Maldonado, Francisco Severo (1775–1832)

Francisco Severo Maldonado (b. 1775; d. 1832), Mexican politician and reformer. Born in Tepic, Nayarit, Maldonado studied in Guadalajara and became a priest and a scholar. Joining Hidalgo's movement when the insurgent army arrived in Guadalajara in 1810, he published the revolutionary El despertador americano and began drafting a constitution. After the battle of Calderón, Maldonado was put on trial. He renounced his earlier views and began to write for a royalist periodical, El telégrafo de Guadalaxara (1811). He supported both the Constitution of 1812 and the Plan of Iguala, and served in the early congresses. His social and political ideas, expressed in various editions of a work he called Nuevo pacto social and Contrato de asociación (1823), may have influenced Mariano Otero. Maldonado's plans are, in the words of Charles Hale, "an odd blend of liberal individualism, utopian socialism, and traditional corporate theory." His views on land reform and corporate society have been seen by some as presaging the Constitution of 1917.

See alsoMexico, Wars and Revolutions: War of Independence .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (1968), pp. 74-75; Diccionario Porrúa de historia, biografía y geografía de México, 5th ed. (1986).

Additional Bibliography

Benítez González, Florencio. El Plan de Iguala: En la historiografía de su época. México: Comuna Municipal, 2001.

Magallón Anaya, Mario. "El pensamiento filosófico y político de Francisco Severo Maldonado." Cuadernos Americanos 85, Nueva época (Jan-Feb 2001): 193-207.

                                          D. F. Stevens