Malcontents, Rebels, and Pronunciados: The Politics of Insurrection in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

8. The End of the “Catholic Nation”: Reform and Reaction in Puebla, 1854–1856

guy thomson Eight. The End of the “Catholic Nation”: Reform and Reaction in Puebla, 1854–1856 It is eight o’clock in the evening, the hour in which the nuns are being forced to retire to private houses rather than to the convents where they lived before. The city is extremely quiet and there is no movement but that of the beds, trunks, and mattresses that the nuns are carrying themselves to the houses where each is retiring. —general jesús gonzález ortega, Puebla, to Minister of War, 26 December 1862 I ndependence from Spain and the patriotic expression of early Mexican nationhood owed as much to the church and the clergy as it did to secular leaders and military caudillos. Although church-state relations were often strained during the first thirty years of independence, they never broke down. Churchmen remained active in politics and public life, religious imagery infused public discourse, and church and municipal corporations, as they had done since the sixteenth century, continued to share elaborate baroque ceremonies to celebrate feast days of patron saints, Corpus Christi, and Holy Week.1 How, then, from a position in the spring of 1855 when church and state still shared fairly amicably the same public space and patriotic objectives, had Mexico by 1861 become a secularized “Jacobin ” Liberal republic in which the Catholic Church had been The End of the “Catholic Nation” 149 divested of its wealth, was banished from the public sphere, and had had its political allies defeated on the battlefield? Between the fall of 1855 and the winter of 1856, violent conflict in Puebla—two uprisings from the barrios in support of the bishop, three sieges of the capital, and fighting throughout the state—defined the battle lines between Liberals and Conservatives nationally, shaping political allegiances over the subsequent twenty years of armed conflict. In this chapter I hope to explain how this came about and why Puebla and poblanos were so instrumental in setting the scene for the Reforma. The actions (or inactions) of two poblanos, former class mates at the city’s Jesuit College during the 1820s, hastened these changes . One was Ignacio Comonfort, the moderate Liberal leader of the Ayutla revolution against Santa Anna and then the president of the republic from December 1855 to January 1858. The other was Antonio Haro yTamariz, former finance minister under Santa Anna, who joined the Ayutla movement to ensure that Conservatives , particularly the regular army and the church, retained a voice in a Mexico now freed from its dictator. Both were swiftly drawn into adopting positions they had hoped to moderate: Comonfort failed to prevent radicals from abolishing the legal immunities of church and army, excluding the clergy from elections and citizenship and nationalizing church wealth; Haro yTamariz found himself at the head a Conservative uprising in Puebla aimed at protecting the privileges of the army and the church. As these two opposing agendas clashed, the state of Puebla became a magnet for rival caudillos , and the battle lines of the Three Years War were drawn up. The political initiative shifted to the countryside, with Conservatives aspiring to control the state capital and the cereal-producing llanura and Liberals taking refuge in the northern Sierra.2 150 Thomson During the Three Years War and the Second Empire, while the Liberal state government set up a peripatetic state government in the Sierra, the state capital briefly returned to being a baroque city in which church and state could share the public sphere.3 After 1867 Puebla finally became the laboratory of Liberal reforms sought by the radicals, sporting Mexico’s first Methodist teacher training college (which Ignacio Ramírez, its first director, observed could not have been established in the capital). Under serrano governor Juan N. Méndez, bell ringing, symbol of the baroque city, was limited to ten minutes for masses, religious functions, and funerals.4 Finding itself at the center of violent national conflict was nothing new. Much as the Aztecs liked to conduct their flower wars (xochiyaoyotl) across the volcanoes on the plains of Huejotzingo, during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century the state of Puebla and especially its capital were the republic’s preferred battle ground.5 People from other parts of Mexico are often unkind about poblanos and show little sympathy or understanding for the predicament of the city during the nineteenth century. Between February 1821 and October...