This book presents a kind of contextualised biography, a new sort of political history, in which the author narrates the public acts of the most controversial president of Ecuador. He places them in the context of the networks of power and the regional, national and international political conjunctures that existed during the construction of the Ecuadorean nation-state in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a biography, the book naturally also discusses the private life and character of this personality, especially his life with two successive wives, thanks to the voluminous correspondence they maintained, but the author is mainly interested in sketching this political personage in action: how he constructs himself, the actions he embarks on, the political situations he provokes and confronts, those from which he emerges triumphant, and those which bring him down; the networks of kinship, friendship and solidarity which he creates and makes political use of, supporting himself on them in order to govern.
García Moreno was a central actor in the formation of the Ecuadorean nation-state from 1859, when he headed a political movement and raised an army to throw out the elected government, until his assassination in 1875 during his second presidency. He intervened in a particularly turbulent and critical period of Ecuadorean history: it was a country besieged by the armies of Colombia and Peru, whose intentions were probably to share between themselves that ‘wedge between Peru and Colombia’, as the French consul wrote to the Quai d'Orsay. The country was also attacked by Ecuadorean revolutionaries who organised expeditions from inside and outside those little-known and barely established frontiers, seeking support from any source. García Moreno himself did the same from Peru on one occasion; on another he blocked such an attempt by summarily executing some ten Ecuadorean rebels who had disembarked from Peru.
It should be remembered that the recently inaugurated country was densely inhabited in the highlands mainly by Indians, almost empty on the coast, and with an unknown territory in the Amazon. Its unity as a nation-state, in the first three decades of the national experiment, was a risky hypothesis threatened by the obstinate ambitions of local power groups concentrated in the highland cities of Quito and Cuenca, and in Guayaquil on the coast. This port city was beginning its cocoa export boom, binding itself ever closer to the world market. A crucial problem was the political consolidation of the territory: some unity had to be provided for that space, small but traversed by abrupt cordilleras and with great difficulties in communications. Above all, the highlands had to be connected by road to the coast, and some kind of operational control, both physical and political, created for the phantasmal state.
Another necessary task was the establishment of a modern tributary system to extract taxes from a suspicious class of big landowners, overcoming their resistance to any state intrusion into their spheres of power. This class exercised – individually and as a group, even though divided by regions, kinship ties, idiosyncrasies and ambitions – a solid private power over their lands and Indians, and also a considerable power over the white, Indian and mestizo populations of the towns. Finally, the hypothesis of a nation also required an educational system and a process of modernisation, for the country was slow to acquire the scientific and technological knowledge of the Industrial Revolution.
García Moreno assumed these modernising tasks with exceptional energy; they fell to him as a politician, as to other politicians in nineteenth-century America. But peculiar to García Moreno were his excesses: a passion for untrammelled personal power, driven by notions of progress and ultramontane Catholic integrism, which made him an envied example in Central America and a myth for the extreme Catholic Right in Francophone Canada.
The ‘historian's ethic’, as far as one can tell from Henderson's text, lies between a Weberian ‘comprehensive distance’ (in the sense of empathetic and comprehensive understanding) and a value-free perspective on the political implications of his research. This balance is paradoxical, an uncomfortable narrative position which may be more of a quality than an obstacle given the passions that García Moreno has provoked and continues to provoke a century and a half later. Indeed, it offers one advantage to the reader: with a narrative so single-minded and invariant, historiographic questions and queries present themselves with each turn of the page. These concerns may light the fuse for new research into this absorbing political character, less politically non-committal and more centred on controversial issues: the cost in lives and suffering which García Moreno's grandiose public works imposed on the Indian population, for example, and even on the white-mestizo ‘people’; or the persecution of concubines, and the consolidation of a clerical morality in everyday life, and of the Church in politics, features of Ecuadorean life which persist till today; or the consolidation of gender hierarchies and ethnic exclusion; or the obstacles his legacy has bequeathed to the creation of a space of public debate, even today resistant to dialogue.
This makes me wonder about the implications of the research path chosen by the historian. I refer to the lack of a critical and reflexive hermeneutic as regards the use of certain types of archive, the series examined and the interpretation of the documents. Henderson's effort at documentation is very wide and varied, and is genuinely admirable: it goes from the national archives, passing through the consular ones, and even reaches the ‘reserved’ archives of the Vatican. No doubt the researcher who concerns himself with the life and deeds of García Moreno will discover an exceptionally rich documentary vein for several reasons: he wrote obsessively (letters, documents, reports), and his contemporaries, both national and international, wrote abundantly about him and took meticulous care to hoard everything concerning him, perhaps with the idea of presenting these documents in support of his canonisation to the Congregation of the Roman Curia.
Now, anyone who has worked in the archives of the central state knows that they require great care, a critical stance and a reflexive attitude as regards what one reads and what the historian's task demands. One knows that they offer an archival reality (in fact, they construct it) close to what as anthropologists we call an ‘official version’: a public, legitimate and functional self-representation. If no effort is made to contrast this documentation with other less controlled sources, the researcher finds himself on an ‘archival motorway’ that guides him by predetermined routes and slip roads. He does not see those little archives on the edges of the state (parish, tenancy, even provincial archives) that are less filtered (though still in official code) and closer to the freshness of everyday events, where one can see the consequences of the actions of central government.
What the motorway approach shows is an artificial landscape: a reality which is neither false nor ideal, but simple and functional for the requirements of the state. In this case, without a critical hermeneutic or a comparison of the sources, the historian reproduces the discourse of the state. In the end, this route takes the researcher by an easy road (perhaps unconscious, perhaps deliberate), and in spite of his attempts at axiological distancing from present debate over the controversial figure of Gabriel García Moreno, ends by projecting an attitude of acritical empathy towards the character under study. Does this treatment raise another statue to him?
