The French invasion of Spain in 1808 destabilized the Spanish monarchy and opened a constitutional crisis across its American colonies. In Mexico, the crisis did not simply produce a contest for independence: it exposed a deeper conflict over who would hold political power and whether popular participation would threaten the privileges of colonial elites. The book presents that struggle as a decisive contrast with the constitutional process that had developed in the United States.

Invasion and Constitutional Crisis

In February 1808, French armies invaded Spain, and by May they had taken Madrid. By September, Spain’s king, Ferdinand VII, had been captured and had abdicated. A national junta, the Junta Central, took up resistance to the French. Forced south by the advancing armies, it eventually reached Cádiz, a port city under siege that continued to hold out. There the Junta established a parliament, the Cortes.

In 1812, the Cortes produced a constitution calling for a constitutional monarchy based on popular sovereignty. It also called for an end to special privileges and equality before the law. These principles challenged an American colonial order shaped by the encomienda, forced labor, and extensive power held by colonial elites and the state. The invasion therefore mattered beyond Spain: the collapse of royal authority made the source and legitimacy of political rule an urgent question throughout colonial Latin America.

The Mexican Response

The crisis prompted disputes over whether the colonies should recognize the Junta Central. Many Latin Americans began forming their own juntas, and the prospect of independence increasingly came into view. The first declaration of independence took place in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1809, but Spanish troops sent from Peru quickly suppressed it.

In Mexico, elite attitudes had also been shaped by the 1810 Hidalgo Revolt. Led by Father Miguel Hidalgo, the revolt took on a character that the book describes as closer to class or ethnic warfare than to a conventional independence movement. After Hidalgo’s army sacked Guanajuato on September 23, it killed the senior colonial official and then killed white people indiscriminately. The episode united elites in opposition. Because they feared that independence could bring popular participation in politics, Mexican elites rejected not only the revolt but also the legitimacy of the Cádiz Constitution, which had opened a path toward such participation.

From Constitutional Restoration to Independence

In 1815, as Napoleon’s European empire collapsed, Ferdinand VII returned to power and abrogated the Cádiz Constitution. The Crown began trying to reclaim its American colonies, but Mexico remained loyal. That position changed in 1820, when a Spanish army assembled in Cádiz to sail to the Americas and restore Spanish authority mutinied against Ferdinand. Army units elsewhere in Spain joined the revolt, forcing the king to restore the constitution and recall the Cortes.

The recalled Cortes was more radical than the body that had drafted the 1812 constitution. It proposed abolishing all forms of labor coercion and challenged privileges such as the military’s right to try its own members in separate courts. Faced with the prospect that these measures would be imposed in Mexico, the elites decided that separation from Spain better protected their position. The invasion’s constitutional aftermath had thus helped turn Mexican loyalty into a movement for independence—not because elites had embraced popular sovereignty, but because they feared the reforms associated with it.

Independence and Its Political Stakes

The independence movement was led by Agustín de Iturbide, a former Spanish army officer. On February 24, 1821, he published the Plan de Iguala, which envisioned an independent Mexico as a constitutional monarchy headed by a Mexican emperor. The plan removed provisions of the Cádiz Constitution that Mexican elites considered threatening to their status and privileges. It won immediate support, and Spain soon recognized that it could not prevent Mexican independence.

Independence also created a power vacuum that Iturbide used to secure his own elevation: backed by the military, he had himself declared emperor. The book contrasts this outcome with the United States, where the constitution written in Philadelphia in 1787 emerged from a longer political process beginning with the formation of the General Assembly in Jamestown in 1619. Its central point is that the two constitutional paths were shaped by different struggles over political power: in Mexico, independence preserved elite privileges and enabled an emperor, while the American constitutional process established democratic principles, limits on political power, and a broader distribution of authority.