Conservative, Traditionalists, and Reactionaries: The Mexican Reception of European Anti-liberal Thought, 1821–67

The dynamics of independence in America can lead to invert the label of revolutionary or counter-revolutionary of historical actors depending on how and when revolution is defined. Same applies to the American opinion about early Spanish liberalism, as proved, for example, by the changes of political loyalties during the Independence Age. Generally speaking, in order to avoid being considered as defenders of the Ancien Régime or nostalgic of the colonial past, the true meaning of these two notions was at the core of the reception of European conservatism in Iberian-America.

This paper will be focused on the reception of the anti-liberal and traditionalist European thought in Mexico from 1808 up to 1867. I will illustrate the existence of a specific modulation of the most conservative political theories that needed to tackle certain fundamental limits within the narrative of a nascent national identity in order to be regarded as legitimate. At the same time, some continuities between both sides of the Atlantic and the persistence of old issues can be observed, in special, those that affect the Church properties, the pope supremacy or the Royal Patronage. The nation-building process of the Mexican state and its most relevant debates, such as monarchy or republic, centralist or federal State, are decisively influenced by the difficulty in defining both the role and rights of the Church in the new legal, political and social realities emerged after the Independence. Despite these, the polemic was deeply rooted in eighteenth-cenury Bourbon reformism, its regalist policies and subsequent controversies. In the post-Independence settlement, the corporations’ defence of privileges should be made compatible with the new values of the constitutional nation, which set a specific attitude regarding liberalism.