May Revolution
The May Revolution was a direct reaction to Spain's Peninsular War. In 1808, King Ferdinand VII of Spain abdicated in favor of Napoleon, who granted the throne to his brother, Joseph Bonaparte. A Supreme Central Junta led resistance to Joseph's government and the French occupation of Spain, but eventually suffered a series of reversals that resulted in the Spanish loss of the northern half of the country. On February 1, 1810, French troops took Seville and gained control of most of Andalusia. The Supreme Junta retreated to Cadiz and dissolved itself, and the Council of Regency of Spain and the Indies replaced it. News of these events arrived in Buenos Aires on May 18, brought by British ships.
Historiography of the May Revolution
The academic consensus of the end of the 19th century began to be questioned by the time of the World Wars, when liberalism lost its former hegemony and fascism and left-wing ideologies became important. Liberalism attempted to impose an ultimate and unquestionable historical perspective, though Ricardo Levene and the "National Academy of History". This school of thought kept most of the viewpoints of Mitre. Left-wing authors opposed it with a revisionist production, based in nationalism and anti-imperialism. However, revisionists would work mainly with the historiography of Juan Manuel de Rosas, Justo José de Urquiza, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento or Mitre himself, without working much with the War of Independence, and in fact José de San Martín was equally supported by both genres. Nevertheless, they deemphasized the idea of a conflict between criollos and peninsulars, and described it instead as a conflict between liberalism and absolutism. The fascist author Hugo Wast would describe the Revolution as a military coup carried out by military leaders, and where the population was completely uninvolved.