The Provincial Council in Action: 1870–1914

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, the expectations and rules of municipal government were regularly altered through constitutions and legislation. While the overall tendency was to restrict municipal independence and make public administration more uniform, lawmaking was often hasty and contradictory. In the early days, as Gabriella Chiaramonti (2007) points out, the letter of the law was not necessarily acted on in the provinces. Old ideas of the municipality as personero (representative) of the people persisted, as did traditions of organization and collective decision-making embedded in local governing institutions. The rights and attributes of municipal government had been formally recognized in the final years of Spanish rule through the Cadiz Constitution of 1812, with late-colonial reform annulling the distinction between Spanish and Indian Republics and lifting ethnic barriers to citizenship. This made Spanish and Creole, indigenous, and mestizo men eligible for political rights in the towns. With this inheritance, Provincial Councils of the nineteenth century were keen to assume governing responsibilities and prepared, if need be, to stand up against the arbitrary rule of outsiders. And that could include the central state.