Both the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue encouraged White male colonists to consider themselves “enlightened” “American” citizens devoted to advancing the public good through reasonable means. This chapter focuses on the Affiches, which flourished into the revolutionary decade of the 1790s. It situates its founding in the rise of similar metropolitan publications while showing how the colonial context informed its objectives. Like metropolitan editors, its founder Jean Monceaux was confident in the power of communication to inform and of discussion to enlighten; brought metropolitan ideas and news into the colonies; created forums for debate within it; and believed that a press served its public by furthering the collective good. Constrained by official censorship, the Affiches nevertheless expressed colonial discontent with the postwar order by publishing extensively on the British Stamp Act Crisis. In the process, it exposed readers to a robust assertion of colonial “rights” in the face of metropolitan “tyranny” and implicitly connected Saint-Domingue’s political troubles with that of British North America and the Brittany Affair in France.

The Journal de Saint-Domingue joined the Affiches Américaines in encouraging White male colonists to consider themselves members of an “enlightened” and distinctively “American” citizenry devoted to reason and the common good. While acknowledging metropolitan precedents for a general-interest publication, its editors trumpeted their publication’s novelty, claimed all of “America” as their journalistic jurisdiction, and stated their intention to generate original content, not just reprint metropolitan articles. The monthly Journal fostered the creation of American “taste” by publishing reviews and critiquing poetry by colonists. With strong ties to the local Chambres d’Agriculture and strong support from planter subscribers, it also published extensively on agriculture (Chapter 11). With the Affiches, it created a forum where colonists could appropriate the intellectually respectable terms of “political economy,” combining them with a robust rhetoric of citizenship to respond to criticism from merchants and metropolitan chambers of commerce; debate the reimposition of the trade restrictions of the Exclusif and proposed limitations on sugar refining; and seek to redefine the colony-metropole relationship.

This chapter is primarily interested in exploring the origins and development of liberalism during the revolutionary and early republican period of nineteenth century Spanish America. It first considers the peculiarities of the Spanish crisis of 1808 in the context of the Atlantic crisis of the European monarchies and also evaluates the assimilation of the Enlightened agenda by the Catholic Spanish political culture. The second part the chapter introduces the relevance of the idea of emancipation and considers the characteristics it adopted in the Spanish World as a keystone of the constitutional cultures that flourished in the area. The last part of this chapter shows the limits of a theory of emancipation in Catholic societies and how the new republics (and the Spanish liberal monarchy as well) had to deal with limits to constituent power posed by the assumption that the Spanish were societies with a “national God.” Depending on the solutions proposed and adopted to the limits of emancipation different branches of liberalism developed, debated among them and very often went to civil wars.