“La tiranía de las campanas”. Autorrepresentación del intelectual y el pueblo en la prensa chilena del siglo XIX

This paper analyzes the self-representation of narrator Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna and his construction of the people, as a form of resistance to the hegemonic conservative power in the year 1858. Through the figure of the “bells,” objects that allow or prohibit speech, the narrator denounces this power while constructing himself as the voice of the people in opposition to this hegemony. The text analyzed here is unpublished, therefore its recovery can be considered both heritage and critical. Although we used to recognize the texts by Vicuña Mackenna as works of political and social analysis of the 19th-century Chilean society, there are few public texts in which the author represents himself as an intellectual wandering around the city. This analysis was performed from the category of representation, which allowed us to delve into the ways in which the author appropriates the discourse to show himself as an intellectual critic of the conservative power held by Manuel Montt (1851-1861).