May Revolution
The May Revolution was not the product of the actions of a single political party with a clear and defined agenda, but a convergence of sectors with varying interests. Thus, there are a number of conflicting perspectives about it, because different authors highlight different aspects. Mitre, for example, referred to "The Representation of the Landowners" (an 1809 economic report by Mariano Moreno) and the role of the merchants to support the view that the May Revolution intended to obtain free trade and economic integration with Europe; right-wing revisionists center around Saavedra and the social customs of the time to describe the revolution under conservative principles; and left-wing revisionists use the example of Moreno, Castelli and the rioters led by French and Beruti to describe it as a radical revolution.
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.