La monarquía constitucional y la independencia de México en el pensamiento político de José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1821-1823)

This paper aims to examine the political thought of the writer José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi during the First Mexican Empire (1821-1823). There are plenty of studies on his literary production, educational proposal, and liberal and republican stances. However, historiography has not dealt in depth with an essential aspect of Lizardi s political argumentation during the above-mentioned period: his defence of constitutional monarchism as the foundation for constructing a liberal state in independent. The task of analysing Lizardi s iturbidist ideology is addressed framing it as a genuine Mexican manifestation of the monarchist imaginaries which proliferated at that time in the political cultures of liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic. We intend to refute the historicist interpretation that has considered the First Empire as a mere accident in the country s history. As a reactionary parenthesis that preceded the arrival of liberal premises to the Mexican State. The analysis of Fernández de Lizardi s political thought demonstrates that the moderate monarchy formulated by Iturbidism was a project built around doctrinaire liberalism. Far from representing an anomaly in the ideological context of the Americas, Lizardi s monarchism is ascribed to a philosophical-political current that imagined constitutional monarchies compatible with the limitation of executive power, parliamentary representation, and respect for the individual rights of the citizenry.