Algunas lecturas francesas de las independencias hispanoamericanas

This paper analyzes documents produced by Frenchor Frenchified authors, in which America and itsindependence processes, particularly Spanish-Ame ri can processes, occupy center stage. An important do-cumentary corpus was found including books and periodicals. Some of these materials were used in French primary and secon-dary schools, others circulated among scholars and university professors. Some texts from Americanist acts of commemora-tion are also analyzed, such as speeches by legatees or perso-nalities with political or scientific prestige, as well as literary texts that competed in a variety of events related to Indepen-dence celebrations and acts of commemorations. Based on these documents, five lines of reflection are proposed. First, from the perspective of social, political and cultural representations of Spanish-American independence processes, the research inter-est is focused more on what is said to have happened and less on what actually happened. Second, the reiteration of the cate-gory of influence to approach the nineteenth-century relations between America and France highlights the originality of the Enlightenment ideas and the French Revolution; by contrast, the Spanish-American revolutions would represent one of its consequences, more or less distorted on this side of the Atlan-tic. Third, the hermeneutic language of what is said to have happened created modern political myths, directly linked with a successful, egalitarian, libertarian and fraternal revolution. Fourth, in the world context of political modernization dyna-mics, “the French” should be construed as a part of modernity globalization processes. Fifth, the social and cultural exami-nation of the intellectual production considered here sheds a critical light on national (France, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, etc.) or continental (Europe, America, Latin America, etc.) histories, which allows modernization-related processes to be better understood.