Historian Jorge Basadre maintains that militarism (the predominance of the military in power) arose in Peru due to the weakness of the civilian ruling class after a time of war, whether internal or external.

This new militarism has the difficult task of recomposing the administrative and governmental apparatus of the State and of exercising its authority in order to achieve the participation of citizens to guide the nation towards its recovery.

[1] After the catastrophic defeat against Chile, the person who had sufficient prestige and authority to restore social and political order in Peru was General Andrés Avelino Cáceres, known as the hero of the Breña resistance.

[2] Cáceres faced the then president Miguel Iglesias, who had signed the peace treaty with Chile by ceding territory and had asserted himself in power with the support of the Chilean Army.

He resigned from the presidency in 1885, being succeeded by the provisional government of the Council of Ministers (headed by Antonio Arenas), which called elections in which Cáceres won overwhelmingly.

It was this consensus that allowed Cáceres and his successor, then Colonel Remigio Morales Bermúdez (1890–1894), to retain political control for almost a decade, in the midst of public peace.

Piérola was the one who consolidated the National Reconstruction, inaugurating a new stage called the Aristocratic Republic (both terms coined by Basadre), which would last during the first two decades of the 20th century.

Chile was also going through economic difficulties, but, after the Spanish–South American War (1865–1866), the government of Federico Errázuriz Zañartu had approved the acquisition in 1871 of two armored frigates with which it obtained naval supremacy in the Pacific.

Peru was at a crossroads: it did not have the necessary resources to make that payment; and at the same time, it urgently required capital to reactivate its export economy, without which it was impossible to pay its debt.

This was understood by the first government of Andrés A. Cáceres, which devoted itself fully to the matter, until signing the Grace Contract, by virtue of which the Peruvian State ceded control and administration of its main productive resources to its English creditors (railroads and guano), in exchange for the complete extinction of their debt.

For better administration of the resources they received, the English creditors converted their foreign debt bonds into shares of the Peruvian Corporation, the most important British company that was created to implement the agreements of said contract.

[2] With the issue of foreign debt thus settled, the Peruvian ruling class understood that the country's future depended on the development of natural resources for export.

Thus, the first foundations of a system of exploitation of resources and the native labor force began to be laid, which would reach its most complete consolidation during the First World War.

The leader of this reaction is Manuel González Prada (1844–1918), who cultivated a poetry that, due to its aestheticising themes and the introduction of new metric forms, was a clear precursor of modernism.

Among his works in prose are: Pájinas libres [es] and Horas de lucha, books in which he makes a furious criticism of the political class, responsible, according to him, for the war.

Such is the case of: In August 1885, Daniel Alcides Carrión, a Peruvian medical student, was inoculated with the help of Evaristo Chávez, the secretion taken from a wart of the patient Carmen Paredes.

Carrión kept a diary with detailed notes of his symptoms until the last days of his illness when his clinical condition worsened and he died of the disease on October 5, 1885.

In 1902, he designed his "torpedo plane" powered by a battery of rockets, mounted on a pivoting wing that allowed it to take off vertically, after which they rotated backwards to propel it into horizontal flight.

In 1911 he published his masterpiece, The Flora of the Peruvian Andes in its Fundamental Features (German: Die Pflanzenwelt des peruanischen Anden in ihren Grundzügen Dargestellt).

[37] Piérola, who created the revolution from Chile, landed in Puerto Caballas and from Chincha he advanced to Lima, where he entered leading his troops through the Portada de Cocharcas, on March 17, 1895.