La restauración en la Nueva Granada (1815-1819)

Having spent five years captive in a French castle, Ferdinand VII returned to Spain in 1814. After abolishing the Constitution, dissolving the Cortes and considering everything they had done null and void, the monarch dispatched a powerful expedition to America in order to put an end to end to the revolutionary processes of the continent. Under the command of Pablo Morillo, the so-called Peacekeeping Army successfully laid siege to Cartagena at the end of 1815 and subsequently annihilated the revolution in the entire New Kingdom in one breath. Although the rapid collapse of the United Provinces predicted a peaceful and lasting reestablishment of monarchical authority, the regime itself collapsed after three years. How to explain such an outcome? How could the Spanish monarchy abhor a secular prestige in such a short time and how could the republican record be hailed again as the historical destiny of New Granada after the harsh experience of the interregnum? Put succinctly, why did a pacification begun under the happiest auspices fail? Leaving aside the traditional narrative that opposes Creole victims to ruthless royalists, this book proposes a redefinition of the period and suggests studying it as a restoration of the Restoration period. Likewise, and instead of concentrating on terror and the “Reconquista”, he is interested in the successful experiments of pacification, in the survival strategies of the revolutionaries and in the imprint of the Fernandina experience in the factory of the Republic of Colombia.