 Liberal ideas first became widespread in Latin American with the influence of the liberal Cádiz constitution of 1812 which was in force in the Spanish empire for two years until the reestablishment of absolute rule. At the beginning of the century, “liberalism” in this context primarily meant what Spanish liberals meant by it in the debates that took place in the Cádiz Courts, which met as a sovereign national assembly in response to the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808. It was in this setting that the term “liberal” was for the first time employed in a political sense to refer to a political group (Breña 2012). Since the Cádiz constitution was, in turn, heavily influenced by the political ideas of the French Revolution, the first liberal ideas in Latin America had likewise primarily this origin. Ideas such as popular sovereignty, civil equality, individual representation, the conventional nature of political authority, freedom of thought and of the press, and a division of powers that privileges the legislative became central to early Latin American liberalism. The latter was by no means identical to Spanish liberalism or to the political ideas of the French revolution, but these two are its main initial sources.