Don Francisco Xavier Venégas de Saavedra...Habiendo Ilegado à Mis Manos un Periódico Sedicioso Intitulado "Ilustrador Nacional"... [caption title & first lines of text]

Dado en el Real Palacio de Mexico: June 1, 1812. Very good.. Broadside, 17 x 12.25 inches. Printed in two columns. Paper stamped on verso with the arms of Ferdinand VII, dated 1812-1813. Signed by Venegas with his mark after his printed name, as the viceroy of Spain, and signed in full by his secretary. Old folds, two short work tracks in right column affecting a handful of letters but not readability. A very rare broadside printed in colonial Mexico at the outset of the second phase of the revolution against Spain. The broadside gives notice that the circulation of the "seditious newspaper entitled National Illustrator, printed in Sultepec with the aim of hallucinating the masses [with] criminal and futile propositions" and "all other incendiary papers that are published by the rebels" is prohibited. Venegas also quotes extensively from three statutes of law which govern the censoring of publications, which stipulate penalties for those who posted issues of the newspaper publicly, penalties for those who "copied, read, or heard such seditious papers," and punishments for soldiers who read the paper.

Venegas was a notable Spanish military leader who served as viceroy of New Spain from 1810 to 1813. He was replaced after being accused of going soft on the Mexican insurgents who would later win their freedom a year into the next decade. Venegas' term as viceroy seemed doomed from the start. Two days after he took office, insurgents under Father Miguel Hidalgo began the rebellion, taking control of a number of Mexican cities in about a month. Royalist troops soon responded, and took the upper hand and by early 1811 had regained all lost territory, executing the leaders of the rebellion. Political disputes over the 1812 Spanish Constitution sparked the embers of revolutionary spirit in Mexico, and Venegas was replaced in 1813 for "arbitrary measures that impeded the pacification of the country...[and] a lack of energy in suppressing the rebellion." OCLC locates just four copies of this broadside, at Indiana, the JCB, Texas A&M, and the National Library of Spain.
Sabin 98853.