Charles A. Hale is Professor Emeritus of Latin American History at the University of Iowa. His two most significant books are Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821-1853 (1968), winner of Mexico’s Fray Bernardino de Sahagn Prize, and The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (1989), winner of the Bolton Prize.

Emilio Rabasa and the Survival of Porfirian Liberalism

The Man, His Career, and His Ideas, 1856–1930By Charles A. Hale

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5876-5

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………………………………ixPreface………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..xiAbbreviations in Text, Notes, and Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..xii1. Introduction: The Nineteenth-Century Heritage……………………………………………………………………………12. Forming a Porfirian Career: Oaxaca, Mexico City, and Chiapas (1856–1894)………………………………………………123. Senator, Juridical Theorist, and Constitutional Historian (1894–1912)…………………………………………………334. Confronting the Revolution (1911–1914)…………………………………………………………………………….535. The Exile Years: Politics, Journalism, and History (1914–1920)……………………………………………………….756. Europe and the Return to Mexico: Economic Development and the Social Agenda of the Revolution (1919–1930)…………………1087. The Constitution of 1917, the Supreme Court, and the Conflict of Legal Traditions (1912–1930)……………………………1338. Conclusion: The Survival of Porfirian Liberalism…………………………………………………………………………163Appendix A: A Castelar…………………………………………………………………………………………………..181Appendix B: Emilio Rabasa’s Immediate Family……………………………………………………………………………….185Notes………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….187Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………………223Index………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….239

Chapter One

Introduction The Nineteenth-Century Heritage

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For the historian of Mexican thought and politics and for the biographer, Emilio Rabasa is not only a figure of central importance but an enigmatic and contradictory one as well. It is widely acknowledged that Rabasa exerted a strong influence on the formation of the Constitution of 1917, the Magna Charta of the Mexican Revolution. And yet this influence came from a man who was politically antirevolutionary and socially conservative. As a senator in 1912 he opposed Francisco I. Madero, the “apostle” of the Revolution. As a diplomat he served Victoriano Huerta, the “usurper.” As a close associate of the Científicos, Rabasa in his historical writings of 1912 and 1920 took a benign view of the regime of Porfirio Díaz (the Porfiriato) and has been often labeled its apologist. As governor of his native state of Chiapas in the 1890s, Rabasa introduced measures to divide indigenous communal property; and these policies continued to guide his social ideas during the revolutionary and postrevolutionary eras. Yet as a jurist, Rabasa became not only the phantom member of the Constitutional Congress of Querétaro but also the revered modern master of Mexican constitutional law, idolized by the juridical community. In addition, Rabasa is celebrated for his literary works of 1887 to 1891 and recognized as the pioneer of the Mexican realist novel. Although some aspects of his career have been the subject of study by historians, legal scholars, and literary critics, other aspects have been slighted or overlooked entirely. Aided by both known and heretofore unknown evidence, I present (as far as possible) a full biographical portrait of this major figure in Mexican history, whose life spanned three critical but distinct periods: the era of Porfirio Díaz (1877–1911), the Revolution (1910–20), and the reconstructive years of the 1920s. Rabasa is of particular interest to me because his ideas and career constitute intellectual continuity and survival from the old regime to the new regime.

Within the constraints and peculiar obsessions of the biographical mode, I have tried to follow the methods of my earlier work. My central objective has been to examine Mexican political ideas within a broader Western context, both in terms of influence and comparison. The world of the nineteenth-century intellectual and governing elite was Europe, mainly France and Spain, but also England (usually filtered through a continental lens), and as the twentieth century wore on, the United States. One of my central questions has been: why were certain ideas, policies, and political configurations influential in Mexico and not others? I have found the answer to be that intellectual influence is based on the relevance of those European and North American ideas to Mexico and thus adapted to Mexico’s social and political peculiarities. I have always rejected the notion that the ideas of the Mexican (and by extension Latin American) intellectual elite are a mere “reflection” of foreign thought; moreover, I have refused to enter the sterile debate over “imitation” versus “authenticity” in the intellectual life of the continent. Thus, my concern has been consistently comparative. In the case of Emilio Rabasa I have tried to identify ideas and authors that guided his thought, seek out sources (even though his references are often vague and his documentation casual), and to find the reasons why he found them relevant. Therefore, my method has been comparative throughout this book, a method that is particularly appropriate in the case of Rabasa, who himself was a master comparativist.

In terms of reputation and continuing influence, it might be useful to compare Rabasa to other important Porfirian intellectuals. In his notable defense of the Constitution of 1857, Daniel Cosío Villegas identified Rabasa and Justo Sierra as the major critics of the document and as the principal defenders of the Porfiriato. He correctly identified Rabasa’s La Constitución y la dictadura of 1912 as an elaboration of ideas enunciated by Sierra in the newspaper La Libertad from 1878 to 1880. The reputation of both Sierra and Rabasa has seen a strong revival since the 1940s, yet we should resist too close a comparison. Though both men were born in remote provinces, Sierra in 1848 in Campeche and Rabasa in 1856 in Chiapas, Sierra was taken to Mexico City at an early age and experienced the heroic civil and ideological wars of the 1860s as a student in the capital. Rabasa was sent to school in Oaxaca during the years following the restoration of the Republic in 1867. He did not go to Mexico City until 1886 when the regime of Don Porfirio was fully consolidated. Thus Sierra, more than Rabasa, retained a lingering attachment to classic political liberalism and to the “old” liberals of the Constitutional Convention of 1856–57. One of these liberals was Ignacio Altamirano, the literary mentor of Sierra’s youth. The young Rabasa, by contrast, is credited with being the first post-Reforma novelist not to be sponsored by Altamirano.

Though Rabasa and Sierra shared many ideas, Rabasa’s age and the experience of his formative years made him a Porfirian liberal without the degree of ambivalence Sierra revealed toward the regime. In fact, in the early 1890s Rabasa was essentially appointed by Porfirio Díaz to be governor of Chiapas. Also critical in comparing the subsequent reputations of Sierra and Rabasa is the fact that Sierra died in 1912, while ambassador from the Madero regime to Spain, and thus was not forced, as was Rabasa, to take a political stand during the turbulent years 1913–20. How would later generations of Mexicans have regarded Sierra if he like Rabasa had first accepted Huerta and then spent the rest of the decade in exile?

Rabasa’s political ideas and his defense of the Porfirian regime might also be compared to those of Francisco Bulnes. Yet Bulnes, who lived until 1924, was so much the polemicist that his attacks on Benito Juárez and his subsequent defense of Porfirio Díaz identified him thoroughly with the old regime in the eyes of later generations. As for Rabasa’s influence on the Constitution of 1917, only Andrés Molina Enríquez surpasses him. However, Molina was a decade younger, and his major work of 1909 was a critical treatment of the land problem, a problem Rabasa viewed in classic liberal terms and even questioned its existence. Molina’s Los Grandes Problemas nacionales made him the reputed precursor of revolutionary agrarianism, an official consultant on agrarian issues, and presumed author of Article 27 of the Constitution. Though Rabasa’s reputation has not achieved the exalted status of Justo Sierra and Andrés Molina Enríquez, it certainly has surpassed that of his Científico contemporaries. For example, there were the brothers Macedo, whose ideas were either too confined within the narrow official boundaries of the late Díaz regime (in the case of Pablo) or sufficiently technical to arouse little continuing interest (in the case of Miguel). In short, Emilio Rabasa emerges as an unusual figure among those Porfirian intellectuals whose ideas were subjected to the ideological onslaught of the post-1910 years.

Clearly a major source of Rabasa’s reputation and continuing influence is the respect he has come to command among members of the legal profession. This status stems in large part from the experience of Mexico City’s lawyers and legal educators during the revolutionary decade. The juridical establishment of the capital was closely identified with the regime of Porfirio Díaz and showed little enthusiasm for the triumphant arrival of Francisco Madero in mid-1911. One prominent figure was Francisco León de la Barra (1863–1939), eminent lawyer, ambassador to the United States, minister of Foreign Relations, and interim president of the Republic from 25 May to 6 November 1911. Another was Demétrio Sodi (1866–1934), distinguished jurist and Supreme Court justice from 1908 to 1911, who served as Diaz’s final minister of justice. Sodi declined a cabinet post offered by Madero. Another leader of the legal community was the aforementioned Miguel S. Macedo (1856–1929), prominent Científico, expert on criminal law, and sub-secretary of the Interior from 1906 to 1911. All three had close ties to the Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia, directed from 1904 to 1911 by Miguel Macedo’s brother Pablo (1851–1918), chief publicist on development issues during the final decade of the Porfiriato.

The critical event that solidified Rabasa’s central place in the metropolitan juridical community was the founding of the Escuela Libre de Derecho (ELD) in July 1912, a subject I discuss in detail in Chapter 4. Although a student strike against Luis Cabrera, the new director of the Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia, provided the spark, the idea of a “free school” (that is, free from direction by the revolutionary government) soon found considerable professorial support and became a reality within two months. Emilio Rabasa was perhaps the most significant figure in the ELD of 1912. Among the other professorial founders were men I have just mentioned, Francisco León de la Barra, Demétrio Sodi, and Miguel S. Macedo, as well as Jorge Vera Estañol, a popular professor. The school rapidly gained prestige, in part because its founders were the country’s leading lawyers and jurists. Though its degrees were not given official recognition until 1930, the political antagonism between it and the official school soon faded, especially after the fall of the regime of Victoriano Huerta in July 1914. Emilio Rabasa’s professorship in the early ELD was brief, yet by the time he left Mexico in May 1914 as chairman of Mexico’s delegation to the conference in Niagara Falls, Canada, mediated by Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (ABC), his reputation was established as the country’s premier expert on constitutional law. His two works, El Artículo 14 (1906) on the defense of individual rights and his more general La Constitución y la dictadura (1912), were standard texts for the new generation of law students.

Rabasa’s influence on the legal community was based on more than technical expertise. His juridical studies and his teaching of constitutional law were informed by a keen historical sense, which broadened his vision and strengthened his argument. As Cosío Villegas acknowledged, despite disagreeing fundamentally with his substantive interpretation of the Constitution of 1857, “Rabasa knew history and knew law,” something that “is rare in México.” Rabasa was the major exponent in the post-1910 period of the dominant political doctrine of the Porfiriato, a transformed liberalism that rested on the contemporary concept of “scientific politics” and on a historical or traditional constitutionalism already rooted in nineteenth-century Mexico.

To demonstrate Rabasa’s adherence to these elements of Porfirian liberalism, we must consider the well-known aspects of his career and writings but also look beyond to aspects that are less studied or heretofore ignored. These include his policies as the modernizing governor of Chiapas from 1891 to 1894, his role in the Senate of the Republic from 1894 to 1913, his anonymous contributions from 1916 to 1918 to the émigré journal, Revista mexicana, and his career and writings following his return to Mexico in 1920. Also of major importance was his close business and legal association with William F. Buckley, Sr., an American lawyer and oil entrepreneur, working in Mexico from 1908 to 1921. Additional major insights into Rabasa’s career, his concerns, and his ideas come from an extensive and intimate correspondence from 1910 to 1920 with José Yves Limantour, the exiled finance minister of the late Díaz regime. In particular, this correspondence opens up for us Emilio Rabasa’s previously unknown exile experience. In short, Rabasa’s ideas, based on the transformed liberalism of the late nineteenth century are further revealed in a multifaceted career that in the absence of a Rabasa personal archive has remained largely obscure to historians. The correspondence with Buckley and Limantour also uncovers the personal side of a man who made a concerted effort to avoid public scrutiny.

The concept of scientific politics was put forth by Justo Sierra and the other editors of the newspaper La Libertad in 1878. Drawn from the positivism of Henri de Saint Simon and Auguste Comte, scientific politics entailed a critique of classic liberal and particularly egalitarian ideas. Politics must not be based on abstractions, but upon science, that is, upon empirical study, history and social reality, and practical economic objectives. Furthermore, argued La Libertad, politics is the science of the possible; dogmas, theories, and legal formulas must give way to observation, patient investigation, and experience as the guides to statesmanship. The self-styled “new generation” of intellectuals of La Libertad contrasted scientific politics with the “metaphysical politics” of the “old” midcentury liberals, whose ideas in their view had led only to revolution and anarchy. Sierra and his colleagues called themselves “new” or “conservative” liberals, following the founders of the Third Republic in France and the First Republic in Spain, particularly Adolphe Thiers, Jules Simon, and Emilio Castelar. Articles by and about these “conservative-liberal” leaders filled the pages of La Libertad in the years 1878 to 1880. The term conservative-liberalism became the correlate of “scientific politics,” in Mexico as in Europe.

The idea that administration must take precedence over political contention, central to scientific politics at its origin in the thought of Henri de Saint Simon, had great appeal for the writers of La Libertad. The ultimate success of the Díaz regime, they argued, will depend on the formation of a “scientific plan of administration and politics, based on knowledge of the biological, social, and economic conditions of the country.” Another major feature of scientific politics in Mexico was the now commonplace idea that society was an evolving organism to be understood historically. From Herbert Spencer came the idea of the social organism, its evolution and inevitable progress. From Auguste Comte came the emphasis on history as the proper way to study the science of society. Strong government through practical administration, a biological and historical sense of society, a faith in progress: these were all key elements of scientific politics.

In addition, Sierra and his colleagues also sought constitutional reform and regarded themselves very much as constitutionalists. These advocates of scientific politics called for a constitution that was in accord with the country’s political and social realities. In short, their constitutionalism was historical or traditional as opposed to the doctrinaire constitutionalism of 1856–57. The doctrinaire tendency reflected a belief that rigid adherence to or imposition of the precepts of the written document could guarantee the realization of constitutional order. Doctrinaire constitutionalists often took a radical or democratic political stand, believing it was necessary to change society to conform to the constitution. Historical or traditional constitutionalists, on the other hand, sought to change constitutional precepts they found abstract or unrealizable in Mexico. They tended to be politically moderate and socially elitist, calling for strong government within the constitution, at the same time resisting personal presidential power. The assumptions of historical constitutionalism came to guide Emilio Rabasa’s political thought, and he carried them into the revolutionary decade. Thus Emilio Rabasa, like Justo Sierra, can be rightly called a constitutionalist and a liberal, as well as a positivist. The terms are not mutually exclusive and reflect the ideological consensus that prevailed among the intellectual and governing elite of Porfirian Mexico.

The constitutionalism that guided Rabasa was well established in Mexico. Throughout the nineteenth century there were continual unsuccessful attempts by liberals to establish a system of “constitutional balance” that would prevent the extremes of “anarchy” and “despotism.” The elements of this system were an effective separation of powers, an ambivalence if not hostility toward popular sovereignty, and a tie between individual rights and propertied interests as the guarantee of stability. The system was elitist, antidemocratic, and theoretically antistatist, though it came to include a strong state if properly limited by constitutional means. It drew inspiration from a current of French political thought that had its origins in Montesquieu and was put forth in the nineteenth century by Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edouard de Laboulaye, and even in a sense by Hippolyte Taine. French constitutionalists idealized English (and in one instance, North American) institutions and made their point of departure a critique of the French Revolution and the egalitarian or “jacobin” revolutionary tradition. The Mexican version of historical constitutionalism is revealed in three episodes from the 1820s to the 1890s.

(Continues…)

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