Paper short abstract:

We aim to show the corporate logic of citizenship in Peru (1834-1860). The indigenous population was not necessarily excluded from the electoral system, among other reasons, because of the liberal interest to legitimate the Republic (most of them shared an "organic" meaning of liberalism).

Paper long abstract:

This paper suggests that citizenship in Nineteenth Century´s Peru was rooted in corporate logics, and liberals adapted their ideas to the diverse and complex reality, driven by the belief that the legitimacy of the precarious State required to include the indigenous majority.

Indeed, the challenge of the new republics was to build an order based on law and equality in a society heavily corporate and heterogeneous. Regarding citizenship, between 1834 and 1896, most of Peruvian Constitutions and electoral laws established "corporate" solutions ", namely alternative requirements (for example, 4 in the Constitutions of 1856 and 1860) that allowed access to suffrage various subjects, including indigenous.

Unlike Bolivar or Juarez, Peruvian liberals chose to respect the indigenous communities. Even they approved "positive discrimination" in favor of the Indians, to access the suffrage (1847 and 1849). The German Organisism of Krause and Ahrens or Constant's liberalism, rather than English constitutionalists were essential for these. However, rather than the result of ideas or theoretical influences, the "corporate" requirements to vote were the liberal response to the challenges of the complex reality, not vice versa.

In this paper we analyze the constitutions and electoral laws, the liberal arguments and reasons for these proposals were part of political consensus, until the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally, we propose a "corporate" period from 1834 to 1896, culminating in the liberal "mutation" to positivism and the electoral reform of 1896, which excluded the vast majority of the illiterate population, including indigenous.