Epilogue

Abstract

Apart from some letters Diego Portales did not leave much of a legacy. His goal was peace and tranquility, and he did in fact help to establish political and economic stability and to conserve the social order. But he was not concerned with the continuity of political ideology: largely because the ascendant consensus was only in the broadest sense of the term an ideology. He did not write or even seriously influence the outcome of the Constitution of 1833. After his death Chile proceeded as if he had never lived. That is, Chile was essentially the same after Portales’ death as before. Ideologically no Portales tradition had ever existed, so none had to be broken. The political differences between the Portales period and the following two decades can be measured in gradation but not in ideological principles. In calmer times Diego Portales would have been considered both temperamentally and educationally a most unlikely political leader for Chile. By nature Portales was capable of both inordinate sensitivity and unabashed callousness. He little delighted in public life, preferred to be a private citizen, and became a dictator. His private and public personalities manifest a remarkable similarity: he had a propensity to arbitrarily dictate.