Faculty and Staff
Peru in Revolution: The Civil War of 1894-95 and the Formation of Peru's Modern Political Culture
A Brief Project Description
Nils Jacobsen
Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
March 1999
Purpose and Major Interpretive Lines of the Project
With this project I hope to contribute to a reevaluation of the meaning of revolution in Latin American history, and of Peru's modern political culture. WhiIe most scholars recognize this revolution as an important turning point in Peruvian history, no study on it exists. More broadly, very few studies exist that look at process rather than outcome for violent revolutionary events in nineteenth century Latin America.
I contend that a rigid distinction between social and political revolutions has distorted the nature of change in Latin America's post-colonial polities. The "political" revolutions of the nineteenth century have conventionally been portrayed as mere power struggles between various elite sectors, with little or no lasting consequences. Yet recent literatures on hegemony, discourse analysis, the public sphere and civil society have considerably extended our notions of political agency, and of the processes of nation-state formation. I hope to show that the Peruvian revolution of 1895 is paradigmatic for many Latin American post-colonial revolutions in combining elite conflicts with popular mobilization. Rather than creating a clean slate, they brought about change through an updating or "regeneration" of older notions of the polity in which cyclical and linear notions combined. The extent of political participation, and the relationship between civil society and the state have undergone frequent changes in Latin America precisely through hybrid and contradictory revolutions as that of Peru in 1895. For Peru's modern political culture, I contend, the revolution lead to limited elite consensus necessary for strengthening the state, and to the inclusion of large minorities of lower middle class citizens.
The revolution came at the end of the twenty year period marking Peru's most profound political, economic and social crisis (1876-1895). It was brought on by the collapse of the country's export economy, the devastating defeat, and territorial loss in the War of the Pacific against Chile (1879-83), and the effects of considerable modernization in transportation, civil society and education after 1850. Initially, partisan politicians set the revolution in motion as just another struggle over presidential succession, but soon it spread to achieve the widest grass roots insurgency in the history of the republic to date. A broad range of routinized conflicts and modes of public behavior coalesced to ignite a common revolutionary movement mobilized by the charismatic Nicolás de Piérola, a conservative populist party leader, who temporarily united various social, ethnic and regional groups against a government now seen as tyrannical. Tens of thousands of men and many women took up arms, contributed supplies, transported arms and ammunition and aided and abetted montoneras [irregular forces]. They did so for many distinct reasons: some were recruited vertically by their bosses, some joined family members, a political or civic club, or local community leaders in taking up arms. They fought for diverse causes: local autonomy, rejection of certain taxes, conflicts over land, disgust with the anticlericalism of the government, revenge for grievances inflicted by the government party, and hope for attaining power and office in a new regime. Yet in the revolution all these particularistic local goals were subsumed in a common desire to make the nation strong and honorable again after the trauma of impoverishment, defeat and chaos of the preceding decades, and to achieve effective representation in a regenerated republic. I thus contend that the process of the revolution and its transformative potential can only be understood as the outcome of both the real modernization of civil society and the catastrophic breakdown that had gone before. This created the amalgam of discourses and practices that incorporated long-standing local traditions into a movement for a modernized, more effective nation-state.
The State of the Literature
Two broad strands of writing currently shape the depiction of political cultures in Latin America: 1) hegemony analysis associated with subaltern post-colonial studies and focusing on the issue of power (Mallon, Thurner); 2) analyses of discourses, political institutions, public spheres and civil societies (Guerra, Demelas). Although some authors engage several of these strands (Mücke), these literatures communicate little with each other, because they focus respectively on what might be called the dark and the light sides of modernity: Mallon and many writing from the subaltern studies perspectives have depicted post-colonial nation-state formation as the struggle over building alliances in order to achieve hegemonic power. They stress the importance of all social and ethnic groups in this process. As the modern nation-states consolidate, subaltern groups suffer repression, and attacks on their own "counter-hegemonic" projects. In short, this vision, influenced by Marx, Gramsci and Foucault, sees the rising nation-state as blocking the broader projects of subaltern groups. François Xavier Guerra, in contrast, seeks to show the strong impact of the French and North American enlightened revolutions on Latin America, creating, since the struggles for independence, a modern politics hampered and compromised by social structures that remained "traditonal" for long.
Guided in part by the ideas of Anthony Giddens, my work on the Peruvian revolution of 1895 seeks to combine these perspectives on the dark and light sides of modern nation-state formation. I will argue that the processes of mobilization for and prosecuting of the revolution, as well as the multiple visions of its goals, served both as a means to discipline large groups of the citizens and to "emancipate" them or effectively include them in the public arena. The most accomplished modern author on Latin American revolutions, Alan Knight, has demonstrated such a pragmatic processual approach in his exemplary work on the Mexican Revolution of 1910, combining close attention to varying regional socio-economic structures and to the contingent effects of the agency and discourse of multifarious groups.
The revolution of 1895 has been controversial in the historiography from the outset. The social critic Manuel Gonzales Prada (1985 [1898]) argued that the revolution and Pierola's subsequent presidency established a political clique that worked for the enrichment of the capital's plutocracy and merely solidified everything that was abhorrent in Peru's political tradition. Similarly, dependentista social scientists during the 1970s claimed that Piérola's economic and state-building policies helped to consolidate the emerging bourgeoisie's control over the state (Cotler). Florencia Mallon (1983, 1995) argues that the revolution gave rise to a broad coalition of elite groups, acknowledges Piérola's project of broad-based national development and his support among large popular sectors, but believes that his project failed due to strong peasant resistance, ending in repression of the indigenous majorities. In contrast, Jorge Basadre (1983), Peru's foremost modern historian, saw the revolution inscribed in the repeated struggle of the Peruvian people to conquer their own state from those who had come to rule against the nation. But Piérola's post-revolutionary regime did not fulfill its promise to favor broad subaltern strata.
I argue that most of these accounts underestimate the effects of popular mobilization on the longer-term transformations of Peru's political culture and demonstrate an inadequate understanding of the relationship between the state, dominant elites and broader civil society.
Methods and State of the Project
This study will combine a careful analysis of political, economic, social and cultural structures and conflicts in the decade before the revolution with a minute account of different actors' ideas and pronouncements, their actions to organize and fight in the montoneras, and of the outcome of the revolution in terms of civil society mobilization and contests over policies. I will focus on several regions of Peru where fighting was intense (Arequipa in the south, Piura in the north, and the coastal region between Cañete and Chincha/Pisco in the near south). For these regions I will analyze social and economic change, forms of political organization and mobilization. I will then demonstrate how the mobilization for the civil war, the formation of montoneras, and the forms of violence employed by both sides during the civil war, applied institutions, practices and norms previously developed during decades of modernization and cataclysmic crisis. The study will juxtapose this regional, grass roots emphasis with a discussion of política criolla, the juggling for power between various groups of upper and middle class politicians on the national level that reached out to the provinces (and "down" to the "people") fur support in the crisis over presidential succession. To connect the national level political struggle with the local level I will investigate three themes unifying the multifarious revolutionary forces: The call for effective, honest elections, the heightened and socially broadened appeal of nationalism (in various guises), and the concern a secularized society and an anti-clerical state. In one chapter I will analyze "public opinion:" the arenas -- from gossip and associational activity to newspapers, broad sheets, and national and international cable services -- in which different groups contested the dominant political ideas.
The research for this study is about 85 - 90 percent completed. Since 1992 I have spent more than six months of intensive work in Peruvian archives and libraries. I have worked with the holdings of the libraries of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Columbia University, Yale University, as well as with the British diplomatic correspondence housed in the Public Record Office in London. In Peru I have worked in the Archivo General de la Nación, the Biblioteca Nacional, and smaller collections in Lima, as well as in regional archives and libraries in Piura and Arequipa. The major groups of primary sources on which this study is based are the administrative and military correspondence between Lima and local authorities, the Piérola archive and other correspondence between the revolutionaries, court records for the regional case studies, newspapers, periodicals and fliers, diplomatic correspondence, and other contemporary publication, from pamphlets to collections of popular song and verse. In the summer of 1999 I shall return to Peru to wrap up my research with the Piérola archive and in the Archivo Histórico Militar in Lima.
I have already written a first draft of the introductory chapter, a paper on economic policies and ideas in Peru during the 1880s-90s, another long paper on "The Meaning of Revolutions in Latin American History, "and most of a very long paper on the montoneras in Piura between the 1860s and 1890s. I will include parts of these papers in several chapters.