May Revolution
The mutiny of Aranjuez in 1808 led King Charles IV of Spain to abdicate in favor of his son, Ferdinand VII. Charles IV requested that Napoleon restore him to the throne; instead, Napoleon crowned his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, as the new Spanish King. These events are known as the Abdications of Bayonne. Joseph's coronation was met with severe resistance in Spain, which started the Peninsular War, and the Supreme Central Junta took power in the name of the absent king. This also led to Spain switching allegiances from France to Britain. France eventually invaded Sevilla, and a Council of Regency based in Cadiz replaced the disbanded Supreme Central Junta.
Historiography of the May Revolution
Meanwhile, Esteban Echeverría epitomized the ideals of May in the concepts of progress and democracy. In the future, these concepts would be the axis around which revisionist history would differ from the canonical history in reference to the events of May. The canonical version claimed progress and justify the abandonment or delay the realization of democratic ideals in order not to risk the economic prosperity of society arguing that even then was not able to properly take advantage of political freedom. This situation was known as the establishment of the "Possible Republic." Mitre and Echeverría were part of the '37 Generation, a group of romantic authors born during the revolution itself and formed in the local context generated after it. Those authors did not work purely in intellectual fields, but took instead active part in the political events of their time, and strongly opposed the governor Juan Manuel de Rosas. They were closer to the unitarians than to the federalists, but were not fully unitarians either: they thought that it wasn't enough to apply directly the new ideas generated in Europe or the United States, but instead to adapt them to the local contexts of the Río de la Plata. They choose the May Revolution as the point to mark the birth of the nation because of their rejection to the Spanish or aboriginal cultures.