Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

So we’ve spent the last two episodes [5.01 and 5.02] laying a lot of groundwork, taking the Spanish Empire from a band of marauding conquistadors in the early 1500s to a modernizing mercantilist empire at the end of the 1700s. Well, today we’re finally going to get into the good stuff, at least in terms of the stuff we like to talk about here on the Revolutions podcast: protest, revolt and rebellion. Because, though, last week I just sort of described in the abstract the reforms implemented by King Charles III of Spain after the end of the Seven Years War, in the real world, those reforms were not going to be implemented without a goodly amount of protest, revolt and rebellion. 

So the first precursor revolt we get to talk about is the Rebellion of the Barrios, and that is with two r’s, but please don’t make me try to roll my r’s. This rebellion blew up in 1765 in the city of Quito, which is now the capital of Ecuador. And it was triggered by the first round of post Seven Years War reforms, with two being particularly odious. First, stricter enforcement of the long established but long despised sales tax, and second, a tightening of the state’s monopoly on liquor production and sales. The criollo elite of Quito were incensed at the monopoly reforms, in particular, because they owned the sugarcane fields and facilities from which and through which the liquor was produced. Meanwhile, the mostly mixed race lower classes were ticked off that the sales tax was now jacking up prices everywhere. But it wasn’t just the liquor monopoly and the sales tax per se that were so odious. It was that the enforcement of both would be taken out of the hands of local contractors and put into the hands of salaried agents of the Crown, who are now those lowborn peninsulares civil servants we talked about last week and who are now being introduced in force. So the elites in Quito drafted a letter of protest to the viceroy in Bogotá, only to have the viceroy blow them off. Then, much to everyone’s surprise, everything escalated really super quickly. 

On May 22, 1765, somebody started ringing the town bells, and thousands of mostly mestizos and Amerindian lower classes flooded into Quito. They converged on the tax offices and destroyed all the tax records. This sudden riot was then followed up a month later by an even deadlier uprising, with armed residents actually seizing control of the city. But in what would be a consistent theme of all these Spanish American uprisings, up through the early days of the wars of independence, the insurrectionaries repeatedly proclaimed their undying loyalty to the King of Spain and that they only fought his corrupt and malevolent agents, whose corruption and malevolence the King would no doubt be shocked to discover. And as a further expression of this sentiment, the insurrectionaries now wanted more than just tax and monopoly relief. They forced the cowed audiencia of Quito to expel all unmarried peninsulares and all nonresident peninsulares, period. So what had started as a simple tax revolt had turned quickly into an expression of local anger against evil peninsulare foreigners. 

Now, amazingly, for whatever reason that is, I can’t actually find the reason, the viceroyal authorities in Bogota did not make a concerted effort to retake the rebellious Quito for a good year and a half. And it was not until September 1767 that they finally mustered some regular army troops to march over and bring Quito back into the official imperial fold. And then, just as curiously, the army was able to do so without incident. Now, I honestly have not been able to dig up too many details about the surprisingly long and then ultimately anticlimactic end to the Rebellion of the Barrios, but given the pattern of future uprisings, there had to have been some collaboration here between the viceroyal authorities and the local criollo elite of Quito to halt the spread of any further radicalism on behalf of the mixed race lower classes. It was one thing to protect elite economic privileges, but quite another to just turn the world upside down, and so thus ended the Rebellion of the Barrios. 

Now, right smack-dab in the middle of all this, a similar wave of violent unrest started breaking out up in New Spain, specifically the region around Guanajuato, northwest of Mexico City. In 1766, locals erupted over a whole host of complaints. They were opposed to a new array of taxes and the stiffer collection of existing taxes, the influx of cheap goods from Spain that undercut local producers, and the forced extension of militia service. Eventually, a mob 6,000 strong stormed the city of Guanajuato and raided the royal treasury, just smashing the joint up. Then they proceeded to control the city for a good three days before finally dispersing. As with their cousins in far off Quito, the rebellious mob in Guanajuato swore that they were not rebellious at all. They shouted, “Long live the King!”, and asked only for the death of bad government. The Guanajuato riot of 1766 receded without further incident. But then everything re-exploded in an even wider spread series of protests the following year, when word came that the Jesuits had been expelled from the Empire. Remember, by now, most of the Jesuits are local sons, prominent local sons, respected, educated, with strong ties to both the elites and the lower classes. All across New Spain, and indeed all across Spanish America, protests and clashes and the occasional riot accompanied the forced expulsion of the Jesuit brothers. But it never coalesced into a broader, unified movement. And as with all of these precursor uprisings, temperatures did soon cool. But the tyrannical expulsion of the Jesuits would leave a lot of lingering resentment all across Spanish America. 

Now, what I just described were just the most explosive incidents, and they were accompanied by varying degrees of resistance and resentment everywhere as this new round of Bourbon reforms was introduced after the Seven Years War. But while up in British North America, a bunch of anti-tax, anti-monopoly revolts during the 1760s led directly into a patriotic independence movement in the 1770s, down in Spanish South America, the 1770s turned out to be a time of renewed calm and order. But things did start to pick back up again in the early 1780s, and that was in part triggered by Spanish involvement in the American War of Independence. Now, as we all know that after the Battle of Saratoga, the French joined the American fight. But as I also very briefly mention in Episode 2.12, the French help nudge their European neighbors into helping them punch the British in the nose. And both the Dutch and the Spanish wound up pledging money and military aid. On the Spanish front, that meant mostly engaging in operations against the British down in the Caribbean. And then, as we’ll talk about in a minute, the siege and capture of Pensacola, Florida in 1781. To support the effort, the Crown wanted to raise a bunch of money from their American subjects, which meant, among other things, new taxes and further strengthening of various Crown monopolies, all of it being administered by those intrusive peninsulare civil servants. 

So the first nascent rebellion got going in 1780 down in what is today Santiago, Chile. That is the conspiracy of the three Antonios. The first Antonio was a French born teacher and Enlightenment enthusiast named Antonio Berney. The second Antonio was another resident Frenchman who had emigrated to Santiago to make a fortune, Antonio Gramusset. And the third Antonio was a prominent criollo named José Antonio de Rojas. The conspiracy of the three Antonios was actually one of the most radical of all the precursor rebellions, because these three guys planned to overthrow the Spanish Crown, found an independent republic, and then proceed to abolish racial and economic classes, liberate the Amerindians from all of their obligations, and free the slaves. And as if that wasn’t ambitious enough, they then planned to move on to radical land redistribution. The conspiracy of the three Antonios was, in fact, so radical that it is often plucked out and cited as a precursor not just to Spanish American independence, but to all the socialist and communist revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. But it went nowhere. The plot was uncovered, and the three Antonios were arrested on January 1, 1781. The two French Antonios were sent back to Spain for prosecution, but died en route. Meanwhile, José Antonio de Rojas spent some time in a Spanish prison before returning home to Santiago, just in time to play a critical role in the first dissolution of Crown authority there in 1810. 

Now, just as the conspiracy of the three Antonios was uncovered, the mother of all the precursor rebellions, and certainly the most famous, broke out up in Peru. This was the rebellion that was led by Túpac Amaru II. So Túpac Amaru II was originally just a prominent mestizo landowner living in a town southeast of Cusco named José Gabriel Condorcanqui. Now, by trade, he was a muleteer, that is, he ran a herd of, like, 350 mules. And though he was mixed race, he was also one of the leaders tapped to ensure that the Amerindians paid their tribute and provided their labor, so he was a very prominent Amerindian leader. 

By the late 1770s, though, he had become fairly well disgusted by the exploitative system he was administering, and he started telling people that his lineage, in fact, traced back to the last Inca emperor, Túpac Amaru, who held on to a final round of the Inca Empire until he was defeated and executed in 1572. So now, self styling himself as Túpac Amaru II, we start hearing about prophecies that maybe the Spanish aren’t actually long for this world. 

In November 1780, with the exploitive system getting even more exploitive, the self-proclaimed Túpac Amaru II had finally had enough. He and a core group of followers seized the local Spanish administrator, who was particularly cruel, and held him captive for just under a week, during which time they extracted from him money, guns, and ammunition, and then they forced him to call for a mass meeting of the local population. When everyone showed up, Túpac Amaru hanged the administrator and claimed that he was doing so on orders from the King of Spain. And not only that, but he also had further orders to abolish taxes and end the forced labor system. The assembled masses were thrilled, and Túpac Amaru II now had a couple of hundred followers. He also had money, and he had guns, and he put them all to good use.

Now, word of this rebellion spread fast and the majority Amerindian population of Peru had suffered for so long, all rose up against the Spanish authorities. And by December 1780, Túpac Amaru was leading an army 40,000 strong to the gates of Cusco. This was a huge rebellion. 

But any attempt to take Cusco itself was repulsed by the Spanish defenders. And so, much like the slave revolt in Saint Domingue a few years later, the rebels wound up holding the rural areas while the Spanish remained safely ensconced in their urban strongholds. From these strongholds, the Spanish then started orchestrating repacification expeditions. But they did have to wait until regular army troops could be moved into the area, because, as it turned out, those militias that the Bourbons had been trying to foster as the principal defenders of Spanish America, well, they were not particularly interested in fighting these Indian rebels and in many cases just went ahead and switched sides. But when the regular army arrived, repacification commenced and basically any Amerindian was considered a combatant to be dealt with accordingly, whether they were a combatant or not. And over the course of the rebellion, tens of thousands would be killed. 

With its tenuous cohesion now under serious assault, the rebellion was dealt a debilitating blow in the spring of 1781, when Túpac Amaru himself was captured. He was dragged into Cusco along with his family and then forced to watch as the Spanish tortured and executed his wife and children one by one before they turned on Túpac Amaru himself. They cut his tongue out and then attempted to quarter him by having four horses pull in four different directions. But that attempt failed, and so finally, they just beheaded him. 

But independent rebel groups did carry on the fight. Túpac Amaru’s brother had managed to lead a rebel army to the city of La Paz in Upper Peru and he proceeded to surround the city with a huge army and lay siege to it for the next six months. But then he, too, was captured and executed in November 1781. Now, by that point, most of Peru had been repacified, but scattered rebel groups did manage to hold on until the last of them were finally snuffed out in 1783. 

Now, the Spanish, not being totally blind to what had just been unleashed, did reinstate the forced labor system and the taxes. But they legislated some corrective reforms to curb the worst abuses. They also opened up a special audienca in Cusco to hear Indian complaints against Spanish transgressors. 

So then, in that same spring of 1781, right around the time that Túpac Amaru is being captured, yet another rebellion broke out up in New Granada. So in the six months between, like, November 1780 and April 1781, you’ve got three totally unrelated yet very, very troubling uprisings hitting all at once. So the latest revolt up in New Granada wound up looking a lot like a wider spread version of Quito’s rebellion of the barrios 15 years earlier. To generate more state revenue to underwrite their operations against the British, the Spanish authorities tried to squeeze greater profits from their liquor and tobacco monopolies, they pursued the sales tax with renewed vigor once again, and then introduced completely new taxes that no one had ever had to pay before. The enraged locals in New Granada were soon literally up in arms about all this, kicking off what would soon be dubbed the Revolt of the Comuneros. 

Now, if you know a bit about Spanish history, you know that technically, this is the third revolt of the Comuneros in Spanish history. The first was an uprising in Castile in 1520 against the rule of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. The second was a revolt down in what is now Paraguay, back in the 1720s and 1730s. All three of these were unrelated, but they did follow a pattern where local towns claimed that the tyranny of the central political leaders had triggered a justifiable devolution of sovereignty to the local towns, otherwise known as the Comunidades, the communes, the communities. Hence, the Revolt of the Comuneros. 

So this latest Revolt of the Comuneros erupted in the city of Socorro, a city northeast of Bogotá, where the authorities had introduced the new taxes and monopoly edicts. And again, as had happened in Quito, the upper and lower classes joined forces to protest the intrusive new regime. They dumped out government booze and burned government tobacco, amongst other displays of open hostility. Then they took things one step further: they organized. The residents of Socorro, appointed a five man executive committee to coordinate further action. A pattern then spread across the region, with other towns forming their own communes, knitting together a loose network of rebellion with Socorro at the center. But the criollo elite were nervous about where all this might be headed. And so the five men leading the Revolt of the Comuneros in Socorro actually all signed a letter to the viceroy saying that they had accepted their roles under duress and that their principal concern was making sure that things didn’t get out of hand. So the comuneros then stopped destroying tobacco and booze and instead sold it to raise money to fund their little rebellion. And the next thing you know, you’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 to 20,000 armed men marching on Bogotá. 

With the viceroy himself down in Cartagena (thank you to everybody who told me how badly I was pronouncing it last week), the audienca in Bogota was the only authority around, and they had no troops to defend them because all the troops were down in Cartagena, too. And the audienca might have called out the militia, but a bunch of the militiamen were already on the other side. And so calling the rest in might just double the strength of the rebellion. When the comunera army approached Bogotá, they proceeded then to negotiate. And the terms were simple: in exchange for us not sacking Bogotá, the audienca will repeal all the new monopoly rules and taxe, and then hinting again at that underlying criollo-peninsular tension. In the future, criollo applicants for various state jobs would be given preferential treatment over peninsulares. 

Now, the audienca agreed to all this because they were staring down a huge army. But the viceroy in Cartagena heard the terms and he hit the roof. He ordered regular army troops to march on Bogotá, restore order, and cancel any and all capitulations. Once the army arrived, the comuneros folded, at least the leadership did. The elite criollos appeared ready to shut the whole thing down as things got hairy, and the arrival of the regular army was their cue to split. And their reticence to keep pushing, like has happened in Quito, might be traced back to their fear that resisting political and economic reforms might lead to an uncontrollable social revolution that would engulf them, the criollo, along with the hated Spanish peninsulares. And this was not an abstract fear now, because word had by now reached Bogotá that a massive Indian rebellion was underway in Peru and might be spreading north. So the lower class comunera rebels were told to either drop the business right now or face the Spanish army without any elite backing. Most abandoned the cause, but a few fought on, only to be snuffed out by the end of 1781. 

So, as with the rebellion to the 1760s, this run of rebellion in the early 1780s did not lead directly to a movement for independence. And in fact, we are still one full generation away before we get there. But this does bring us perfectly to the point of departure for the man who would become known as the precursor, the man who would dedicate his life to the project of Spanish American independence, to the point where he practically became synonymous with the project for Spanish American independence. That’s Francisco de Miranda. And we will spend the rest of today’s episodes on the adventures of Francisco de Miranda, which, if you’ve never heard of him, is going to be pretty fun because he just sort of wanders his way through the American, French and even, very briefly, Haitian revolution. 

So, Francisco de Miranda was born in Caracas in 1750. His mother came from a wealthy criollo family, while his father was an émigré from the Spanish Canary Islands. Miranda’s father rose up to become a prominent merchant, but his Canary Island roots led the Caracas elite to turn their noses up at him. And though the elder Miranda secured a prestigious captaincy in the local militia, two jealous rivals accused him of having African blood, which in the caste system would have disbarred him from the post. The elder Miranda now had the support of the governor of Caracas, but he had to go to great lengths to prove that his bloodline was, in fact, pure, and even then would voluntarily resign over the issue in 1769. It was a humiliation that burned the father and roused the indignation of the son. 

A young Francisco and his siblings, though, did receive a topflight Jesuit education, and the boy turned out to be a voracious reader and an incurable bibliophile. He loved books. He’s going to love books his whole life. And as the flood of Enlightenment material poured out of Europe, young Francisco gobbled up whatever he could. You name it, he read it.

He graduated from a small university in Caracas before making ready to continue his education in Spain. And so, in 1771, at the age of 21, Francisco de Miranda departed Caracas. And though no one could have imagined it at the time, he would not, in fact, again set foot on Venezuelan soil for 35 years. He spent the next two years as a student in Madrid, and upon completing his studies, he purchased a captaincy in a regiment of the Spanish Regular Army in 1773. At the time, Spain was trying to hold on to its last remaining possessions in North Africa, and Miranda saw the first action of his career defending the Spanish occupied city of Melilla in 1774. But Captain Miranda was not exactly an ideal soldier. He much preferred reading to the soldier’s life. Suspicious bookkeeping seemed to follow him wherever he was posted, and he was both insubordinate to superiors and overly harsh towards subordinates. But he did bounce around various posts in Spain then, until the Spanish entered the American War of Independence and Miranda’s application to take his services back to the Americas was granted. But though he returned to the Caribbean in August of 1780, he does not appear to have dropped by Caracas to, like, visit his family or anything. He was stationed in Cuba, then promoted to lieutenant colonel, and arrived just as the Spanish were on a nice little run of success against the British, taking first Baton Rouge, and then Mobile. The first operation Miranda himself appears to have participated in came in early 1781, when the Spanish laid siege to Fort Pensacola. The siege lasted for just about two months and ended with the British capitulation in May 1781 – all of this happening around Episode 2.12, just as the Americans and French were converging on Yorktown. 

Shortly thereafter, Colonel Miranda was dispatched to Jamaica to arrange for the release of 900 Spanish prisoners, and while there, he, of course, came into direct contact with British officers and citizens with whom he developed a very natural rapport. Miranda greatly admired the forward thinking British, as opposed to what he considered to be the backwardness of the Spanish. And while he was there, he also arranged for the purchase of some British ships for the Spanish Navy. And then, crucially, he cut a deal with a British merchant to fill the holds with British goods to resell them in the closed Spanish markets. When he got back to Cuba, Miranda’s enemies, and he had his share, accused him of being a British spy and a smuggler. These charges would then hang over his head for almost two years. And while he managed to fend off arrest with the help of some well placed friends, because he had his fair share of those two, in the summer of 1783, he was tipped off that the governor of Cuba was going to arrest him. Rather than take his chances with the authorities, Miranda ran for it. He secretly boarded an American ship in June 1783 and sailed off to the Carolinas, beginning a life of permanent exile. 

Miranda was a dreamer with a very healthy ego and a chip on his shoulder, and it is likely that he was already mulling what it might take to lead a glorious fight for freedom in his own homeland, to break away from the arrogant, petty and backward Spanish. And as he traveled the globe, he would only become more fervent in his belief that it was his destiny to free America from Spanish rule. 

Miranda would then spend the next year and a half in the United States. And though when he arrived in a young country, he had only very rough English and no connections, he soon charmed his way up the coast and would leave a much loved semi celebrity. He was well-read, insatiably, curious, and a perfect guest. He was, by all accounts, a witty, fun loving guy who often complained only that the austere Protestant Americans just didn’t want to drink with him enough. And as he moved from the Carolinas to Philadelphia to New York to Boston, he collected calling cards that would open future doors for him. And it did not take long for the dashing enlightened Spaniard to crack the upper rung of the American economic and political elite, including, among others, George Washington, Thomas Payne, the Marquis de Lafayette, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, Sam Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, forming in particular lifelong friendships with both Knox and Hamilton, with whom he would exchange letters for the next 20 years. And this is all going on through Episode 2.14 – “The Critical Period”, as all of these guys are dealing with the transition from being an independent republic under the Articles of Confederation that are not working so well, and then he’s going to leave just before the Constitutional Convention convenes. 

Miranda was also a great friend of the ladies, beginning his reputation as a revolutionary Don Juan. And on a few occasions, his decision to move on stemmed from one of his frequent affairs.

Wherever he traveled, Miranda was a meticulous observer of everything he encountered: social habits, governmental systems, economics, the physical infrastructure, religion, science, nature, whatever. He took it all in and wrote it all down in a meticulously kept diary. And he was particularly interested in Revolutionary War battle sites. Then he made contact with continental veterans to take him on tours of the grounds upon which they had fought. I mean, he’s really studying what it’s going to take here. The Americans loved the serious attention that he was giving them and their cause, and he came to admire their earnest Republicanism greatly. And together they all talked about the dream of Spanish American independence. 

Miranda then wrapped up his tour in Boston in late 1784, engaged in long talks with Sam Adams about the process of winning an independent republic. But then he decided to keep on moving. And in early 1785, he boarded a ship in Boston and set sail for London, leaving behind an array of friends and contacts and allies that he could and would draw upon down the road. And indeed, when he entered London he came with a stack of letters of introduction that he used to enter the small American social circle in London. And in that circle, he quickly became best friends with Colonel William Smith who was attached to the American Embassy and serving the man who was about to become his, that is Smith’s father-in-law, Ambassador John Adams.

Smith and Miranda made plans to go on a grand tour of the continent together. And in August 1785, they crossed over to the Netherlands and from there went on to Berlin where they witnessed Prussian military exercises. They then spent the next few weeks making their way down to Vienna and from there to Budapest, where they no joke got to hang out for a few days kicking it with the great composer Joseph Haydn. And I am thinking of starting a historical parlor game that’s called Six Degrees of Francisco de Miranda because seriously, he meets, talks to, has dinner with, lives with practically every notable intellectual, artistic and political figure of the age. 

So Colonel Smith then had to return to London and so Miranda pressed on alone through the Alps and into Italy. And when he got there, he started making contact with the exiled American Jesuit community, most of whom had taken up residence in Italy. Now, when those guys had arrived in Europe they discovered that the Europeans were phenomenally ignorant about the Americas. And so to dispel ignorant prejudices, they had started cranking out natural histories of the Americas and social histories and various other scholarly works to defend their homeland, and explain it to the Europeans, forging, as I said last week, a uniquely pro-American identity that Miranda would come to thoroughly embrace. 

Now, Miranda’s diary is suspiciously silent on which of the prominent, probably now seditious, Jesuits that he met with, but that’s not exactly the kind of thing you just go writing down. He finally settled in Rome for two months and inhaled that great city, before heading to Athens in the spring of 1786 to inhale that great city, and from there to Constantinople, where he spent a further few months inhaling that great city. Everywhere he went, he studied the history, and the language, and the culture, and wrote it all down, and he pondered it, and he thought about it, I mean, really, Francisco de Miranda is a guy who has a very unique perspective on the early modern world, because he goes everywhere, sees everything and meets everybody. 

Now, at this point, he makes a fateful decision in 1787 to make his way up into Russia. And while in the Crimea, Miranda met the great general and statesman Grigori Potjomkin, or, as we call him in English, Potemkin, who took a liking to Miranda and told the Spanish exile to accompany him to Kiev to meet the Empress Catherine the Great. So in February 1787, Miranda finds himself invited to a dinner with the Empress. Catherine was as enlightened a despot as they come, and she herself was insatiably curious and so she spent the meal peppering Miranda with questions about his Spanish American homeland. Miranda was charming and insightful enough with his answers that the Empress brought him into her inner circle of favorites. And over the next few weeks and months, the two engaged in long, meandering discussions about every topic imaginable. Now, the standard rumor to emerge from all this is that they also became lovers. But there is surprisingly little evidence of a physical relationship and, in fact, much to discredit the claim. 

But as was usually his MO, wherever Miranda went, as much as he could, he talked about Spanish American independence, and he was now trying to talk Catherine into backing him. Now, the Empress seemed interested in supporting the project, but soon enough, a renewed war with the Turks would draw her attention and her money much closer to home. 

Now, while Miranda is doing all of this traveling, he is always traveling under an alias, because the Spanish diplomatic corps is out there sending out alerts to keep an eye out for this wandering, troublesome deserter. And it soon came to the attention of the Spanish ambassador in Russia that this charismatic Spaniard who had taken up with Catherine was indeed this troublesome deserter. And he protested to Catherine, whereupon the Empress made Miranda a Russian count and gave him 10,000 rubles to live on. Now, she implored Miranda to live in Russia permanently, but he declined, whereupon Catherine offered him the protection of the Russian embassies wherever he went in Europe, just in case the Spanish managed to convince some local government to arrest him.

So Miranda left Russia and traveled through Scandinavia before hopping down to Copenhagen and from there down the Rhine, all through the summer of 1788. And eventually he arrived in Switzerland in September 1788, where he made a point to call on the famous English historian Edward Gibbon to talk a little Roman history. From Switzerland, Miranda went over into France, and when he got to Marseilles, he was warmly welcomed by Abbé Raynal. Remember? He’s the guy who wrote that “History of the Two Indies” that called for a black Spartacus to avenge the New World. Well, Miranda had, of course, read Raynal’s book, because he read everything. And the two spent a great deal of time discussing the future of the Americas. From Marseilles, Miranda then traveled up to Paris, arriving in, you guessed it, May 1789, right smack dab at the beginning of the French Revolution. He literally arrived on May 5, the day the Estates General convened in Versailles. 

But Miranda did not care much for the French. He was an Anglophile all the way, and he had no intention of getting sucked into the mad squabbles consuming Paris. At least not yet. And so, in June, just days before the Tennis Court Oath, he headed back up to London. Upon arrival in London, he was entered onto the roles of the Russian Embassy, and from that point on, he lived under their diplomatic protection. But by now, though, Miranda’s reputation had wound its way up to the highest levels of the British government. And Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder invited Miranda to a secret meeting to discuss this rumored plan of South American independence and how the British might be of assistance. Miranda then went on the British payroll and got his first chance to really start drawing up serious plans for Spanish American independence. How the liberation would work, how a new government might function. He also provided Pitt with tons of intelligence on the often impenetrable world of the Spanish Empire. And it does kind of seem like that was all Pitt was really after, because once Miranda has dumped all of this in his lap, Pitt just stopped returning his calls. And over the next two years, Miranda grew increasingly irate and depressed as he finally came to realize that Pitt was just stringing him along. 

So in 1792, Miranda had pretty well given up on British assistance and he turned his attention back to revolutionary France as a better vehicle for his ambitions. And in March 1792, he got on a boat and went back to France, and he arrived in Paris just in time for the Legislative Assembly to declare war on Austria just a few weeks later, and we are now at Episode 3.22 – “War”.

Miranda then fell in with the Girondin intellectual circle, cue ominous music. And after the sudden overthrow of the monarchy on August 10, 1792, Miranda was approached by Alexandre Pétion about signing up for the armies of the French Republic, which were in dire need of experienced officers. 

Now, the thing here is that the French were under the impression that Miranda had been a brigadier general during the American War of Independence, a notion that Lieutenant Colonel Miranda did not disabuse them of. He was then commissioned as a field marshal and left for the front in Belgium just days before the September Massacres – we’re now at Episode 3.24. When he arrived up in the Army of the North, he joined high command of General Dumouriez, who was at present about to go win the surprise victory at Valmy, which, unless I am mistaken, Miranda did not participate in. 

So anyway, here is the craziest kicker of all. After the Austro-Prussian allied army had retreated out of France, Jacques Pierre Brissot turned his own attention back to the problem of the rebellion in Saint Domingue, because we are, right now, right around Episode 4.6 / 4.7, where Britssot’s brothers Sonthonax and Polverel have put old Governor d’Esparbès on a boat and sent him home, and he still needs to be replaced. Brissot got it into his head that Miranda was actually the perfect man for the job. Miranda even came back to Paris to talk it all through, though he expressed some mighty huge reservations about taking on, you know, a French colony in the Caribbean currently in the throes of a massive slave rebellion. So the idea eventually does get dropped, and instead, as we saw in Episode 4.7, they sent our ill-fated little friend, Governor Galbaud. But yeah, Francisco de Miranda was almost made Governor of Saint Domingue in November 1792. 

But instead, he went back up and rejoined the Army of the North. But, of course, a renewed Austrian offensive in February 1793 sent the French forces, some of them under Miranda’s command, into scattered retreat. And then Dumouriez made his ill-advised attack at Neerwinden on March 18. We are now at Episode 3.27 – “Advance and Retreat”, this obviously being the retreat part. So the French were badly beaten at Neerwinden, and when the dust settled, Dumouriez decided to fix all the blame on this possibly treasonous foreigner: his Spanish Field Marshal Miranda. Dumouriez denounced Miranda’s conduct during the battle and blamed him for the defeat. But then, of course, Dumouriez goes rogue and tries to turn his army on Paris. And when that didn’t work out, he defected to the enemy. Now, Miranda had scoffed at joining Dumouriez’s coup, but he was now in a very tight spot. His principal political connections in Paris were all Girondin, and like it or not, he was a part of Dumouriez’s senior staff, which put him under suspicion on two fronts, to say nothing of the fact that he was a foreigner. And just now, the dread foreign plot was working its way into the increasingly paranoid imaginations of the French revolutionaries. So Miranda was brought back to Paris and tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal in May 1793. But remember, this was still in the days when evidence and testimony did count for something, and Miranda wound up being cleared of all charges. 

But Robespierre had mentally pinned a target on Miranda’s back. And so, after the purge of the Girondins that we talked about in Episode 3.31, and then the reorganization of the Committee of Public Safety that we talked about in Episode 3.32, that’s when they booted out Danton and brought in Robespierre, Miranda was rearrested and dumped in prison in July 1793. 

But after being put in prison, his number never came up, which is honestly pretty crazy. All of his friends in the Girondin movement were fed to the guillotine in October, that was Episode 3.34. And then a bunch of the foreign plotters were wiped out when Robespierre got going on his liquidation spree in March and April 1794, that all took place in Episode 3.36. But Miranda just sat and sat and sat, and was never actually called to stand trial. And so he continued to just sit there until Thermidor arrived in July 1794. But even after Thermidor, he continued to just sit all the way until January 1795, so he sat in a French prison for, like, a year and a half, and he only did wind up getting out thanks to the maneuvering of the American ambassador, James Monroe, because Miranda still had a lot of friends in the American government. And this is also, by the by, right around the same time, Monroe is getting Thomas Paine out of a French prison, too.

Upon his release, Miranda remained in prison, but he continued to be like a generally suspicious character to the French revolutionaries. And so when the Vendémiaire uprising hit in October 1795, that was when young Bonaparte’s “whiff of grapeshot” cleared out all the conservative insurrectionaries. And we’re now at Episode 3.42. Miranda, of course, had nothing to do with it, but he was arrested and interrogated, though he did wind up getting released. But then he did have to go into hiding in the countryside because another arrest warrant was issued and he remained in hiding until that order was lifted in April 1796. Miranda then kept his head down and was mostly left alone until the Coup of Floréal comes along in Episode 3.46, at which point he was again targeted for arrest and deportation as a suspicious, reactionary foreigner. 

But by then, events back in Spanish America had taken a further revolutionary turn, particularly in his native Venezuela. And Miranda suddenly had some hope that the project of Spanish American independence would yet live. And that he might be able to go back to the British and get their support, because Spain by now has capitulated to the French, and are now at war with Britain. 

And next week, we’re going to talk about that revolutionary turn in Venezuela and Miranda’s new approach to the British about supporting his project. But mostly, we are going to introduce the man who will be at the center of the show from here on out, because that particularly revolutionary turn in Venezuela in 1797 would make quite an impression on teenage criollo aristocrat, getting ready to make his own grand tour through Europe: Simón Bolívar. 

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