Liberal Party (Mexico)

When President Valentín Gómez Farías sought to pursue an anti-clerical campaign in 1833, among other liberal reforms, his government was overthrown, and the triumphant conservatives replaced the constitution with the Siete Leyes inaugurating a decade of the Centralist Republic of Mexico.

After a constitutional convention was inaugurated in 1856, men such as Melchor Ocampo, Benito Juárez, Ignacio Ramírez, and Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, pursued unprecedented liberal reforms, including a continuation of the anti-clerical measures which were first attempted in 1833.

The liberal Spanish Constitution of 1812, promulgated during the last years of colonial rule, divided New Spain into provincial deputations with popularly elected assemblies.

[4] The arguments for integrating federation into the new constitution prevailed, motivated by the long struggle during the war of independence to seek as much autonomy as possible, and also an eagerness to reap the salaries that would accompany local bureaucracies.

This time Gómez Farías urged the nationalization of church lands as a means of funding the war effort, but the efficacy and prudence of such a measure was questioned by Conservatives, even by moderate liberals.

This time it was not only the nationalization of church lands, but the question of religious freedom, and the jurisdiction of canon law over clergy that was brought to fore during the discussions regarding the drafting of the Constitution of 1857.

Church properties not related to religious functions were nationalized, priests remained under the jurisdiction of canon law only in non-civil cases, and for the first time a Mexican Constitution did not declare Catholicism as the state religion.

Both parties joined in condemning José María Gutiérrez de Estrada when he suggested in 1840 that Mexico ought to invite a foreign monarch to establish a Mexican monarchy.

"[15] Even the Conservative statesman, Antonio de Haro y Tamariz, agreed with these points, sarcastically suggesting that the government start granting titles to generals.

[16] The Liberal Party was in power when the Second French Empire launched an invasion of Mexico, the Second French Intervention, in 1861 with the intention of overthrowing the government of Mexico and replacing it with a monarchical client state, the Second Mexican Empire, a scheme that gained the collaboration of the Conservative Party, which previously however had expressed republican principles,[17] causing the Liberal ambassador to the United States, Matias Romero to remark that “the French government has been and is, then, the true and only author of the project to establish a monarchy in Mexico, which can only be conceived...by persons who did not know the present situation of the republic and the ideas and tendencies of its people, or who believe the Mexican nation is an automaton with which one may do as one pleases.