Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros
The news of the fall of the Junta of Seville reached Buenos Aires in May 1810. With both the king of Spain and the Junta removed of power, many people thought that Cisneros had no legitimacy to govern, starting the May Revolution. Cisneros tried to calm down the population, to no avail. He called the commanders of the local armies and requested their support, but they denied it. Cisneros was ultimately forced to allow an open cabildo, which would discuss what to do. Although those meetings were usually composed of the wealthiest population, the army and a group of rioters plotted to prevent the entry of many wealthy people and allow common people instead.
Historiography of the May Revolution
According to those historians, the Spanish revolution against absolutism got mixed with the Peninsular War. Charles IV was seen as an absolutist king, and by standing against his father many Spanish got the wrong understanding that Ferdinand VII sympathized with the new enlighten ideas. Thus, the revolutions made in the Americas in the name of Ferdinand VII (such as the May Revolution, the Chuquisaca Revolution or the one in Chile) would have been seeking to replace the absolutist power with others made under the new ideas. Even if Spain was at war with France, the ideals themselves of the French Revolution (liberty, equality and fraternity) were still respected by those people. However, those revolutions pronounced themselves enemies of Napoleon, but did not face any active French military attack, which promoted instead fights between Spanish armies for keeping the old order of maintaining the new one. This situation would have changed with the final defeat of Napoleon and the return of Ferdinand VII to the throne, as he restored absolutism and persecuted the new libertarian ideas within Spain. For the people in South America, the idea of remaining as part of the Spanish Empire, but with a new relation with the mother country, was no longer a feasible option: the only remaining options at this point would have been a return to absolutism, or independentism.