March 19 marked the 211th anniversary of the issuance of this Spanish Constitution, which served as an argument to prevent the reinforcement of Spanish troops fighting against those who carried out the war of independence in the second phase of that admirable feat to achieve freedom.
On the influence of the Constitution of Cádiz, the new book by Ricardo Sánchez, based on Carlos Marx’s research on the subject, affirms that Marx’s technique was the analysis of international contexts and the duly periodized cycles of national processes .
And he affirms openly that the Constitution is an expression of the field of struggle because there was a debate about what was happening before the French occupation, the necessary reform and modernization of the monarchical State to give it the constitutional overtones with the limits to power, the kings had capitulated and the towns of nineteenth-century Spain rose up in insurrections.
With the Constitution of Bayonne, Napoleon transferred and grafted what he had done in France. Napoleon abolished church privileges, introduced French atheism; and the old Spanish customs and laws, he fought them with rational concepts.
Professor Ricardo Sánchez, on Marx’s interpretation of the Constitution of Cádiz, asserts that, “Another dimension of the method in the case of the Constitution of Cádiz consists in asking why this type of constitution and not another; value in its multiple meanings, in its coherence, in the legal-political influences, in the symbolisms it presents.
From the reading of the economic-social-cultural grammar, the legal-political reading is carried out, always showing the beyond of what the constitution evidences, revealing the ideological fetishes, but accepting that it is an institution of power, a framework in which different forces compete. The constitution as an expression of a field of struggle.
The Constitution of Cádiz did influence our independence, at first indirectly and collaterally, then it had a direct and gradual or dosed impact. I explain this dual or bifurcated statement.
First in an indirect and collateral way because when it was issued in 1812 it did not reach to influence our first pre-republican constitutionalism with a provincial character in that confused first period of independence (1810 / 1816), where the constitutions of Cundinamarca, Tunja, Antioquia, Cartagena, Popayán and two others.
This was a derivative constitutionalism with other roots: the French, the North American, the English, the Haitian.
Period full of confrontations between criollos/patriots and independentistas, autonomists and royalists who became involved in disputes forming the United Provinces of New Granada, from the base of shouts, meetings and acts of independence, without defeating the royalist army, but conceiving a territorial order that wore them down in the conception of centralism and federalism, inadvertently allowing the resumption of Spanish power with the so-called reconquest of the “peacemaker” Pablo Morillo.
It should be noted that the Constitution of Cádiz in that period had an impact because it lays out the foundations of a new Spain.
And although he tried to preserve control over the Spanish colonies, he placed limits on the King by introducing monarchical constitutionalism, that is, another type of State with barriers to limit absolute power.
Another type of State impregnated with the French liberties of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the guidelines of the first French constitutions, those of 1791, 1793 and 1795. King Ferdinand VII himself said, with irritation and annoyance that, the Constitution of Cádiz was a copy of the French constitution of 1791.
And then that Constitution of Cádiz had a gradual and measured impact because it served as the basis for the allegation of the Riego rebellion.
General Rafael Del Riego, who was ordered a second reconquest of the Viceroyalty, with pacification (extermination), refused to travel under those conditions of the absolute monarchical mandate, and stated before the King that he should restore the validity of the Constitution of Cádiz and comply with its precepts on human rights, that is, it ordered him to change the conduct and style of conducting domination over the colonies.
The author, Ricardo Sánchez Ángel, highlights that, “On July 9, 1820, before the Cortes presided over by the Archbishop of Seville, Don José Espiga, King Ferdinand VII swore allegiance to the Constitution of Cádiz.
It was the recognition of the revolutionary maturity of Spain, which once again threatened to adopt its Jacobin, radical form.
Of course, the monarchy sought by all means to reduce the application of constitutional regulations, gradually creating the conditions for the restoration of monarchical absolutism in 1823”.
It should also be noted that this Constitution proclaimed the application of amnesties, suppression of oppression over indigenous people, elimination of the slave trade, etc.
Constitutional norms that drew the lines of what would later gradually be included in norms of the republican constitutionalism of the Colombian State in the reforms of 1843, 1858 and 1863, initially, for the agreements on the cessation of hostilities.
Just as Gramsci weighed the influence of that Constitution in Italy, one can see the gradual and deferred influence in the republican Colombia in formation that during the 19th century tried with the liberal reformers and later with the liberal radicals, to break the moorings of colonialism, revising the constitutions of 1851 and 1863 show this influence, to highlight another aspect, one must read the regulations on the abolition of tithes, ecclesiastical privileges, the suppression of monasteries, the transformation of waste land, etc.
The Constitution of Cádiz was an attempt to make the monastic and feudal institutions more flexible to give rise to a better administration system, to loosen ties with feudal institutions without dismantling until then.
Marx affirmed that the Constitution of Cádiz was the fruit of the liberal ideas of the 18th century, and the dark traditions of theocracy.
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