A FAMILY OF IMPERIAL CONSTITUTIONS
The Constitution of Cadiz is part of a family of liberal charters that I have elsewhere referred to as “imperial constitutions.”[643] They formed a specific subcategory among the broader group of written constitutions of the time, although the variations and differences in their articulation were many and substantial.[644] Broadly speaking, the imperial constitutions - as opposed to the dual or colonial constitutions - were conceived to encompass eighteenth-century dynastic monarchic states as a whole, not just their metropolitan centers.
Therefore, these constitutional texts cannot be conceived of outside the constant negotiation between the ruling classes of the metropolis and those of its overseas possessions. Furthermore, imperial constitutions were in most cases last-ditch and desperate attempts to keep empires alive, their territories reunited around the metropolitan center and its institutions.The case of Spain clearly followed this trend, and its first liberal constitution, that of March 1812, can be better understood as an able response to the threat of the empire’s dismemberment amid Napoleon’s clear wish to stir the troubled and dissident American waters, made manifest in Bayonne in July 1808. Under the dramatic circumstances of war in peninsular Spain and of discontent and political instability in America, peninsular liberals had to present an inclusive and egalitarian framework for all Spaniards, as proclaimed by the Junta Central in October of 1810, in order to make the continuation of Spanish sovereignty attractive to colonial subjects.[645] In this sense, the Cadiz experiment should be considered the greatest political body assembled by any European country in the revolutionary period, ranging, as it did, from the French border in the Pyrenees to present day Mexico, Chile and the Philippines.
But beyond the question of opportunity, the political character of the Cadiz Constitution is much more complex, given that it relied on the intersection of a foundational political discourse and an ambiguous accommodation of the realities of the time.A new ideological ferment took center stage in the political debate in the endless conflicts between European states and the inhabitants of imperial territories. This new factor, laden with revolutionary significance, was the idea of political representation, which introduced three key elements into the revolutionary cycle between 1780 and 1830. The first was the centrality of the category itself, which expelled forever the partial, disparate and cumulative claims of the ancien regime, even in the case of a constitutional monarchy such as Britain. The corrosive nature of representation became clear with the absolute end of so-called “virtual representation,” the only formula that the Westminster system offered to colonials during the crisis following the Seven Years’ War. For decades, virtual representation permitted partial claims to be channeled, but it was by definition not conducive to full rights. Furthermore, the specific logic of delegated and partial claims in the colonial framework strengthened the hierarchical relationship with the metropolis, which itself was in crisis as a result of wars and the increasing demands of the fiscal-military state.[646] The same distrust of old formulas could be heard in the debates in the French Estates General, in the Spanish Council of Regency, and in Portugal’s Cortes of 1820. For better or for worse, the inhabitants of the empire were only interested in equal representation, irrespective of their different institutional traditions and legal cultures.
The second element was the inevitable question of who should represent the whole, the indivisible sovereignty, the very subject of the new political order.[647] The intersection of both plural representation and single sovereignty led directly to the question of national sovereignty, and that is the third element, which transmuted the moment of representation to the mystical community of the nation, the amalgamation of citizens’ will in one entire whole. The circle closed here.
If the space of the nation was not the same as that of the empire (as the French constitution of 1791 vainly intended with Article 8, Title VII), they proved very difficult to separate during the revolutionary crises in the Atlantic world. Thus the formation of one transoceanic space, national and imperial at the same time, meant that the problems associated with the idea of representation and the definition of a new political subject were placed at the heart of the imperial interplay between political demands and the very idea of rights. This poisoned logic, which those in the metropolis accepted as necessary compensation for the integrity of their empires, gave an extraordinary dynamism to the transformation of political cultures in the European metropolis and colonial worlds as a whole. It is no coincidence that inhabitants of both realities shared one political framework, the rights and equal representation that were the bases of the imperial constitutions.So which of the constitutions of this period were imperial constitutions? In principle, they were the 1787 Constitution of the United States, the French Constitution of 1793 or Montagnard Constitution (which, suspended during the Terror, provided the framework for the emancipation of slaves in the French empire in 1794, known as the “general constitutionalization of liberty”), the moderate French constitution of 1795, the Spanish Constitution of 1812, and the Portuguese Constitution of 1822. All invoked the articulation of a single unitary space as the geographic locus of national sovereignty. All, for the same reason, denied particular rights to old historical entities or colonies. Robespierre’s famous words - “Perissent les coloniesplutot qu'enprincipe” - refer to the uncompromising defense of the unitary nature of the Republic and not, as some believe, to the continuity of slavery in the French colonies.
The constitutions I have named imperial were in no way the only modality of constitutional design during these years.
The French monarchical constitution of 1791, the unwritten British constitution and the Jacobin constitution of the Batavian Republic of 1795, were not imperial because they were not formally applied to the Antillean or Asian colonies of the states that approved them. Those charters maintained the dual formula of a representative framework valid for metropolitan residents but not for those in the rest of the imperial domain. In these examples, especially the British case, the improved political status of the empire’s inhabitants (such as local assemblies and representation, as in the two Canadas) in no way threatened the supremacy and territorial composition of the metropolitan parliament, which never agreed to assume the form of an imperial parliament where colonial parliamentarians could opine and vote. In the realm of the vaunted British flexibility, colonials were allowed to maneuver only in the darkness of parliamentary procedures, as members of lobbies such as the ones composed by Caribbean planters and Indian nabobs.[648]Meanwhile, imperial constitutions were involved in that most complex and difficult of operations, the definition and organization of a common framework for different societies and groups. The extraordinary similarity and dimensions of the debates between French colonials and the metropolis and their Iberian counterparts were from the start limited by the reality of a system of sole representation, which rejected differences in rights and in the quality of representation. It was also limited by the enormous dimensions and social heterogeneity of the territories, which complicated the establishment of parliamentary majorities to an extraordinary degree. So, the underlying idea of ?citizenship’ became the most heated matter to define, the factor that could tip the scales of political power. Moreover, by definition, a common framework made conflicts visible and urgent.
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