CONCLUSIONS
The first conclusion that this interpretation of the Cadiz Constitution suggests is a general historical warning that is often repeated, and just as often ignored: the importance of the context in which the text was created, and the context in which its creators sought to apply it.
Let us recall that things would have been quite different if the Cortes had not wished to consider the entire empire, from the Pyrenees to Chile and the Philippines, constitutive of the Spanish nation. Spaniards were not the first to enter into a dynamic like this or to discuss the ability of Indians and descendants of slaves to become citizens, as the radical Alvaro Florez Estrada wrongly asserted in an important contribution.[680] The French revolutionaries were pushed in that direction by the events that unfolded on the country’s sugar islands. For both Spain and France, the issues both of citizenship and the delimitation of the nation’s political space proved to be crucial. For both, the unexpected forced them to negotiate political equality with people who until then were unequal because of their birthplace (outside the metropole or its European territories), because of their nonEuropean ancestry, or because of their personal status as chattel labor. This is the paradox of constitutional modernity, whose starting point was not the classical works of possessive individualism or the social contract, but rather the forced application of the mandate of equality in order to remake the unity of imperial political spaces. (It is here that the precise homology and also the radical distance of the eighteenth century revolutions in citizenship in relation to the Antonine Constitution are made clear.) This transformation of political culture took multiple forms, and each had its particularities. In each of the above-mentioned contexts, the forms and paths taken depended in the last instance on which political coalition managed to triumph.For obvious reasons, political equality led to situations that were very difficult to control from the top. Contemporary Europeans found it hard to accept that people “contaminated” by life beyond the frontiers of true civilization, people who lived in less “complex” and enlightened societies than theirs, some bearing the stigma or stain of slavery, could not only partake in the political process but impose their will upon their betters.[681] Imperial constitutions took shape in the context of the colonial reality of monarchical empires, but the ideological principle of political equality that underlay them was very difficult for the surviving social and political institutions of the old regime to digest, and many of these institutions would not emerge unscathed, with political inequality reduced to a sort of blot from the past. The most important of these blemishes, slavery, disappeared in parts of the Atlantic world (in the thirteen colonies, the French Antilles, and independent Spanish America), though it would rise from its own ashes and survive a few more decades in some areas in what has been named the “second slavery.”[682] The crisis of Old Regime monarchies led to the liberal revolutions, but it could not lead directly to fundamental systemic reforms nor alter the right of property sacred to the American “pursuit of happiness,” even if the property in question were human beings.[683]
One final observation: the fragility of imperial constitutions was clear to everyone. The way out was shown by France and the United States, almost simultaneously, though in different ways. Instead of imposing one identical constitutional framework on everyone within their jurisdiction, they separated out constitutional and institutional dynamics for the nation and for the empire. In short, they built what are known as dual constitutions, with political representation and equality for the metropolitans and “special laws” to regulate social and political life in the colonies.
This is one of the great Napoleonic contributions to nineteenth-century colonialism, which can be seen most clearly in the French Constitution of the Year VIII (1799), a truly colonial text. The division of political space into two was behind the shameful reestablishment of slavery in the French colonies in May 1802, but its consequences went beyond this immediate effect, especially the idea of the “special” colonial situation.[684] But the message of potential equality among different peoples and continents had spread throughout the world, a mirror image in negative of the reality of living under special regimes.This paper does not mean to posit an alternative to current ideas about the transformation of languages and political culture in this era. It is simply a reminder that political conflict and the social bases of that conflict sometimes bring about political changes that go beyond people’s initial intentions. One only has to look at the constitutional processes in Cadiz and Messina under British supervision - Arthur and Henry Wellesley and William Bentinck, respectively, all trained as proconsuls of war and British imperial politics in the Indian subcontinent - to immediately see the contextual differences.[685] In Sicily there were heated debates about dissolving the three Old Regime estates into a bicameral system, while in Cadiz a similarly heated debate took place regarding who would enjoy full political rights in the Iberian Peninsula, the Caribbean, and the Andes. No matter the results, the difference was crucial.