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FRANCISCO QUIROZ CHUECA
THE CONSERVATIVE AND NATIONALIST HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE EARLY
TWENTIETH CENTURY
The establishment of the basis of a vision of Peruvian history that would
become the “official” version of the country after the debacle of the War with
Chile (1879-1883) corresponds to the Jesuit Rubén Vargas Ugarte. The war
had devastated the country materially but also culturally. The previous export
boom was replaced by a sharp and prolonged economic crisis accompanied by
a bitter confirmation: the national self-esteem had been gouged by the defeat
to a country that the dominant social sectors of Lima (and Peru in general)
always considered as inferior.
The country had to be rebuilt both materially and culturally. Historiography
was called to meet the demands of this last aspect but the task had to be
deferred due to the civil strife in which strongmen or caudillos dispute the
political power believing themselves to be the saviors of the country that,
in fact, they anarchized. Toward 1895 the civil war ended, inaugurating a
period of a new primary-export economic boom and political stability at the
expense of a huge reduction of citizenship by excluding the indigenous and
rural majorities of the country from the political, social, and cultural system.
This new oligarchic republic was controlled by old wealthy sectors
(landowners and bankers) and new ones dedicated to mining, petroleum,
agricultural exports, finance, and modern industry. Their exclusionary politics
and social manners gave way to what is called the “aristocratic Republic” in
Peruvian history (1895-1919).
In this context, the dominant oligarchy sought to highlight positive aspects
of Peruvian republican history in order to eliminate the negative image that
national history had acquired after the war.'? The awkward task was to focus
on the few moments when the country lived in social order rather than in the
chaos attributed to the democratic norms rejected by a disillusioned oligarchy
of the republican political system.
Actually, the disappointment with the republican regime is common
throughout Latin America at the turn of the century. New social actors
were breaking into the political, social and cultural scene by questioning
the hegemonic role of the oligarchy in these fields. Mesocratic, provincial,
8A radical anti-oligarchic leader, Manuel Gonzalez Prada launched a very sharp dart at the
oligarchy in his famous speech at the Politeama theatre in Lima, collected in his book of
essays Pajinas libres (1888), shortly after the war was over. In the presence of the President of
the Republic of the time, Gonzalez Prada pointed directly to the situation of backwardness
and exploitation in which the oligarchy kept the majority of the population of the country
as the actual cause of the defeat in the war. Gonzalez Prada concluded his speech with a
lapidary expression for the pre-war governments: “the history of former governments of
Peru fits in three words: imbecility in action’. Manuel Gonzalez Prada, Ensayos 1885-1916,
Lima, Universidad Ricardo Palma, Editorial Universitaria, 2009, 53-55, 57.
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