"Fernando Napoleon" Rio de la Plata
“Fernando Napoleon”: Revolution, War and Sovereignty in the Rio de la
Plata (1808-1816).
Santiago Bestilleiro Lettini
Abstract: The abdications of Bayonne, in 1808, displayed a crisis of sovereignty over the Hispanic World that produced an imperial conflict on the legitimacy of the assumption of the political attributes that the King Fernando VII, captive in France after Napoleon Bonaparte’s occupation of Spain, was unable to exercise. The formation of a series of provisional governments in different Hispanic American cities, the Juntas, and the internal disputes then opened have been studied from multiple perspectives. However, the effects of the European context, more precisely of the Napoleonic wars, in the revolutionary course, has received less attention in the Rioplatense case. This paper attempts to offer an introductory analysis of the instances in which sovereign disputes in Buenos Aires observed and reflected the European political and military affairs between 1808 and 1816