The governments of the Orléans Monarchy pursued a very active policy in Spanish America. In 1838–9 France fought a brief war with Mexico. From 1838 to 1840 she was engaged in a dispute with Governor Rosas of Buenos Aires which escalated into an attempt to overthrow him. The French Navy played a distinctly un—neutral role during the Argentine siege of Montevideo in the early 1840s. In 1845 France and Britain cooperated in an attempt to impose a peace settlement upon the belligerents in the Río de la Plata. These two powers also seriously considered a plan to block American expansion in 1845 by offering certain guarantees to Texas and Mexico. The French were also involved in several minor disputes – involving New Granada, Chile, and Mexico again – which nearly led to blows. The armed forces of France were in more constant action only in North Africa. Yet French political and economic interests in Spanish America were hardly as important as these activities implied. In fact, French policy was based upon a misconception of the potential importance of their interests. The error was made worse by the nature of the French policy-making process. The aims of this paper are ito explain how these erroneous conceptions of French interests were formulated, why they were not rectified, and why it was the French rather than the British, despite their greater interest in Spanish America, who appeared to wave ‘the big stick’ there during this period.

In a recent critical survey of scholarly writing on dependency theory, Ronald H. Chilcote noted that, ‘like other theory in an infant stage, dependency theory has spawned a plethora of interpretations and applications, and has been adopted by ideologues on all sides of the political spectrum’. This enthusiastic response, while welcome for the new perspective it affords on underdevelopment, has led some Latin Americanists to caution against the over-application of dependency theory and the unwarranted inflation of its explanatory power. Richard M. Morse, speaking specifically of urban development observes that ‘the “external dependency” thesis … easily leads to dogmatism’, and Phillipe Schmitter warns against the indiscriminate use of the theory to explain all of Latin America's ills. Such caveats have merit, especially in view of the plasticity of current thinking about dependency.

After the Chilean junta abolished party democracy in September 1973, it announced plans for a new constitution modeled on corporatist lines. Although, to date, few concrete expressions of these proposals have emerged, there is enough evidence since 1973 to suggest the lines along which the junta is thinking, and this indicates that not only international factors but also two sources of native historical inspiration are at work. First, and most important, Chile's military dictators were considering elevating an existing infrastructure of government-certified functional interest groups to replace the outlawed parties as intermediaries between the State and the individual. These gremios (private economic sctoral organizations, such as the National Society of Agriculture) had traditionally shaped public decisions both as representatives of their occupational fields and as permanent, often official, participants in state agencies concerned with their production sectors.

Early in 1869, when the flags of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay were unfurled from the turrets of Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, an end to the horrors of the Paraguayan War was at last in sight. The conflict between Paraguay on the one hand, and Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay on the other, had raged for five years, since 1865, destroying human lives and material wealth. The fighting came to an official end with the death of Francisco Solano López, dictator of Paraguay, on 1 March 1870.