The Invention of Public Opinion in Peru at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century
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Abstract
We are going to study the way and conditions in which the concept of public opinion was born in Peru by analysing two periodicals, El Peruano and El Satélite del Peruano which appeared between 1811 and 1812, in these peculiar times when power was vacant in Spain, King Fernando the seventh exiled in France and the Cortès meeting in Cadiz. Allowed to come out by the decree about the freedom of the press issued in Cadiz, november 1810. The writers saw themselves as instructors of public opinion and spokesmen of the general will. They called upon publicity to handle private affairs in progress, changing the newspaper into a tribune and even a tribunal and forged the notion and the discursive and representative status of public opinion as an instancy for debate and judgement. Essential element of political modernity, the new concept is linked to national and popular sovereignty. «Kind of a law», it is the expression of the «general will», a regulator between the strength of some and the freedom of others, between the governors and governed people. New source of authority, political tool endowed with symbolic significance for an elite in search of legitimacy, this concept of public opinion is at stake in a merciless fight between rival groups and is a threat to the government as it testifies the existence of an instancy whose decisions may be more effective than those issued by legal authority, and stands for a society independent of any power.
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