Like all revolutionary processes, those that led to Latin American independence were highly volatile and experimental in nature. Often accompanied by extreme violence, even open warfare, the formation of the new Latin American states in the early nineteenth century required imagining new states, institutions, and laws. The need, often urgency, to transform colonial domains into various independent units frequently coincided with the desire to end (or at least modernize) the Ancien régime. Yet the wish to supersede the past did not guarantee rupture. Instead, it initiated a period of questioning more often than answering, of experimenting more often than finding solutions. After describing the context in which the independence took place, this chapter surveys some of the questions that had to be answered, mostly by identifying debates that required settling and the difficulties entailed in achieving this goal. It examines who had the power to declare independence, how to identify the territories that would become new polities, how the national territory and citizenship were defined, how new republican structures should be formed, and elections conducted, and the legal changes all these developments entailed.

With the collapse of the ancien régime following a fiscal crisis, the Revolutionaries of the 1790s sought to design a more equitable tax system, based on direct taxes; most indirect taxes were abolished. These new taxes, though, proved insufficient to meet France’s needs, particularly given the collapse of public credit due to political instability. Committed to honouring the debt incurred by the ancien régime, and facing the mounting expenses of a major European war after 1792, the Revolutionary governments failed to stabilise the fiscal situation. Instead, they were pushed to compensate for insufficient tax receipts by levying forced loans, imposing price controls and printing money, which produced hyperinflation by the mid-1790s. These drastic measures, and their failure to resolve the fiscal problems of the 1790s, did much to discredit the Revolutionary regimes, and consequently facilitated the emergence of post-revolutionary politics under Napoleon.

In this chapter, Richard Avramenko suggests that Tocqueville’s voyage to America should be understood in light of a lifelong aristocratic concern for unearthing lost remnants of the Ancien Régime. By way of illustrating Tocqueville’s ambivalent relationship to aristocracy, Avramenko draws an etymological distinction between the concepts of “debris” and “remnants,” two words Tocqueville uses in systematic ways throughout his corpus to differentiate certain institutions of the Ancien Régime that are doomed from others that might be rehabilitated for a democratic age. Avramenko traces the etymology of these two words in the French tradition and then locates these usages in Tocqueville’s discussion of various aristocratic or quasi-aristocratic institutions in the United States such as the Native Americans, the American South, the military, the new industrial aristocracy, and the profession of the law. Avramenko finds one inspiration for Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont’s travels in their childhood fascination with a 1798 novella Voyage d’un Allemand au Lac Onéida by Sophie von La Roche. The book tells the story of an aristocratic couple’s exile to Lake Oneida, New York, one of the destinations Tocqueville and Beaumont visited during their travels as chronicled in Tocqueville’s “Journey to Lake Oneida.”