José Antonio Aguilar Rivera
Professor of Political Studies
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
(CIDE)
Mexico City
[print edition page xxxii]
[print edition page 1]
| 1 | The Founding and Early Constitutional Experiments: 1821–1840 |
[print edition page 2]
[print edition page 3]
| JOSÉ MARÍA LUIS MORA |
José María Luis Mora (1794–1850), the leading liberal thinker during the first federal republic (1824–53), was ordained as a priest and received a degree in theology. Later he studied law and became a lawyer. He was a member of the provincial deputation of Mexico and later was elected as a deputy to the constituent congress of the state of Mexico. He participated in the making of the state constitution and in the drafting of important laws.
Mora edited and published essays in newspapers such as Semanario Político y Literario, El Indicador, and El Observador de la República Mexicana. He played an important role as an adviser during the brief Gómez Farías administration (1833–34) when the government put in place the first reform policies against the privileges of the Catholic Church.
The essays gathered here were published as unsigned newspaper articles between 1821 and 1830. While Mora’s positions were very close to those of Benjamin Constant at the beginning of his career, he later realized that fighting the privileges of the Church and the military required an active government. Two of the essays, “Discourse on Public Opinion and the General Will” (Discurso sobre la opinión pública y voluntad general) and “Discourse on the Nature of Factions” (Discurso sobre los carácteres de las facciones), have been attributed to the Spaniard Alberto Lista because they had appeared earlier in the Spanish daily Lista edited, El Espectador Sevillano. However, we decided to include the essays because they received prominent placement in El Observador, of which Mora was the editor and the arbiter as to what to include and where. Clearly, Mora believed the essays expressed important ideas with which he agreed and of which his readers should be aware. That is, he gave the essays his imprimatur, even to the point of allowing readers to assume that the essays expressed his own views, inasmuch as he did not
[print edition page 4]
attribute them to someone else or otherwise suggest that they were not his or that he disagreed with them. Furthermore, the views that the essays express are integral to Mora’s overall argument on factions and on the proper conception of how public political and social opinion is to be formed and brought to action.
We present nine newspaper articles written between 1821 and 1827.
[print edition page 5]
| 1 | Discourse on the Independence of the Mexican Empire * |
The custom among civilized peoples, in making some substantial change to their government, has been to reveal and clarify before all other nations the reasons that justify those changes. Inasmuch as such change cannot be limited to the internal effects that constitutional alterations produce in a state, and inasmuch as such change is necessarily very important to foreign societies because of the established relationships that unite the peoples of the world and have more or less influence on their prosperity or decline, the right of self-preservation indisputably authorizes those other societies to inform themselves of the motives that drove their neighbors to establish the new constitution and also to remove the obstacles that the constitution might pose to their just aspirations.
The Mexican Empire, upon entering into the enjoyment of the rights that fall to it as an independent nation, could not feign ignorance of an obligation or consideration so important. It therefore endeavored to make clear to the world, through explanations and public declarations, the justifications that supported it in requesting and effecting its independence from the Spanish monarchy. To this end, its deputies have pursued independence with firmness and persistence in the cortes of Madrid, its writers have defended it in Mexico against the charge of treason and rebellion, and its soldiers have contended for it on the battlefield with arms in hand. But despite not having been able to give a solid and satisfactory response to the arguments that justify independence, despite having now proven itself by the force of arms, a necessary effect of the extent and rapidity with which the opinion that favors independence has spread, many consider that independence unjust and unlawful. Even the legislators of the [Iberian] Peninsula, those illustrious
[print edition page 6]
patriots who have known how to liberate their own country from the yoke that oppressed them, refusing to recognize the principles sanctioned in their Constitution and openly proclaimed to the world, cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that laws deduced immediately from those principles have their effective fulfillment on the American continent, which urgently demands they be observed.
Those heroes who have justly been admired by the nations of Europe for the great services they have rendered the cause of liberty; those wise men who have laid out the road and smoothed the path that leads to independence; those patriots, we repeat, are the ones who must be accused of inconsistency, because loving the cause, they detest and abominate the result; because establishing a principle, they reject its consequences; finally, because proclaiming liberty in their country with the greatest firmness, they sustain the slavery of Mexico with the same tenacity.
Indeed, without looking beyond the Spanish Constitution and without outside assistance from the works of the most celebrated writers on public law, the Constitution itself supplies us with enough to justify the independence of our empire. The Constitution firmly establishes, as an indisputable principle and as base of the entire constitutional system, the essential inalienable sovereignty of the nation, and the laws of that code proclaim and recognize this doctrine in the most legitimate way. Through those laws comes recognition of the incontestable right that all peoples have to establish the government most suitable to them, alter it, modify it, and abolish it completely when their happiness requires it. Through the Constitution, finally, comes the recognition that in the people of the nation lies the authority to dictate the fundamental laws that ought to rule the nation, to create magistrates that apply those laws to particular cases, settling the disputes that can originate in the opposing nature of interests and organizing a public force that makes effective the observance of the laws and the enforcement of judicial sentences. The consolidation of all these powers results in that supreme authority that exists in societies and that we know by the name of sovereignty. If, then, sovereignty, in those stated terms, is an essential and inherent power of all societies, how can it be denied to this totality of individuals that make up what we call the Mexican Empire? If the legislators of the Peninsula wish to act according to their principles, they will have to do one of two things: either acknowledge the right that helped
[print edition page 7]
us to effect independence, or deny that we have the capacity to create a strong government that can sustain that independence against external invasions, to enter into political and trade relations with external powers, and to combine those individual interests with the public interest in such a way that internal upheavals, the germ and origin of civil war and anarchy, are avoided. In a word, they will have to deny that our people can and should be understood in the sense that one ascribes to this word “society.”