Celebrating Insurrection: The Commemoration and Representation of the Nineteenth-Century Mexican Pronunciamiento

8. The Crumbling of a “Hero”: Ignacio Comonfort from Ayutla to Tacubaya

I n El Libro Rojo, published between 1870 and 1871, Manuel Payno addressed the figure of Ignacio Comonfort, pointing out that it was not his intention to write a biography but only “the familiar memories of some of the most striking features of a man who, in any case, would have to be taken into account in our contemporary history.”1 The subtitle of the book was “Bonfires, gallows , scaffolds, martyrdoms, suicides, gloomy and strange events that happened in Mexico during the civil and foreign wars,” since its purpose was to remember those individuals who had been sacri ficed for the country. Comonfort was at that time considered a martyr of Mexican history—at least by the editors of El Libro Rojo. A year later, in 1872, Manuel Rivera Cambas included in his Gobernantes de México a biography showing great respect for Comonfort. According to Rivera, Comonfort had “a great soul” and his acts were always sound until “he took a false step,” the coup d’état of December 1857. Nevertheless, Comonfort had atoned for his errors by his self-exile, with the Foreign Intervention having offered him “an honorable vindication.” Although he had been courting death since the siege of Puebla in 1863, he unfortunately did not die in particularly heroic circumstances until several months later.2 When these biographical sketches were written, the Juárez antonia pi-suñer llorens Eight. The Crumbling of a “Hero”: Ignacio Comonfort from Ayutla to Tacubaya The Crumbling of a “Hero” 177 administration was, in its turn, vindicating Comonfort. In February 1868 his remains were transferred from San Miguel de Allende to the cemetery of San Fernando in Mexico City and were honored with “solemn funeral rites” in Congress. The ceremony was attended by all the secretaries of state, congressmen, and “many other public servants,” with president Juárez at the top of the list.3 A possible reason for the presence of the latter and his staff—among whom were Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada and José María Iglesias, former friends and collaborators of Comonfort —could have been that they also believed the late president “had expiated his fault” dying for the Republic. But there is also room for the conjecture that there was another more pragmatic reason: Comonfort was not so greatly mistaken in his appreciation of how difficult it was to govern with the 1857 Constitution. Payno’s statement that “in any case” Comonfort would have a place in Mexican history was probably founded in his belief that as time went by, the judgment of History (with a capital H) would not be as harsh toward Comonfort as that of the Liberal Radicals after what they called the coup d’état of December 1857. Payno’s view would prove mistaken. Given that the 1857 Constitution became the liberal banner of the wars of the Reforma (1858–60) and French Intervention (1862–67), and moreover that it was triumphant in both conflicts, emerging as the national symbol of radical liberalism, the image of Comonfort as the president who had disowned it in December 1857 resulted in his losing the heroic dimension that two historical works had given him. These were Historia de la revolución de México en contra de la dictadura del general Santa Anna: 1853–1855 and México en 1856 y 1857: Gobierno del general Comonfort, both written by the Spaniard Anselmo de la Portilla, the first in 1856 and 178 Pi-Suñer Llorens the second two years later, in New York, where the exiled president was living at the time. In spite of their epic and flattering discourse—it is interesting to remember that José María Mata ironically called the one written in New York “la Comonforteida” (the Comonfortiad, in reference to Virgil’s Aeneid)—these two books became the main sources for all the successive historians who undertook the task of reconstructing the events that took place between the pronunciamientos of Ayutla and Tacubaya. They followed these two works closely—sometimes copying them without qualms—albeit diverging from them as to the perception of Comonfort and his acts. In this essay I aim to show the coincidences and disagreements between these first books and those published between 1860 and 1901, all of them written in very different circumstances and with diverse intentions. Considering these works in chronological order, I have reviewed the Memoria sobre la...