Les « Réflexions philosophiques et politiques » de Juan Wenceslao Barquera : un intellectuel de la Nouvelle Espagne face aux troubles du pouvoir

At the dawn of the independence of New Spain, Juan Wenceslao Barquera, a Mexican scholar, wrote two seminal pamphlets against both Napoleon Bonaparte and his brother Joseph who had then become king of Spain thanks to the ruthless political manoeuvrings of his aforementioned younger brother. The way this South American man of letters committed himself to defending against the French ‘tyrant’ the territories that were owned by Spain is in keeping with the Zeitgeist prevalent in that troubled era when the country was torn between its allegiance to the Bourbons, its desire to break free from the motherland and its refusal to be ruled by a violent, oppressive, usurping foreign power. The study of the rhetorical devices used by Barquera in his writings enables one to fully understand what the political and social stakes were at that watershed in the history of Spanish America, an entity which was, at the time, still in the making.