The King and the Kingdom

Royalism and the concept of Order in Tierra Firme during the Age of Revolutions

Resumo

This article explores how the royalists in Tierra Firme—present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama—used the concept of order to reconstruct the legitimacy of the Spanish monarchy during the absolutist restoration of Fernando VII (1814–1820). It illuminates how royalists understood the foundations of the monarchical order, conceptualized the crisis of the Spanish monarchy, and envisioned the roles of the king and the vassals in a postrevolutionary society. Through a close reading of the language of order employed in newspapers, political treatises, sermons, pamphlets, and petitions, the article shows how royalists responded to the radical reordering of the conceptual structures of the political world caused by the revolution in Tierra Firme. It reveals how royalists established public opinion as a legitimizing force alongside the Crown, thereby asserting the impossibility of returning to the prerevolutionary political-conceptual framework. Moreover, the article reframes the monarchical restoration as a creative political response to an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy in Tierra Firme. It presents this period as a moment of profound re-elaboration of the traditional political culture and a historical experience informed by the intellectual developments of the revolutionaries.