13 - Conclusion

Summary

The centralist decade was an eventful period in Mexico's always eventful history. Ten individuals had occupied the presidential office – eight army officers and two civilians – and there were several hundred ministerial changes as the various administrations came and went. The 1836 constitution, or Siete Leyes, had lasted four and a half years until its replacement by the Bases de Tacubaya in 1841, which in turn was removed in favour of the Bases Orgánicas in 1843, which survived, if only on paper, until the restoration of the 1824 federal charter in 1846. Pronunciamientos had been declared more or less continuously, and Mexico City had witnessed the human and physical devastation of warfare in 1840 and 1841 as well as the comparatively bloodless coups of 1844, 1845 and 1846. Two presidents – Bustamante and Herrera – had been arrested in person inside the walls of the national palace, and apart from the interim occupants of the presidential quarters, every president had been driven unwillingly from office as a result of armed rebellion, with the unique exception of the peaceful coup by Congress against the Santa Anna–Canalizo regime of 1844. Texas had been lost forever, Yucatán was virtually independent for much of the decade and war had been declared, if not actually fought to any degree, against France in 1838.