Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Peru

The emphasis on political history in Peru continues apace with the appearance of Ulrich Muecke’s work on the rise of the Partido Civil during the mid-nineteenth-century guano boom. Having endured the turmoil of the military’s failed effort to reform the country in the 1970s and then the vicious insurgency of the Shining Path in the 1980s, a new generation of Peruvianists has turned away from the heavily socioeconomic and Marxist approaches of their predecessors to more traditional political themes in the last decade or so. For example, until the appearance of Carmen McEvoy’s important work on Manuel Pardo (1994), the Civilist Party had been dismissed by earlier historians as little more than a crass “electoral” manipulation by guano-corrupted elites to gain power.At the same time, since redemocratization in the 1980s and the appearance of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (Verso, 1983), not to mention Samuel P. Huntington’s influential work on the evolution of democracy in Latin America, many historians and social scientists have focused on the genesis and development of early democratic politics in the nineteenth century — particularly the middle decades of the century. Surprisingly, for a country and region mired in decades of military rule after independence, Peru in the mid – nineteenth century experienced a remarkable blossoming of civil society, an early form of party politics, and the emergence of “limited,” elite-led democracy.Anticipating Carlos Forment’s important two-volume Democracy in Latin America, 1760 – 1900 (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003) — a book that has not gotten the scholarly attention that it deserves — German scholar Muecke has written a pathbreaking study of the burgeoning of a rudimentary democratic political culture in Peru during the guano age (1840 – 80). His book focuses on the origins, formation, and development of the Partido Civil, which evolved from electoral clubs and associations that emerged in the country during the 1860s. A carefully researched, crisply written, and well-translated book that appeared in Germany in 1998, it is chock full of provocative, revisionist history that will alter our picture and recast our thinking of nineteenth-century Peruvian politics for some time to come.Inspired by the works of Weber and Duverger, from whom he draws his definition of the term “party,” Muecke organizes his study into three main chapters: on the bourgeoisie’s rise to power during the guano age, the development of the Partido Civil (the elections and party campaigns in the 1870s and formation of parliamentary groups), and the Partido Civil in power during the presidency of party founder Manual Pardo. In doing so, Muecke provides the most thorough political history of the period to date, based on heretofore unused archival materials drawn from the Pardo Papers in the National Library in Lima.Of particular significance are copies of the voluminous signed letters from Manuel Pardo written during his 1871 – 72 presidential campaign to the potential local supporters who would form the corpus of the party’s organization in the provinces. Extraordinary for their national scope and reach for the times, these letters reveal in unusual detail the nature of Peruvian politics in the towns and cities of the interior, as well as the structure and function of the party in Lima — spotlighting a surprisingly extensive and vibrant civil society. Equally important is the socioeconomic profile of party members that Muecke carefully compiles in text and tables, a portrait that includes not only the rising guano bourgeoisie but also significant elements from the expanding urban middle sector and even small artisan participation.The Partido Civil, according to Muecke, constructed an intricate and complex web of relationships and discourses among individuals and groups that played a determining factor in the shaping of government in the 1870s. At the same time, the party’s 1871 – 72 election campaign, which created closer ties between the center (Lima) and the various regions, was particularly significant in reinforcing a sense of national identity and the idea of an imagined community — indeed, of a relatively unified nation itself (p. 96). In fact, this election was, Muecke concludes, a milestone in Peru’s political history: for the first time not only an opposition, but a civilian, candidate won the presidency. Finally, he writes, “even if violence [referring party militants’ forcible attempts to control public space and the polls], deception, and intrigue made the elections appear a farce, they played a key role in political life because they encouraged debate and forged political contacts and, despite their shortcomings, were able to legitimize power” (p. 83).In sum, Muecke has written one of the best analyses on a long-ignored and dimly understood corner of electoral politics in the nineteenth-century political history of Peru. Along with the works of McEvoy and Forment, it pushes back and clarifies Huntington’s stages of democratic evolution in Latin America, making it a must-read for Latin Americanists searching for the seeds and sprouts of early democracy in the region

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