Klaus Gallo has written a short and insightful study of Bernardino Rivadavia's political and cultural project in Buenos Aires in the first half of the 1820s. Gallo argues that Rivadavia should be remembered as ‘the main instigator of the feliz experiencia of 1821–24, which in many ways marks the genesis of Argentine cultural life’ (p. 91). The main focus of the analysis is on Rivadavia's complex and ambiguous relationship with Great Britain and its thinkers, diplomats and businessmen.
The book is based on a series of lectures that the author gave at the Institute for the Study of the Americas in London in 2004. There are four chapters, based on secondary sources, Rivadavia's published writings, unpublished documents held in the British Library, the Jeremy Bentham Papers at University College London, and diplomatic correspondence at The National Archives in Kew.
The first chapter examines ‘the making’ of Rivadavia as a rioplatense politician. This consists of a standard biographical treatment of the late colonial period and the awakening of new identities in creoles like Rivadavia, followed by the protagonist's ‘voyage of diplomacy and ideological discovery’ in 1814, when Rivadavia and Manuel Belgrano were sent to Europe as the representatives of the United Provinces of the River Plate.
Gallo is particularly interested in how the ‘political-intellectual scene in Britain and France’ (p. 15) affected Rivadavia's thought. As Karen Racine and Ivan Jaksic have stressed for Andrés Bello, and Tomás Polano Alcantará and John Lynch have argued for Simón Bolívar, the experience of representing a new South American nation in Europe, and particularly London, acted as a catalyst to nascent national identities and political and anti-colonial projects. In 1820 Rivadavia returned to Buenos Aires after an absence of six years, enthused with the idea of reform, and full of ideas and energy.
The second chapter focuses on the government of Buenos Aires between 1820 and 1824, in which Rivadavia was the driving intellectual force and from mid-1821 Minister of Government. The attempt to create a Utilitarian Republic saw a ‘rapid and sustained institutional transformation, mainly as a result of a series of economic, social and political reforms’, which were designed as much to impress British observers and win diplomatic recognition of the new state as to assure credibility, stability and legitimacy in the eyes of those it sought to govern. The reforms, explored in some depth by Gallo, included the introduction of universal manhood suffrage, the creation of a new legislative assembly, attempts to secularise the Church, and the creation of the University of Buenos Aires. Gallo's assessment of the influence of Jeremy Bentham on Rivadavia, as detected in the reform programme of the feliz experiencia, concludes that although it ‘may not be very helpful’ to see Rivadavia as a ‘disciple’ of the Englishman, the evidence suggests that Rivadavia did ‘attempt to promote a common ground between utilitarian philosophic principles and the reforms carried out by the government of the province of Buenos Aires in 1821–1824’ (p. 45). The correspondence between the two men, cited by Gallo, is particularly revealing. In August 1822, Rivadavia wrote to Bentham from Buenos Aires, detailing the reforms he had introduced, calling them ‘the worthy changes, which hopes of your honourable acceptance have given me the strength to promote and will give me the necessary [strength] to carry out’ (p. 45). In April 1824, Bentham wrote to Rivadavia from London calling the latter ‘the greatest statesman late Spanish America has produced, but alas! the only one!’ whilst lamenting that news of Rivadavia's reforms suggested ‘my having been cast off by a disciple, if I may take the liberty of calling you so, of whom I have so much reason to be proud’ (p. 44).
These two quotes, rather confusingly introduced by the author in reverse chronological order, show the two individuals distancing themselves from each other, just as time and distance had separated their ideas and their implementation. As Simón Bolívar recognised in his 1815 Jamaica Letter, it was simply impossible for any Spanish American to remain a faithful ‘disciple’ of any European thinker. Rivadavia could only ‘hope’ that Bentham would be pleased with what he had achieved; Bentham also seemed to recognise, albeit reluctantly, that Spanish American independence meant Rivadavia and others had the freedom to reform in their own ways, and at their own pace.
The third chapter explores other dimensions of the government of Buenos Aires between 1821 and 1824, with some interesting discussion of cultural debates taking place in newspapers and civic festivities. One example was the prohibition of bullfighting in 1822, which ‘did not seem to provoke major complaint’, perhaps because audiences ‘from diverse social sectors’ (p. 58) turned to the resurgent theatre instead. Gallo sees the government's cultural activities as one arm of Rivadavia's project to ‘establish a stronger relationship between the population and the main features of the so-called “spirit” of the Enlightenment’ (p. 63), and for a while at least, it seems to have worked. The feliz experiencia was characterised in Buenos Aires by a unique ‘cultural-ideological atmosphere’ with an ‘essence of the “enlightened” or “Voltairean” spirit’. It was this atmosphere, in which the city's inhabitants gave the benefit of the doubt to the radical ideas of Rivadavia and his cohort, which created the space for what were undoubtedly radical reforms. The irony was that this spirit evaporated in the second half of the decade, undermined by political discord, factionalism and practical difficulties, just as Rivadavia himself held the presidency.
The fourth chapter examines ‘the rise and fall of Rivadavia’ in the eyes of British observers. Gallo highlights the ‘complex and sometimes paradoxical features’ of Rivadavia's ‘liaison’ with Britain and her subjects' (p. 68), which he later characterises as ‘ambiguous’ (p. 85). What did this really mean? In essence, Rivadavia was a quintessentially pragmatic rather than idealistic leader. He recognised the importance of British trade for the prosperity of Buenos Aires, and he was convinced of the necessity of diplomatic recognition in order to assure legitimacy and stability at home. Yet at the same time, his ideas about politics and culture were grounded in a distinct patriotism that rejected European examples at the same time as he employed the ideas of Bentham and others in designing his reforms. In the book's epilogue Gallo quotes Domingo Sarmiento, in Facundo (1845), encapsulating in a phrase the ambiguity of what we might call Rivadavia's transatlantic or postcolonial identity: ‘Rivadavia comes from Europe, he brings Europe with him; moreover, he despises Europe.’
As a tight analysis of Rivadavia and his actions during this short but important period, the book is excellent. The focus of the book is deliberately narrow, providing a profound insight into the world in which Rivadavia moved in this period. The author makes no attempt to engage comparatively with other Spanish American leaders who may have been similarly influenced by their time in Europe. Indeed, when the author does take a step back the accuracy becomes less certain, as in mistakenly referring to the New Granadan leader José rather than Francisco de Paula Santander (p. 19), and in erroneously suggesting that Andrés Bello arrived in London in 1811 ‘alongside Bolívar and Miranda’ (p. 21), when in fact his companions were Bolívar and Luis López Méndez. These quibbles apart, this is an insightful overview which casts new light on a difficult period of political and cultural history. It helps us to understand the ambiguous way in which Europe and its inhabitants influenced Spanish American leaders like Bernardino Rivadavia in their attempts to build legitimacy, stability and prosperity after independence.
