In Fuenteovejuna (1619), playwright Lope de Vega gave Spanish theater one of its most enduring lines: “Fuenteovejuna lo hizo” (Fuenteovejuna did it). Set against the backdrop of the Castilian War of Succession (1475–79), the play describes the rebellion of the townspeople of Fuente Obejuna (spelled Fuenteovejuna in the play) against nobleman Fernán Gómez de Guzmán. Incensed by the magistrate’s many transgressions, the people rise in arms, murder Guzmán, and face trial. The famous cry appears in the last portion of the play, as a royal magistrate tasked with investigating the crime interrogates under torture the men, women, and young boys of Fuenteovejuna. When the judge demands them to identify who killed Guzmán, witnesses answer (as they had previously agreed) “Fuenteovejuna did it.” The play thus stages a community unanimously committed to assume collective responsibility for the murder of their lord.
More than two hundred years later, in 1833, a group of young male students from Santiago de Chile’s Instituto Nacional—the country’s foremost public education establishment—made a similar choice. On the night of September 5, some seventy students gathered in one of the school’s patios and began shouting against the principal. The demonstration soon took a more violent turn, as students rang bells, threw fireworks, and hurled stones at the principal’s office. Although students at the Instituto Nacional were overwhelmingly drawn from the country’s political and social elite, and thus may have expected some level of protection, the government reacted fiercely. That same night, after soldiers disbanded the rioters, the administration tasked Judge Manuel Joaquín Valdivieso to initiate a criminal investigation and punish the culprits. Eleven students aged between fourteen and twenty-one years old were imprisoned in the following days. On September 9 and 10, Valdivieso interrogated the accused and asked them to identify who had participated in the rebellion. They all refused to name names. Echoing the characters in Fuenteovejuna, six of the prisoners gave the judge what appears to have been a previously rehearsed response: theirs had been “a complot of all.”Footnote 1
While the students were likely unaware of the existence of Lope de Vega’s play—Fuenteovejuna’s popularity faded over time, and there are no records of it having being performed in Chile before 1833—they were undoubtedly familiar with the legal and political questions it explored.Footnote 2 Scholars, critics, and playwrights have much debated about the political message behind the play, some claiming that Lope endorsed popular insurrection and others contending that he defended absolute royal power.Footnote 3 But perhaps the most significant political issue the play addressed, and the one that most resonated across the Spanish world, was the tension between notions of legitimate resistance to abusive authority and the law. While the former demanded that people act spontaneously and collectively as a single, unanimous entity, the latter required that events be attributed to specific, individualized actors. By agreeing to answer “Fuenteovejuna did it” during interrogations, the townsfolk of Fuenteovejuna obstructed the assignment of legal responsibility to their rebellion and simultaneously provided evidence of its rightful nature.Footnote 4 At the end of the play, monarchs Fernando and Isabel pardon the villagers, acknowledging that the culprit could not be identified.Footnote 5 Yet they also take the additional step of putting Fuenteovejuna under their protection, which suggests that the peasants had proven both their loyalty and the legitimacy of their motivations. For a revolt to be justified, then, it had to challenge the ways in which the law rendered human actions intelligible.
This was, in essence, the same strategy adopted by Chile’s Instituto Nacional students in 1833. But, unlike the fictional magistrate in Lope’s play, who limits himself to asking “who did it,” Judge Manuel Joaquín Valdivieso came up with a wide and complex set of questions designed to individualize the culprits. His exchanges with the rebellious students offer a fascinating window onto how authorities in Chile and the wider Spanish Atlantic sought to establish penal responsibility in cases of political unrest, and how the accused resisted such attempts.Footnote 6 Scholars of law and legal culture in colonial and postcolonial Latin America have shown that women and men of diverse backgrounds were not only keenly aware of their surrounding legal landscapes, but also shaped and appropriated imperial and national legislations.Footnote 7 As Timo Schaefer has noted, the literature seems to agree that, for plebeians in colonial Latin America, “the law had become an indispensable instrument for claiming rights, solving conflicts, and advancing interests.”Footnote 8
Less attention has been paid to how groups and individuals used their knowledge of the law to sabotage its application and to challenge the very logic through which it apprehended reality. In colonial and early independent Latin America, courts of justice were not only transactional spaces in which people negotiated their goals and interests: they were the main institutional means through which social actors established and disputed the truth.Footnote 9 Criminal trials, in particular, were supposed to determine not only what had happened but also who was responsible for it.Footnote 10 When establishing the truth about a criminal offense, then, such legal investigations necessarily had to assign blame to a specific, identifiable agent. This was precisely what the Instituto Nacional students, like the fictional characters of Fuenteovejuna, rejected in 1833.
Guilt was a contentious political issue in colonial and early postcolonial Spanish America. Historians have long observed that elites in the region attributed episodes of unrest to the work of outside agitators who allegedly manipulated a simple and otherwise contented population. This “politics of the blame,” as Matt D. Childs calls it, served to delegitimize dissent by presenting it as the product of a few contaminating agents.Footnote 11 Ordinary Latin Americans were aware of these assumptions and stereotypes, and relied on them to negotiate their responsibility in court. Mutinous soldiers in nineteenth-century Chile, for example, regularly claimed they had only followed orders or were too ignorant to grasp the political significance of their actions. Indigenous insurgents during the Mexican War of Independence told authorities they were simple peasants who had been manipulated by their leaders and had no ulterior political motives. Some of the enslaved women involved in the 1840s La Escalera rebellion in Cuba also downplayed their role, arguing that they neither understood nor participated in politics. Scholars rightly perceive such testimonies as individual attempts to deflect blame by capitalizing on the authorities’ gender, racial, and social prejudices.Footnote 12
However, this was at times a coordinated strategy implemented by multiple people simultaneously. In some cases, communities across colonial Latin America appear to have collectively agreed not to name names. In 1662, the Native inhabitants of the neighborhood of Asumpción in San Mateo de Capulalpa, Mexico, blamed their neighbors from Santa Cruz for having chased down and stoned the town’s alcalde mayor. Yet, in direct contradiction to this claim, they were unable to identify a single individual who had participated in the events, nor could they say who had played a prominent role. The people from Santa Cruz had conveniently fled before the arrival of the magistrate tasked with investigating their transgression.Footnote 13 Similarly, after the riots that rocked the city of Quito, Ecuador, in 1765, none of the twenty-five witnesses the authorities summoned was willing to “point fingers.” The reasons for their concerted silence remain unclear.Footnote 14
Some communities went a step further and appeared willing to assume collective responsibility for their actions. For instance, in Guatemala, the Maya inhabitants of San Juan Chamelco and San Pedro Carchá in 1735, and those of Tecpán in 1759, adopted this strategy when facing Spanish repression.Footnote 15 Further south, in the Viceroyalty of Perú, other Indigenous communities engaged in similar efforts to blur penal responsibility. In 1776, the townspeople of San Pedro de Condocondo, in what is now Bolivia, claimed in court that no specific individual could be held responsible for the murders of their cacique Gregorio Llanquipacha and his brother Andrés, since these had been carried out collectively by the whole town.Footnote 16
Scholars have interpreted such arguments as tactics to deflect blame, highlighting how they expressed group solidarity, legal knowledge, and, in the case of Condocondo, the emergence of alternative notions of popular sovereignty among Indigenous peasants.Footnote 17 They have also noted the parallelisms between these strategies and Fuenteovejuna. Martin Minchom, for instance, uses “Fuenteovejuna did it” as an epigraph for his work on protests in late colonial Quito, pointing to the similarities between barrio politics and the unanimous, collective actions portrayed in the play.Footnote 18 S. Elizabeth Penry argues that the doctrines of popular sovereignty that Lope defended in Fuenteovejuna echoed those of insurgent Andeans in the eighteenth century, and even speculates whether the latter were directly inspired by the play.Footnote 19 While unlikely, the idea that the play influenced common people is not implausible: when in 1663 the peasants of the Castilian town of Aldeanueva rose up, they shouted “Who did it? Fuenteovejuna.” Like the characters in the play, most of the townspeople refused to name names after the event.Footnote 20
But rather than viewing these efforts to disturb the application of penal responsibility as mere expressions of group solidarity or political doctrines, I argue that they also functioned as strategies to assert the legitimacy of disruptive collective action—precisely the challenge at the core of Fuenteovejuna. Though at first glance a minor and inconsequential event, the 1833 student revolt in Santiago de Chile offers a strikingly rich example of how magistrates and protesters clashed over the attribution of criminal responsibility. The detailed back-and-forth between the judge and the accused students brings to the fore how the courts served as arenas in which actors constructed and disputed the meaning of episodes of unrest, including their origins, goals, and unfolding.Footnote 21
To uncover the students’ efforts to blur penal responsibility, I first explore how, in their depositions before Judge Valdivieso, they attributed the protest to a collective and impersonal entity they referred to as “todos” (everyone). This allowed them to frame their movement within accepted forms of collective political action while also preventing the magistrate from identifying a main culprit. I then analyze how Judge Valdivieso and the students clashed over the demonstrators’ “true” motivations. Determining these goals, I show, directly impacted the legitimacy of the revolt and the guilt of the alleged ringleaders. Finally, I analyze how the students anticipated the judge’s hostile reading of their rebellion, opposing anonymity to individuation, horizontality to hierarchization, and circular interactions to the judge’s linear vision of causality.
While the eleven detainees came from privileged backgrounds, their clash with Judge Valdivieso was far from trivial. If found guilty, they faced not only dishonorable physical punishment and expulsion from school but also the potential end of promising academic careers. Being proven to have ulterior political motives could lead to their deportation to a remote village or even to the harsh penal colony on the Juan Fernández Islands, in the Pacific Ocean. However, they were determined not just to save themselves but also to prevent the judge from using any of them as scapegoats. Their success hinged on their ability to outmaneuver him.
Politics and Education in Early Republican Chile
Santiago’s Instituto Nacional was not just any educational institution. Founded twenty years before the mutiny, the Instituto embodied the ambitions and aspirations of Independence-era reformers. This model public school originally aimed at revitalizing Santiago’s existing educational establishments and at promoting new pedagogical approaches and curricular programs. As Chile severed ties with Spain, the Instituto’s creators envisioned it as an incubator for the country’s future leaders. Despite opposition from some Church authorities and the slow, underwhelming implementation of innovative curricular ideas, the establishment quickly emerged as the most important and emblematic educational center in the country.Footnote 22
Located in downtown Santiago and occupying almost an entire city block, the Instituto primarily offered higher education courses, though it also hosted a primary school. By the early 1830s, it had become not only the most prestigious but also the largest colegio (institution of higher education) in Chile. In 1831, 511 students were enrolled at the Instituto (excluding the primary school), which represented over 40 percent of all the students attending Santiago’s colegios.Footnote 23 During their time at the establishment, students typically took one or two courses per year, each of which lasted two to three years.Footnote 24 These young men remained in the institution for several years. For instance, one of the rioters of 1833, eighteen-year-old Vicente Villarreal, had been a student there for seven years.Footnote 25
The student body was divided in two main categories: “internal” students, who lived in common dorms inside the establishment, and “external” ones, who did not. According to the 1832 Instituto regulations, internal students were to reside in three common dormitories, although a few students were authorized to live in separate rooms.Footnote 26 Given that the 1833 protest took place at night, we can assume that the imprisoned students were all internal. The Instituto’s principal and vice-principal, as well as most of the faculty, also lived inside the school. They were likely joined by several men and women who took care of cleaning, cooking, laundry, and other tasks.
Although direct evidence is scarce, it is probable that the boys and young men formed meaningful bonds within the institution. When former student Marcial González died in December 1887, his classmate José Victorino Lastarria reportedly said, after kissing his coffin, “I loved this man, gentlemen: he was my brother in spirit and heart.”Footnote 27 Both were among the detainees in September 1833. Shared experiences and gendered honor codes may have fostered a sense of group solidarity among the student body. Another prisoner, sixteen-year-old student Wenceslao Cruz, informed Judge Valdivieso that he had been punished in the past for refusing to disclose the identity of “another student who had thrown a rock in the classroom.”
The Instituto’s high profile made it a focal point for political controversies. Chile emerged from the Spanish imperial crisis amid persistent political instability. After independence was declared in 1818, multiple political factions coalesced around loose principles and shared interests. Governments were typically short-lived, and political elites struggled to forge durable agreements or establish viable institutional frameworks. The Instituto was enmeshed in these conflicts. On the one hand, curricular discussions at the Instituto touched highly sensitive topics, including the relationship between state and Church as well as the founding principles of the new republic.Footnote 28 Additionally, its financial resources, such as fellowships and faculty appointments, turned it into a prize for partisan groups.
During the second half of the 1820s, Liberals and Conservatives vied for control over the institution, with students often actively participating in these struggles. In 1826 a series of episodes of indiscipline—including students throwing fireworks and breaking out of the establishment—rocked the Instituto, leading to the removal of the Liberal-appointed and reformist principal Carlos Lozier.Footnote 29 The latter was convinced these events had been orchestrated by the “opposition party,” an idea that was likely shared by some students as well. One of the participants in the rebellion of 1833, José Victorino Lastarria, would later claim that Conservatives had incited the student unrest in 1826.Footnote 30
In 1829, conflicts between Liberals and Conservatives over control of the state escalated into a civil war, from which the Conservatives emerged victorious in early 1830. As the new government appointed yet a new principal in the Instituto, a few students staged walkouts and refused to obey his directives. A year later, in 1831, students posted pasquinades with insults against Principal Blas Reyes, Vice-Principal Manuel Montt, and the inspectors. Both school authorities and the government believed these actions were politically motivated. In May of that year, the government, likely dissatisfied with Reyes’s inability to maintain order, took the unusual step of tasking the Intendant of Santiago with overseeing student discipline. Nevertheless, episodes of unrest persisted.Footnote 31 In June 1833, the government gave Principal Reyes the prerogative to bar undesirable students from enrolling in courses, which in practice meant expelling them from the school. Students could appeal to the Junta Directora de Estudios, a committee that oversaw the administration of the Instituto, as well as to the government, but were informed that “in such cases” the authorities “will proceed at their discretion, based on extrajudicial reports and by the easiest means of uncovering the truth.”Footnote 32
While it is not possible to determine with certainty whether student unrest was politically motivated, it is likely that some students espoused ideas of social and political transformation that clashed with the Conservative regime then in power. Despite its limited embrace of educational reform, the Instituto had in fact become a breeding ground for new and radical ideas. In the years that followed the revolt of 1833, many of its alumni would champion sweeping social, cultural, and political reforms.Footnote 33 Chief among them was the aforementioned José Victorino Lastarria, who emerged as Chile’s most prominent Liberal intellectual.Footnote 34 While the precise influence of reformist ideals on the student movement of 1833 is also unclear, some of its alleged leaders grew to be opponents of the authoritarian administration that would rule the country for decades.
By 1833, political tensions in the country had reached their highest point since the civil war. In May of that year, Conservatives and their allies ratified a new constitution that they hoped would cement their rule and prevent further institutional crises. Many Liberals apparently believed that the government could only be defeated by force, and between March and August of that year authorities uncovered three alleged conspiracies to topple the regime. Rumors circulated that President José Joaquín Prieto feared for his life.Footnote 35 On August 31, a few days after the discovery of the third conspiracy, an officially controlled Congress granted President Prieto exceptional powers to suppress dissent. As a result, a “climate of conspirative paranoia” reigned in the capital at the time the students of the Instituto Nacional decided to rebel.Footnote 36
The timing of the riot might suggest that the students sought to further contribute to the regime’s instability, but no evidence of such motivations survives in the documentation. Moreover, if “all” students participated in the uprising, as the rebels claimed, this would require assuming that most students were committed Liberals, which seems unlikely at an institution that brought together young men from different elite families. One of the students singled out as a supporter of the movement, Francisco Javier Ovalle, was later described as a lifelong Conservative.Footnote 37 There is also no evidence that the students received support from outside the school. Be it as it may, the movement certainly caught the attention of political elites—news of it reached as far as Lima, Peru—and, perhaps to the students’ alarm, also that of the government.
The Rebellion and the Initial Stages of the Trial
It is difficult to ascertain with precision the origins and unfolding of the revolt. Most of the available information about the event comes from the files included in the criminal investigation led by Judge Valdivieso. These consist basically of a report from the Junta Directora and the interrogations of the vice-principal, inspectors (students in charge of overseeing their classmates), and alleged ringleaders. As will become apparent in the discussion that follows, these testimonies provide conflicting interpretations of what transpired that day. Two other sources complement the judicial record. The first is a letter which merchant Ramón Mariano de Arís sent to General O’Higgins, then living in Peru, dated September 13, 1833. The second is an anonymous letter dated on the 19th of the same month, and published under the signature “E. R.” in the newspaper El Telégrafo de Lima.Footnote 38 None of these authors were firsthand witnesses of the event, and both likely based their reports on hearsay. They were also enemies of the administration, and used the episode to criticize it.
Scholars have mostly ignored the rebellion. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna remains the only historian to have described it in detail, in his 1863 book D. Diego Portales.Footnote 39 The most authoritative history of the Instituto Nacional during these years, Domingo Amunátegui Solar’s Los primeros años del Instituto Nacional (1813–1835) (1889), reproduces Vicuña Mackenna’s account of the rebellion, although it also includes additional documentation about its aftermath.Footnote 40 But Vicuña Mackenna is not the best guide to understand what transpired that day, as his narrative relies mostly on Arís’s letter. Similarly, the other major historical work on this period, Ramón Sotomayor Valdés’s Historia de Chile bajo el gobierno del jeneral D. Joaquín Prieto, merely reproduces the anonymous letter published in Lima.Footnote 41 What follows, then, is the first description of the rebellion that incorporates the information contained in Judge Valdivieso’s criminal investigation.
While available documentation offers only a partial account of the incident of September 5, it allows for the reconstruction of at least a basic sequence of events. At around 2:00 p.m. on that day, a group of Instituto students signed a list in which they apparently committed to ousting the principal. Originally, the students intended to demonstrate during dinner but postponed it when Principal Blas Reyes, alerted to their plan, failed to show up in the refectory. Later that night, approximately fifty students gathered in the patio outside the principal’s room, where they began shouting and throwing rocks at doors, windows, and lamps. The boys and young men also rang some of the school’s bells and threw fireworks. Principal Reyes escaped from the establishment through a back door and came back with a group of policemen. The students refused to surrender and only disbanded after additional government troops arrived. Apparently, with the troops came an emissary from President Prieto, his nephew and external student Ángel Prieto y Cruz, who negotiated with the rebels the terms of their retreat. At around 3:00 a.m., sixty-eight students signed a new document, which will be discussed later, and finally went back to bed.
Once daylight broke on September 6, the Junta Directora de Estudios met with the principal, the vice-principal, and the school inspectors. According to Arís, the Junta also questioned all the students (by which he likely referred to the internal ones). While this is unclear, the Junta certainly interrogated at least some of the students present that night, as it mentioned two of them as sources of information in a report sent to the government later that day. No faculty members were interrogated, perhaps to preserve control over the investigation by limiting the witnesses formally implicated. It remains unclear whether any of them supported the rebellious students during or after the proceedings.
Based on this preliminary investigation, the Junta outlined a few basic facts about the insurrection, including the number of students involved and their actions (signing lists, shouting, ringing bells, hurling rocks, and throwing fireworks). It also mentioned rumors that firearms had been introduced into the institution. Finally, the Junta singled out fifteen students as alleged leaders and concluded that they had had no legitimate reason to rebel. Based on this report, President Prieto and his Minister of Interior, Joaquín Tocornal, issued a decree on that same day initiating a criminal investigation against the students, arguing that their actions “should not be considered only as aimed at inverting the internal order” of the Instituto, “but as touching upon public order.” They put Judge Manuel Joaquín Valdivieso in charge of the inquiry, tasking him to find “the culprits” with utmost celerity.
Valdivieso was an experienced lawyer. Born in 1770 in Santa Fé, present-day Argentina, he was Judge of Criminal Affairs in Santiago since 1828, and had served in Chile’s Supreme Court in 1830. He was also a man of certain political relevance. In 1831 he had been elected to Santiago’s Provincial Congress (Asamblea Provincial), a position he held until early 1833.Footnote 42 Valdivieso must have been a trusted figure in the eyes of Prieto and Tocornal. Arís called him “godo”—an epithet he reserved for the members of the Conservative faction then led by Minister Tocornal.Footnote 43
Manuel Joaquín Valdivieso immediately set to work. On that very day, he took depositions from Vice-Principal Manuel Montt, the two students mentioned in the report, and four of the school’s five inspectors. While the judge recorded Montt’s full account of the events, he merely requested the other witnesses to verify the Junta’s report (which they all did) and offer any necessary clarifications. In addition to the fifteen students already identified by the Junta, Montt and three other deponents implicated a student named José Manuel Argomedo as one of the ringleaders. After this initial round of questioning, the judge requested Santiago’s Intendant to imprison all sixteen accomplices in the barracks of Santiago’s Military School. According to Arís, it was not yet midday when the judge issued this order, which reflects the celerity with which Valdivieso acted.
The merchant’s letter offers a dramatic version of what followed. After being interrogated by the Junta, he writes, the students returned to their homes in peace. They did not expect further retaliation, as President Prieto had, according to him, agreed to their demands earlier that morning. (Arís does not clarify exactly what these demands were.) The onset of a criminal investigation and the judge’s request to imprison the accomplices thus came as a surprise. In Arís’s narrative, the city’s watchmen were charged with arresting any student they saw on the streets. While this was likely an exaggeration, the order to capture the alleged ringleaders must have caused concern, confusion, and uncertainty among students and their families. Not only did they fear the punishment that potentially awaited the culprits, but, as Arís remarked in his letter, this mode of apprehension was dishonoring and unfit to their social standing. Many parents thus sent their children outside of the city to avoid arrest.Footnote 44 By September 9, government forces had only managed to apprehend nine of the accused. Two more were caught the following day, but five of the alleged ringleaders eluded capture and were not interrogated. The authorities’ delay in apprehending the students may have given them time to prepare and coordinate their responses.
The imprisoned students were José Antonio Álamos, José Manuel Argomedo, Anselmo Cruz, Luis Cruz, Wenceslao Cruz, Pedro Nolasco Díaz, Marcial González, Hipólito Guzmán, José Victorino Lastarria, Ramón Sepúlveda, and Vicente Villarreal. The youngest detainee was Marcial González, fourteen years old, while the oldest was Anselmo Cruz, twenty-one years old. Four of the arrested were eighteen years old, and three were sixteen. At least four were relatives: Luis and Wenceslao were brothers, and cousins of Anselmo and Hipólito. The prisoners were enrolled in different classes. Among the ten students who specified their courses in their depositions, three were studying Legislation, two Roman Law, two Latin, and three Philosophy. Some of the detainees were very accomplished students. Earlier that year, eighteen-year-old José Victorino Lastarria had been publicly recognized as one of the top two students in the Legislation course, while twenty-year-old Hipólito Guzmán received the same distinction in Philosophy.Footnote 45
There is reason to believe at least some of these students were critical of the administration. Until 1830, José Manuel Argomedo, Anselmo de la Cruz, and Marcial González had been recipients of a government fellowship at the Liceo de Chile, a school led by Spanish intellectual José Joaquín de Mora in Santiago that was closely identified with the Liberal faction. Argomedo, de la Cruz, González, and thirty-nine other peers were forced to join the Instituto when Conservatives rose to power and transferred their scholarships in an effort to defund Mora’s school.Footnote 46 Additionally, three years after the Instituto rebellion, cousins Hipólito Guzmán and Anselmo de la Cruz were involved in a conspiracy to overthrow the regime. Curiously, they were joined by Ramón Guerrero, one of the two students who collaborated with the Junta and were interrogated (though not prosecuted) by Judge Valdivieso in 1833.Footnote 47 Other detainees went on to have significant political careers as Liberals, as was the case of the aforementioned Marcial González and José Victorino Lastarria.Footnote 48
Collective Actors, Revolts, and the Law
The magistrate interrogated the imprisoned students on September 9 and 10. Upon asking them who had initiated or engaged in the rebellion, they consistently responded that “todos” (everyone) did. José Manuel Argomedo was the first student brought before the judge. When requested to disclose the identity of the other participants, he stated that “all students” had been involved, and that “the entire school had agreed” to participate. Throughout the two days of interrogations, the ten other prisoners gave Valdivieso basically the same answer. Todos plotted the movement, todos agreed to be a part of it, todos signed the lists, and todos shouted against the principal and stoned his office.
The idea that “the entire school” participated in the protest is somewhat perplexing given that, according to the prisoners themselves, at most eighty students were involved. This contrasts with the Instituto’s total enrollment of several hundreds. It is likely that by todos the prisoners were referring to a subset of the student population. As mentioned earlier, the “external” students do not seem to have participated in the rebellion. Likewise, the prisoners also told Valdivieso that the Sala de Menores (“minors’ section”) was not involved in the conspiracy. While little additional information exists about this section, it appears to have referred to younger students who lived in separate dormitories.Footnote 49 Thus, the approximately eighty students who demonstrated that night represented almost the totality of the Instituto’s senior internal students.
The claim that “everyone” conceived of and participated in the revolt carried significant political implications. It aligned with long-standing ideas about political agency in the Spanish Atlantic and reinforced the notion that the movement was both spontaneous and unanimous. In early modern Spanish political thought, politics was not the affair of mere individuals. A broad range of collective entities were also recognized as political actors, including kingdoms, cities, parishes, towns, guilds, religious and civic organizations, and status-based groups. These corporate bodies were more than just the sum of their members: they possessed an independent existence and were expected to act as unified entities.Footnote 50
By 1833, Chile, along with the rest of the Spanish Atlantic, had experienced a series of radical political transformations that led to the development of more individualistic conceptions of political representation.Footnote 51 Yet some corporate identities remained significant. The Instituto was a particularly emblematic one, as political actors sought to elevate it as the country’s most prestigious educational establishment. A protocol for official ceremonies issued in 1832 gave the Instituto a prominent role in public celebrations, along with other relevant entities such as the military, the courts of justice, and Santiago’s merchants guild.Footnote 52 Thus, when students told Judge Valdivieso that “the entire school” had rebelled, they framed their movement not as the product of individual actions but as an act carried out by the school as a political entity. In doing so, they echoed protesters across the Spanish Atlantic who similarly attributed episodes of unrest and rebellion to collective bodies such as “el común” (the collective, the commoners).Footnote 53
This argument helped students assert the legitimacy of their movement. In the political arena, units such as “the people” or “the nation” were supposed to express their will both unanimous and spontaneously. In 1737, the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy defined “Voice of the People” as a “position [dictamen] followed by a town or city with no disagreement, but instead in unanimity and conformity.”Footnote 54 A good government or just cause could therefore be recognized by the undivided and unprompted support it received from the collective.Footnote 55 While by 1833 Chileans had come to expect division and dissension as part of political life, spontaneity and unanimity remained cherished ideals.Footnote 56 Newspapers such as El Araucano regularly praised the people’s spontaneous jubilation during the September national festivities, which they interpreted as a sign of the positive alignment between the government and the population.Footnote 57 Instituto students were likely familiar with this discourse, not least because school authorities (and presumably pupils) often participated in these events.
This association between the authorities’ legitimacy and the people’s unanimous and spontaneous expression could also be used to challenge those in power. What happened when, instead of supporting existing authorities, the “Voice of the People” rejected them? Following this logic, unrest, when unpremeditated and widespread, likely had legitimate or at least reasonable causes. In fact, in the years leading up to the student revolt of 1833, supporters of Chile’s authoritarian government had portrayed the regime as the result of the impulsive uprising of “los pueblos” against tyranny.Footnote 58 It is likely that the students had such claims in mind when deciding to characterize their rebellion as a “complot of all.”
In politics, the spontaneous and unanimous action of such agents was therefore not only possible, but a barometer of the authorities’ legitimacy. In the legal sphere, however, the claim that “everyone” initiated and carried out a rebellion made little sense. In postrevolutionary Chile, as in other Spanish American countries, legal agents continued to draw on early modern Spanish legislation in penal and civil cases, and mastery of this legal tradition was an important part of training at the Instituto Nacional.Footnote 59 In this legal framework, the prosecution of a crime required the establishment of a causal connection between an agent and a criminal action.Footnote 60 Punishment was thus reserved for those who were causally connected to the event being judged. A penalty, then, was the result of an action someone committed voluntarily “with malice or guilt,” as one influential author put it.Footnote 61 Individuals could not be declared guilty for actions they had not committed or for which they were not responsible.Footnote 62 This meant that criminal actions had to be attributed to specific actors with discernable intentions. Collective entities such as towns or cities were in principle one such actor, and authorities in the Spanish monarchy did, on rare occasions, punish entire towns for perceived crimes.Footnote 63 Yet this did not mean that everyone was equally guilty. This was a subtle but crucial distinction: the subject of the penalty was the collective entity itself, not the individuals who composed it. Thus, according to the law, such penalties could not be applied to people’s lives or properties, but to the town or city’s common patrimony, status, and privileges.Footnote 64
An indiscriminate penalty against all members of a community or corporate group, Spanish legal scholars agreed, would be a great injustice, as it would entail punishing the innocent along the guilty.Footnote 65 Francisco de la Pradilla Barnuevo in his Suma de las leyes penales (1622) thus recommended magistrates to be lenient when deciding cases involving “crowds” if they had been unable to identify the main perpetrators.Footnote 66 Some scholars even worried that ordinary people were aware of this norm and took advantage of it. Sebastián de Covarrubias, for instance, argued in his book Emblemas morales (1610) that criminals often sought shelter among the innocent, knowing that magistrates would refrain from punishing the latter. To illustrate this, Covarrubias cited the murder of Fernán Gómez de Guzmán in Fuente Obejuna, and how everyone in town colluded to make it impossible to distinguish the guilty from the innocent.Footnote 67
Covarrubias was not referring to Lope de Vega’s play, which would not be published until 1619, but to the actual assassination of Fernán Gómez de Guzmán in the Andalusian town of Fuente Obejuna in 1476 that served as its inspiration. In April of that year, amidst a civil war in Castile, the villagers killed their lord, Gómez de Guzmán, together with his retinue. The peasants’ refusal to name names during the royal investigation that followed became widely known across the Spanish-speaking world, in no small measure because of its effectiveness. In their thorough investigation of this event, historians Emilio Cabrera and Andrés Moros conclude that the Castilian crown failed to “find the specific [persons] responsible” for the crime, and that the latter remained unpunished because authorities could not “punish an entire town.”Footnote 68
In the following centuries, the episode was mentioned in chronicles, sermons, dictionaries, and other instances across the Spanish empire, and gave rise to the proverb “Fuenteovejuna lo hizo,” which Lope would include in his play.Footnote 69 By the late eighteenth century, as Lope’s play faded in popularity, the proverb continued to be popular in Spain. A man from Fuente Obejuna itself, Francisco Caballero Villamediana, commented with some irritation that “there’s hardly a city, town or place” in Spain in which “upon hearing the name Fuente Obejuna” people “do not immediately and without hesitation burst out with the popular refrain.”Footnote 70
In the words of Theresa Kirschner, the people of Fuente Obejuna came to represent two ideas in Spanish political culture: the power of unanimity and “the illegal action that cannot be punished” because no individual culprit could be identified.Footnote 71 In his Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611), the same Covarrubias explained that people used the proverb Fuenteovejuna lo hizo “when the crime is patent, but the culprit cannot be found” because of the large number of criminals involved.Footnote 72
Central to the events of Fuente Obejuna, then—and to its memory both as a real and as a fictionalized event—was the construction of a collective actor that was to be blamed for the murder of Guzmán. Both the real peasants, according to commentators such as Covarrubias, and the fictional ones of Lope’s play took this step consciously and with the explicit aim of frustrating the logic of individual penal responsibility. This also seems to have been the strategy chosen by the Instituto students in 1833. According to José Victorino Lastarria, the list that sixty-eight students signed after the mutiny was over represented a formal engagement “to present myself in case two or three were accused [as the main culprits], saying that I and the others had had the same part in the movement.” While three students gave the judge an alternative explanation—claiming vaguely that the list engaged them in continuing their movement—Lastarria’s account matches the detainees’ unanimous refusal to single out specific students and their claim that todos were responsible. This was, by and large, a conscious choice.
How the students arrived at this strategy remains unclear. The sources are silent on the matter, and there is no evidence that they were inspired by previous demonstrations. I have not identified other legal cases from this period in Chile in which the accused claimed collective responsibility for their actions. However, the attribution of responsibility to one or two individuals was a recurring legal practice, employed by authorities of different political affiliations.Footnote 73 It is possible that familiarity with this mode of distributing blame shaped the students’ decision to claim collective responsibility. Students enrolled in courses on Legislation and Philosophy must have been particularly aware of how responsibility was constructed in legal cases.
But perhaps it was their own experiences during earlier episodes of unrest at the Instituto that exposed them to how blame could be constructed and negotiated. They had seen how responsibility could be focused on a single student. In 1826, for instance, following a series of disturbances at the school, the Council of Discipline expelled a student named Galo Irarrázaval after classmates reportedly identified him as “the only one trying to agitate them” (ponerlos en revolución). They complained of his violent actions, and insisted that they “did not want to be held responsible for his bad behavior.”Footnote 74 Students similarly knew that refusing to identify an individual could disrupt disciplinary proceedings. As noted earlier, an imprisoned student named Wenceslao Cruz told Judge Valdivieso in 1833 that he had previously been punished for refusing to disclose the identity of a classmate who had thrown a rock in the classroom.
Moreover, at least some students had already experimented with collective forms of action at the Instituto. On March 9, 1830, Philosophy Professor Juan Ulloa Berríos informed Principal Reyes that the students, “all in complot” (todos complotados), had refused to enter the classroom that evening.Footnote 75 Principal Reyes summoned the entire class to his chambers and admonished them for their conduct. As he later reported to the government, the students responded “unanimously” that they would not return to class. The principal subsequently requested authorization to expel several students, among them Joaquín Hoevel, who would later be identified as one of the leaders of the 1833 rebellion.Footnote 76 Not only would a similar form of collective action reappear in 1833, but students would describe their movement in terms strikingly close to those used by Professor Ulloa Berríos.
The students’ decision to assume collective blame likely drew on all these previous experiences. To sustain this version of events, however, they would have to confront Judge Valdivieso. Like the townsfolk of Fuenteovejuna, they came prepared.
Performing and Disputing Goals
Judge Valdivieso asked all prisoners basically the same set of questions. Taken together, his queries suggest that he sought to learn more about the movement while also questioning its legitimacy. One of his main strategies was to dispute the students’ motivations. Valdivieso immediately tried this with José Manuel Argomedo, the first prisoner to be examined. After asking him to state the reason for his imprisonment, as was customary in criminal proceedings, the magistrate ordered him to name his accomplices in the rebellion and to disclose its “true objective.” The question implied that there was a hidden, secret agenda behind the students’ apparent goal of removing the school principal. Argomedo answered that their aim was simply the expulsion of Principal Reyes. The judge continued with other questions, but as the interrogation came to an end he pressed this matter. He reprimanded Argomedo for being obstinate and lying to the court, as ousting the principal seemed “a pretext to hide the goal” of their movement. Failure to reveal their real objective would aggravate his fault and result in him being considered guilty of rebellion. Argomedo was unimpressed and did not change his position. All ten students the judge subsequently interrogated similarly rejected having secret objectives, even after being scolded by the magistrate.
In adopting this line of questioning, Valdivieso echoed the Junta’s report to the government, which had already established that the movement had no justification. In his deposition, Vice-Principal Montt had similarly told Valdivieso that the students had had no reason to rebel. While both the Junta and Montt suggested that the students may have been aggrieved by recent, unspecified disciplinary measures taken by the principal, they dismissed this as a plausible motive. By questioning the students’ motivations, the school authorities and the judge challenged the legitimacy of their revolt and, by extension, asserted the legal responsibility of those responsible for it. Since the students had no real reasons to rebel, the mutiny must had been the artificial product of a small fraction of students with ulterior and eventually seditious goals. This line of reasoning of course exculpated school authorities of any wrongdoing, instead placing the blame entirely on the student leaders and other potential instigators.
Episodes of collective unrest in the Spanish Atlantic usually—one might dare say always—sparked controversies over motivation. Officials and authorities regularly suspected (or feigned suspicion) that popular rebellions had been orchestrated by a third party with a secret, often treasonous agenda. This allowed them to exculpate most rebels while also concentrating guilt on a few individuals with evil motivations. The aim of criminal investigations like the one conducted by Judge Valdivieso was precisely to identify such culprits and to uncover their true goals.
Yet students not only refused to disclose their alleged secret intentions to the judge but also attempted to prevent him from using additional evidence to infer them. For example, during his interrogation, Anselmo Cruz, the most senior prisoner, handed the magistrate a list signed by the students after the rebellion. As preserved today, the list’s header is struck through and illegible (see Fig. 1). Although not mentioned during the trial, it is reasonable to assume that Cruz presented it to the judge in this condition. The header likely indicated the signatories’ objectives or commitment, which according to José Victorino Lastarria was to assume collective responsibility for the revolt. Whatever it may have contained, students must have anticipated that the judge would use the header as evidence against them, or that they were in a more advantageous position if the list’s objective remained unclear. They thus decided to give the judge the document as evidence of their movement’s wide support, while at the same time retaining control over how their goals were to be interpreted.
The list which Anselmo Cruz handed over to Manuel José Valdivieso. ANCG, vol. 338, p. 1, f. 32
However, Judge Valdivieso counted on other evidence to reconstruct the students’ motives. According to the Junta’s report, before throwing stones at the principal’s office, the students had chanted, “Death to the principal, death to the vice-principal and the inspectors.” The shouts were also mentioned during the initial round of depositions. Inspector José Manuel Novoa said he only heard “Death to the principal,” while Vice-Principal Manuel Montt humbly claimed that he also heard “Long live the vice-principal.”Footnote 77
From this evidence Judge Valdivieso seemed to have concluded that at least some of the students shouted “Death to the principal,” and that this could point him in the direction of the movement’s leaders and their true goals—after all, wishing the death of the principal reflected a likely undeserved animosity against the school authority. During his interrogation of José Manuel Argomedo, the magistrate did not ask him whether he and the other students shouted this phrase, but who did it first. Argomedo saw right through the judge’s ploy and answered that “they had not shouted Death to the principal but Out with the principal.” Valdivieso asked the exact same question to the other students, but they all answered in the same manner.
The accused students had apparently anticipated that the judge would use the shouts to discredit them, and came prepared to prove him wrong. Before Valdivieso could even inquire about the matter, sixteen-year-old student Wenceslao Cruz told him that they had shouted “Out with the principal, and not Death to the principal as some have pretended.” Hipólito Guzmán went even further, and told the judge that the demonstrators had chanted “Out with the principal, long live the Minister.” The latter likely referred to Minister of Interior Joaquín Tocornal, who was responsible for both public order and overseeing educational matters. This version of the shout aimed to delineate the students’ aspirations by clearly distinguishing between their request to remove the principal and their subordination to the government.
It is not a coincidence that Guzmán’s version of the students’ shouts echoed the famous rallying cry “Viva el rey, muera el mal gobierno” (Long live the king, death to the bad government). For centuries, this cry (or some version of it) featured prominently in demonstrations and mutinies throughout the Spanish monarchy. Scholars have often interpreted it as an almost spontaneous expression of the demonstrators’ loyalty to the king, despite their disapproval of the government or of government officials. Yet its very relevance—the fact that observers, participants, and authorities cared either to perform or to notice it—suggests that it was more than a spontaneous manifestation of political sympathies. As Sinclair Thomson has observed, demonstrators may have used the shout “strategically” to portray themselves as faithful vassals.Footnote 78 By shouting “Death to the principal, long live the vice-principal,” or some version thereof, demonstrators communicated that their goal was circumscribed to removing Principal Reyes.
Not content with refusing to disclose any ulterior motives and disputing the judge’s rendition of their shouts, the prisoners also tried to take advantage of the discussion he initiated about their real objectives. The second detainee Valdivieso summoned, fourteen-year-old Marcial González, first told the magistrate that the students wished to remove the principal because of some reports he had sent to the Junta that were detrimental to the student body. But then he added that “the true motive” was “not only the said report but other reasons that other students claimed to have but I ignore.” Subsequent witnesses also hinted at a significant problem with Principal Reyes, citing his “conduct” (Anselmo Cruz), “a thousand defects that I cannot describe out of decency” (Luis Cruz), and expressing that it was “not honorable” to have him as a principal (Vicente Villarreal). The implication was that if Judge Valdivieso was genuinely interested in uncovering the true motivation behind their movement, he would also have to disclose uncomfortable truths about Reyes.
It is unclear what the students were alluding to.Footnote 79 Judge Valdivieso not only refused to investigate their claims but adjusted his interrogation strategy to avoid them. While in the first three interrogations he directly pressed students to disclose their true motivations, he later abandoned this approach, focusing instead on the mutineers’ shouts and other incriminating evidence. This shift may have stemmed from his realization that prisoners were using his questions to cast doubt on Reyes’s morality. Valdivieso must have also recognized the implicit threat in their answers: if the legal process continued beyond the interrogation stage and the students were formally charged, they would raise questions about Reyes’s behavior. This seems to have unsettled Valdivieso. Once the investigation concluded, he took the unusual step of burying it in the court’s secret archive, as magistrates sometimes did in cases that touched on the reputation of, and peaceful coexistence between, important members of the community.Footnote 80 Was he protecting the elite Instituto students, or Principal Reyes?
Individualization and Hierarchization
Most of the questions Valdivieso asked the prisoners were designed to challenge their claim that theirs had been a collective, horizontal, and spontaneous movement. Valdivieso tried to establish a sequential reading of the rebellion and to derive from it the individuals who were to blame for either causing, inspiring, or playing a prominent role in it. Students again came prepared, anticipating and resisting the logic of individuation and linear causality advanced by the judge.
As he probably expected, Valdivieso could not get students to identify the movement’s ringleaders. On the contrary, the prisoners were determined to prove that they all shared the same responsibility. Wenceslao Cruz, for instance, told the magistrate, “We all played the same part as there has been a complot of all.” Cruz’s point, shared by the other imprisoned students, was not that he was unwilling to share the leaders’ names: it was that there were no leaders to begin with. For Cruz, the absence of leadership was not an accident, but an essential feature of their movement, a sign of its horizontal and spontaneous nature. When the judge asked him whether the movement had any leaders, Cruz replied there were none, “because, as I said, we all were [its leaders].”
If students were unwilling to identify their leaders, Valdivieso must have reasoned, then he would have to uncover them himself. One of his main strategies to do so was to focus on those who initiated the rebellion or played a prominent role in its organization. Authorities in criminal investigations in Chile and Spanish America often adopted this line of questioning.Footnote 81 The underlying assumption—which was explicitly formulated in Medieval Spanish legislation concerning the crime of lèse-majesté—was that unauthorized, dissenting political movements unfolded in successive stages. First there was the planning phase, in which a reduced number of conspirators discussed their goals; second, an expansion phase in which the initial group invited others to follow them; and finally, the implementation phase, in which the plan was carried out.Footnote 82 By asking who invited participants to join the rebellion, then, magistrates hoped to retrace the spread of the dissension to its few original instigators. What sets this case apart is the detailed manner in which Judge Valdivieso tried to individualize the students involved and establish their degree of responsibility.
The confrontation began as soon as Judge Valdivieso interrogated the first prisoner, José Manuel Argomedo. When the officer demanded Argomedo to disclose when he first heard of the rebellion and through which channel, Argomedo answered that around 2:00 p.m. on September 6 he entered a room where over sixty Instituto students were discussing the movement’s plan. He then added that he “could not remember now from whom he heard it first.” While the second part of Argomedo’s answer was rather conventional (feigning loss of memory to avoid naming names), the first was potentially more subversive. What Argomedo suggested was that the movement had arisen spontaneously, with no identifiable vector of contamination.
Three other students, Anselmo Cruz, Wenceslao Cruz, and José Victorino Lastarria, similarly told the magistrate that they learned of the protest by walking unprompted into a room full of students. Other prisoners similarly emphasized the students’ spontaneous adherence to the movement. Vicente Villarreal claimed to have learned of the revolt after dinner. “The channel,” he defiantly told the judge, “was my own sight because of what I could see and hear from everybody, and nobody told me about it in particular.”
As students would not give a straight answer, Valdivieso focused on the list they signed in the afternoon of September 5. He reasoned that, by determining who invited each other to sign it, he could infer who participated in the early planning stages of the movement. While two students, Argomedo and González, claimed to have forgotten who told them about the lists, the rest said they learned of the documents spontaneously. Juan Ramón Sepúlveda, for instance, told Valdivieso that “nobody invited me in particular” to sign the list, “instead everyone did, because most of the school was part of the complot.” According to Sepúlveda, he walked uninvited into a room full of students who were signing a list, and “everyone said here is Sepúlveda, let him sign, too.” Unprompted, Pedro Díaz told the judge he signed the afternoon list when it was “placed over a table in don Hipólito Guzmán’s room.” Not only had nobody invited him to sign the document: no one even handed it to him.
To counter the judge’s sequential reading of the rebellion, which implied that it had first originated in a group of corrupted individuals and then spread following a contamination circuit, the students advanced a nonlinear explanation. In this version, the conspiracy or “complot” emerged spontaneously through collective, mutual, circular persuasion. Wenceslao Cruz, for example, told the judge that he walked unprompted into a room full of students signing a list, and, when he asked what were they doing, “everyone answered in one voice that it was to remove the principal.” Pedro Díaz described finding some seventy students in a room who were “inviting one another [combocandose unos a otros]” to join the rebellion. Hipólito Guzmán similarly told the judge that no one invited him to sign the document, but that “we informed each other in complot.” The idea of students acting in one voice, and “inviting” or “informing” one another, directly challenged the contagion-based framework the magistrate sought to impose on the revolt.
But Valdivieso still had tricks up his sleeve. He requested the first witness, Argomedo, to recall whose handwriting was on the first list the students signed that day. Anyone who had penned the header or any additional text could be reasonably assumed to have played a prominent role in the rebellion. Argomedo answered that the list (which was lost) contained only the students’ signatures. Similarly, and again anticipating the judge’s reasoning, student Anselmo Cruz declared unprompted that the list “had no content other than the signatures.” The students’ awareness that handwriting could be used to individualize the culprits and construct leadership narratives may also explain why the list Anselmo Cruz handed to Judge Valdivieso—the one signed in the early hours of September 6—had its header stricken through (see Fig. 1). This prevented the magistrate from matching the handwriting to any student, and thus from designating them as leaders of the movement.
If the handwriting in the lists could not help Valdivieso determine the originators of the “complot,” then the signatures would. The judge asked Argomedo, González, and Anselmo Cruz to recall whose signatures appeared first on the list they signed in the afternoon of September 5. Whoever signed first, he must have thought, could be considered the movement’s instigator. The prisoners simply claimed they could not remember. It may seem contradictory, then, for Anselmo Cruz to have handed the second list (the one signed in the early hours of September 6) to the judge. This gave Valdivieso the opportunity to interpret the signatures’ order as evidence of differing individual responsibilities. Anselmo Cruz’s gesture is even more striking considering that his signature appeared first on that document. But this was clearly a premeditated strategy. As Anselmo Cruz himself told the judge, the students signed the list following the order of their assigned dormitories. This sequence was maintained until the fifth dorm, after which the signatures appear “in disorder because [the students] insisted on being first.” Not only was the list deliberately structured around a neutral, objective sequence, but students competed to sign first. That Anselmo Cruz presented the list to the judge was almost a provocation: what Valdivieso may have expected to be evidence of individual guilt, the students presented as proof of their movement’s unanimous and collective nature.
Valdivieso did not rely solely on the lists to individualize the culprits behind the rebellion. He also focused on two episodes mentioned in the Junta’s report: the throwing of stones and the shouting. He asked ten of the eleven prisoners some version of the following question: “Who first shouted Death to the principal, and began showering with stones his room?” The question aimed both at singling out individuals from the indefinite todos and at establishing a sequential reading of their actions. While they may have all thrown stones, as they claimed, someone must have done it first.
To avoid naming names, five detainees claimed that they could not remember or provided similarly evasive answers. But others pointed to a different obstacle in responding to the judge’s question. Marcial González said he could not know who first shouted or threw stones at the principal’s room, “because everyone (todos) was disguised and even wore masks, except me.” He similarly refused to identify who had shouted against the troops sent to quell the mutiny, as the students were “faking their voices.” Five other students likewise told the judge that they could not individualize the students involved in that night’s actions, either, because they were disguised or had altered their voices. The adoption of these anonymizing practices suggests that the students had once again prepared in advance in case some external actor sought to individualize them and assign them different degrees of responsibility.
Producing Guilt
Once Judge Valdivieso completed the final interrogation, he sent the file to the state attorney, Fernando Antonio Elizalde, for review. Elizalde answered swiftly. On a review signed September 11, 1833, Elizalde concluded that the movement had been led by the students singled out by the Junta, an assertion all the more remarkable considering not all of them had been apprehended and interrogated by the judge. He determined that the criminal proceedings ruled out that the students had ulterior motives and attributed the rebellion to a lack of morality and discipline among them. He tasked the Junta with determining each student’s punishment, which would be administered internally by the Instituto authorities. Any students deemed undesirable by the Junta would be expelled, but only after being punished. Furthermore, they would be barred from enrolling in other public educational institutions. In just one day, Manuel Joaquín Valdivieso approved the recommendations without amendment.
In practical terms, this sentence meant halting the investigation and leaving the determination of guilt to the Junta and Instituto authorities. On the surface, this may have seemed like a reasonable decision, considering that the students insisted that they had no political goals. However, while both the state attorney and the judge acted as if the trial had clearly established the students’ responsibilities, they likely knew that such claims would be challenged in the next stages of a legal proceeding, where the accused would not only have the opportunity to defend themselves but also, perhaps, to tarnish Principal Reyes’s reputation. Valdivieso had been unable to legally determine the individual guilt of each participant, so he and Elizalde deferred to the Junta and Instituto to do so. Here the students’ strategies would not be as effective. As the government had already stated in the June decree granting Reyes the authority to bar students from courses, these entities could operate through “extrajudicial reports” and resort to the “easiest” (that is, nonjudicial) “means of uncovering the truth.”Footnote 83
The Junta hesitated. While the aforementioned decree allowed it to review appeal cases through extralegal means, deciding expulsions and punishments was a different matter. On September 14, its members notified the government that acting as a tribunal fell outside their mandate. They had no authority to impose penalties and could only confirm expulsions decided by the principal in consultation with the Instituto faculty. As a result, the government delegated the task of judging the students and enforcing punishments to an ad-hoc faculty committee led by Vice-Principal Montt, which it had established by decree on September 9.Footnote 84 It is worth noting that Elizalde, Valdivieso, and the government avoided placing the investigation in Principal Reyes’s hands, perhaps because his position in the dispute compromised his neutrality, or because the government had lost confidence in his ability to maintain order at the school.
I have not been able to find the original decisions taken by this committee, but some were reproduced by historian Domingo Amunátegui Solar in Los primeros años del Instituto Nacional. On September 17, based on its own investigation, the committee expelled an indeterminate number of students and sentenced others to live in a special dormitory, eat at a separate table, and be put in the stocks on Sunday and Thursday evenings for the rest of the academic year.Footnote 85 Unfortunately, the identities of the students remain unknown, as Amunátegui Solar removed their names from the transcribed sources. The government was apparently displeased with the committee’s decision. On September 20, it sent a communication to the committee, the contents of which are unknown. However, from the latter’s response we can infer that it was instructed to review Valdivieso’s investigation. The committee responded the following day, expelling more students (again anonymized by Amunátegui Solar) as well as imposing an additional punishment for those who remained (kneeling during meals in the dining hall for a week).Footnote 86 Since Amunátegui Solar withholds the students’ names, it is unclear whether the committee increased penalties for the same group (including the expulsion of some of the students sanctioned in the previous decision) or whether it also expelled new individuals.
Amunátegui Solar, a former Instituto student himself, describes these punishments as “acts of cruelty … worthy of an inquisitorial tribunal.”Footnote 87 The bodily, public, and dishonorable nature of these penalties were not only rare for men of such social prominence, but quite harsh compared to other forms of physical punishment normally applied within the establishment. The students thus punished likely found these penalties not only painful but intolerable. A group of them refused to remain on their knees in the dining hall during mealtime, which prompted Vice-Principal Montt to expel them from the Instituto on October 9.Footnote 88
Although Amunátegui Solar anonymizes references to specific punishments, he does provide a list of the leaders (sublevados principales) of the rebellion. This list encompasses the eleven students interrogated by Judge Valdivieso as well as the five other students identified as ringleaders by the Junta Directora de Estudios who had managed to escape arrest. The list also mentions ten other students, who likely correspond to those identified as ringleaders by the faculty committee. In total, then, at least twenty-six students were interrogated or subjected to disciplinary measures after the rebellion.Footnote 89
Some of these students continued at the school and successfully completed their studies in the following years. This was the case for José Victorino Lastarria and Marcial González, who went on to pursue careers as respected Liberal politicians. Other students clashed again with authorities before graduating. As mentioned earlier, in 1836 Hipólito Guzmán and Anselmo de la Cruz were accused of conspiring to topple the regime. They were likely the Instituto students whom Lastarria referred to in his memoirs as having been deported to the penal colony in the Juan Fernández archipelago that same year.Footnote 90
Despite Elizondo’s recommendations, at least two of the expelled students were transferred to another elite institution (albeit a less prestigious one): the recently reformed Military Academy. Wenceslao Cruz was among them. Years later, a former classmate at the Military School would remember him as “sharp, shrewd, scheming and full of flashes of brilliance.” In 1836, he was detained along a few other cadets for their alleged participation in the same conspiracy in which his cousins and former classmates Hipólito Guzmán and Anselmo de la Cruz were implicated. Perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, when brought to testify before Santiago’s Military Commander, Cruz reportedly refused to name names.Footnote 91 A second student transferred to the Military Academy was Benjamín Muñoz Gamero, identified as a ringleader by the faculty committee and subsequently expelled for refusing to kneel during mealtime.Footnote 92 After studying at the Academy, Muñoz Gamero rose through the ranks of the Navy and was eventually appointed governor of the Chilean colony of Punta Arenas, in Patagonia. There, he would find himself on the other side of a mutiny. In 1852, he was executed by a rebel firing squad, his body then burnt in a public pyre.Footnote 93
Conclusion
The criminal investigation of the Instituto Nacional revolt of 1833, while peculiar because of the students’ privileged social position, brings to the fore how actors in the Spanish Atlantic contested and negotiated the meaning of episodes of unrest. For authorities, criminal investigations functioned as tools through which to render these events both legally and politically legible, primarily by individualizing the culprits and assigning different degrees of guilt. In turn, those accused could resist this logic by proposing an alternative account that justified their actions and prevented the application of criminal law. What might initially seem like a conventional case of people refusing to name names was, in fact, a contest over the meaning and legitimacy of rebellion.
Valdivieso and the students clashed over three key aspects of the mutiny: who was behind it, what they aimed to achieve, and whether individual participants could be held personally accountable for their roles before and during the event. Following the precepts of Spanish criminal law, Valdivieso sought to identify the individuals involved, establish their true motivations, and assign them a specific degree of responsibility. Students advanced an alternative story. They presented themselves as a collective without discernable leaders, acting autonomously and spontaneously to pursue a transparent objective, the removal of Principal Reyes. While Valdivieso interpreted the rebellion as a sequence of discrete actions carried out by identifiable individuals, the students framed their protest as a single, collective act that defied individual attribution.
Both parties employed distinct tactics to assert their interpretation of events, showing how these meanings were not self-evident but actively constructed. Valdivieso sought to pressure the students into revealing their true motivations and tried to infer intent from their chants and from the list they compiled after the mutiny. He also broke the event into sequential stages, aiming to isolate those most involved in its planning and execution. The students, though occasionally caught off guard by the judge, were prepared to challenge his reading of the revolt. They claimed to have acted with a single, clear objective and tied that aim to Reyes’s morality. Their efforts to retain control over the interpretation of their aims may even explain why they deliberately obscured the original header of the list they submitted to the judge. The prisoners similarly claimed theirs had been a horizontal, spontaneous rebellion. There were no leaders or vectors of contagion, as their movement had arisen from the students’ mutual interactions.
The students’ concern over hostile readings or interpretations of their actions seems to have predated the trial. During their demonstration, Instituto students drew from a repertoire of contentious practices shared across the Spanish Atlantic. This included shouting, throwing stones and fireworks, ringing bells, wearing disguises, and, although less common, signing documents. But these choices were more than an unconscious, unreflective expression of a common political culture. A close reading of the criminal file shows that the students were aware of the signifying nature of their actions and carefully considered their meaning. The demonstrators thought about the content of their shouts, the strategic value of hiding their faces and faking their voices, and the order in which their signatures would appear on the lists. By carefully orchestrating their demonstration, they could prove that their aims were legitimate and that they had acted as a single body.
This case suggests that similar strategic considerations may have shaped how other protesters across the Spanish world engaged with the repertoire of contention available to them. When the Instituto students told Judge Valdivieso that theirs had been “a complot of all,” they echoed similar claims by people across the Spanish Atlantic, from peasants in Mexico and the Andes to the urban poor in Quito and Madrid. As this episode reveals, they likely did this not simply to avoid prosecution, but to assert the legitimacy of their revolts. The Instituto students of 1833 constitute in this manner a particularly illustrative example of how people in Spain and its former colonies tapped into shared social and political frameworks to claim, each in their own manner, Fuenteovejuna lo hizo.
Martín Bowen is Associate Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi and Global Network Associate Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of The Age of Dissent: Revolution and the Power of Communication in Chile, 1780–1833 (2023), which received an honorable mention for best book in the social sciences from the Nineteenth Century Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association. He is also the author of Experimentar el cuerpo y escribir los pecados: La confesión general de José Ignacio Eyzaguirre (1799–1804) (2014).
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