Scholars have traditionally studied 19th-century historical narratives of Latin American independence revolutions framed through national or regional socio-political and historiogra- phical contexts. This paper aims to transcend that approach by inserting those narratives in global-scale processes. Specifically, it suggests that the historical accounts by Latin American nationalist historiographies of mid-19th century deserve to be observed in two ways. First, this paper considers the nationalist and popular revolutionary cycle carried out by the bourgeois and popular social sectors of Europe and the Americas in the 1840s. Second, it takes into account the historiographic reactions that, in both sides of the Atlantic, were given to those revolutions and to the precipitous and unstoppable entrance of a new character into the global political scene: “the people”. This work will focus on two cases considered by critics as the most conspicuous examples of Latin American nationalist historiography written between the 1840s and 1850s, that is, Historia de Méjico (1849-1853) by Lucas Alamán and História Geral do Brasil (1853-1857) by Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen. I will argue that the historical accounts that Alamán and Varnhagen presented of the independence revolutions of Mexico and Brazil - which condemned the revolutionary participation of popular segments while extolled the aristocratic character of the triumphant independence movements -, were attached to their experiences of the popular uprisings and revolutions that occurred in Mexico and Brazil during the late 1840s. Additionally, I will assert that the historical interpretations of both authors, the same as those of historians like Jules Michelet, Augustin Thierry, Karl Marx, Alexandre Herculano, and George Bancroft, were informed by the news that reached them of February-June Paris 1848. Hence, this paper aims to contribute to the study of the historiography of Latin American independences with a global history perspective.

Conventionally, scholars have interpreted the revolutions of the late 1840s as a strictly European phenomenon. However, in recent literature, authors such as Guy Thompson, Kurt Weyland, Will Fowler and Pedro Santoni have argued that those revolutions were rather global historical proces- ses that encompassed societies that were, or had been, colonized by Europeans (THOMPSON, 2002, p. 1-8; WEYLAND, 2009, p. 391-393; FOWLER; SANTONI, 2019, p. 19). From Canada to New Zealand, from Prussia to Brazil, and from Jamaica to Chile, the events of February and June Paris 1848 unleashed a series of political and social movements animated, either by a spirit of open opposition to the status quo, or of containment of the liberal, democratic and nationalist revolutionary enthusiasm (THOMPSON, 2002, p. 1; WEYLAND, 2009, p. 392).

Although the events in Paris functioned as a kind of trigger for revolutions in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania, in each of these regions, and in each state that integrated them at that time, revolution acquired specific traits. For example, revolutions of Central and Southern Europe, although all emulated the Parisian revolutionary construction of street barricades, almost none imitated its example of deposition of the monarch, nor its early democratic and republican spirit. In the Augsburg Empire, the German States, the Italian Kingdoms and the Principalities of Walachia and Moldavia, the example of Paris led to the assumption of moderate and containment measures, by both established and revolutionary governments. In fact, most of these revolutions had a nationalist and moderate democratic character, since they demanded the configuration of constitutional monarchies and not of Republics. Cases like that of the Hungarian revolution illustrate this spirit of containment: for although Lajos Kossuth and his revolutionaries called for the creation of an independent national state, just before the Austrian and Russian repression of their movement began they did everything possible to avoid radicalization and violence, even guaranteeing that the Crown of St. Stephen - but not the Government of Hungary - would remain in Augsburg Emperor, Ferdinand the Fifth (SPERBER, 2005, p. 121, p. 142-143). In con- trast, there were also some cases in the Ibero-American world that were more clearly imitative of the revolution in Paris. Scholars Guy Thompson and Clara Lida, point out that during the 1830s and 1840s, French liberals and democrats became a model for the progressive intelligentsia of the countries of the region. This factor explains why in Spain, Portugal, Peru, Colombia or Argentina, the events of February 1848 were observed by their liberal elites as the paradigm for the republican and democratic union of the artisans, the peasantry and the educated social sectors that would make possible the expulsion, once and for all, of the remnants of the Ancien régime - mainly of caudillismo and clericalism (THOMPSON, 2002, p. 6-8; LIDA, 2002, p. 46-75).

Despite the differences in goals and means of the 1848 revolutions, some scholars have tried to recognize a common background for all. First, they have postulated that in most cases the revolutionaries reacted to autocratic regimes and sought avenues of democratization by expanding the possibilities of the population’s participation in public life, either through the institution of republics - as in the French and Brazilian cases -, or through constitutional monarchies - as in the Hungarian and Sicilian. Second, they have pointed out that all revolutions involved political participation by popular sectors, whether they were masses of artisans dissatisfied with the conse- quences of an incipient industrialization - as in the French, Canadian, Chilean or Prussian cases -, or masses of peasants who supported the restoration of collective property and the distribution of lands - as in the Mexican, French, and Hungarian cases (HAUP; LANGWIESCHE, 2000, p. 4-9). A third element in common that could be highlighted: nationalism. Nevertheless, the latter only seems to be applicable to the Central, Southern and Eastern Europe revolutions, which took place in territories dominated in the period by three multi-ethnical empires: the Augsburg, the Russian and the Ottoman (HAUP; LANGWIESCHE, 2000, p. 9; SPERBER, 2005, p. 133-147). The French Revolution of 1848 itself, which served as an inspiration for many European and Latin American revolutionaries, was not nationalist in character. Likewise, in the case of the Americas, the question of recognition of national autonomy was already a fait accompli - with the exception of some societies such as the Cuban or the Quebecois -, and at that time, political and social issues such as the expansion of popular sovereignty and the fight against the disappearance of traditional forms of production, took center stage (THOMPSON, 2002, p. 1-2).

The final element that should be examined as a shared feature of the revolutions of 1848 is that all were defeated, leading to the re-establishment or strengthening of absolutist or conserva- tive regimes (RAPPORT, 2008, p. 263-334). In France, the democratic republic constituted in February 1848 gradually became more and more conservative until Louis Napoleon’s coup d’ état in 1851 (SPERBER, 2005, p. 208-215). By Autumn of 1848, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Tuscany, Parma, and Modena, in the Austrian Monarchy, and in Spain, the antiparliamentary conditions prior to the outbreak of the revolutions were restored (HAUP; LANGWIESCHE, 2000, p. 13-14). In the Empire of Brazil, the Pernambuco liberal and popular revolution that shocked Recife’s elites in November 1848 - the Praieira Revolution -, ended up being brutally crushed by the conservative administration of Rio de Janeiro in 1851 (NARO, 2002, p. 110-121). In Mexico, the enthusiasm shown by liberal politicians following the publishing of the events in Paris by newspapers like Montior Republicano, was gradually restrained after the explosion of peasant and indigenous revolts in the Center and South of the country, which were repressed by the moderate administrations of Presidents José Joaquín Herrera and Mariano Arista (LIDA, 2002, p. 65-73; FOWLER; SANTONI, 2009, p. 10-12). Nevertheless, in spite of their general defeat, what was laid on the table by the revolutions of 1848 forever changed the dynamics of the political and social relations of Western societies, and of all those that were within their sphere of influence: they promoted the conversion of the people from an object of political rhetoric, to a subject of political action; in other words, they accelerated the irremediable transition of those societies towards democratization and mass politics (HAUP; LANGWIESCHE, 2000, p. 13-21; SPERBER, 2005, p. 123).

But the revolutions that shook the globe during the late 1840s denote not only the moment when the people entered the political scene, but also when it made its appearance as a key character of historical narratives. Before that moment, the 18th century French and German philosophy of history had already considered the people as a historical entity. Philosophers such as Voltaire or Herder, for example, had written histories of the peoples, or rather, of the character or spirit of nations and peoples - the former in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) and the latter in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-1791). However, with both authors the people were still an undifferentiated whole, a cultural unity whose parts - individuals and social groups - manifested in their thoughts and actions the spirit of the whole (LÖWITH, 1949, p. 104-114; SAFRANSKI, 2009, p. 19-30). Additionally, in these types of discourses, the people were not yet identified within specific sectors of society, nor were they granted any agency in history. Thus, one of the most important contributions of historiography written in the revolutio- nary whirlwind of the mid-19th century, was to assign the people to a social class - depending on the case, with the lower classes or with the bourgeoisies - and to confer on its political agency, that is, to recognize - either positively or negatively - its active role in national and universal histories.

Jules Michelet is an example of this new historiographical attitude. Unlike the aforementio- ned philosophers of history, in his famous opuscule Le Peuple (1846), written on the eve of the revolutions of 1848, he used that noun to designate a particular sector of French society:

Although the bourgeoisie does not demand anything but to be a separate class, it is not easy to specify it’s limits, where it begins, where it ends. It does not include wealthy people exclu- sively; there are many poor bourgeois. In our countryside, the same man is a laborer here, and bourgeois there. This means, thank God, that we cannot rigorously oppose the bourgeoisie to the people, as some do, which would not go unless we create two nations. Our small rural owners, whether we call them bourgeois or not, are the people and the heart of the people (MICHELET, 1974, p. 132).

As can be observed in the quoted passage, Michelet’s conception of the people gives the impres- sion of being quite inclusive. For him - a confessed liberal and democrat (PETETIER, 2006) -, that human collectivity was not only made up of the lower classes of French society - the urban workers and farm laborers -, but also of the thriving bourgeois sectors: the bureaucrats, the craft- smen, the small merchants, professionals and small rural landowners. However, despite Michelet’s best wishes for unity between the poor and the rich within the bosom of the people, some sectors of French society were clearly excluded from his conception, namely the most prosperous ones: nobility, the aristocratic or financial bourgeoisie and the catholic priesthood. In his dualist view of history, expressed fundamentally in works like the Histoire de la France (1833-1867), but above all in the Histoire de la Revolution Française (1847-1853) - this last one written in the midst of the Springtime of the Peoples -, the aristocrats and the priests represented nothing but the unfair and despotic Ancien régime that the action of the people - including the petty bourgeoisie - brought down with the Revolution of 1789, and would finally be destroyed with the Revolution of 1848 (MICHELET, 1848, p. 185, 259; WHITE, 2014, p. 152-157).

A much more exclusive notion of people than Michelet’s appears in a historiographic text also born in the framework of the revolutions of the mid-19th century: Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850 (1850) by Karl Marx:

By making its grave the cradle of the Bourgeois Republic, the proletariat forced it to appear immediately in its pure form as the State whose avowed aim was to perpetuate the domination of capital, the slavery of labor […] Once the proletariat temporarily removed from the scene and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie officially recognized, it was evident that the middle strata of bourgeois society, the rougher petty bourgeoisie, were to rally more and more to the proletariat. As before in the rise of the proletariat, it was now in its defeat that they had to find the cause of their misery.

Since the June insurrection increased throughout the continent the confidence of the bour- geoisie, and made it openly ally with the feudal royalty against the people, who was the first victim of this union? The bourgeoisie itself. The defeat of June prevented it from consolidating its domination and from halting the half-satisfied, half-dissatisfied people at the low folds of the bourgeois revolution (MARX, 2008, p. 74).

Through his historical balance of the defeat suffered by the French Left in the days of June 1848 (SPERBER, 2005, p. 213), it is clear that for Marx there was not the slightest possibility of conciliation between the rich and the poor, in other words, between the bourgeoisie and the pro- letariat. From his point of view, the latter constituted the bulk of the people - whose lines were destined to swell the harsher petty bourgeoisie -, and was irreconcilably at odds with the Bourgeois State. But to complete the characterization of Marx’s people-proletariat it is essential to underline the hypertrophied historical agency that he conferred on it. As the philosopher/historian said in his other mayor historiographical work, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (1852), the authentic “revolution of the 19th century” - the one that, unlike the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century, will not have a short life and minimal consequences, but would radically change the history of humanity, eliminating the first cause of all social exploitation, the private ownership of the means of production and the division of labor - would be precisely a coup-de-main undertaken by the proletariat, by the people against the predatory bourgeois Republic/Empire already stripped of all its masks (MARX, 2008, p. 178-179).

As it is evinced by the cases of Michelet and Marx - to which that of Augustin Thierry and his Essai sur le Tiers état (1850) must be added -, towards the middle of the 19th century and under the influence of the Spring of the Peoples, the conscience of the historical role of the popular classes began to gain ground in the historiography produced in the economically developed countries of Europe, namely in France and England. Nonetheless, this phenomenon also occurred in certain undeveloped European countries that did not experiment the 1848 revolutions as nationalist movements. Such was the case of Portugal, where two revolutions converged in the late 1840s, one popular - the Maria da Fonte Revolution (1846) - and the other liberal-democratic - the Patuleia Revolution (1846-1847) - (BONIFÁCIO, 1993), and thus there appeared a historiography that conceded a relevant historical role to a specific sector of society designated as the people. Portuguese mid-19th century historiography, epitomized by the História de Portugal by Alexandre Herculano, is a clear contrast with the one written in other scarcely industrialized, rural countries of Europe - Prussia, the Augsburg Empire, the Italian Kingdoms -, where given the nationalist nature of the revolutions of 1848 (SPERBER, 2005, p. 133-147), what predominated was a historiography that still conceived the people as Herder’s, that is, as an ethnic or cultural social unit - v. gr. Ranke’s Preussische Geschichte (1847-1848), János Majláth’s Geschichte der Magyaren (2. ed., 1852-1853) and Luigi Cibrario’s Origini e progresso della monarchia di Savoia (1854) (BERGER; CONRAD, 2015, p. 111-113). An example taken from the História de Portugal will illustrate this peculiarity of mid-century Portuguese historiography that matches Michelet’s, Thierry’s and Marx’s:

Numerous troops from Portugal were, however, part of that famous battle [Navas de Tolosa], and the way in which they were there is a feature that interests national glory and, at the same time, is an indication of the progress that the internal forces of our country had made […] There, among the innumerable multitude of men-at-arms covered in iron and mounted on powerful horses […] the numerous but poor and rude Portuguese infantry knew how to distinguish themselves by extremes of suffering and activity in the toughest and heaviest service of the army and in the impetuous value with which they dared to fight, as if giving and receiving death was the delight of a banquet. And of what folk was this energetic and brave infantry that generated astonishment in one of the most eminent individuals of that time, Rodrigo de Toledo, who was a witness of his readiness and effort? Of the men of the councils organized in the cradle of the monarchy and which our first two kings spread with a profuse hand to all angles of the kingdom. It was the People who emerged strong and active, because the municipal life had awakened in them the feeling of freedom and the idea of the homeland; because the head of the monarchy had elevated them in his own eyes, taking the first steps towards this mutual alliance that will endure centuries against the pride and brutal unbridling of the privileged classes, converting them from homens de criação or malados, almost servants of the landlords, into free subjects of the king; because finally, their consti- tutional letters, called forals, were real contracts, where alongside each duty imposed on the bourgeois, a right was guaranteed (HERCULANO, 2007, p. 510).

The conception of people contained by this passage of the História de Portugal is undoubtedly as exclusive and radical as Marx’s, but in an opposite sense. From Herculano’s point of view, since its medieval childhood the Portuguese people was not made up of the lowest classes of society - the so-called arraia-miúda, the urban and rural proletarians - but rather by the bourgeoisie, the proprietary middle classes made up of free men who were members of the municipal councils, and which, together with the kings, were the true agents of all the historical revolutions that had made Portugal evolve from a traditional to a modern society (HERCULANO, 2007, v. 1, p. 483-484, v. 2, p. 270-296, p. 567). It is well known that, since his youth, Herculano had little sympathy with the uprisings of the lower classes and with democracy. Already during the democratic revolution that shook Portugal in 1836, in his famous A Voz do Propheta (1836-1837) he had condemned this type of political movements which involved the participation of the arria-miúda (HERCULANO, 1873, p. 51-54). Bearing this in mind, it is not surprising that in his opus magna, written precisely in the midst of the broader plebeian and democratic movements of the late 1840s (BONIFÁCIO, 1993, p. 26, p. 37-38), he gave all his attention to the medieval development of the Portuguese bourgeoisie, relegating to a second plane the historical interventions of the “proletarian classes”. Symbolically, what this author intended to point out with his historical narrative, was that no “proletarian” revolution would succeed in ending the dictatorship that weighed on 1840s Portugal - the dictatorship established since 1841 by António da Silva da Costa Cabral - (BONIFÁCIO, 1993, p. 20), but rather the only consistent way to overthrow it, while at the same time guaranteeing peace and order without foreign intervention, was the recovery of the original and progressive Portuguese alliance between the “bourgeoisie/people” and the king.

Now, what has been said so far in relation to the European historiography of the mid-19th century, is also applicable to that one written in the Americas during the same period. In works partially written in the aftermath of the 1840s revolutions, such as History of the United States of America (1854-1878) by George Bancroft, or Historia de Belgrano y de la independencia Argentina (1859) by Bartolomé Mitre, the people appear as a main character of the historical process. The same can be said of the two histories that constitute the focus of this article: Historia de México (1849-1852) by Lucas Alamán, and História Geral do Brasil (1853-1857) by Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen. However, as it will be developed in the next section, the main difference between the two groups of historiographical works is that while in the former the people is drawn as a character whose actions have a positive influence on the development of the American and Argentine nations, in the latter it is characterized as an historical agent that needs to be subdued for the good of the Mexican and Brazilian nations.

The following passage from the volume IV (1852) of the History of the United States by Bacroft will serve as an example of a positive conception of the people in the mid-19th century historiography written in the Americas:

New York had been settled under patents of lands to individuals; New England under grants to towns; and the institution of towns was its glory and its strength. The inhabited part of Massachusetts was recognized as divided into little territories, each of which, for its internal purposes, constituted a separate integral government, free from supervision, having power to choose annually its own officers; to hold meetings of all freemen at its own pleasure […] to elect and to instruct its representatives […] New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine, which was a part of Massachusetts, had similar regulations; so that all New England was an aggregate of organized democracies. But the complete development of the institution was to be found in Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay. There each township was also subs- tantially a territorial parish; the town was the religious congregation; the independent church was established by the law; the minister was elected by the people, who annually made grants for his support […] He that will understand the political character of New England in the eighteenth century, must study the constitution of its towns, its congregations, its schools, and its militia. Yet in these democracies the hope of independence, as a near event, had not dawned. Driven from England by the persecution of the government, its inhabitants still clung with confidence and persevering the affection to the land of their ancestry, the people of their kindred, and the nationality of their language (BANCROFT, 1852, p. 148-149).

The lines quoted above are extremely illustrative of a conception of the people similar to those formulated by Herder and Michelet. First, it should be noted that when Bancroft spoke about the societies that, a few decades before the Revolution of Independence, populated the New England region - considered by him the cradle of American democracy -, he referred to them as descending from the same ethnic root - “They were of homogeneous origin, nearly all tracing their descent to English emigrants of the reigns of Charles de First and Charles the Second. They were a frugal and industrious race” (BANCROFT, 1852, p. 159). Thus, when he spoke of all the individuals that make up these societies, that is the people of New England, as possessing the same “national spirit”, it is possible to link his concept of the people with Herder’s Volkgeist. However, it should be noted that, also like Michelet, when Bancroft made reference to New England’s people -that one which was free to elect their parish priests and governors, and participated in the local mili- tias - he mainly included in this concept the individuals who owned “modest freeholds” and the homespun manufacturers (BANCROFT, 1852, p. 150). Bancroft’s decision to define these social sectors as the active seeds of the future American people is not surprising, as he was a politician sympathetic with President Andrew Jackson’s democratic reforms that, during the 1830s and 1840s, contained social discontent and opened the doors of political participation (mainly of voting) to the popular classes - precisely to modest white farm owners and white urban workers (LEVIN, 1959, p. 74-92; WISH, 1960, p. 75-77; HOBSBAWM, 1962, p. 111, 121; ROBERTS, 2002, p. 76-77; WEYLAND, 2009, p. 411).

Now, as previously mentioned, other contemporary historiography written in the Americas did not have such a favorable opinion of the people. Alamán and Varnhagen’s negative perception of its historical role was quite different not only from Bancroft’s, but the same can be said in respect to their European colleagues’. To understand this radical divergence, it is necessary to take into account two fundamental issues: first, that Historia de México and História Geral do Brasil were written by historians belonging to the white or Creole¹ political and cultural elites that governed the Mexican Republic and the Empire of Brazil from the moment of their independences; and second, that their works appeared within the framework of a series of popular revolutions and external conflicts that challenged the political and social primacy of these elites (THOMPSON, 2002, p. 7-8). Given these premises, it is intelligible the adverse - and even hostile - perception that both authors granted to the people’s agency in their national histories, particularly in the sections of their narratives that addressed the independence revolutionary processes.

I will begin this discussion by analyzing the case of Historia de México. Some scholars have interpreted this work - devoted by Alamán fundamentally to the historical account of the indepen- dence revolution of New Spain - in light of the disastrous experience of the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848, which ended with the loss of more than half of the Mexican territory (PLASCENCIA DE LA PARRA, 1997, p. 324-325; PALTI, 2009, p. 303-304). This interpretation is undoubtedly correct; however, it overlooks two fundamental issues that also had an impact on the writing of Alamán’s work. On the one hand, the fall in 1846, of the centralist political-administrative system that was established in Mexico in 1836, and sustained for a nearly a decade by the Creole elite of Mexico (COSTELOE, 1993, p. 298-300). On the other hand, the series of Indian/peasant revo- lutions that shook the moderate post-war governments of José Joaquín Herrera (1848-1851) and Mariano Arista (1851-1853) (BRADING, 1988, p. 129; FOWLER; SANTONI, 2019, p. 10-12).

To assess the aforementioned impact, it is necessary to remember that Alamán was not only a prominent member, but the very political and ideological leader of the conservative elite that in 1846 was displaced by the liberals that overthrew the Bases Orgánicas - the centralist constitution - and reestablished the federalist and democratic Constitution of 1824. After entrenching himself in the City Hall of Mexico City, of which he was president in 1849 (June-December), and from which he founded the Mexican Conservative Party (1849) - using the newspapers El Tiempo and El Universal as broadcasting organs -, Alamán was finally expelled by radical liberals and relegated

to civil life (FOWLER; SANTONI, 2019, p. 8-9, p. 14). The lines recorded by him in an editorial for El Tiempo (January-February 1846) during the imminent fall of the centralist regime, and the United States military invasion, illustrate his state of despair, and alert his nation of the coming catastrophe resulting from commitment to democratic and federalist principles:

‘Whenever democracy is preached, a lie is told’ Equality of rights brought lack of respect for authority, ‘awful elections’ and the dangerous rise to political power of men from the ‘bot- tom social classes’ who were entirely unsuitable and incapable of occupying public office. In sum, ‘equality has mixed up the wise man with the ignorant, the judicious and moderate with the restless and rowdy, the honorable and virtuous citizen with the unruly and perverse’ (COSTELOE, 1993, p. 284-285).²

The fall of the centralist regime and its Creole sustainers, as well as Mexico’s defeat against the United States, both became a reality in the span of three years. Separated from political life and dedicated entirely to the writing of his Historia de México, Alamán witnessed how, once the war was over and the Federation and the expanded democracy were reinstated, the liberal-mode- rate governments of Herrera and Arista never found a way to reorganize Mexican society. Added to the disputes between radical liberal and conservative politicians, and the everlasting struggle between the Republic’s Executive and Legislative, was a bloody racial struggle: in the Southeast, the rebellions of the Mayas (the War of the Castes), which rose up against the Creoles and tried to expel them of the Yucatán Peninsula; in the new northern frontier, the constant riots of the untamed tribes that showed the same ferocity against the Mexicans as against the Americans; and in the federative states of Chiapas and Guerrero, as well as in the Sierra Gorda in the high plateau of Central Mexico (the Bajío), the uprisings of Indian and Mestizo peasants against the Creole landowners (BRADING, 1988, p. 129; FOWLER; SANTONI, 2019, p. 8).

Taking into account the Mexican revolutionary context of the late 1840s, to which it must be added the news that reached Mexico on the Springtime of the Peoples, and particularly the events from February and June Paris 1848, published in newspapers such as the liberal Monitor Republicano, the moderate liberal El Siglo XIX, and the conservative El Universal (LIDA, 2002, p. 69-70), Alamán’s conception of the people implied by his famous historiographical argument of the two independence revolutions acquires much more meaning and depth:

This horrendous revolution [of Miguel Hidalgo and the first insurgency] is, however, the one that has been tried to make the Mexican Republic recognize as its cradle. The individuals who promoted it not only did not achieve the independence, but also delayed and prevented it, And the principles they propagated have been nothing more than a continual source of misfortune for Mexico […].

The royalist party that fought against the insurgents has claimed right to the indepen- dence; But having done it in a timid and disguised way, it has resulted for the independence a double origin and a double celebration, each one according to the side to which their clai- mers belonged […]. But it cannot be doubted that the time will come when good sense will prevail over the concerns and interests of the moment, the facts will be judged impartially, and it will end up recognizing and confessing that Hidalgo, Allende, and their companions indiscreetly launched into a revolution that they were entirely incapable of leading: That they did nothing but run their country into incalculable evils and misfortunes [...] (ALAMÁN, 1942, v. 2, p. 145-147).

As evinced by this passage from Historia de México, and unlike contemporaries such as historian Carlos María de Bustamante, who was an absolute supporter of the insurgency (BUSTAMANTE, 1953-1963, v. I, p. 39; BRADING, 1988, p. 76, 199; SIMON, 2017, p. 140-142), Alamán considered that in the struggles for Mexican independence there were two well-differentiated stages that had nothing to do with each other: the first, constituted by the popular revolution led by Miguel Hidalgo (1810-1811) and José María Morelos y Pavón (1811-1815), which failed in its main objective; the second, constituted by the Creole and aristocratic triumphant revolution of Agustín de Iturbide, which achieved the independence in 1821 (SIMON, 2017, p. 130-131; PALTI, 2009, p. 309-312). This argument of the “two independence revolutions” reveals the longstanding political and social philias and phobias of its author, but also his concerns about the revolutionary chaos of his present and the fragility of his social class: the Hombres de bien (gentlemen), that is to say, the Creole landowner, industrial and professional middle classes (COSTELOE, 1993, p. 16-24, 100-103). From his youth at the mining city of Guanajuato, Alamán had accumulated a deep fear of the popular classes. That fear was not unwarranted: the young Alamán had basically been nearly killed at the hands of the rebellious Indian, Mestizo and Mulatto army of priest Miguel Hidalgo, which upon its violent incursion to Guanajuato, carried out a copious massacre of Spaniards, including his friend and protector the intendente Juan Antonio Riaño (PLASCENCIA DE LA PARRA, 1997, p. 307). To his primitive animosity for the people or for the popular classes, and his anti-popular and anti-democratic stance of the 1830s and 1840s, three other causes must be added: first, Alamán’s unfavorable judgement of the popular revolution of the first insurgents, drawn from his affection for Edmund Burke’s negative opinion on the sans-culotte revolution (Reflections on the Revolution in France); second, his awareness, when he was deputy for Guanajuato in the Cortes of Madrid (1820), of the dangers to the Mexican Creole elite through the adoption of a political-administrative system founded on the recognition of popular sovereignty, given that Mexico was a country mostly made up of Indians and Mestizos (SIMON, 2017, p. 143-148); and third, his direct and indirect knowledge - the former gained from the experience of a trip through England, France, Italy, Spain and Prussia (1814-1820), the latter acquired through the news of the 1848 Revolutions -, of the social reality implied by the industrialization processes, knowledge that led him to interpret the popular revolution of Hidalgo and Morelos as a historical symbol of the class struggle that he thought was taking place during his time - “an uprising of the proletarian class against property and civilization” (ALAMÁN, 1942, v. 4, p. 461).

Alamán reserved the positive role in the struggle for Mexican independence for the social sector that, towards the beginning of the 19th century, constituted “the enlightened and pro- prietary part” of New Spain’s population, the Creoles (ALAMÁN, 1942, v. 5, p. 232). For him, the Creoles were the descendants of the conquerors and first colonizers that by right of conquest inherited this land (ALAMÁN, 1942, v. 5, p. 126-127). They joined the royalist forces, not as enemies of independence - an inevitable fact according to Alamán -, but to defend the very base of all societies - individual property - attacked by the people, the proletarian army of Hidalgo and Morelos (ALAMÁN, 1942, v. 2, p. 347-348). The Creoles achieved Independence from the homeland in 1821 through the Plan of Iguala by Agustín de Iturbide, which brought together the best heritage of the Hispanic Conquest and Colonization: the “union of [Spanish] Europeans and [Spanish] Americans” in Mexican territory under a powerful central authority, and “the preser- vation of the Catholic, Roman apostolic religion, without tolerance of any other” (ALAMÁN, 1942, v. 5, p. 73-74):

Nothing, then, is less true than what is usually said with boast, that Mexico won its inde- pendence with ten years of war and without the help of anyone. Those years of war were nothing other than the effort that the enlightened part and the owners, together with the Spanish government, made to suppress a vandalistic revolution, which would have ended the civilization and prosperity of the country. Independence was made, to use Iturbide’s own words, in his presentation to the regency of December 7, 1821, on awards to the army, “in a very short campaign time, without bloodshed, without destruction of fortunes, and to say it at once, without war, because it does not deserve the designate as such, one in which there are less than one hundred and fifty individuals who have died in the field of honor […] The very troops that fought to restore order and prepare freedom under solid and just founda- tions, even having the resources that a systematic government always abounds, suffered more incomparably than the ‘Army of the Three Guarantees’, because this made its march along highway roads, without stumbling, finding hearts prepared in agreement and conformity for the Christian religion, reasonable liberty and just union.” Nothing can oppose such a confession, of who was more interested than anyone in raising the merit and difficulties of the company (ALAMÁN, 1942, v. 5, p. 232).

One last point remains to be addressed in this analysis on the place of the people in Historia de México. Alamán’s text points to the struggle for independence by his Creole equals - first as guarantors of order and defenders of property in the face of popular chaos, and then as architects of their own independence under the banner of the three guarantees (Independence, Religion, Union) -, and not to the Indian and Mestizo populace. From his perspective, it had been the cons- cious or unconscious democratic ideas of Creole politicians and historians such as Servando Teresa de Mier, Carlos María de Bustamante, Valentín Gómez Farías, and Lorenzo de Zavala, that were throwing the country down. Anchored in his revolutionary present, Alamán thought they had miscalculated the danger that for their class, the hombres de bien, represented the historical defense of the people, the popular insurgency, and the principles of popular sovereignty associated with it: without being aware of it, the Creoles were opening the doors for their own expulsion from the country, and for the ascendance of an Indian and Mestizo nation (SIMON, 2017, p. 140-142; BRADING, 1988, p. 76, 119).

The conception of the historical role of the people contained in História Geral do Brasil has considerable resemblances to that held by Historia de México. Like the latter, the former has usually been interpreted by scholars as the expression of the thought of the white slave-owning and monarchist Brazilian elite - particularly of the province of Rio de Janeiro - that achieved the desired stability of the Empire in the 1850s (RODRIGUES, 1988, v. 1, p. 17-27; GUIMARÃES, 1988, p. 6; ODÁLIA, 1997, p. 4; WEHLING, 1999, p. 33, 88; REIS, 2000, p. 33; IGLÉSIAS, 2000, p. 75-82). This statement is only partially correct. First, it leaves aside that the Golden Age of the Empire - the decade of the so-called Conciliação partidária (1853-1862) - was built upon the rising fear from the series of slave, Indian, Mestizo and liberal revolutions and uprisings of the 1830s and 1840s - the slave Revolta dos Malês (Bahia, 1835), the Indian and Mestizo revolt of Cabanagem (Pará, 1835-1840), the liberal and federalist revolutions of Sabinada (1837) and Farroupilha (Rio Grande do Sul, 1835-1845), and the liberal and popular Praieira revolution (Pernambuco, 1848- 1851) -, which challenged not only the integrity of the Brazilian territory, but also the political and social ascendancy of the Creole elite. Second, it forgets that Varnhagen’s text only represents the point of view of a part of that elite: the conservative Philo-Lusitanian monarchists’, which in the 1840s, and precisely from the impulse of the aforementioned uprisings and revolutions, began to be displaced from the Palace, the key positions of the imperial bureaucracy, and the import trade (MATTOS, 1987, p. 71-75, 111; CARVALHO, 2003, p. 253, 322; CARVALHO, 2012, p. 103).

Despite the fact that due to his occupation as a member of the Brazilian diplomacy, Varnhagen actually spent very little time of his life in Brazil, given his activity in favoring his country in its territorial disputes with other South American nations, some scholars agree on his place within the Creole Brazilian elite who authored the consolidation of the Empire towards mid-19 century (MATTOS, 1987, p. 125-126; GUIMARÃES, 1995, p. 529; CEZAR, 2018, p. 19). However, notwithstanding he developed his academic and diplomatic career during the Second Reign (1840-1889), it is necessary to recognize that his idea of nation did not align with that of the political leaders of the regime of D. Pedro the Second, whom were linked to the prosperous aris- tocracy of coffee agriculture in the Rio de Janeiro region - Rodrigues Torres, Paulino José Soares de Sousa, Eusébio de Queirós, Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão, José da Costa Carvalho Gonçalves de Magalhães, Gonçalves Dias, José de Alencar. On the contrary, Varnhagen’s conception of the Brazilian nation was closer to the one of the generation of Portuguese and Creole statesmen, headed by D. Pedro de First, which decreed independence and ruled Brazil until the abdication of the first Emperor in 1831 - José Bonifácio and Diogo Antônio Feijó (MATTOS, 1987, p. 125-126). With respect to the members of both generations it can be said that all were monarchists, whether liberal-moderates or conservatives. Nevertheless, while those who belonged to the so-called Generation of the Independence were philo-Lusitanians, a good part of those of the Generation of the Monarchical Consolidation were rather nativists. Varnhagen having been born in São Paulo, but living in Portugal since his childhood, and in fact Brazilian only by naturalization - when he left Brazil (1823) the independence had just happened (CEZAR, 2018, p. 33-36) -, towards the end of the 1840s persisted in the defense of a Brazilian nation independent of Portugal but exclusively Portuguese, in contrast to his nativist Creole and Mestizo contemporaries who vindicated the Indians as part of the Brazilian nation. This was

openly stated in the pages of his famous Memorial Orgânico (1849-1850):

Now, our Indians are either Brazilian citizens or not: in order to be citizens, they do not fulfill any of the obligations of the laws, and they walk around loitering and with pierced ears and lips, instead of being national guards and wearing uniforms, etc. Not being citizens, due to moral incapacity, as the Constitution says, the law -civil law- cannot see in them more than strangers to the social pact, who had abused the mercy with which they are treated, inhabiting the woods and making impossible to move and cultivate, but even giving cruel assaults to our neighboring farms, which in some parts have been obliged to give up the field to them until today […].

But let us not follow these arguments: let us speak clearly. Brazil belongs to us for the same reason that England belonged to the Normans when they conquered it. For the same reason that Portugal belonged to Afonso Henriques and his successors and vassals who took him from the Moors. The first right of all known nations was that of conquest. We proclaim to the Empire (understanding the territory of which it is master), our Leader and our law. Anyone who does not obey to them is a rebel and is a criminal (VARNHAGEN, 2016, p. 165-167).

From reading this passage, there is no doubt that Varnhagen ascribed citizenship, and therefore, part of Brazilian sovereignty - the other part was reserved for the Emperor - to a particular segment of the population that inhabited the Brazilian Empire in the mid-19th century: the Portuguese and their descendants - the Creoles -, who he asserted the territory belonged to by right of con- quest. The Indian masses, not to mention those of African slaves, but also even the Mestizos and Mulattos, were left out of the equation (VARNHAGEN, 2016, p. 120, 210-211; VARNHAGEN, 1854-1857, v. 2, p. XXIV-XXV). In fact, regarding the Indians, he affirmed in these paragraphs that, as “strangers to the social pact”, their subjection or extermination was justified.

But how to understand this radical stance of Varnhagen regarding the Indian, African, Mestizo and Mulatto masses, which at that time constituted the bulk of Brazilian population, its “people”? Could it be that his assertions were only the result of Eurocentric prejudices, or perhaps they had a deeper substratum that could be explained from both individual and collective expe- riences of certain social processes that took place at that moment? Undoubtedly, Varnhagen was an Eurocentrist who thought of Brazil as an European Empire in the Tropics, child of Portuguese (VARNHAGEN, 1854-1857, v. 2, p. XXV; ROWLAND, 2003, p. 366). The Indians, on the other

hand, he considered as stateless societies so closely linked to nature that it could even be said, as he did, that they had ethnography but no history (VARNHAGEN, 1854-1857, v. 2, p. 107-134; CEZAR, 2018, p. 189-190). This rejection of the aborigines, which he generalized towards other sectors of Brazilian society that were not Portuguese or Creole, had several sources. First, an alleged native attack that some critics point out Varnhagen experienced during his stay in 1840 near the town of Paranapitanga, in the province of São Paulo (PUNTONI, 2003, p. 641-642). Second, his disagreement with the rise of romantic indianista or cabocla literature between the decades of 1840-1850 - a literature that rejected the historical Portuguese roots of Brazil, and that began to gain ground in various areas of Brazilian politics and culture, especially in the framework of the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute (IHGB) of which Varnhagen was a member (GUIMARÃES, 1995, p. 560; PUNTONI, 2003, p. 655; SÁ, 2017, p. 161). Third, the news that arrived to him - by then based in the Brazilian diplomatic legation in Madrid - from his fatherland about the periodic and violent attacks that, since the abdication of D. Pedro the First, the Indian, Mestizo and Mulatto populace perpetrated on the Portuguese habitants of the towns and cities of the Empire. These last ones were constantly attacked because of the resentment aroused by its monopoly on the retail trade and the state bureaucracy; the violence directed against the Portuguese was undoubtedly more radical when nativist Creole sectors incited the mob, as had happened in the context of the Praieira revolution (1848) (NARO, 2002, p. 112-118; CARVALHO, 2003, p. 111, 252; CARVALHO, 2012, p. 97-98). Finally, the direct experience and the news that Varnhagen probably received about the European revolutions of 1848, as he returned from a one-year stay searching in the archives of London, Paris, Bruges, Cologne, Bonn, Frankfurt and Strasbourg, among many other cities, for documents on Brazilian colonial history (CEZAR, 2018, p. 37-38).

Varnhagen’s disdain for the Indian, Mestizo, and Mulatto mobs - for those social sectors that constituted the Brazilian povo - is also noticeable in his most important historiographic work, História Geral de Brasil. This text was written in the 1850s; however, it reflects its author’s concerns for the liberal, democratizing and anti-Lusitanian wave that, since the Praieira Revolution of 1848, increasingly strengthened in Brazilian politics, finally taking the forefront at the beginning of the 1860s (CARVALHO, 2012, p. 103). One of the sections of the História Geral that expresses with greater clarity the mentioned concern is the narration of the Pernambucana Revolution of 1817 - or Insurrection, as Varnhagen called it:

We who vow for the integrity of the Empire, and who see in D. João the Sixth another emperor, do not believe that Brazil loses anything in glory failing to catalog as an historical fact the Pernambuco insurrection in 1817. And even less do we regret the maturity of independence has not been counted since 1817, we who make it proceed from the royal letter on the port liberalization, and therefore in the month of January 1808; and therefore with more glory for Brazil, which from this art dates back its colonial emancipation from Europe to a time before that of all the Hispanic-American continental republics […].

[In Pernambuco insurrection] These were the same rivalries of Native Brazilians and European Brazilians, led to exaggeration among the garrison officials themselves, children of Brazil, with the children of Portugal. More often, in the same province of Pernambuco or in others, there have been greater excitement in this regard; and yet the policy of the rulers, or the events alone, will have conjured up great storms. However, it did not happen like this in 1817 […]. The people started to agitate, as happens in identical cases: some fled, others gathered, soldiers retreated to barracks. Agitation followed the turmoil: and in a short time, the revolt took shape. The prisons were opened, releasing not only Martins, but the criminals, who soon armed themselves, proceeding to perpetrate the acts of ferocity and blood, frequent when the brake of authority is broken (VARNHAGEN, 1854-1857, v. 2, p. 375-379).

Through his attack on the Pernambucana “Insurrection”, Varnhagen intended to restrain a historical interpretation that awoke in the 1840’s, and that observed the aforementioned event as a preamble to the 1822 Independence revolution by the Duke of Bragança, prince D. Pedro the Fourth of Portugal - D. Pedro the First of Brazil. That interpretation was José Ignácio de Abreu e Lima’s - participant in both, Pernambucana and Praieira Revolutions -, who in his Compêndio da História do Brasil (1842), presented an image of the Pernambucana Revolution as a peaceful and orderly movement that derived in the organization of a failed republic that suffered the bar- barous repression of the Portuguese army (ABREU E LIMA, 1843, p. 182-191; RODRIGUES, 2017, p. 296-298). The image configured by Varnhagen is absolute contrast to Abreu e Lima’s: for História Geral’s author, the Pernambucana “Insurrection” was an uprising emerged from a historical, but unnatural, hostility between Native Brazilians and European Brazilians that, due to the passions of the revolutionary leaders, and especially for their mistake of calling the mobs for action, derived in an abominable massacre.

In his História Geral do Brasil, Varnhagen did not recognize another Revolution of Independence than the one carried out, first by D. João the Sixth - who transferred the Court to Brazil in 1807, declared freedom of trade in the ports of Brazil (1808), and created, in 1815, the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves -, and later by D. Pedro the First - who consummated his father’s work by declaring the complete separation from Brazil in 1822, giving to it its integrity, its monarchical order, and its dynasty (VARNHAGEN, 1853-1857, v. 2, p. 313-314, 438-439). The aim of Varnhagen’s historiographic claim of the colonial period as the cradle of the Brazilian nation, but above all, his conception of the transfer of the Portuguese Court to Rio de Janeiro as the key moment of Brazilian national life, is evident: he wanted to demonstrate to his Creole contemporaries that Brazil was not the caboclo country, the Mestizo or the popular nation that the romantic and indianista novelists, Gonçalves de Magalhães, Gonçalves Dias and José de Alencar, preached in works such as A Confederação dos Tamoios (1856), Os Timbiras (1857) and O Guarani (1857) (ROWLAND, 2003, p. 376-377). On the contrary, bearing in mind his direct and indirect experiences of the 1848 revolutions, Varnhagen asserted that in Brazil “the European [Portuguese] element is the essential constituent of the current nationality”; being the indissoluble link of Portuguese and Creole population with the Bragança monarchy, the only barrier against the anarchic-socialist storms prevailing in Europe and in the fake republics of Hispanic America (VARNHAGEN, 1854-1857, v. 2, p. 281, 437-438).

The fall of the French king Louis Philippe in February 1848 by the revolution of the Parisian bourgeoisie and workers, unleashed a revolutionary torrent through Europe and the countries and regions under his sphere of influence. However, the expansion of the revolutionary wave was not direct. Unlike what happened at the end of the 18th century, when the French revolutionary armies invaded the rest of Europe and brought revolution and war to the European colonial dominions, in 1848 no revolutionary regime invaded the others. In 1848, what favored the expansion of the revolution was the advance in communication systems, mainly the information channels opened by regional and local presses. Thus, the revolutions that emerged in Poland, Sicily, Hungary, Chile, Jamaica, Canada, Brazil or Mexico, beyond the impulse they received from their own contexts of local discontent, were undoubtedly encouraged by the news received from France about the possibility of a change of regime (WEYLAND, 2009, p. 392, 403-405).

The spread of news of the bloody June 1848 also unleashed a wave of contention that, towards the autumn of that same year, overthrew most of the democratic and national demands won by the February triumphs. Everywhere - in Canada as well as in Piedmont, in Bohemia as in Colombia, in France as in Mexico, in Brazil as in Hungary - the revolution was defeated; and to its defeat followed the restoration of absolutism, or the instauration of dictatorial and conservative regimes. Now, despite their failure, scholars agree that the revolutions of 1848 globally changed the ways of conceiving and doing politics. They affirm that the revolutions of 1848 accelerated and expanded the circles of those considered capable of political participation, even reaching the popular strata of societies - the workers and the peasants. Likewise, they sustain that 1848 marked the moment of the emergence of modern political parties and propaganda systems. Finally, they claim that, starting with the so-called Springtime of the Peoples, the idea of the nation as a promise of democracy and progress was expanded and sharpened (HAUP; LANGWIESCHE, 2000, p. 17-21; SPERBER, 2005, p. 123).

The writing of history also changed towards the end of the 1840s and the beginning of the 1850s. As it happened in the sphere of political activity, the news that reached societies all around the world about the events in Paris, as well as the revolutionary movements that emerged at the local level, influenced the incorporation of a new character in historical narratives: the people. This

character who had already appeared as a passive entity in the philosophies of the history of the 18th century, the historiography of the mid-19th century contributed to complete its differentiation from the whole of society, giving to it concrete features and, above all, endowing it with historical agency. From that moment on, in historiographical works such as Michelet’s, Marx’s, Herculano’s or Bancroft’s, “the people” became a historical subject whose conscious actions influenced, positi- vely or negatively - that depended on the ideological philias and phobias of each historian -, the historical development of societies.

It is precisely in that global context of political, social and historiographical revolutions that this article locates Historia de México by Lucas Alamán and História Geral do Brasil by F. A. de Varnhagen. The concrete examination of the narratives of the independence revolutions confi- gured by the Mexican and Brazilian historians reveals a similarity in their hostility towards the people, that is, against the participation of the masses of Indians, Mestizos and Mulattos in the fundamental events of the national histories of Mexico and Brazil. This shared perspective can be explained from its interconnection with some personal experiences by the authors and with the local and global revolutionary context of the mid-19th century. To begin with, both Alamán and Varnhagen belonged to the philo-Iberian and conservative Creole elites that governed Mexico and Brazil since the moment of their Independences, and which, towards the end of the 1850s, began to lose their political and social ascendancy. Therefore, both authors were part of social and political groups that argued the need for the descendants of the ancient Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and colonizers to maintain political dominance over the groups of Indians, Mestizos and Mulattos that made up the bulk of the populations of the Mexican and Brazilian territories. In addition, the two historians were direct and indirect witnesses of the liberal, democratic and popular revolutions that shook the world, including their own countries, in 1848. On the one hand, Alamán had news - via the main Mexican newspapers of the moment, Monitor Republicano, El Siglo XIX, El Universal - of the events in Paris, and at the same time he witnessed the uprisings and peasant revolutions of Indians and Mestizos that shook the South, Center and North of the country since 1847. On the other hand, Varnhagen, being a diplomatic of the Brazilian Empire in Madrid, and in charge of searching for documents on the colonial history of Brazil in diffe- rent European archives, had news of both the European revolutions and the popular and liberal uprisings that threatened the Portuguese and Creole social, political and economic ascendance in Brazil, as well as the unity of the Empire.

Observed from the perspective of global history, the phenomenon of the writing of history acquires new dimensions. It allows, among other things, to transcend the scope of national histo- riographic traditions, recognizing the interconnections between them, as well as their communi- cation channels. The historical narratives of Alamán and Varnhagen have largely been the subject of multiple monographic studies; critical works are still needed to locate and value them within the framework of global historiographic trends of the 19th century.