748 Chapter XXXI
Various conspiracies were discovered further south, all purely local and momen-
tary. There was one at Quito in 1794, at Buenos Aires in the same year, at Caracas,
La Paz, and remote Potosi in 1797, and at Bahia, in Brazil, in 1798. Generally the
conspirators were found to be using French terminology (such as “citizen” and
“republic”); at La Paz part of the evidence consisted in copper engravings showing
the death of Louis XVI. Distance, censorship, and the absence of any systematic
French propaganda meant that French writings, as found in South American con-
spiratorial circles, were of a highly random character. At Bogota, in 1793, Antonio
Nariño printed a hundred copies of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen. At Rio, after a visit by a French ship in 1792, a translation of the French
constitution was made into Portuguese. Otherwise, the French works that we hear
of were extremely sporadic. For some reason, both at Mexico City and at Bahia,
about five thousand miles apart, the authorities were alarmed to find handwritten
copies of speeches made in the French convention by Boissy d’Anglas, who was
certainly one of the most sedate men of the French Revolution. The Orateur des
Etats- généraux de 1789, attributed to J. L. Carra, was found in the hands of a Bra-
zilian mulatto—as in the bookshops of Moscow. Worried officials also found cop-
ies of Volney’s Ruines, with its disconcerting subtitle, Méditations sur les révolutions
des empires.
The Latin American disturbances, even at this early date, are of interest in
that they raised racial issues in a way that had no parallel in Europe or the United
States. Many persons of Indian or Negro descent were already better off than in
English- speaking America. At Quito the leading figure was Espejo, a pure-
blooded Indian, a medical doctor, who was also head of the first public library at
Quito. In 1792 he began to publish a periodical, and founded a patriotic society of
some fifty members, in the best European style. His group secretly obtained copies
of Nariño’s edition of the Declaration of Rights, and in 1794, possibly on hearing
news of the French invasion of Catalonia, put up placards in the streets. It is not
clear to whom they were addressed, since at least one of them was written in Latin.
Espejo was imprisoned, tortured, and died thereafter. Nariño was transported to
Spanish Africa.
At Buenos Aires and Bahia the plots involved mulattoes and Negro slaves. At
Buenos Aires certain French merchants were alleged to have offered freedom to
Negroes in return for joining in a revolt against the Spanish crown. At Bahia the
conspiracy was more substantial. A French frigate had stopped at Bahia in 1797,
and a number of local teachers, doctors, and clergy had thereupon had the idea
of forming a literary society. About the same time a company of mulatto soldiers
petitioned for equality of treatment with a company of white soldiers at Bahia. A
handful of whites, mulattoes, and slaves formed secret links with each other. Most
of the mulattoes were soldiers, but one was some kind of minor official or notary.
Of the whites, one was a Latin teacher from a local planter family, and one was
a surgeon educated in Portugal. However hopeless as a revolutionary movement,
their efforts suggest the social discontents, the thinking, and the knowledge of
the outside world in a town on the Brazilian coast at the time. The conspirators
probably had heard that the French had abolished slavery; whether they knew of
the revolution in Haiti is not clear from the evidence. By the middle of 1798 they