Simón Bolívar: A Life

Perhaps because the life story of Simón Bolívar is so complex and so massive, we have waited a long time for a major new biography in English. Previously, the most widely used was Gerhard Masur’s Simón Bolívar (1948), which J. H. Elliott recently described in the New York Review of Books (July 13, 2006) as “relentlessly pedestrian.” It is a pleasure to report that this new biography of South America’s greatest historical figure, written by the dean of British Latin Americanists, significantly updates and adds to the literature and should supersede its predecessors. This mature, warm, and accessible work is obviously the fruit of many years of reflection during Lynch’s distinguished career.It is possible that there are no documents relating to the life of Bolívar that are not already known, and the vast majority of what is available has been published. Thus Lynch, while reflecting the entire body of primary and secondary material, does not actually produce any new evidence. It is a book of analysis and interpretation, both judicious and thoughtful. Not all specialists will agree with every element of Lynch’s appraisal, but all are plausible, rooted in the mastery of the independence period he has arrayed in several previous books. He has also been a major interpreter of the early years of caudillismo, and in this book he continues his use of the term caudillo to refer to the regionally based lesser liberators, such as José Antonio Paéz of Venezuela, Juan José Flores of Ecuador, and Agustín Gamarra of Peru, who came to power in the wake of Bolívar.While Lynch clearly admires Bolívar, he is not uncritical. Social, political, economic, cultural, and regional factors are fully articulated in relation to the achievements and failures of the Liberator. Lynch allows Bolívar to change over time, tracing the expansion of his thought and his personal and psychological trajectory; he argues that in his last years Bolívar admired monarchy even as he remained a republican. At all times authoritarian and centralist, he was deeply suspicious of the liberalism that was sweeping his world. Lynch does not venture a solution to some mysteries about the hero’s personality and decisions. A notable strength of this book is that the favorite personal details of Bolívar’s life — his love affairs, his relationship with Manuela Sáenz, his oath on the Monte Sacro in Rome, and many others — are noted but do not overshadow Lynch’s focus on Bolívar’s leadership of the independence process.While Lynch discusses many of the debates about Bolívar, consistent themes throughout the book and throughout Bolívar’s life include his aversion to federalism, his desire to fulfill the meaning of liberty with genuine liberation, his enormous eclecticism, his pragmatism and utilitarianism, his awareness of the limitations of the colonial social legacy, the relatively limited impact of the French and U.S. revolutions, his religious observance and his belief in the role of the church in civil society, the enormous difficulty of his position as both military commander and state builder, his commitment to ending slavery, his devotion to his soldiers, the flaws in Bolivarian modernization schemes, the eventual loss of the purity of his ideals, Francisco de Paula Santander as his greatest nemesis, and the constancy of Antonio José de Sucre. Lynch argues that the Indians were the losers in independence, particularly in the Andes, and that for the par-dos (half of the total population of Venezuela), independence was a regression. No single theory can encompass all Bolívar’s life, and Lynch adheres to none.There were dark spots on Bolívar’s record, and Lynch makes no attempt to excuse them (neither did Bolívar, on the whole). Both author and subject seem to feel that the exigencies of the struggle often explained tragic episodes (the War to the Death in Venezuela, the execution of eight hundred Spanish and Canarian prisoners in La Guaira, Bolívar’s betrayal of Francisco de Miranda). Lynch insists that Bolívar never seriously considered adopting monarchy, even if in his last years he listened to favorable arguments from members of his own government. Lynch depicts well the gradual, agonizing unraveling of Bolívar’s political system and Bolívar’s own decline in his last years. The chapter on Bolívar’s legacy is a wonderful piece of writing, focusing on Bolívar’s profound belief that “liberty is the only object worth the sacrifice of a man’s life” (p. 284). A brief passage in the final paragraph of the book defines the use of Bolívar’s image by Hugo Chávez (who imagines “the populist Bolívar”) and Fidel Castro (who asserts “the socialist Bolívar”) as a “new heresy” (p. 304) in Bolívar’s cult. Whatever Bolívar was, and Lynch labors mightily to define it, he certainly was neither populist nor socialist.Published a year before his 80th birthday, Lynch’s book is a worthy tribute to the lifetime pursuit of historical understanding by a scholar who represents both abiding energy and a constant willingness to modify his judgments and to learn. Unlike some postretirement books, this one stands as an ornament to the author’s scholarly career and may well be judged by scholars and general readers alike as Lynch’s most enduring work.

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