Historiography of Juan Manuel de Rosas
José Rivera Indarte wrote a work called Blood Tables (Tablas de Sangre) which was published in Europe.
[5] The liberator José de San Martín, who was living in France, corresponded with Rosas, offering his full support, both against the Europeans and the Unitarians.
[6] Rosas was deposed by Justo José de Urquiza in 1852, in the battle of Caseros, and Buenos Aires seceded from the Argentine Confederation later in the year.
It's needed, then, to mark with a legislative sanction declaring him guilty of lèse majesté so at least this point is marked in history, and it is seen that the most potent court, which is the popular court, which is the voice of the sovereign peoples by us represented, throws to the monster the anathema calling him traitor and guilty of lèse majesté.
[9][A]A notable exception to this trend was Juan Bautista Alberdi, who was among the Unitarian expatriates in Montevideo and attacked Rosas during his rule.
[12] Bartolomé Mitre started the first noteworthy historiographic studies shortly afterwards, but opted to avoid the period of Rosas rule altogether.
[13] Similarly, Mitre wrote a series of small biographies of men from the War of Independence; some of them worked with Rosas later but those details were carefully omitted.
[14][15] Mitre established a version of history with an explicit bias against his enemies of the civil war;[15] this method constrated sharply with the historiography of the United States, which avoided the arbitrary divisions into heroes and villains and preferred a fair and dispassionate perspective.
Saldías rejected the civilization and barbarism dichotomy introduced by Sarmiento, and described the ranchers of the countryside as a mere political faction with specific interests.
He gave new significance to the Federal Pact, a perspective that would be shared by both future revisionists and authors as Emilio Ravignani and Ricardo Levene.
[27] A common assumption of the time considered that Argentina began an age of prosperity after the defeats of Rosas and Urquiza at Caseros and Pavón.
Juan Álvarez, influenced by the new state of affairs, wrote a history of Argentina from an economic perspective, and redeemed the protectionist policy of Rosas as an attempt to restore the economy of the country that had been badly damaged by wars and free trade.
[28] The new historical school was a new generation of historians, influenced by the University Revolution, who sought to modernize the historiographical work with new methodologies.
[30] One of the authors of the New Historical School that worked with Rosas was Emilio Ravignani, his main interest being the origins of federalism and the national organization.
As subsecretary of international relations during the administration of Hipólito Yrigoyen he could check a lot of documents and bibliography, which allowed him to write a book about the first meeting of Rosas and the British diplomat Henry Southern.
Unlike the authors that dismissed the period as anarchic, Ravignani considered that the pacts and the role of the caudillos was instrumental to maintain national unity.
[32] His work was discussed by Ricardo Levene, who thought that the civil war and the delegation of the sum of public power generated a dictatorship, and that Rosas was a special caudillo, unlike the others.
[34] Another important historian was Carlos Ibarguren, minister of Roque Sáenz Peña and teacher of History of Argentina at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature.
[41] Authors that focus instead on the historiographical merits of revisionism choose instead Ensayo sobre el año 20 (Spanish: Essay about the Year 20) and Ensayo sobre Rosas y la suma del poder (Spanish: Essay about Rosas and the sum of power), by Julio Irazusta, also from 1934.
This institute and similar ones thought that public instruction was instrumental in generating a new nationalist sentiment in the population, but using new historical structures in place of the ones used in previous decades.
[51] José María Rosa rejected the Great Man theory, and thought that history should not focus on specific isolated men or events but on the evolution of society as a whole.
However, the radical role of Jordán Bruno Genta at the National University of the Littoral was highly criticized, both by antifascists and by other revisionists as Arturo Jauretche and the Irazusta brothers.
[53] The historical revisionism lost the high hierarchical roles achieved in the Revolution of '43 when Juan Perón was elected president.
[54] The government of Perón avoided taking sides in the ideological disputes of the times, and did the same in historical topics, without endorsing nor rejecting revisionism.
The state only made official praise to universally accepted national heroes, such as José de San Martín, whose centennial was celebrated in 1950.
[59] The Repatriation of Juan Manuel de Rosas's body, a project begun in the 1930s, finally took place in 1989, at the beginning of the first presidency of Carlos Menem.
[60] According to the historian Félix Luna, the disputes between supporters and detractors of Rosas are outdated, and modern historiography has incorporated the several corrections made by historical revisionism.
[1] Luna points that Rosas is no longer seen as a horrible monster, but as a common historical man as the others; and that it is anachronistic to judge him under modern moral standards.
[1] Luis Alberto Romero, leader historian of the CONICET, the University San Martín and the UBA, pointed that the ideas of revisionism have been smoothly included into high-school textbooks, with no visible contradictions with other perspectives.
[61] Horacio González, head of the National Library of the Argentine Republic, points a paradigm shift in the historiography of Argentina, where revisionism has moved from being the second most important perspective into being the mainstream one.
