THE BURDEN OF EQUALITY

Both the French in 1792 and the Spanish in 1810 used equality in their constitutions as a means to protect the integrity of their monarchical empires. There were, of course, other choices out there.

Discussions over the cultural definition of the new political subject - identified as a citizen (an elusive concept in the long run, as Daniele Lochak reminds us) - were similarly sharp and urgent. U. S. and French debates on the census are em­blematic in this regard, as was the exclusion of mixed-blood people with African ancestries, the castas pardas.^[650] From the start, the unitary nature of representation made parliamentary majorities critical. As a result, the request for or denial of vot­ing rights for some groups and their active participation in institutional politics be­came a key matter, the result of “the cascading logic" of universal rights, in Lynn Hunt’s words.^[651] Choices are never by chance, and each had its own story. At one time or another, women, minors, felons, aliens, transhumant groups or individuals, religious minorities, slaves and slaves’ descendants were all excluded. Slaves and the descendants of slaves were here the chief problem. Unlike women, children, or servants, slaves were in no way subjects that could or should have their will dele­gated to their owners, given that they had no shared interests. That was the key to Mirabeau’s position in the debate concerning the French overseas census, and to Jefferson being called the “Negro President” after his electoral victory in 1800, in which three-fifths of the slave population was been included in the electoral cen­suses (what was called the Federal ratio or 3/5 compromise).^[652] In metropolitan Spain castas pardas were not considered citizens because, given the unity of repre­sentation, the imperative to build a peninsular majority demanded it. Liberal creoles of European origin were in fact the real target of that risky, and ultimately fatal, exclusion, for castas pardas in their districts would not be counted for apportioning representatives. The spurious step of excluding free people with African blood in their veins institutionally inscribed them with the stigma of slavery, pushing them closer to slaves than to their fellow free citizens.^[653] This programmatic violence is the measure of the distance between the equality invoked in the Constitution and the debates leading up to it and the necessities of crude politics.

boundaries on political debate until 1799, with Saint-Domingue in the background and the spectacle of a miniature France of former slaves with the right to political representation in Paris.^[654] The French historian Florence Gauthier has rightly called the events in France the triumph and death of natural law.^[655]

Debates over unity and federalism and the universality of citizenship shared the dynamism inherent in the audacious attempt to build one space for political repre­sentation. Legislation to reform the Old Regime could only be imposed if its legiti­macy was unquestionable. That explains the powerful unitary will of French Re­publicans as well as the first generation of Spanish and Portuguese liberals. In the Spanish case, complexity and difficulty were added because Spanish liberals were supposed to be ruling on behalf of the King “in exile,” but he in no way supported or consented to their policies. If imperial constitutions triumphed thanks to the mandate of equality and the serious challenges of international reaction and civil wars (the Vendee in western France, the slaveholding colonists and the British in­truders in the Antilles, secessionist Americans and royalists in Spain), it is easy to see why equality and political unity were combined into one whole. It is also easy to see how this explosive combination would have long-term consequences in the two empires. French Republicanism and genuine Spanish liberalism were not born as perfect and coherent units. Instead, both of them grew out of a political cycle that pushed events in a certain direction, with well-known consequences in the mean­time.

4.