This section of the Canon and Atlas project mapping the republican tradition contain essays on Cattaneo and the federal republic, the Roman republic of 1849, and the Spanish republics of 1873 and 1931, Greece 1821 as a republican problem (not only a Philhellene romance), and segway into the section on Iberia and Latin America Bolívar’s 1815 Jamaica letter, his dream of a continental republic, the Cádiz constitution of 1812, Mexico’s republican rift, Martí and the Cuban republic in arms, among other neglected histories.
THE CONSTITUTION OF CÁDIZ 1812 DECLARED THAT SOVEREINGNTY resides essentially in the Spanish nation and that the nation comprises the Spaniards of both hemispheres. It established a dominant Cortes, ministerial responsibility, and limited monarchy, and it was sworn in American cities before Ferdinand VII revoked it. American deputies who sat at Cádiz carried the language of national sovereignty home. Many of the first republican constitutions in Spanish America reproduced its declarations and its representative structure (Constitution of Cádiz, 1812). Bolívar’s Jamaica Letter of 6 September 1815, written after the collapse of the first patriot republics, rejected the simple transfer of any European model. Spanish America’s distances, castes, and lack of civic habits required adapted institutions. For New Granada he sketched a government with a hereditary senate and a president for life. The letter combines a continental vision with explicit doubt about the immediate capacity of American societies to sustain pure republican forms (Bolívar, Jamaica Letter, 6 September 1815).
Cattaneo’s quarrel with Mazzini after 1848 turned on the same problem of scale and unity. Mazzini insisted that only a unitary republic animated by a common national faith could expel Austria and overcome local rivalries. Cattaneo answered that a unitary state would merely replace one center of arbitrary power with another. Italian liberty had always been municipal and regional. Only a federation of republics, a United States of Italy, could preserve those liberties while providing common defense. He cited the United States and Switzerland as working proofs (Cattaneo, Writings and Letters, 1848-1850s). The three texts therefore form a single revolutionary lineage. Cádiz supplied the Atlantic language of national sovereignty, Bolívar tested that language against American conditions and found it insufficient without adaptation, and Cattaneo tested the Mazzinian demand for unity against Italian conditions and found it incompatible with historic liberties. In each case the revolution is filed by the regime it tried to found, not by a shared atmosphere.
The revolutions will be filed by the regimes they tried to found rather than by the networks that prepared them. Mazzini’s unitary republic, animated by a national civil religion and directed against both local fragmentation and foreign rule, is one such attempt. Bolívar’s Jamaica Letter weighs the obstacles of geography, caste, and absent civic habits and sketches governments that may need life presidents or hereditary elements if they are to endure. The Cádiz constitution of 1812 declares national sovereignty for Spaniards of both hemispheres and supplies the representative forms that American deputies later adapted or rejected. The revolutions of 1848 and the Roman Republic of 1849 test whether Mazzinian or liberal republican institutions can be established against existing monarchies and the papacy. In each case the relevant document is the constitution, the proclamation, or the letter that states what kind of public thing is being founded.
Networks such as the Carbonari and the Filiki Eteria remain important as organization. They recruited, transmitted programs, and coordinated risings. They are the practical means by which small groups attempted to bring a new regime into existence. This history therefore contains both the founding documents and the associative forms that carried them. What it does not contain is a single revolutionary spirit that can be detached from the particular constitutions that were proposed or briefly enacted. The differences between a federal design, a unitary national republic, and a constitutional monarchy that preserves representation are differences of regime. They are the proper principle of classification.
