The Enlightenment, Creole Grievances, and the Crisis of the Spanish Monarchy

Despite the Inquisition's vigilance, Enlightenment ideas — Rousseau's Social Contract, Montesquieu's separation of powers, Voltaire — circulated among educated criollos through smuggled books and returning travelers, while the independence of the United States in 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 supplied working models of colonial emancipation and republican government. Francisco de Miranda, "the Precursor," who had fought in both revolutions, founded a London lodge dedicated to planning Spanish American emancipation, and a young Simón Bolívar swore, on Rome's Monte Sacro in 1805 before his tutor Simón Rodríguez, not to rest until America was free. Haiti's independence in 1804 circulated through this same Atlantic world as an ambivalent reference — feared by slaveholding criollo elites, valued by Black and mulatto sectors — within what historians such as R. R. Palmer have called the broader "Atlantic Revolution."