When the political elites of early republican Venezuela aimed to build a new state on liberal models imported from the North Atlantic, they had to overcome ways of thinking, feeling and behaving that came from the past. To bring about the changes they wanted, consonant with the liberal principles they admired, they not only had to establish constitutional government and design new laws. In Venezuela, as in other Latin American states, liberal governments also had to persuade people that the new regime was legitimate and find ways of supplanting the values of the old order with those of the new.
To address the question of whether Venezuelan liberals were able to harmonise independence and modernity, Reuben Zahler examines three major issues. First, he focuses on the shift from a Spanish legal system, which he argues was based on an unwritten code of ‘honour’, to a liberal system of law which treated citizens as equals; second, he considers the persistence of patriarchy; third, he examines the part played by law and honour in the political conflicts which broke out in the late 1830s and early 1840s, when the decline of Venezuela's export economy precipitated conflict between economic and social groups.
Venezuela is a particularly interesting place to study the construction of an independent state: its society had an unusually high proportion of people of African descent, both slave and free; its internal wars had been unusually violent; and, during a decade of destructive warfare, power had passed into the hands of armed caudillos. In short, for Venezuelans more than their neighbours, power was associated with armed violence. Yet, despite devastation by war, post-independence Venezuela made a rapid economic recovery and saw a relatively smooth transition to a stable system of republican government based on liberal principles.
Zahler explains this by arguing that early Venezuelan liberals achieved more than historians have allowed. He argues, first, that they built a burgeoning export economy and a wide franchise to create a broad social base for the new republic. Second, they aspired to improve government by reforming administrative structures and promoting citizenship. Third, he believes that liberal governments soon succeeded in building an effective legal system that encouraged people to resolve conflicts in the courts just as they had under Spanish rule. With this, he suggests, went an important change in attitudes. Republican government made the idea of equality before the law a central plank of the republic's constitution. But liberals also introduced new written rules and procedures to ensure that the law was applied equally, without social prejudice. Venezuela's liberals thus moved away from the Spanish ‘regime of justice’ where the courts' judgments were inflected by local custom and social hierarchy, to a ‘regime of law’ in which individuals were presumed equal and where judgments were determined by written laws, clearly-defined processes, and the presentation of empirical evidence.
To gauge the extent to which people embraced this radical change, Zahler uses a novel methodology, based on analysis of court cases where individuals sought satisfaction over public insults, violent attacks, marital infidelities, and official corruption. From these cases, he tests the balance of continuity and change in Venezuelan political life, seen through the relationship of honour and law and the relations between men and power. One key conclusion is that while the republic ensured the dominance of written law, it continued to coexist with the long-entrenched unwritten code of honour that, as in many monarchical societies, was more important in determining social behaviour than either written law or even religious commands. Indeed, Zahler suggests that the awareness of individual and group honour made a vital contribution to social and political stability in the republic because, although it was incompatible with the principle of equality before the law because of its association with social ranking by birth and blood, its unwritten rules encouraged civility and good conduct. Another central finding is that, while honour remained an important prop of the republican order, so too did the patriarchal norms associated with it. For, if people could envisage the possibility of a political community without a king, they had less imagination when it came to the question of a society without male supremacy. Venezuelan leaders aspired to build their republic on liberal principles, but had the same blind spot as liberals elsewhere. They embraced the idea of individual rights but left intact the patriarchal social practices which excluded women and other dependants from public affairs and made them inferiors in the courts. Indeed, by assuming the natural inferiority of women and avoiding any confrontation with patriarchal norms, Venezuela's liberals ensured that citizenship was the preserve of male heads of household in a social hierarchy which in many ways replicated that of the colonial past. Change at one level was, as in other post-colonial societies, matched by profound continuity at another.
The blend of colonial practices with republican discourse and institutions did not, however, guarantee Venezuela's political stability, and the book's closing chapters seek to explain why elite consensus turned into rebellion and civil war and why the poor joined the opposing sides. The first major rebellion showed that political culture had decisively broken one pillar of colonial hegemony. In the republic no-one called for a return to the old order; all spoke instead the language of constitutionalism and defined their cause in its terms. However, Zahler also points out that the new language of politics blended with contradictory attitudes: politicians regarded political attacks as assaults on personal honour and refused to treat their opponents as a ‘loyal opposition’ to whom power might temporarily pass. Thus, while Liberals and Conservatives grouped in parties that used the idiom of constitutionalism, political disputes turned into highly personalised conflicts in which contestants presumed that ‘winner takes all’.
This is a book which is bound to interest scholars concerned with the history of Venezuela's early republic and the wider issues of the transition to independence and modernity in Latin America, for both its perspective on early Venezuelan politics and its contribution to the debate about passages from colonial to republican regimes in Spanish America. Like other historians who see that the independent republics required their leaders to invent a new legitimacy, a new political language, and a new social imaginary, Zahler rightly highlights the importance of the efforts made to change political culture. Entering the field from the angle of the law and combing the judicial archives for evidence of the ways in which Venezuela's new republican order altered the behaviour and thinking of its citizens, he uses original material to create a fresh analysis. The strength of the argument rests, of course, on the cases used to document it, and one is not always sure how representative these cases are. Nonetheless, if his court records sometimes seem a slender base for all the conclusions drawn from them, their use puts the reader into closer contact with the ways in which people thought, felt and acted, thereby providing some valuable clues to the ways in which subjects of the king turned themselves into citizens of the republic.
That said, one wonders how deep these changes went. Zahler acknowledges the role of Páez as the key source of stability in the early decades of independence, but perhaps underplays his importance. If people learned to use a new language in the courts, consonant with a constitutional order, one must remember that the new order depended heavily on Páez's prestige and coalition politics. Páez was, as John Lynch calls him in Caudillos in Spanish America, a ‘consensus caudillo’ and when the consensus cracked, caudillos and dictators came again to dominate politics, despite the underlying shifts in political culture inaugurated during the early republic. In political culture, as in much else, old habits die hard.
