Buenos Aires and those that remained loyal to Spain. The May Revolution began the Argentine War of Independence, although no declaration of independence from Spain was issued at the time and the Primera Junta continued to govern in the name of the king, Ferdinand VII, as a subordinate king to popular sovereignty. As similar events occurred in many other cities of the continent, the May Revolution is also considered one of the early events of the Spanish American wars of independence. The question of the mask of Ferdinand is particularly controversial in Argentinean History. Historians today debate whether the revolutionaries were truly loyal to the Spanish crown, or whether the declaration of fidelity to the king was a necessary ruse to conceal the true objective—to achieve independence—from a population that was not yet ready to accept such a radical change, but there is strong evidence of the truly loyal to the Spanish crown. The Argentine Declaration of Independence was issued at the Congress of Tucumán on July 9, 1816. Causes International causes The U.S. declaration of independence from Great Britain in 1776 led criollos (Spanish peoples born in the Americas) to believe that revolution and independence from Spain were feasible. Between 1775 and 1783, the American patriots of the Thirteen Colonies waged a war against both the local loyalists and the Kingdom of Great Britain, eventually establishing a republican government in the place of a constitutional monarchy. The fact that Spain had aided the colonies during their war with Britain weakened the idea that it would be a crime to end one's allegiance to the parent state. The ideals of the French Revolution of 1789 spread across Europe and the Americas as well. The overthrow and execution of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette ended centuries of monarchy and removed the privileges of the nobility. Liberal ideals in the political and economic fields developed and spread through the Atlantic Revolutions across most of the Western world. The concept of the divine right of kings was questioned by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, by the oft-quoted statement that "all men are created equal" in the United States Declaration of Independence and even by the Spanish church. However, the spread of such ideas was forbidden in the Spanish territories, as was the sale of related books or their unauthorized possession. Spain instituted those bans