El lector en su contexto.La defensa de José Fernández Madrid frente a los testimonios y la escritura de la historia de Colombia, 1821-1830

n our local historiography, the problem of readingand the confrontation of the meaning of the pastin the history of the revolution, during the third decade of the nineteenth century, has been understudied. This paper aims to reconstruct the reading practices from which a critical view was taken and a certain public opinion was developed regarding the narration of events from the republican past, linked to the independence processes in New Granada. To this end, the defense of José Fernández Madrid is examined in the face of testimonies, narratives and what he referred to as the “denaturalization of facts” in the nascent Colombian history, which began to be invented after the events of Boyacá in 1819 and following the enactment of the Political Constitution of 1821. The paper aims to draw attention, on the one hand, to the truthfulness criteria that were applied to the testimonies of the protagonists of Independence when confronted with the reader’s interpretation, documents and proofs. On the other hand, it aims to point out the uses made by the enlightened republicans in order to justify their “political behavior” and preserve the “reputation”, at a moment when the political foundations of the new Republic were being invented and legitimized. In this context, the paper attempts, from a methodological point of view, to advance in the field of the history of reading by analyzing the discussions, defenses, comments and responses from the reading public, to legitimize their critical attitude towards the forms of ignorance fostered by the writing of history. En la historiografía nacional poco se ha estudiado elproblema de la lectura y la confrontación del sentidodel pasado en la historia de la revolución durante la tercera década del siglo xix. El objetivo de este artículo es reconstruir las prácticas lectoras a partir de las cuales se asumió una posición crítica y se construyó cierta opinión pública frente a la narración de los hechos del pasado republicano vinculado con los procesos de independencia en la Nueva Granada. Para ello, se examina la defensa de José Fernández Madrid frente a los testimonios, narrativas y lo que llamaba la “desnaturalización de los hechos” en la naciente historia de Colombia, que se empezó a inventar después de los sucesos de Boyacá en 1819 y luego de sancionada la Constitución Política de 1821. Se quiere llamar la atención, por un lado, sobre los criterios de veracidad a los que eran sometidos los testimonios de los protagonistas d