Tuesday, May 19, 2015

José Pablo Feinmann on Mariano Moreno and the Revolución de Mayo of Argentina

This is Chapter 2 of the third season of Argentine philosopher José Pablo Feinmann's public TV series Filosofía aquí y ahora, "T3 CAP 2. El Plan de Operaciones," Encuentro n/d YouTube 02/07/2013, which continues with his discussion of the Revolucion de Mayo of 1810 and its chief leader Mariano Moreno.



The Plan of Operations (Plan revolucionario de operaciones) was a document by Moreno, laying out a plan for constructing an indepedent Argentina, heavily influenced by French Jacobin theorists Robespierre and Saint-Just.

Feinmann argues that Moreno's Plan didn't have a people, a public, that was large enough and so constituted that it could act as a genuine revolutionary subject in the sense that the French Revolution had experienced.

Not to put to fine a point on it, Buenos Aires, where Moreno and his fellow revolutionary leaders Cornelio de Saavedra and Manuel Belgrano, was a small city in a backwater section of the Spanish Empire.

What we now know as Argentina was the largest part of the Virreinato [Viceroyalty] del Río de la Plata, established by Spain in 1776. This graphic from Wikimedia Commons shows the territory it included:


The Revolución de Mayo ended the rule of the last Viceroy of Spain, Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros, though Francisco Javier de Elío formerly held the title 1810-12, though he had no effective control in most of his nominal territory. The Revolución de Mayo established the independence of Buenos Aires.

The Virreinato del Río de la Plata was formerly abolished in the Congress of Tucumán of 1816, which declared the independence of the Provincias Unidas [United Provinces] del Río de la Plata

Feinmann here groups participants in a revolution into three groups: enthusiasts, enemies and spectators and discusses Moreno's approach to each.

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