The Republic in Hispanic America: political languages and community building in the Rio de La Plata, between Catholic monarchy and independence revolution.

Summary During the revolutions in Hispanic America in the early nineteenth century, some twenty republics were organized on the continent after three hundred years of monarchy. More than a form of government, the republic refers to the institution of a new political community, and to a language of public freedom, virtue, patriotism and the common good. The construction of the republic is part of a long history of res publica, originally conceptualized by Cicero and reformulated in different contexts in the Atlantic world, including that of the Hispanic monarchy. The thought of the res publica is based on everything that makes a group of men a political community: the law, the citizen, the homeland, religion. Implemented by cities in revolt against the monarchy, such as the United Provinces in the Netherlands in the 17th century, this thought is also characteristic of Hispanic jurists and theologians. The references to the republic as a political body shape an anti-absolutist discourse, eclipsed in the eighteenth century during the Bourbons. With the monarchic crisis, following the royal abdications in 1808, a scenario of political experimentation centered on the cities was set up, to respond to the unprecedented problem of the representation of the absent sovereign. The constitution of the government juntas in Hispanic America, opens the revolution and the war. The case of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata and its revolutionaries, republicans and Catholics, illustrates well the tensions and ambiguities of the construction of a disincorporated republic. It also highlights the constituent issues of Spanish-American republicanism.