 The crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies upon the Napoleonic invasion set off the process of independence in most of Latin America and opened the way for the free circulation, for the first time, of modern political ideas in the region (the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions had prohibited freedom of thought and of the press). Though the Cádiz constitution was influential in both Hispanic (i.e., Spanish-speaking) and Portuguese Americas, liberalism developed in quite different directions in these two regions because of the two quite different ways in which the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies responded to the French invasion. While the flight of the Spanish king tossed the empire into a political crisis, the Portuguese were able to maintain political stability by transferring the capital of the empire to Brazil. Thus, questions about the source of legitimate political authority became pressing in Hispanic America, but were not as critical in Brazil. Although the initial answers that Hispanic Americans offered were framed in terms of traditional scholastic political thinking, they soon began to appeal to the political ideas of the French revolution, specifically to the notion of popular sovereignty. According to the scholastic traditional view, sovereign authority rested on a pact between the king and its people, and in the absence of the king, sovereignty returned to the people. On this traditional view, the sovereign authority of the king was limited by natural, divine, and teleological (i.e., common good) considerations. The transition to the modern conception of unlimited and indivisible popular sovereignty marked a radical break in the political thinking in the Spanish colonies. Similarly new and revolutionary was the related conception of individual representation in a constituent assembly, as opposed to the traditional corporate representation before the king, to which the American subjects were never entitled.