improvements they had seen in the West. The Northern Society, first organized in 1822 in St. Petersburg and Moscow under the leadership of Suroji Muraev, began plotting the overthrow of the Tsar and the establishment of freedom of the press and religion, the abolition of serfdom, an end to the draft, reform of the courts, and the creation of city, district, provincial, and regional governments that would be run by elected officials.8