“ A Complot of All ”: Student Rebellion and the Disruption of Penal Responsibility in Santiago de Chile, 1833

In September 1833, eleven students aged between fourteen and twenty-one were imprisoned and brought before judge Manuel Joaquín Valdivieso in Santiago de Chile. They were accused of leading a rebellion that had rocked the country’s foremost educational institution, the Instituto Nacional, earlier that month. When asked who had initiated the revolt or invited them to join, the students refused to name names, insisting instead that theirs had been “a complot of all.” Their statement echoed similar assertions made by protesters across the Spanish Atlantic, from Castilian peasants to Andean Natives. Tracing the confrontation between the Instituto students and Judge Valdivieso, this article examines how appeals to collective agency and unanimous action disrupted the attribution of penal responsibility. I argue that such strategies served not only to deflect blame but to assert the legitimacy of revolts and other dissident political acts. The article explores how students confronted the judge’s interpretation of their movement, from their motivations to the dynamics of the insurrection. To justify their revolt, it shows, the Instituto students had to mobilize their knowledge of the law—not to claim its protection, but to undermine its capacity to render their actions intelligible.