Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (review)

Karen Racine has produced previous works on the impact of European exile on nineteenth-century Latin American leaders of the early independence period, the Age of Revolution in the transatlantic world. It is natural, then, that she applies this same perspective in this innovative biography of the Precursor of Independence, Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816), who is one of Spanish America's most fascinating and most enigmatic characters. Born in Venezuela, engaged in a military career, Miranda spent most of his life in Europe and the United States, from 1783 to 1811, trying to stir up support for the idea of Spanish American independence from Spain. Though his efforts were largely fruitless, he became the most famous Spanish American of his day and developed a list of important contacts that included many of the great and near great of Europe and North America, from George Washington to Catherine the Great. Although internationally famous as a revolutionary, in the two attempts he made to create or lead revolutions in Venezuela, in 1806 and in the First Venezuelan Republic of 1811–2, Miranda suffered stunning failure. He spent the last four years of his life as a Spanish prisoner and died in a prison in Cádiz in 1816.

Based on research in document collections in ten countries, Racine's biography of Miranda focuses on his personal life and his friendships, rather than on his political or military careers. We learn little new about his vision or the influence he had on others, but the book does answer many questions about his personality, family life, strengths, and weaknesses. Miranda was venal, self-absorbed, fond of the good life, not notably loyal to those who supported him, a womanizer, and a heavy drinker. He was also devoted to his English wife and their two children (this is a discovery of Racine), a true son of the Enlightenment who came to Utilitarianism through his years in England, something of a polymath and linguist, a keen anglophile, and utterly unshakable in his devotion to the idea of independence. Racine newly clarifies the importance of Miranda's home in London as a gathering place for future liberators and founders of new nations in Latin America, including Simón Bolívar and Andres Bello. Through a multitude of adventures, including service as a general in the French Revolution and as a spy for the British government, Miranda is defined by Racine as more Don Quixote than Don Juan and as "a mind whirling in distant isolation" (107).

The book is briskly written and very accessible to the general reader but with firm scholarly foundations. One is struck by how easy it was for Miranda to impress Europeans and North Americans, frequently lying to them about his credentials and background. It is remarkable that Racine could take a historical figure about whom an enormous hagiography exists and provide new insights into his life. And she does this without even drawing undue attention to some of the low points of Miranda's life, such as his role in the capitulation of the First Republic to the Spanish. Her judgments are judicious, critical but sympathetic. The overall effect is gently iconoclastic, and the impact on the reader is subtle, but the fact is that Miranda, warts and all, does not stand up too well to the glare of a bright light.

In the end, Racine emphasizes that Miranda's greatest deficiency was that he had grown out of contact with the peoples and cultures he aspired to liberate and that, unnoticed by his contemporaries or himself, he had waged his wars in the drawing rooms of the elite. He barely knew Venezuela, and when the time came to lead the first republic there, he was hopelessly out of his depth and not equipped...