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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

CENTRAL
A M E R IC A N
H I STORY
The Oxford Handbook of

CENTRAL
AMERICAN
HISTORY
Edited by
ROBERT H. HOLDEN

1
 3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022012628

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​092836–​0

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190928360/001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Marquis, Canada
 About the Editor

Robert H. Holden is a professor of Latin American history at Old Dominion University.

He is the author of Armies Without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in
Central America, 1821–​1960; the coauthor, with Rina Villars, of Contemporary Latin
America: 1970 to the Present; and contributed the essay on modern Latin America to
volume four of The Cambridge World History of Violence.
 Contents

Contributors  xi
Note about the Cover Image  xiii

Introduction: Interpreting the History of a Region in Crisis  1

Robert H. Holden

PA RT I : H UM A N A N D T E R R I TOR IA L C ON T E X T S
1 Land and Climate: Natural Constraints and Socio-Environmental
Transformations  27
Anthony Goebel McDermott
2 Regaining Ground: Indigenous Populations and Territories  57
Peter H. Herlihy, Matthew L. Fahrenbruch,
and Taylor A. Tappan
3 The Ancient Civilizations  81
William R. Fowler
4 Marginalization, Assimilation, and Resurgence: The Indigenous
Peoples since Independence  107
Wolfgang Gabbert

PA RT I I : C ON QU E ST, C OL ON IA L I Z AT ION ,
A N D T H E PAT H TO SE L F- R​ ULE
5 The Spanish Conquest?  141
Laura E. Matthew
6 Central America under Spanish Colonial Rule  167
Stephen Webre
7 The Kingdom of Guatemala as a Cultural Crossroads  191
Brianna Leavitt-​Alcántara
viii   Contents

8 From Kingdom to Republics, 1808–​1840  219

Aaron Pollack

PA RT I I I : C HA L L E N G E S OF M ODE R N I T Y
SI N C E C . 1840 : T H E R E G IONA L F R A M E
9 The Political Economy  253
Robert G. Williams
10 State-​Making and Nation-​Building  285
David Díaz Arias
11 Central America and the United States  309
Michel Gobat
12 The Cold War: Authoritarianism, Empire, and Social Revolution  335
Joaquín M. Chávez
13 Central America since the 1990s: Crime, Violence, and
the Pursuit of Democracy  359
Christine J. Wade
14 The Rise and Retreat of the Armed Forces  379
Orlando J. Pérez and Randy Pestana
15 Religion, Politics, and the State  403
Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval
16 Women in Central America since Independence  431
Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz
17 Literature, Society, and Politics  455
Werner Mackenbach

PA RT I V: C HA L L E N G E S OF M ODE R N I T Y
SI N C E C . 1840 : T H E NAT IONA L F R A M E
18 Guatemala  485
David Carey Jr.
19 Honduras  519
Dario A. Euraque
 Contents   ix

20 El Salvador  545

Erik Ching
21 Nicaragua  567
Julie A. Charlip
22 Costa Rica  591
Iván Molina
23 Panama  615
Michael E. Donoghue
24 Belize  637
Mark Moberg

Index  659
 Contributors

David Carey Jr., Doehler Chair in History, Loyola University

Julie A. Charlip, Professor of History, Whitman College
Joaquín M. Chávez, Associate Professor of History, University of Illinois at Chicago
Erik Ching, Professor of History, Furman University
David Díaz Arias, Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Historicas de America
Central, Universidad de Costa Rica
Michael E. Donoghue, Associate Professor of History, Marquette University
Dario A. Euraque, Professor of History & International Studies, Trinity College,
Hartford, CT
Matthew L. Fahrenbruch, PhD Candidate, Department of Geography and Atmospheric
Science, University of Kansas
William R. Fowler, Associate Professor of Mesoamerican archaeology and ethnohis-
tory, Vanderbilt University
Wolfgang Gabbert, Professor of Development Sociology and Cultural Anthropology,
Leibniz University Hannover
Michel Gobat, Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh
Anthony Goebel McDermott, Professor of the Department of History, Researcher
of the Center for Central American Historical Studies (CIHAC), and Director of the
Postgraduate Program in History, University of Costa Rica
Peter H. Herlihy, Professor of Geography, University of Kansas
Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval, Associate Professor, Department of History, Iowa State
University
Robert H. Holden, Professor of Latin American History, Old Dominion University
Brianna Leavitt-​Alcántara, Associate Professor of History, University of Cincinati
Werner Mackenbach, Researcher and Professor, Centro de Investigaciones Históricas
de América Central (CIHAC)
xii   Contributors

Laura E. Matthew, Associate Professor of southern Mesoamerica and Central America,

Marquette University
Mark Moberg, Professor of Anthropology, University of South Alabama
Iván Molina, Professor of History, University of Costa Rica
Orlando J. Pérez, Dean and Professor of Political Science, University of North Texas
at Dallas
Randy Pestana, Assistant Director, Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy, Florida
International University
Aaron Pollack, Professor and Researcher, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios
Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS)–​Sureste
Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz, Professor of History, University of Costa Rica
Taylor A. Tappan, PhD Candidate, Department of Geography and Atmospheric
Science, University of Kansas
Christine J. Wade, Professor of Political Science and International Studies, Washington
College
Stephen Webre, Professor Emeritus of History, Louisiana Tech University
Robert G. Williams, Voehringer Professor of Economics, Guilford College,
Greensboro, NC
 Cover Image

Painted limestone relief, La Pasadita, Guatemala, ca. 770 AD, signed by the court artist
Chakalte’. Designed to decorate the dome of a Mayan palace entryway, this one-​yard-​
square sculpture commemorates the visit of Tiloom (middle figure), the local ruler of
La Pasadita, to Shield Jaguar IV (seated), the god-​king of Yaxchilan (today, Chiapas,
Mexico). Tiloom is paying homage to Shield Jaguar IV by presenting him a headdress
with his left hand and what might be packets of incense or a plate of tamales in his right
hand. The hat worn by the figure behind Tiloom was associated with traders. Political ri-
valry between Yaxchilan and the Guatemalan kingdom of Piedras Negras forced smaller
polities like La Pasadita to choose between them. Entitled “Relief with Enthroned
Ruler,” the sculpture is part of the Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest
of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
 Introduction

I nterpreting th e H i story
of a Region i n C ri si s

Robert H. Holden

The seven countries of Central America (Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala,
Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama) comprise Latin America’s most cohesive region.
Defined above all by its geographical unity as the isthmus separating the world’s two
great oceans, to a lesser but still sufficiently homogeneous extent, their regional iden-
tity also springs from the persistence of socioeconomic and political patterns that have
consistently inspired recourse to the word “crisis” among its own peoples, as well as
among scholars of the region’s past and present. Indeed, if there is one idea of Central
America that the historiography has converged upon across the decades, it is that of a re-
gion afflicted by a sequence of grave emergencies since 1821, the year of its self-​declared
and largely nonviolent exit from three centuries of comparatively equable rule by the
Spanish monarchy. Disparate in character and origin, the crises have yielded up a grim
histoire événementielle of violence, instability, and lawlessness. As the most durable, vis-
ible, and moving signs of continuity in the region’s post-​independence history, together
they pose the problem of a region gripped by a secular crisis of order.
In broad terms, the historiography of the region since independence can fairly be said
to locate the foundational motif of the crisis of order in cycles of putatively progressive
ascent, challenged in turn by an array of long-​standing internal norms, interests, and
structures on the one hand and by hostile entities anchored outside the region on the
other. According to this view, the justifications for reform or revolution in any of their
diverse and protean liberalistic, democratic, or socialistic versions of what counts as en-
lightened change, and the reactionary counterrevolt they inevitably inspire, generate
the crisis of order and keep it going. By the mid-​twentieth century, “revolution” had
come to signify a broadly popular quest (violent or nonviolent) for some combination
of long-​denied, liberal-​democratic institutions, plus more or less radical, state-​directed
redistributions of wealth. Central America, in a phrase popularized by a historian in the
1980s, had thus become the land of “inevitable revolutions,” an admirably synoptic ex-
pression of the apparent wellspring inside the region’s secular crisis of order.1
2   Robert H. Holden

Indeed, the 1980s seemed to gather up a century and half of strife in a single in-
escapable juncture by uniting reformers and revolutionaries in a final assault on
military-​ oligarchic despotism and entrenched social inequities across Central
America. Occupying regional center stage was the new, and authentically revolu-
tionary, government of Nicaragua. Having seized power in 1979 against all odds, it
owed its legitimacy to its success as the leading force in a popular uprising against a
long-​standing dictatorship. At almost the very moment of its triumph, civil war broke
out in El Salvador between the united guerrilla armies of a coalition of reformers and
revolutionaries and the Salvadoran armed forces, which had owned and operated
the Salvadoran government for decades. On Nicaragua’s northern and southern
flanks, Honduras and Costa Rica, encouraged and compensated by the United
States, lent their borders to guerrilla armies intent on replacing Nicaragua’s revolu-
tionary government with the liberal-​democratic reformers whose alliance with the
revolutionaries in power had soured and turned them into counterrevolutionaries.
Farther north and west, the guerrilla warriors of a prospective Guatemalan revolu-
tion persisted in their two-​decade battle against yet another military dictatorship,
which by the early 1980s sought victory by massively targeting civilians suspected of
revolutionary sympathies.
The 1980s ended ignominiously, in disappointment for the revolutionaries and a
Pyrrhic victory for their nominally victorious opponents. The one unmistakable sign
of success for the revolutionaries and their allies was the withdrawal of the armed forces
from formal control of government and their replacement by elected civilians. Yet nei-
ther elections nor demilitarization resolved the crisis of order, whose persistence in
the wake of the bloodiest decade in the region’s history revealed not the inevitability of
revolution (now decisively extinguished) after all but continuity in the reign of lawless
violence. By all accounts, criminal violence exploded after the 1990s and reached world-​
record levels, abetted by states so systematically corrupt, feeble, and inept that analysts
began referring to the phenomenon of “state capture” and of corruption as an “operating
system.”2 In 2020, the El Salvador branch of the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias
Sociales (FLACSO), long the privileged rendezvous of Latin America’s progressive intel-
ligentsia, acknowledged the failure in Central America of both the “revolution as a solu-
tion” and the “neoliberal paradigm” of economic development that followed the 1980s.
Today, FLACSO continued, Central America confronts

a dangerous democratic retreat whose most obvious manifestations are the return in
some countries of dictatorial, authoritarian and repressive regimes, the return of the
military to politics, the deterioration of democratic institutions and the appearance
of populist and authoritarian views and positions that threaten to violate the rule of
law and the rules of the democratic game. This situation, added to the corruption
scandals and the crisis of the traditional political parties and their leaderships, has
led to ungovernability in some countries and further weakened the nation-​states,
some of which have been penetrated by drug trafficking and criminal groups. Added
to this discouraging political panorama has been the increase in citizen insecurity
 Interpreting the History of a Region in Crisis    3

generated by the increase in violence and crime registered in the last decade in the
region, particularly in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, which in turn are the
main countries of origin of migration to the United States. The decline in democracy
and the increase in insecurity have been accompanied by stagnation in some eco-
nomic and social indicators that had previously improved and, in some cases, by an
increase in poverty and inequality.

As a result, the statement called variously for a “new narrative” and for the formulation
of a new “general interpretative framework” sufficiently robust to both (a) explain the
deep sources of the isthmus’s multiple afflictions, and (b) to point the way toward a pro-
gram of action capable of rectifying them.3
Well before the FLACSO initiative of 2020, some of those who had found hope in rev-
olution had already adopted a “new narrative” affirming or implying that the inevitable
may have turned out to be impossible after all. An attentive reader of Greg Grandin’s
widely cited 2004 study of post-​World War II Guatemala would be hard pressed to find a
ray of hope that it, or indeed any Latin American country, might ever reverse the legacies
of the counterrevolutionary wave of violence, state terror, and genocide unleashed by
the United States during the Cold War, which destroyed democracy and condemned
the continent to poverty, inequality, racism, and sexual exploitation.4 In 2018, Central
America’s leading historian, Héctor Pérez-​Brignoli, detected the foundational motif of
the crisis of order in the region’s chronic propensity for violence—​“recurrent,” “multi-
dimensional,” and “structural,” forever falling disproportionately on the poor, at least
outside Costa Rica.5 Not a trace remained of the summary interpretation of the region’s
woes that Pérez-​Brignoli had proffered in the closing pages of the same book’s 1985 edi-
tion. Then, he attributed the source of the general crisis to “the failures of the dominant
classes,” people whose “domination . . . rested exclusively on exploitation, violence and
terror.” While the Costa Rican model of gradual reform might work for Honduras, revo-
lution and socialism on the Nicaraguan model were apposite elsewhere in the isthmus.6
Among the intellectuals most explicitly dispirited by the results of the revolutionary
option was the Guatemalan historical sociologist Edelberto Torres-​Rivas, secretary-​ge-
neral of FLACSO from 1985 to 1993 and perhaps the most erudite and influential of the
vanguard of researchers who broke open the field of Central American studies in the
1970s. Like most of his cohort, as well as the generation of investigators who immedi-
ately followed, he was a scholar-​activist for whom the region’s main hope for advance-
ment lay in radical reform if not social revolution, the scientific rationale for which he
spent a lifetime documenting. Yet seven years before his death in 2018 at the age of 88,
Torres-​Rivas seemed overtaken by despair at the region’s cyclical fate. Its contemporary
history, he wrote in 2011, told of an “anguished and tormented region, full of rebellions
and failures, and with a history of perseverance in making society less unjust. We haven’t
achieved it.” The experience of the late twentieth century taught both “the necessity of
revolution and the impossibility of attaining it.” The self-​negating character of the latter
phrase—​for what is impossible cannot be necessary, and to choose an impossible option
is necessarily to choose failure—​captured the essence of Central America’s long crisis
4   Robert H. Holden

of order and the despair that now accompanied it. Heeding a “self-​critical, ex-​post im-
pulse,” Torres-​Rivas asked himself whether the path of guerrilla warfare, with its aim
of defeating the bourgeoisie and erecting a “radical” state, was ever even possible. “Of
course it wasn’t,” he answered. The correct option in the 1970s would have been to co-
operate with the democratic reformers among the hated bourgeoisie. Hence, futility
and perhaps a sense of regret or even guilt, as suggested by the searing question that
closed an essay he had written in 1997: “¿Valió la pena, para dejar en el camino 300.000
muertos, un millón de refugiados, 100.000 huérfanos?” (Was it worth leaving behind
300,000 dead, a million refugees, 100,000 orphans?)”7 A courageous question, it failed
to elicit even a tentative, exploratory response from its author.
About the same time, Rev. Próspero Penados del Barrio, archbishop-​primate of
Guatemala, was pondering the same question. In 1998, he posed and answered it.
“Who was the victor in this war? We all lost. I do not believe that anyone is cynical
enough to raise the flag of victory over the remains of thousands of Guatemalans—​fa-
thers, mothers, brothers and sisters, and young children—​innocent of the inferno that
consumed them.” All who participated in the war, either directly or indirectly, must ac-
knowledge their guilt and seek forgiveness:

But they are not the only ones; society as a whole must engage in a process of reflec-
tion that reaches into the far corners of the collective conscience in order to enter
into a period of transformation in the aftermath of the horrors that are only begin-
ning to come to light. For this transformation to be genuine, however, we all—​each
sector of society—​must acknowledge our faults, by commission or omission, and
radically change our attitude towards our fellow human beings.8

According to the view of Penados del Barrio, hope for change—​the advent of “a period
of transformation”—​depended not on contriving a “new narrative,” much less yet an-
other “general interpretative framework,” but rather on a repudiation and an affirma-
tion, the political implications of which were hard to miss: (a) that Guatemalans reject
the conventional politics of class, party, and ethnic enmity as well as the mutually hostile
ideologies that have stoked them over the decades; (b) that they would make not a revo-
lution but a nation, a community of citizens whose loyalty to the good of the whole might
effectively interrupt the violence and break the historic cycle of revolt and counterrevolt.
In appealing to society as a whole to examine its “collective conscience” with a view to-
ward a transformation in attitudes and the forging of a consensus on fundamental values
strong enough to hold power holders and power seekers to account, Penados del Barrio
implicitly posed what I argue below in the section “Authority and Power” is the historical
problem at the heart of Central America’s long crisis of order: The separation of power
from a socially recognized, legitimacy-​defining authority to which power remains ac-
countable. As an unintended consequence of the rupture with the Spanish monarchy
that commenced abruptly in 1808, power’s separation from an authority capable of
constraining it only deepened over the decades, in ways that continually thwarted the
search for legitimacy and therefore order.
 Interpreting the History of a Region in Crisis    5

Historiographical Continuities

Before introducing that topic, however, I would first like to briefly develop the theme
I introduced at the outset: that of the two-​century preeminence in the historiography
of a society perpetually subject to a standoff between impractical aspirations and un-
bending resistance. When the liberal publicist and prolific historian Lorenzo Montúfar
(1823–​1898) looked back on the first six decades of independence, which coincided al-
most exactly with his own life span, he observed: “In all our history, what dominates
is the incessant struggle between the present and the past, between the men who are
dragging us back to the Middle Ages and the men who are pushing us forward.”9 In
this, Montúfar—​perhaps that century’s activist-​scholar counterpart of Torres-​Rivas—​
prefigured the late-​life conversions of both Torres-​Rivas and Pérez-​Brignoli from linear
progressivism to cyclical inevitability. Between the age of Montúfar and the age of
Torres-​Rivas was that of the Nicaraguan Salvador Mendieta (1882–​1958), perhaps the
shrewdest analyst of Central America’s history. In La enfermedad de Centro-​América
(The Sickness of Central America), Mendieta recapitulated Montúfar:

Neither those in power nor those in opposition tolerate one another. The one in
power does not recognize the justice of any opposition and therefore denies it all
means of serene and reasoned discourse. The opponent never thinks the government
is well intentioned and fights it with systematic tenacity. Unable to operate in the
light of day, it is necessary to seek out the shadows; not being permitted to take a step
on the surface, it is necessary to take subterranean action. That is why armed revolu-
tion is always latent in Central America. . . . The governments say that they oppress to
avoid revolutions, and the revolutionaries say they rise up in order to free the people
from the oppression of the governments.10

By the second half of the twentieth century, many historians, with Torres-​Rivas and
Pérez-​Brignoli in the vanguard, softened the Sisyphian overtones of the Montúfar-​
Mendieta consensus by locating the multiple expressions of the aspirations for change,
and the resistance they provoked, somewhere within the spacious confines of the con-
cept of social revolution. Fortified by the historicist premises of the inevitability of class
conflict and its redemptive dénouement, progressive ascent, social revolution was a nar-
rative sufficiently flexible to be shared by liberals and Marxists alike. The older, grimmer
assessment never faded entirely, however. In 1982, Torres-​Rivas himself even reiterated,
in a distinctly cyclical voice, Mendieta’s equation of intolerance with sickness, observing
that since the nineteenth century, political intolerance had turned politics into warfare,
“a sickness . . . that is contagious and endemic.”11
Despite, then, their mutual distance in time and ideology, the interpretations of
Pérez-​Brignoli and Torres-​Rivas and Montúfar and Mendieta converge on the postu-
late of a region in torment, casting about for an exit in the form of one or another over-
arching program of betterment or “development” whose diverse advocates—​whether
6   Robert H. Holden

incumbents or insurgents—​can be counted on to scorn appeals to incremental or

negotiated change while denying legitimate standing to their opponents. Hence, the
ubiquity and inevitability of “revolutionary” attempts to rearrange institutions and
structures in defiance of law and constitution. Hence too the inevitable summoning of
enemies, external and internal. Calls to arms, accompanied by a rhetoric of demoniza-
tion and appeals to mutual extermination, typically follow.12

The Great Rupture of 1808–​1821

The interpretative continuity across the work of Montúfar, Mendieta, Torres-​Rivas,

and Pérez-​Brignoli as encapsulated here, and as ratified by the tidal wave of research
published over the last half-​century, uncloaks the travails of a region possessed by a
secular crisis of order whose proximate origin is not difficult to pinpoint. The great
rupture of 1808–​1821, when the Kingdom of Guatemala separated from the mon-
archy of Spain, remains the most transformative moment in Central America’s history,
second only to its violent incorporation into the monarchy in the sixteenth century.
But to a degree unsurpassed across Spanish America, the French-​imposed abdications
of May 6, 1808, and their dramatic sequelae of peninsular invasion, occupation, resist-
ance, and political reform stimulated only the slightest popular interest in indepen-
dence in the Kingdom of Guatemala. Encompassing the entire territory of modern
Central America minus Panama, plus today’s Mexican state of Chiapas, the kingdom
numbered about 1 million souls of whom 65 percent were Indigenous, some 30 percent
mestizo, and no more than 4 percent White. Only within the latter group, divided be-
tween criollos (American-​born Spaniards) and peninsulares (Spanish-​born Spaniards),
could be found the handful of men who directed the political and economic affairs
of the kingdom. Unlike neighboring New Spain, the richest jewel in the crown of
Spain, in Guatemala the momentous events of the decade and a half that followed the
abdications and terminated in full independence would unfold without the involve-
ment of the general populace, and with almost no violence.
To most creoles and peninsulares in Guatemala, the priority was the maintenance of
order and solidarity with the local officials who continued to govern in the name of the
deposed sovereign, Ferdinand VII. Among political activists, those who favored au-
tonomy within a reformed Spanish constitutional monarchy, as opposed to full inde-
pendence, outnumbered the latter until about 1820, after which any dependent status
inferior to independence increasingly fell out of reach as a practical alternative. The
constitutional monarchy at stake in this debate was not a theoretical one. It was erected
in 1812 by the Spanish and American delegates (among whom were Guatemala’s six) to
the Cortes Extraordinarias that began meeting in Cádiz, Spain in 1810. Its constitution
declared that sovereignty resided in the nation and defined the Spanish nation as the
body of all free men born in the dominions of Spain. The constitution earned the exu-
berant endorsement of the colonial governing class, even including the archbishop of
 Interpreting the History of a Region in Crisis    7

Guatemala City, Ramón Casaus, for whom it was the constitution that was “the wisest
and most equitable, the most worthy of the admiration of the world and of immor-
tality.”13 But by 1821, owing above all to the increasing volatility and instability of the
Spanish regime itself, independence had displaced autonomy as the preferred option
within the ranks of the politically active elite, here as elsewhere in Spanish America.14

Authority and Power: The Coordinates

of Political Life

As a result, the great challenge awaiting the peoples of the kingdom in 1821 was not solely
the design and construction of new political institutions suitable for self-​governing re-
publics. In order to deepen and, I hope, illuminate further the origins and persistence
of Central America’s long crisis of order, I propose as a tool of analysis the venerable
distinction between power (potestas) and authority (auctoritas) as two fundamental but
radically independent coordinates of political life. Power invariably acts in response
to authority, its transcendent and therefore hierarchically superior epistemic comple-
ment.15 Itself powerless and dependent on social recognition, authority dictates the
criteria of legitimacy and thus the fitness to rule of the claimants to power. Authority
cannot impede or execute; limited in expression to the word, it can only endorse or con-
demn. A socially recognized authority before which power kneels is thus essential to
order. Sovereignty, as one of its preeminent theorists, Daniel Philpott, observed, is in
fact always “accountable to something larger than itself.”16 Central America’s extended
crisis of order was therefore not owing solely to the destruction of the institutions of po-
litical power but even more to power’s sudden separation from a socially recognized au-
thority. The conditions under which such an authority would have had to be reasserted
were particularly inauspicious, not only in the Kingdom of Guatemala but across the
Hispanic American world, given the brutal abruptness with which a stable arrangement
of power (Crown) and legitimacy-​bestowing authority (Church) had been terminated.
The collapse of the Spanish monarchy separated the Americans from a governing entity
in which the potestas of monarchy and the auctoritas of religion, though overlapping
rather than strictly separated, had together managed to generate and sustain order for
more than three centuries.
Before 1808, what Edward Norman called the “Christendom” model still prevailed
in the Hispanic world, in that the political and religious fields of action were still largely
coextensive.17 For William Taylor, Hispanic life until the late eighteenth century was
governed by the “two majesties” of “the crown as father and the church as mother of
the Hispanic family. Or the two together as the collective head of the social body.”18
The Enlightenment, in the words of Fernández Sebastian, did nothing to dislodge the
Catholic worldview from its status as “the very center” of the system of beliefs that
framed Hispanic life; that, in turn, made it difficult even to conceive of religion and
8   Robert H. Holden

politics as separate entities, long after such a possibility had become thinkable elsewhere
in Europe. For a time even after 1808, it remained “virtually impossible to conceive of a
totally secular sovereignty” anywhere in the Hispanic world.19 “A public morality com-
pletely soaked in religious values,” according to Guerra and Lempérière, left no space
for contrary behavior and yet contributed to the maintenance of a juridical order that
was widely shared and respected across social groupings. Independence therefore
entailed a struggle to reconstruct that “lost consensus” with new values.20 In a synthesis
of the recent historiography of the question, Portillo Valdés argued that even the late
Bourbon monarchy was thoroughly Catholic in an essential and constitutional sense.
The Hispanic world was understood to be “una república de católicos” to such an ex-
tent that the framers of the 1812 Constitution famously (but vainly) posited religion as
the very foundation of national identity, an attempt to “give continuity to the Catholic
monarchy as a nation, where the moral ideal of the Catholic citizens of the Hispanic
Enlightenment might find their means of development.”21
In the Kingdom of Guatemala, relations between throne and altar adhered to the pat-
tern just characterized for Spanish America as a whole. If the Church was “the bedrock
of Hapsburg rule” in Guatemala, it remained so well into the Bourbon eighteenth cen-
tury.22 The surprising stability of Spanish rule in Guatemala was owed neither to mili-
tary power nor to a notably “weak and underdeveloped” civil administrative apparatus
but, rather, in Oss’s estimate, to the Catholic clergy, “who provided the nerves and sinews
guaranteeing continued colonial presence,” particularly in their role as the guardian of
the basic unit of Spanish society, the family. Spain prevailed because, in obedience to
the Medieval and theocentric worldview still shared by few other colonizing powers, it
“presented a single faith and a single order.”23 More recently, Belaubre has posited a de-
gree of symbiosis between throne and altar in Guatemala that never flagged even during
the last decades of Bourbon anticlericalism. As the “almost natural auxiliaries” of royal
officeholders, the clergy “were consulted on all questions of social and economic life.”
Contrary to the conventional interpretation of the Bourbon reforms’ impact on the
Church in Guatemala, the monarchy largely failed to diminish the latter’s “economic,
social and political power” right up to the crisis of 1808.24

Liberalism without Moral Autonomy

Another distinctive and reciprocally related attribute of the Hispanic world had been its
capacity to dodge the early modern shift toward a general culture of moral autonomy,
away from obedience to God-​given authority, and toward the eventual triumph of
the relativization of authority. Much of that capacity lay in the success of the Iberian
monarchies in fencing out Protestantism, a movement that had greatly accelerated the
trend toward moral autonomy elsewhere. At the very moment of the great rupture be-
tween Spain and its American realms, political institutions in much of Europe, and
of course in North America, were already surrendering to the prescriptions of moral
 Interpreting the History of a Region in Crisis    9

autonomy. One result was the broadly liberal constitutions that emerged as templates
of democratic rule; liberal institutions required a culture of moral autonomy for their
proper functioning.25 They have not performed well in Latin America, where the culture
of moral autonomy had not taken root. Resistance to moral autonomy was bolstered
by the persistence in the Hispanic world of a view of society not as a collection of in-
dividual wills but as an ordered mosaic of corporate bodies, in the form of estates and
other collectivities.26 Here, the long-​standing “morality of the good” persisted even
as the “morality of rights” took over elsewhere.27 Comellas speculated that had Spain
managed to forge a “Christian Enlightenment,” synthesizing a limited-​sense ration-
alism with the long-​standing tenets of the faith, it might have avoided (in a phrase that
seemed to ratify Archbishop Penados’s judgment) the two-​century “unbundling of the
Hispanic conscience” (disociación de la conciencia hispana), which in turn gave rise to
so much violence and instability. To the range of contemporary modernities there might
have been added that of a Hispanic and theocentric version, alongside the dominant an-
thropic ones.28
Under different conditions, therefore, Central America might have deflected
the crisis of order. But in the decades after 1821, institutions designed by Britons,
Frenchmen, and North Americans were posited that had been contrived to func-
tion under the gaze of an authority principle—​namely, the imaginary sovereignty of
a popular electorate acting through representatives—​that was radically incompatible
with the long-​standing Hispanic worldview, for which the only socially recognized
authority fit to oversee power had been given by and through the Catholic Church,
and secondarily by and through corporate bodies whose pacts with the monarchy sim-
ilarly drew on the authority of religion.29 The modern idea of a state endowed with
an absolute sovereignty flowing upward from the people was never fully shared by
Spanish society, not even by the most avid late-​Bourbon absolutists. It seems likely
that some of them would even have classified “state sovereignty” as one of those
claims by governments that Michael Oakeshott dismissed as among the “implausible
and gimcrack beliefs which few can find convincing for more than five minutes to-
gether.”30 Operating in a culture that was thoroughly “juridical and Catholic” (in the
words of Guerra and Lempérière) and that never fell for modernity’s fallacious dis-
tinction between public and private, the monarchy consisted of a diversity of powers
throughout the Americas, where localisms, particularities, and exceptions to general
rules prevailed despite the presence of a quasi-​absolutist discourse. In 1808, the king’s
subjects still considered themselves vassals united to their lord by ties of reciprocity,
such that at the moment of the monarchy’s greatest crisis, the king’s prerogatives
were seen to be limited by divine law, natural law, and the rights of corporate bodies.31
This and other distinctive features of Hispanic society would inhibit the adoption of a
socially recognized authority compatible with the liberalism that dictated the architec-
ture (including, most decisively, the criteria of legitimacy) of the institutions of power
after independence. Just because loyalty to the Crown had for so long depended on the
socially recognized authority of religion, no post-​1821 institution of power could come
close to replacing the monarchy.
10   Robert H. Holden

Hence, a crisis of order brought on not simply by the collapse of traditional

institutions, as is typically argued, but by a relativization of authority (and thus legit-
imacy) more sudden and profound than that experienced anywhere else in the West.
Under the monarchy, authority had been organic and integral, not only in the sense of
having been given by long tradition but because of the nonexistence of that pet binary
of the liberal imaginary, “temporal versus spiritual” or “state versus church.” The tem-
poral world was understood to be ontologically Christian in the sense that, having been
created for man and not made by him, it was naturally subject to the ends defined by
Christian doctrine. It was a worldview in which the auctoritas of the Church, though
not entirely external to the potestas of the monarchy, could act as a genuine constraint
on the prerogatives of power. With the collapse of the Catholic monarchy and the dec-
laration of independence, an authority capable in theory of constraining power would
be constituted ideologically by power itself. In the naturalistic worldview of the state-​
makers who undertook that project, public order could only be understood in posi-
tivistic and utilitarian terms, making it answerable exclusively to power and the faux
authority of its preferred ideology.
A restoration of the old order founded on the potestas of kingship and the auctoritas
of religion, natural law, corporate rights, and the Church was now largely beyond reach.
The leadership of the newly self-​declared republics freely copied liberal institutions
but could not liberate their subjects from the long-​standing ethos of moral realism in
favor of an ethos of individual moral autonomy, with its associated recalibration of
older notions of equality, representation, and personal freedom. Hispanic societies
divided deeply over the most important values, igniting an epoch of continuing crisis
characterized above all by the deficit of socially recognized authority. Religion and lib-
eralism made constant war on each other. “Epochs of crisis,” García Pelayo noted, “are
characterized by the absence of auctoritas, precisely because discord and the lack of
commonality in values do not permit the establishment of unity in recognizing what is
valuable.” As putative authorities eliminate one another in the struggle for power, “eve-
rything tends to dissolve itself in power relations.”32
In the decades of self-​rule that have followed independence, it was precisely García-​
Pelayo’s “establishment of unity in recognizing what is valuable”—​a long-​lasting invig-
oration, perhaps, of Archbishop Penados’s “collective conscience”—​that failed to occur,
first under the auspices of the Central American Federation (July 1, 1823–​ca. 1840) and
subsequently under those of the five little republics that succeeded the defunct feder-
ation. Claimants to power alleged that they themselves embodied authority as an at-
tribute of power itself. Or they appealed to one or another among a mélange of rival
authorities—​many associated with mutually incompatible criteria for evaluating the
legitimacy of a power holder—​as the source of their legitimacy.33 Most of them found
inspiration in the continuous arrival of European-​derived mutations of liberalism, con-
servatism, and socialism, not one of which could remotely approach the level of social
recognition enjoyed by the Catholic religion. Rather, they spawned a range of ideologies
whose followers issued anathemas that regularly evoked mutual declarations of exter-
mination. Real authority relativizes power. But under the conditions prevailing in the
 Interpreting the History of a Region in Crisis    11

isthmus after 1821, incentives to ignore or manipulate authority, or simply assimilate it to

power itself, gained the upper hand over commitments to adhere to the only authority
with a credible claim to social recognition.
In motion against the liberalistic and anticlerical core of political modernity, or at
least as a kind of leavening agent, there persisted a broad adherence to the belief in the
traditional role of the Catholic religion in government. The depth of popular adherence
to religion as the true auctoritas to power in public life was revealed above all in the tri-
umph and rule of Rafael Carrera in Guatemala from 1839 to 1865. His revolution, “a re-
ligious crusade” in the estimate of Woodward, restored the Catholic Church to a level
of authority in relation to power that was commensurate with that of the colonial era.
Along with his collaborators in the legislature, Carrera professed the obedience of the
state to the Catholic religion as well as its deference to the Church as the moral regu-
lator of public life and the ultimate guarantor of order and prosperity. “Nearly every
facet of Guatemalan life” became subject to the influence of the Church. The concordat
of 1852 ensured that all educational institutions would once again teach in conformity
to Church doctrine; it authorized Church censorship of certain publications and
turned over collection of the tithe to the state, which also received the right to nominate
bishops. Woodward attributed Carrera’s popular appeal above all to his defense of “the
rural masses,” including the Indigenous communities, “from the economic exploitation
of the creole elite.” To the question, then, of why liberals so passionately opposed the
influence of the Church (and thus Carrera), Woodward correctly joins other historians
in arguing that to the hustlers and impresarios who had embraced liberal ideas, an unim-
peded Church hindered their freedom. In fact, after liberals rode back into power for
good in 1871 they wiped out the protective legislation and correlative religious measures
in both Guatemala and cognate regimes elsewhere on the isthmus.34
By then, a diversity of rival legitimacies, bestowed inchoately upon a diversity of both
aspiring and pro tempore power holders, and exteriorized in pacts subject only to co-
ercive enforcement, led to the emergence in Central America of what I have elsewhere
called “the improvisational state.”35 In summarizing the outcome, by the 1960s, of “the
crisis of the old liberal order” implanted in the late nineteenth century, Pérez-​Brignoli
(writing in 2018) evoked the historiographical consensus epitomized by Montúfar,
Mendieta, and Torres-​Rivas: “Any protest, no matter how timid, put the system to the
question and was seen as part of a subversive conspiracy. That interminable chain of
exclusions—​which extended inevitably to the political opposition—​had over time an-
other equally implacable consequence: the permanent questioning of the established
order by social forces as broad-​based as they were varied.” Pérez-​Brignoli attributed the
crisis to the absence of institutions capable of channeling dissent.36 But that causal argu-
ment, more descriptive than analytical, begged the question. More fundamentally still,
in the absence of a single, socially recognized principle of authority, it was the very legit-
imacy of the state that was ceaselessly put to the question.
Socially recognized authority endows more than a concordant idea of the state. When
coherently articulated, it conveys an idea of the nation, or “a commonality in values”
(as García-​Pelayo put it in the section “Liberalism without Moral Autonomy” above) to
12   Robert H. Holden

which citizens owe their loyalty. The widely acknowledged lack of such an idea gave rise
to what most historians recognize as a yet another, but permanent, crisis in the region’s
history: that of national identity.37 It was a crisis whose appearance naturally coincided
with the shattering (owing to the collapse of the monarchy) of “a common culture forged
above all in the forms and symbols of religious belief,” in Eastman’s estimate. That cul-
ture linked “the Americas to the metropole and elites to peasants and Indigenous ac-
tors, providing a shared language through which emerging collective identities could be
constructed and articulated.” Attempts to yoke this long-​standing multiclass and mul-
tiethnic religious identity to the premises of liberal nationalism under the auspices of
the Cádiz Constitution had proved unavailing.38 Ironically, the failure was due in no
small measure to the determination of liberal politicians to sacralize the state while
crippling the Church, the one institution capable of feeding and sustaining an authentic
sense of social solidarity across class and ethnicity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Carol Smith
argued that Guatemala under Carrera was more unified than any isthmian country until
Nicaragua’s revolutionary government took power in 1979.39 Hence the descent into
contested legitimacy and violence, which continued after the collapse of the Federation
around 1840 as each “estadito” (statelet), in Mendieta’s sarcastic account, faced off its
rivals and “marked its historic feats according to the number of revolutions, factions,
riots, and failed coups, pushing themselves ever downward and away from the concept
of a civilized people.”40
In the absence of a widely shared idea of the nation anchored in a socially recognized
authority, personalistic political commitments turned the act of governing into the ad-
ministration of a system of patrimonial exchange relationships intrinsically subject
to violence. In addition to making every political opponent an enemy of the nation,
patrimonialism infused the tendency, in Mendieta’s words, to “extract personal advan-
tage from any function of government, and not to look after the interests and rights
of the collectivity,” while encouraging the firm belief that “politics represents nothing
more than the desire to live comfortably, without working.”41 The authoritarian habits
inspired by the patrimonial ethos extended well beyond the many military figures who
became the public faces of dictatorship. “The authoritarians are not only the military
men,” observed Torres-​Rivas, guardedly anticipating the subsequent judgment of
Penados del Barrio, “but the numerous social forces of society who call on and utilize
them.”42
A patrimonial ethos may have been organically compatible with traditional monarchy
and its criteria of legitimacy. But patrimonialism metastasized under the liberal dis-
pensation, contradicting the latter’s foundational premise of legal equality, and gravely
corrupting the rule of law. “With the exception of the schoolteacher,” Mendieta wrote,

I do not believe that there exists in the bureaucratic hierarchy of the four States of the
north a man more unhappy than the judge; he is obligated to administer justice and
needs to blindly obey the [local military] commander and the [local] administrator
(who are often rivals), the president, the ministers and local political bosses. Imagine
the situation of this poor devil and the justice imparted!43
 Interpreting the History of a Region in Crisis    13

When separated from a socially recognized authority and thus from the rule of law, the
web of mutual rights and duties ordained by citizenship collapses, and with it the very
possibility of justice and therefore of self-​government. As a result, in Central America
indifference to the law became the fountainhead of every crisis, traceable ultimately to
a political culture devoid of an authority capable of seeding, regulating, and sustaining a
communitarian or national ethos. To Bravo Lira, what made independence “the greatest
institutional catastrophe in the history” of Latin America was the subsequent collision
between two constitutional regimes. The first was the lived, three-​century experience of
a stable, pluralistic “jurisdictional” constitution of fundamental law in which monarchy
and Church shared supreme power in a mutually limiting way. The second governed
according to an endless profileration of merely “written” and thus conveniently “dispos-
able” constitutions; having replaced the rule of law with the rule of act, they propagated
“distrust, opposition and resistance.”44

The Failure of Liberalism

Until about 1990, a single premise and its correlates practically controlled scholarly dis-
course about public violence in Central America. Violence of all kinds—​from military
intervention to guerrilla war to more routine political violence—​was an artifact of social
inequities and political oppression. For those scholars writing in the liberal tradition, the
solution was democracy; for those writing from a Marxist perspective, the solution was
socialism. Although socialism has largely but not entirely receded as a credible political
program, the liberal democracy-​consolidation “narrative” has been well underway for
more than two decades. But now, instead of the kind of violence once associated with
military rule and popular rebellion, the region suffers from violence of a political and
criminal kind nourished not by the state or the enemies of the state but by society it-
self—​the very arena once assumed to encompass the victims of public violence, who
would one day emerge, if sufficiently mobilized, as the revolutionary subjects of peace
and democracy. Before, demilitarizing the state and subjugating it to the sovereignty
of the people was the strategy of both Marxists and liberals. Today, the state remains at
the center of discussion, but less as the powerful instrument of specialized agents of vi-
olence, or the beleaguered target of ideological enemies. Now it appears more and more
as a desolated relic, hollowed out by corruption and incompetence, ungovernable and
disbelieved.
As a result, in the study of state formation, the conventional focus on regime type now
seems to be less relevant than the character of the relationship between state and society,
a perspective that can no longer avoid, I argue here, confronting the authority/​power
binomial. Pace Jürgen Habermas, Central America’s history suggests that the demo-
cratic process itself cannot produce the social solidarity required to sustain democracy.
No political constitution can sustain itself without what John E. Finn calls “background
principles” or “preconstitutional principles” that themselves embody “the activity of
14   Robert H. Holden

constitution making properly understood,” binding the framers of the constitution and
making their enterprise intelligible.45 Such, I argue here, is the so-​far neglected principle
of authority, upon whose formation and effective enforcement depends the very exist-
ence of the “collective conscience” to which Penados del Barrios appealed.
Liberalism, adopted at independence as the first of the region’s many doctrines of
salvation, achieved a sort of hegemony in the late nineteenth century that it has never
relinquished. By the time Torres-​Rivas had begun writing in the early 1970s, it was an
unmitigated failure in the eyes of almost everyone. The question then was whether liber-
alism could be reformed and redeemed. After two savage decades of death and destruc-
tion, the old liberalism emerged intact in the 1990s and persists today, fundamentally
unchanged, still the reigning ideology, still an ignoble failure.46 The fundamental social
realities so authoritatively documented by Torres-​Rivas in a series of books beginning
in 1969—​the gross inequalities of wealth, income, and status; the poverty; the racism;
the everyday norm of lawlessness and its inescapable consort, everyday violence; and
the thoroughly corrupted and inept institutions of government—​have continued, in
his own words of 2011 as quoted above, to make Central America an “anguished and
tormented region” today.47 The perennial albeit partial exception to these dismal
qualifiers continues to be Costa Rica, which accounts for 10 percent of the region’s popu-
lation and area. The occasional recourse to military supremacy, dictatorial government,
and political violence that marked its first century was gradually and for the most part
overcome in the second. Explaining Costa Rica’s relative success in this aspect of state
formation remains a major challenge for historians. An early and continuing disposi-
tion to be bound by preconstitutional religious principles of authority, sharply limiting
the range of rival criteria of legitimacy, stands out as a promising hypothesis.48

This Handbook

If the historiography can be said to reduce the past to waves of radical revision and
hardy resistance, it clearly rejects an analogous reduction of the aims, guiding ideas,
and composition of the forces of ascent, or those of their enemies and allies, external
and internal. Thus, at the level of the events that comprise the secular crisis of order,
the picture is considerably more complex, as the chapters in this collection readily
confirm. Central America has long attracted scholars who specialize in the study of its
history and society, a trend that intensified notably after the 1960s. The rising volume,
variety, and quality of specialized work on Central America’s past—​from regional, na-
tional, and subnational perspectives—​therefore suggested the need for a guide to the
scholarship, which this volume seeks to provide. The handful of such guides that first
appeared around the early 1990s, as the post-​1970s research boom was still gathering
momentum, are now out of date.49
The chapters in Part I, “Human and Territorial Contexts,” furnish panoramic
assessments of five broad regional themes that cross all the major historical periods.
 Interpreting the History of a Region in Crisis    15

They aim to provide the essential contextual physical and social referents for the more
monographic topics that follow in Parts II and III. Anthony Goebel McDermott’s
opening chapter synthesizes the extraordinary variety and complexity of the region’s
natural environment, shaped fundamentally by the contrasting combination of vol-
canic mountains and tropical lowlands. He highlights the myriad ways in which the nat-
ural world directed, and was in turn directed by, human action, from the beginnings of
human settlement to the present day. The next chapter’s analysis of human settlement
and its changing quantity and distribution over time, by Peter H. Herlihy, Matthew
L. Fahrenbruch, and Taylor A. Tappan, focuses on the Indigenous peoples of Central
America. Drawing on a rich diversity of field and archival research as well as govern-
ment survey data, the authors document a remarkable pattern of demographic col-
lapse and territorial decline, followed in the twentieth century by population growth
and growing recognition of Indigenous territorial claims. William R. Fowler synthesizes
the present state of knowledge of the development of civilization or complex societies
before European contact. Highlighting diverse interpretations of the archaeological
data, his chapter traces the history of Indigenous civilization in the isthmus from the
arrival of hunter-​gatherers about 10,000–​12,000 years ago, to the postclassic city-​states
encountered by the Europeans after 1500. The fate of the Indigenous peoples after the
collapse of the Spanish monarchy in 1808, and the rise of Central America’s self-​gov-
erning republics, is the subject of Wolfgang Gabbert’s chapter. It begins by highlighting
the complexities, beginning in the period of colonial rule and continuing until today,
of the very term “Indian.” The exploitation and displacement of the Indigenous peo-
ples did not end with Spanish rule but took new forms in obedience to modern ideas
and the requirements of export-​dependent economies. In recent decades, Indigenous
movements favoring civil, cultural, and land rights have accumulated a mixed record of
setbacks and success across the isthmus.
Part II reviews the progress of scholarship regarding the period of Spanish rule, from
the conquest and the founding of the Kingdom of Guatemala to its gradual collapse after
1808, and the disintegration of the kingdom’s successor state, the Central American
Federation, about 1840. Laura E. Matthew’s analysis of the conquest argues that it was
actually not one event “but a centuries-​long process that continued throughout the
colonial period.” Her chapter complicates the very identities of conquerors as well as
conquered, while noting that the Indigenous peoples not only resisted but survived
and recovered demographically under colonial rule. Stephen Webre breaks down the
political, social, and economic institutions of Central America under Spanish rule.
Beginning with the administrative consolidation of the isthmus as a single jurisdiction
from 1543 onward, Spain sought to centralize control over land tenure, mining, agricul-
ture, commerce, and relations with the Indigenous population, which included a regime
of forced labor and Christianization. The exceptionally diverse cultural history of the
Kingdom of Guatemala is the subject of Brianna Leavitt-​Alcántara’s chapter. Neglected
by historians in comparison to the larger and more influential viceroyalties of Peru
and New Spain, the kingdom gave rise to beliefs and practices that changed its society
and economy, as well as areas beyond its borders, in important ways. She illustrates her
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Courage! on les aura.
Ordre du jour adressé à la IIe armée par le général
Pétain.
 12 Mai 1916.

Enlèvement en masse dans la

région du Nord

Tous les habitants de la maison, à l’exception des enfants de quatorze ans et

leurs mères, ainsi qu’à l’exception des vieillards, doivent se préparer de suite pour
être transportés dans une heure et demie.
Avis de la Kommandantur affiché le 12 mai à Lille et dans les villes du
Nord.

..... Détruire et briser les familles, arracher par milliers de leurs foyers des citoyens
paisibles, les forcer à abandonner leurs biens sans protection, serait un acte de
nature à soulever la réprobation générale.

Protestation adressée aux autorités militaires allemandes par M. Delesalle,

maire de Lille.
 ..... Nous avons beaucoup souffert depuis vingt mois, mais aucun coup ne serait
comparable à celui-ci; il serait, de plus, aussi immérité que cruel et produirait dans
toute la France une impression ineffaçable. Je ne puis croire qu’il nous sera porté.
Protestation adressée aux autorités militaires allemandes par Mgr Charost,
évêque de Lille.
 31 Mai 1916.

Bataille navale du
Jutland

Sir John Jellicoe,

Officiers et Marins de la grande flotte,

Vous avez attendu près de deux ans avec la patience la plus exemplaire
l’occasion de rencontrer et d’attaquer la flotte ennemie. Je comprends parfaitement
combien cette période a été pénible et combien grande doit avoir été votre
satisfaction lorsque vous avez appris, le 31 mai, que l’ennemi avait été aperçu.
Des conditions climatériques défavorables et l’approche de l’obscurité vous ont
empêchés d’obtenir le résultat complet que vous espériez tous, mais tous vous avez
fait ce qui était possible dans ces circonstances. Vous avez repoussé l’ennemi dans
ses ports et vous lui avez infligé de très lourdes pertes. Vous avez ajouté une page
nouvelle aux glorieuses traditions de la marine britannique. Vous ne pouviez pas faire
davantage et, pour votre splendide travail, je vous remercie.
Harangue adressée par le roi d’Angleterre aux représentants de la grande
flotte.
 7 Juin 1916.

Cent huitième Jour de la bataille

de Verdun

Le bombardement a continué assez vif dans la région Vaux-Damloup et sur le fort

de Vaux où la situation reste sans changement.
Communiqué officiel du 5 juin.

Après sept jours de combats acharnés contre des troupes d’assaut sans cesse
renouvelées, la garnison du fort de Vaux, arrivée à la limite de ses forces, n’a pu
empêcher l’ennemi d’occuper l’ouvrage.
Communiqué officiel du 8 juin.

..... Que, durant d’interminables semaines, sous les feux concentrés d’une
artillerie de tous calibres, sur un terrain raviné par les pluies et labouré par les obus,
nos bataillons, relevant le défi de l’ennemi, aient défendu pied à pied les avancées de
Verdun, sans même savoir, avant ces derniers jours, que leur endurance et leur
stoïcisme allaient faciliter ailleurs les opérations combinées des troupes alliées, c’est
un spectacle dont la grandeur épique dépasse tout ce qu’avait jusqu’ici connu
l’humanité.
Discours prononcé par M. Poincaré à la cérémonie du 14 juillet
1916.
 1er Juillet 1916.

Premier Jour de la bataille de la

Somme

Au nord et au sud de la Somme, les troupes franco-britanniques ont déclenché ce

matin une action offensive sur un front de quarante kilomètres environ.
Communiqué officiel du 1er juillet.

Le général commandant l’armée adresse à tous, officiers et soldats, ses

félicitations et ses remerciements.
La conquête de toutes les positions de l’ennemi, 8.000 prisonniers, plus de 50
canons, un matériel considérable, tel est le résultat des trois premiers jours de lutte.
La valeur des officiers généraux, le travail minutieux de l’état-major, la hardiesse
des aviateurs, la précision du tir de l’artillerie, le courage réfléchi de l’infanterie ont
également contribué à assurer ce succès.
 Nous ne sommes qu’au début de la bataille, mais la victoire est certaine si nous
continuons à la poursuivre avec énergie et méthode.

Fayolle.

Ordre du jour adressé le 4 juillet par le général Fayolle aux troupes qui
participèrent à la première partie de l’offensive française sur la Somme.
 14 Juillet 1916.

Défilé des troupes alliées

dans Paris

..... Nous nous sommes organisés pour fournir sans cesse aux combattants des
canons et des obus: le Gouvernement, les Chambres, les commissions ont stimulé
les fabrications nécessaires; les ateliers se sont remplis d’ouvriers et d’ouvrières; les
fours se sont allumés; des usines neuves se sont construites; les machines
multipliées se sont mises en mouvement; la production s’est accrue. Jamais trop!
jamais assez! Mais le pays a compris et le branle est donné.
De leur côté nos alliés ont employé les mois qui passaient à former des armées, à
les équiper, à les pourvoir d’artillerie et de munitions. La Russie, secondée par les
puissances de l’Entente, s’est efforcée de donner à ses troupes magnifiques le
matériel qui leur avait manqué dans les terribles rencontres de l’an dernier; l’Italie a
développé ses moyens de défense; l’Angleterre a réalisé le prodige de faire sortir de
terre des divisions nouvelles, splendides de jeunesse et d’entrain.
Discours prononcé par M. Poincaré à la cérémonie du 14 juillet
1916.
 2 Août 1916.

Deuxième Anniversaire de
la Guerre

.... Les Alliés commencent à recueillir les fruits de votre persévérance. L’armée
russe poursuit les Autrichiens en déroute; les Allemands, attaqués à la fois sur les
fronts d’Orient et d’Occident, engagent partout leurs réserves; des bataillons anglais,
russes et français coopèrent à la libération de notre territoire: le ciel se découvre, le
soleil se lève.
La lutte, hélas! n’est pas finie: elle sera rude encore et tous, tant que nous
sommes, nous devons continuer à travailler, à travailler sans trêve, avec passion et
avec ferveur. Mais déjà la supériorité des Alliés apparaît à tous les yeux. La Balance
du Destin a eu de longues oscillations; c’en est fait maintenant; un plateau ne cesse
plus de monter: l’autre descend, descend, chargé d’un poids que rien n’allégera plus.
Gloire immortelle à Verdun qui a préparé l’action commune des armées alliées!
Gloire à vous, mes amis, qui avez sauvé la France et vengé le droit insulté!
Lettre du Président de la République aux Armées à l’occasion du deuxième
anniversaire de la guerre.
 28 Août 1916.

La Roumanie déclare la guerre à

l’Autriche-Hongrie
L’Italie déclare la guerre à
l’Allemagne

De la Roumanie, comment douter? Pouvait-elle servir ses oppresseurs séculaires,

le Hongrois et le Turc? Pouvait-elle s’unir aux égorgeurs des petits peuples?
Qu’avait-elle à attendre des empires du Centre? Leur victoire eût été sa perte.
N’avait-elle pas, dès le lendemain de la bataille de la Marne, pris sa décision,
d’accord avec la Russie? N’avait-elle pas, dès le lendemain de l’intervention italienne,
précisé, avec la Triple Entente, les terres d’exil où elle devait rentrer?
Dès lors, la présence des Alliés à Salonique, espoir de tout ce qui, en Orient,
désirait notre victoire, l’avance des Russes en Bukovine, la prise de Gorizia,
l’héroïque résistance de Verdun, achevaient d’offrir aux Roumains leur chance.
Comment tarder encore?
Allocution prononcée par M. Deschanel, président de la Chambre des
Députés, à la séance de rentrée du Parlement français, le 20 août.
 29 Septembre 1916.

Quatre-vingt-onzième Jour de la
bataille de la Somme

Le général en chef adresse l’expression de sa profonde satisfaction aux troupes

qui combattent sans relâche sur la Somme depuis bientôt trois mois.
Par leur vaillance et leur persévérance elles ont porté à l’ennemi des coups dont il
a peine à se relever.
Verdun dégagé, 25 villages reconquis, plus de 35.000 prisonniers, 150 canons
pris, les lignes successives ennemies enfoncées sur 10 kilomètres de profondeur, tels
sont les résultats déjà obtenus.
En continuant la lutte avec la même volonté tenace, en redoublant d’ardeur en
union avec nos valeureux alliés, les vaillantes armées de la Somme s’assureront une
part glorieuse dans la victoire décisive.

Joffre.
Ordre du jour adressé par le général en chef aux troupes des armées de la
Somme.
 3 Novembre 1916.

Deux cent cinquante-septième Jour

de la bataille de Verdun

..... La bataille de Verdun, immense opération de rupture de notre front Est, pour
rouvrir les routes d’invasion de 1814, a vu sombrer le prestige militaire de
l’Allemagne.
Dans le champ clos de Verdun, deux peuples, la France et l’Allemagne, se sont
affrontés, et après un duel de cinq mois, dont le monde entier a suivi toutes les
péripéties en frémissant, l’Allemagne a été vaincue.
Le 12 juillet, la dernière vague allemande est venue mourir dans les fossés de
Souville. En août, Fleury est repris; le 24 octobre, Douaumont est repris; les 3 et 5
novembre, Vaux et Damloup sont repris.
Discours prononcé, le 12 octobre 1917, à la Chambre des Députés, par M.
Georges Leygues, ministre des Affaires étrangères.
 19 Novembre 1916.

Prise de
Monastir

Les troupes de l’armée d’Orient sont entrées à Monastir, ce matin à 8 heures, jour
anniversaire de la prise de cette ville par les Serbes en 1912.
Communiqué officiel français.
Je vous adresse mes plus cordiales félicitations pour vous et vos troupes à
l’occasion de la prise de Monastir et je vous prie de communiquer à l’armée française
d’Orient l’ordre du jour suivant:
“ORDRE GÉNÉRAL No 68
“Officiers et soldats de l’armée d’Orient, après avoir accompli, loin de France, les
plus rudes travaux sous un climat malsain, vous avez, quand l’heure est venue de
combattre, surmonté par votre endurance et votre courage toutes les difficultés.
“De concert avec nos vaillants alliés, vous avez rejeté l’ennemi commun hors de
la Macédoine occidentale qu’il avait envahie. Vous venez de lui arracher Monastir.
Vous achèverez demain de le battre.

“Joffre.”

Télégramme adressé par le général Joffre au général Sarrail, commandant

en chef de l’armée d’Orient.
 12 Décembre 1916.

Proposition de paix
allemande

..... Dans cette note, les quatre puissances alliées proposent l’ouverture
immédiate des négociations de paix...
Radiotélégramme émis du poste allemand de Nauen, le 12 décembre, à 13h
20, et adressé à l’ambassade d’Allemagne, à Washington.
..... Au surplus, Messieurs, voyez combien est admirable notre pays: même dans
les heures difficiles qu’il traverse, une telle parole ne l’a pas troublé.
Il l’a reçue comme un défi et quand il a appris que, devant Verdun, nos vaillants
soldats avaient continué à reprendre le territoire conquis par les Allemands, faisant
11.500 prisonniers, s’emparant de 115 canons, remportant une nouvelle victoire
éclatante, ce fut dans toute la France un frémissement de joie et de confiance et
chacun se dit: “Voilà la meilleure réponse à la note allemande.”