The Liberals’ leading theorist and commentator, José María Luis Mora (1794–1850), who had published his critical works during the 1820s and early 1830s, remained in exile in Paris from December 1834 until March 1847, moving to London in 1847 until 1850. He corresponded regularly with former associates – Valentín Gómez Farías, Santa Anna’s Vice President (March 1833–April 1834); Francisco García Salinas, Governor of Zacatecas (1829–34); and Manuel Gómez Pedraza – noting their political evolution during this period. Into the 1840s, Mora added Mariano Otero (1817–50), representative of the younger generation, to this list. A major concern of Mora’s continued to be the evident minority nature of Mexican Liberalism.¹

Otero, originating from Guadalajara, became a rising star among moderate Liberals after his arrival in Mexico City in 1842. A link between generations, he aligned with Gómez Pedraza, virtual leader of the moderates, but derived his ideas on the deleterious impact of Church and army from Mora. Even so, Otero upheld the historic position of the Church in Mexican cultural life and did not consider religious toleration to be a relevant issue in Mexico. Although his aim was to separate the clergy from political involvement, he argued for the Christian roots of Liberalism in a common desire for human improvement. Otero viewed federalism as the natural reflection of Mexican regional identities and provincial sentiment, sympathising with García Salinas and Prisciliano Sánchez (1783–1826), his Jalisco forebear and first state governor.²

Otero sought explanations in his writings and speeches during the 1840s for the general malaise in the country and the lack of civil harmony. The conflicts of the 1830s pointed to the urgency of reform. He believed that by 1840–1 Mexico had reached crisis point. Santa Anna’s frustration of reform in 1842 was, in his view, a step backwards. In his discourse of 11 October 1842, Otero took his stand on political liberty and federalism, but warned of the indifference of the majority of Mexicans to political affairs. Parallel to this was the other ‘worst enemy’: apathy among the ‘decent classes’ (‘gentes honradas’).³

Otero clearly did not regard Mexico as a ‘nation’, since, in his view, no sense of common identity or of mutual cooperation existed among its inhabitants, communities or corporations. Otero went as far as to cite Miguel Bataller, the late-colonial magistrate of the Audiencia of Mexico who, after Independence, exclaimed that ‘the worst punishment that could befall the Mexicans is that they should govern themselves’.⁴

Otero saw the army as ‘undoubtedly the element most immediately responsible for the loss of national honour’. He blamed the officers, despite some exceptions, not the ordinary soldier. All governments over the previous twenty years had been brought to power as a result of some military intervention, notably the ‘farce of pronunciamientos’. He wrote to Mora on 15 September 1848 that in his view the ‘destabilising tendencies’ of military-politicians presented the country’s most serious problem. Furthermore, the insecure situation on the northern frontier resulting from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with the United States in 1848 and an alarming ‘disposition to separatism’ on the part of the frontier states struck him as matters requiring attention.⁵

José Fernando Ramírez (1804–71), who came from northern Mexico, saw a generational conflict between the architects of Independence and the younger men, anxious for influence and power, who wanted to transform Mexico and overcome the errors of the past.⁶ Attempts to work out solutions, however, remained beset by overwhelming difficulties. Until 1851, for example, the Mexican Republic had not managed a peaceful transfer of power at presidential level.⁷ Like Otero, Ramírez was a moderate Liberal. Although they differed in temperament and perspective, their diagnosis of Mexico’s situation in the 1840s was remarkably similar. Ramírez identified officer peculation and inattention to the needs of the soldiery as prime causes of the demoralisation of the army in the Texas War of 1836 and the War of 1846–7, blaming Santa Anna in particular.⁸

In Ramírez’s view, two vices kept Mexico behind: lack of any understanding of representative institutions; and indifference to productive work, which had made the United States strong. He pointed to persistent factionalism, which reached its worst point in the middle of the war with the United States. Ramírez’s analysis was steeped in disenchantment and despair.⁹

When he became Arista’s secretary of foreign relations, Ramírez, on 11 September 1851, outlined his objectives: strict observation of the 1824 Constitution and establishment of the rule of law; the balancing of powers within the constitutional processes – especially between the National Congress and the State governments; full integration of the northern states into the Republic; inculcation of moral principles in public administration; the elimination of corruption; and the regulation of public finance. Ramírez also drew attention to another pressing question: inter-oceanic communication across Mexican territory, henceforth an issue between Mexico and the United States, which had expanded to the Pacific coast in 1847–8.¹⁰

Critics of Liberalism, such as Luis G. Cuevas (1799–1867), offered a different perspective on what went wrong in Mexico from Independence. Appearing in stages between 1851 and 1857, Porvenir de México attributed the downhill trajectory to the intrigues of the masonic lodges during the 1820s, the expulsion of the Spanish in 1829, and measures against the Church in 1833–4 and 1847. Cuevas also saw financial incapacity and a propensity to yield to the seduction of any new ideas as parallel causes. As a result, ‘Mexico in the year 1857 is nothing but the object of disdain and compassion by observers’. By 1861, after three years of devastating civil war, he was saying that Mexico ‘is a source of ridicule for its detractors’.¹¹

He put the blame on the Liberals, with Gómez Farías as the arch enemy. The ‘partido demócrata’, as he labelled it, with little base of popular support, intended in 1833–4 to subordinate the clergy, elevate the Civic Militia above the regular army, and favour the propertyless over property owners. He maintained that, exactly as in Spain, the Mexican Liberals believed that everything which sustained the Catholic religion was inimical to the system they wished to install. Their anti-clericalism had done its utmost to break the link that bound Mexico to the universal Church and brought the country to civil war. The Constitution of 1857 had, for the first time, he reminded his readers, removed the exclusive Catholic establishment. Furthermore, none of the Liberal measures concerning religion had been negotiated beforehand with the Holy See. Factionalism had led to anarchy and catastrophe, as well as territorial loss to the United States. Decades of ‘misfortune’ and ‘ignominy’ had made Mexico the victim of US aggrandisement, which currently threatened to remove the country from the face of the universe.¹²

Cuevas highlighted the forebodings of many Mexican thinkers and political figures. Defeat in the War of 1846–7 had been a terrible shock because the fighting had not been confined to the north but had penetrated into the central heartlands.¹³ The capital of the Republic had been occupied by a foreign army and the Mexican government was obliged to regroup in Querétaro. These disasters would be long meditated in Mexico.

Melchor Ocampo (1814–61) opposed Cuevas’s position. Speaking on the anniversary of the Hidalgo Uprising of 16 September 1810, he identified the absence of any sense of civic education, justice, responsibility or social conscience and the persistence of personal interest as the prime explanations for the failure of national integration. Ocampo did not want public office to be regarded as private patrimony or a sinecure. No one in Mexico cared about the patria. Ocampo appealed to the heroism of Cuauhtémoc and Xicoténcatl, who had resisted Spanish dominance, and the example of the champions of Independence, Hidalgo and Morelos. Although Mexico’s strength and distinctiveness resulted from the intermingling of the indigenous and Hispanic races, it still lacked ‘the energy and capacity for work demonstrated by the Anglo-Saxon race’. Like Otero, he criticised the roles played in society and political life by the military and clergy. He argued that the civil power should be supreme, supported by an educational system stripped of clerical influence and with prime attention to what he perceived to be the useful sciences. Ocampo’s beliefs derived from the Mexican Enlightenment, though expressed in the context of a mid-nineteenth century sovereign state, which he aspired to transform into a Liberal republic. Such a position made him a natural ally of Juárez.¹⁴

In the State of Michoacán, however, Governor Ocampo became engaged in a conflict over jurisdiction with the ecclesiastical authorities, which would have repercussions lasting into the Reform era. Ocampo advocated religious toleration and the separation of Church and State. His government programme of 14 May 1852 expressed his intention to push for the reduction of parish dues for special services conducted by the clergy. This brought him into direct conflict with Bishop Clemente Munguía, who argued that Ocampo’s policies violated the rights and liberties of the Church.¹⁵

Party-polemical news-sheets assumed a key role in the ideological battles from the 1840s and throughout the Reform era. A series of newspapers presented the idea of Mexico as a Catholic nation. La Voz de la Religión (1848–53), which appeared twice weekly, declared itself to be the mouthpiece of Catholicism, refuting ideas expressed in El Monitor Republicano, organ of moderate liberalism from 14 February 1846 onwards. By 1852, La Voz was speaking of the reconquest of the country for the Catholic religion – that is, well before the publication of the Reform Laws after 1855.

In 1848, Bishop Antonio Mantecón of Oaxaca, aroused by those he denounced as ‘los caudillos de la impiedad’, urged his parish clergy and those parishioners who could afford it to subscribe to La Voz and the weekly El Observador Católico.¹⁶ Mantecón by character was neither an extremist nor an alarmist, but his strong language, condemning those allegedly intending to destroy 300 years of the Catholic religion in Mexico does suggest a sense of real alarm among the hierarchy. This begs the question, what brought this on? Oaxaca city might certainly have housed an identifiable group of Liberals, but, like State Governor Juárez, they were largely experienced men, concerned with good government and economic progress, well-educated and accustomed to working with the clergy. The city could by no means be described as a hotbed of inflammatory radicalism and anti-religious sentiment. What, then, generated such language? It can only have come from a reading of the radical Press and pasquinades, and, perhaps more so, from what the clergy had picked up or been told from loose conversations in public places, cantinas and tavernas, or private tertulias.

From Spain, the ideas of Jaime Balmes and Donoso Cortés became known in Mexico. In 1850, La Voz de la Religión published selections from Balmes’s writings, which attributed the Liberal measures of his time to the detrimental influence of the Enlightenment. Balmes, opposed to religious plurality and toleration, became a prime influence in the gestation of Catholic thought during the 1850s in Mexico.¹⁷

El Universal, appearing between November 1848 and the summer of 1855, and which became the principal organ of the Conservative Party, dedicated itself to the intellectual subversion of the Liberal programme. The paper played an important role in the elections to the Municipal Council of Mexico City on 15 July 1849, which the Conservatives won. This key institution became a major Conservative base thereafter. El Universal praised the Carrera regime in Guatemala for its defence of the Church.¹⁹ In Otero’s view, El Universal was ‘the organ for ideas even more retrograde and absolutist than those printed in El Tiempo’.²⁰

In the presidential election of 1850, in which Arista failed to gain an outright majority, one-third of the votes went to the Conservative-backed candidate, Nicolás Bravo, supported by El Universal. In the Senate, the three figures of Antonio Haro y Tamariz, Juan Nepomuceno Almonte (son of Morelos) and José María Tornel opposed Arista’s administration in 1852.²¹

Alamán aspired to recover the long-lasting stability of the colonial era. As editor of El Universal, he outlined the position of the Conservative Party on 23 March 1853. It would, in the first instance, support the role of the Catholic Church ...