Rhetorical strategies in the struggle for historical memory: the Inquisition as a paradigm in the restored republic

Abstract

This paper offers a study about the meeting points of historical novels, commemorative speeches and columns regarding the use of persuasive strategies to spread or counter ideological positions in the period called Restored Republic, from 1867 to 1870. Also, it shows certain divergences in the use of rhetorical sources, which can be explained in terms of the ideological adscription of each discourse. The context that allows us to understand the similarities and the divergences is the debate among liberals and conservatives concerning to the roll of Church in the public life, a debate that entails a peculiar interpretation referring to the relation between the colonial past and the present of the Restored Republic. The corpus is constituted, in first instance, by texts in which the Inquisition performs as an example of a past supposedly dominated by the ecclesiastic authoritarianism, through which the Liberal speeches pretend to demonstrate the benefits of the secularism in the 19th century; in second, by conservative writing that counteract the argument based on that example, aiming to stop the secularization process, or to promote a reconciliation to the past. At the end, I consider some reasons that could explain why the persuasiveness of liberal speeches turned out considerably stronger than the one of the conservatives.