The collapse of Mexico's first radical government in the spring of 1834 was swift and dramatic. Throughout their year in power, from April 1833 to April 1834, radical reformers led by Vice-President Valentín Gómez Farías had attempted to transform Mexican society. They had imposed or signalled fundamental changes in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the nation, and their ambition, or hope, was clear. The colonial society inherited after three centuries of Spanish domination, its privileged institutions and classes and its divisive social values were to be destroyed and replaced by a new order based on civil equality before the law, freedom of expression and eventually of belief and democratic representative government in which individual rather than corporate liberties were guaranteed. Major institutional reforms were thus enacted or promised in education, the army and above all the Roman Catholic Church, whose removal as an all-pervasive influence was, for liberals, a prerequisite of the dynamic, secular society they foresaw on the horizon. The reform of institutions by legislation, however, was only part of the process of change. Gómez Farías and his supporters were fully aware that laws did not change opinions and that their new society would not be consolidated unless the people who benefited from and defended the status quo could be removed from positions of influence and power. Thus, parallel with their programme of legislative change of institutions, the liberals sought to quell reaction by conducting a wholesale purge of their opponents from public office.