INTRODUCTION

Until the 1970s, the 1812 Constitution of Cadiz (named after the city where it was drafted and approved) was considered a Spanish constitution for peninsular Span­iards. Conservative or decidedly anti-liberal Spanish academics concentrated on which of its elements reflected the charter’s unfortunate mimesis of foreign consti­tutions of the moment, in particular that of Revolutionary France.

Many historians, and more specifically legal historians, believe that the years between 1790 and the 1840s saw only shallow, short-range political and social changes.^[631] From the start, a clean break with the past was weighed down by the weakness of the emerging protoliberal factions and by the continued influence of eighteenth-century elites. It is of course true that the climate of consensus and unity generated by the patriotic struggle against the French occupation made it quite easy for the Church and the old dignitaries and magistrates to protect and represent themselves as part of the Nation’s body, irrespective of further ideological clarifica­tion. However, it was not only that. We know today the strength of belief in the Spanish nation’s Catholic nature, and of the public morality associated with it, which has been embedded (not without change) in Spanish public discourse since the eighteenth century.^[632] In this light, one should take seriously the argument that the old perceptions of how society should be ordered continued throughout and despite the constitutional period. From this point of view, the political moment that the Cortes embodied - at least discursively - led to a sticky transactional situation: an alliance between the traditional elites and the emerging factions that enabled both the continuity of the old jurisdictional culture and the subservience of the ide­als of citizenship and political rights to the reform of a Catholic nation as a whole, in which the monarchy would continue to be the ultimate arbiter.^[633]

Meanwhile, another group of Spanish scholars have defended - and defend to this day - the early, radical, and abrupt nature of the break with Old Regime institu­tions and practices. This profound radicalism came about when the reforms spon­sored by Charles IV and his prime minister, Manuel Godoy, were blocked by the alliance of conservative bureaucrats and vested interests.^[634] Both the French puppet government of Jose I, in which many reformist officials participated and those sec­tors that fought the Napoleonic invaders so as to preserve the old government and the empire had to face a third possibility, represented by patriotic advocates of radical reform in the name of something that contemporaries labeled “liberalism.”^[635] Once the French and their Spanish allies were defeated in 1814, the conflict be­tween those who wished to preserve old and royal institutions and those who cham­pioned liberal change became a long-lasting, on-and-off civil war that ended in a bloodbath in its final upsurge between the years 1837-1840 with the definitive de­feat of neo-absolutism and the victory of liberalism.

This text does not aim to clarify these various positions or mediate between them. Rather, I wish to consider the Constitution of Cadiz in all its dimensions, as a constitutional framework for an empire with territories on four continents. I want to provide new insights to help us resolve the fundamental question of how continuity and change were inscribed in the legal and political cultures of the time.^[638] Within this ample topic I will focus more specifically on the meanings of citizenship as developed first in the constitutional debates and then in the fundamental law as such.

Like all basic written legal documents of the revolutionary period, the Cadiz Constitution granted citizenship according to certain rules. Unlike the French lib­eral and monarchical Constitution of 1791, with its crucial distinction between pas­sive and active citizenship, citizenship was �universally’ granted to all Spaniards in the Cadiz charter. Nonetheless, the �universal’ citizenship granted then was also strongly qualified. Some social sectors of the so-called Spanish nation - all males under twenty-five, castas pardas (free blacks and mulattos) in America, and all women - were excluded from citizenship.

Of the rest of the Spanish nationals, Chapter III specified that only avecinda- dos, that is, males already settled in cities and towns as listed in the parish censuses, would be allowed to vote in general and municipal elections.^[639] This requirement excluded recent newcomers and people with no known residence, as a way of em­phasizing the extant power of established local elites. But, as the speaker of the Constitutional committee Agustin de Arguelles clarified during the debates on ex­clusions, the meaning and depth of �citizenship’ upheld by the fundamental law should not be confused with the older idea of vecino. A vecino was a person estab­lished and accepted as part of a municipal community through and thanks to popu­lar scrutiny. Instead, the new �citizen’ was an �elector,’ a man who participated in the making of the laws and the direction of his government alongside his fellows. Once they were declared citizens, electors would choose candidates in indirect four-tiered elections. This hierarchical framework was meant to guarantee, at least in principle, the selection of candidates of social relevance.

Even with all these considerations, the revolutionary character of the universal citizenship granted by the Constitution must be underlined. For the first time and in one stroke, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards in the peninsula and across the em­pire were called to vote and participate in the political process, at both the local and national levels. With the constitutional prescriptions taken literally, laboring classes and Indians were enfranchised all over the vast geography of the empire, from the Spanish-French border to Santiago de Chile, northern New Spain and the Philippine Islands.^[640] “The gathering of all Spaniards of both hemispheres” can be considered, in this light, as the most extraordinary experiment in political representation at the time, despite the manifest exclusion of castas pardas.

Even with the restrictive mechanisms already mentioned, the constitution’s (limited) “universal” citizenship could lead to unintended consequences for politi­cal stability, at least from the perspective of Spanish liberals. These reservations were openly expressed in the charter through the establishment of indirect and py­ramidal elections at four levels. The same reservations may have led to the literacy requirement set for all male adults starting on the twenty fifth year after the Consti­tution’s approval, although the measure is sometimes considered evidence of the Liberals’ desire to implement mass literacy. But the most telling limitation (besides the obvious but self-explanatory exclusion of women) was the exclusion of the so- called castas pardas from citizenship.^[642] In the Spanish terminology and social classification of the time, castas pardas referred specifically to those who had Afri­can slave ancestry, regardless of how remote this might be. This was no small mat­ter, not only because it involved many men who held high positions in colonial government and in local society, but because it seriously diminished the number of adult males in many American censuses, and, therefore, the number of representa­tives to be sent from these overseas territories to the Cortes. As Spanish nationals, however, individual members of castas pardas retained the chance of being awarded citizenship as individuals or as members of certain groups in reward for their mer­its. The constitutional commission’s insistence on this exclusion - which it needed to explain as something more profound than stupidity or racism - dramatically damaged the credibility of the Cortes and its proposals for imperial reform. Despite its revolutionary character vis-a-vis the European old regime, the constitution pro­duced by the Cortes of 1812 fell short of what the “Spaniards” in the overseas ter­ritories had envisioned.

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