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El Supuesto Memorial Del Conde de Aranda Sobre La Independencia de América

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3484474

1527-1900

Allan J. Kuethe,

History and Politics in Latin America

A manuscript copy of the famous but mysterious 1783 memorial attributed to the Conde de Aranda first appeared in 1825, sent by Rafael Morant, an official in the Ministry of the Overseas Treasury, to the Duque del Infantado, the minister of state. It appeared in published form two years later in Andrés Muriel's French translation of William Coxe's history of the Bourbon dynasty (the afrancesado Spanish cleric inserted it into chapter 3 of volume 6). Dated 1783 (but without month or day) from Madrid and addressed to the king, the memorial expressed apprehension about the recently signed Treaty of Paris and the danger posed by the United States, and it advocated for the establishment of a kind of Hispanic confederation, with Spanish infantes assuming thrones in Mexico, Peru, and Costa Firme and with the Spanish king becoming emperor. No original copy of the document has ever been located. Prominent historians such as Ricardo Levene, Alfonso García-Gallo, Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Demetrio Ramos, José Antonio Armillas, Antonio Ballesteros, and John Elliott, among others, have credited Aranda with lucid, farsighted vision in the face of the daunting challenges that the American Revolution unleashed, but both Richard Konetzke (in 1929) and Arthur P. Whitaker (in 1937, in this journal) labeled the document an outright forgery, directing suspicion at Manuel Godoy. Antonio Ferrer del Río had raised suspicions earlier (in 1855), while Ramón Ezquerra Abadía did so again in 1976. Others have simply maintained a prudent distance from the controversy. In the present volume, José Antonio Escudero shows that the skeptics had it right.Escudero established himself as the standing authority on the Spanish secretaries of the office (despacho universal) and their institutions through his publication in 1979 of Los orígines del Consejo de Ministros en España, and distinguished achievements followed. He is an académico de número of the Royal Academy of History and, significantly, the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation as well. In assessing the memorial's authenticity, he accents the historian's methodology with a lawyerly touch.Escudero begins with an exhaustive overview of the state of the question in the existing literature summarized above. With shrewd, painstaking criticism, he then addresses the question of authenticity. While it is impossible to describe here all the points that Escudero makes, several stand out. The memorial was dated 1783 and placed in Madrid, but Escudero shows that the triumphant Aranda, having negotiated the Treaty of Paris (signed on September 3, 1783), did not complete his arduous, 1,300-kilometer return to Madrid until December 28. Moreover, only four days beforehand, Aranda's wife had died, which, needless to say, complicated his arrival. Escudero simply does not believe that an exhausted, grieving Aranda could have penned the memorial before the end of the year.Further doubts arise from the memorial's inconsistency with Aranda's well-documented thinking at the time. Foremost is the proposal that he submitted to Minister of State Floridablanca, dated March 12, 1786, which differed radically in substance from the 1783 memorial, to which he indeed made no reference at all in the later proposal. That in December 1783 Aranda might have expressed “pain and fear” (dolor y temor) about the treaty that he had negotiated in Paris just months before and then, three years later, forget about those misgivings in a major policy statement does not, Escudero argues, appear credible, least of all for a magistrate like Aranda, known for his “obstinacy” (tozudez) and “constancy” (fijeza) (pp. 27, 110).Finally, no one mentioned the alleged Aranda memorial subsequently despite his political survival until 1794. It is implausible, Escudero argues, that a major policy statement on issues so vital to the monarchy and by a minister of Aranda's stature might simply disappear from view for over 40 years. The memorial had to be a forgery.The author then addresses the questions of who might have been the culprit and what his motivations might have been. After disposing of Konetzke's and Whitaker's suspicions about Godoy, he focuses upon the years when the alleged memorial appeared, between 1825 and 1827. Although no definitive answer appears possible, Escudero suggests through circumstantial evidence that the forgery occurred between 1824 and 1825 in the Paris conspiratorial circle of Muriel and the Duque de San Fernando. In the torturous politics at court following the loss of the American colonies, San Fernando, an exiled former political bigwig, hoped to regain the favor of Ferdinand VII at the expense of Charles IV's reputation. Indeed, Muriel stipulated that he had obtained the memorial from San Fernando's manuscript collection. Escudero also provides appropriate appendixes.José Antonio Escudero should be congratulated for an impressive, successful work that resolves much of the mystery about the alleged Aranda memorial. The analysis is thorough, illuminating, and persuasive. Apart from its obvious significance for scholars of the empire before and after the turn of the nineteenth century, the book would also make an excellent tool for teaching historical methodology.