“Do Not Fire a Shot, for God’s Sake, Do Not Waste a Cartridge, for It Is Better to Reach an Agreement Than to Go to War.” Cultural and Political Changes toward Peace in Argentina, Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article examines the cultural and political transformations that contributed to reshaping the management of political conflict in Argentina during the 1850s and 1860s, in the aftermath of Juan Manuel de Rosas’s regime. It argues that the transition from a “warrior society” toward a more pacified political culture was not the product of a single factor, but the outcome of intertwined intellectual, institutional, and political dynamics. The study highlights, first, the role of liberal intellectuals and the diffusion of languages of pacification in exile; second, the contribution of institutions such as the Catholic Church, social clubs, and Freemasonry, which provided new arenas of sociability and mediation; and finally, the political negotiation between Bartolomé Mitre and Justo José de Urquiza in 1861, which avoided a large-scale civil war and enabled national unification. By combining cultural history with political analysis, the article shows that the Argentine case illustrates how nineteenth-century Latin American societies sought to limit the recurrence of civil war and to reorganize political conflict through negotiation, institutional innovation, and social pressure, offering comparative insights into the broader history of pacification and state formation in the region.