The rise of the Argentine Republic was a process that took place in the first half of the 19th century in Argentina. The Republic has its origins on the territory of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, a colony of the Spanish Empire. The King of Spain appointed a viceroy to oversee the governance of the colony. The 1810 May Revolution staged a coup d'état and deposed the viceroy and, along with the Argentine war of independence, started a process of rupture with the Spanish monarchy with the creation of an independent republican state. All proposals to organize a local monarchy (as in the contemporary Empire of Brazil or the First Mexican Empire) failed, and no local monarch was ever crowned. The national organization saw disputes about the type of relation that Buenos Aires should maintain with the other provinces, either as a centralised government or as a federation. The supporters of each project clashed in the Argentine Civil Wars as the Unitarians and the Federalists. Some provinces of the former viceroyalty (turned first into the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata and then into the Argentine Confederation) tried to secede, some of them remained as independent countries up to modern day (as Bolivia or Paraguay) and others rejoined Argentina (as the Republic of Entre Ríos). Two unitarian constitutions were promulgated and then rejected; the definitive one would be the federal Argentine Constitution of 1853, which is still in force. Background The first political event that shaped the future country of Argentina was the creation of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. So far, the territories in it were neglected provinces of the Viceroyalty of Peru: as the Río de la Plata Basin did not have any precious metals or organized indigenous populations to exploit, all ships traded with Peru and New Spain instead. The viceroyalty sought to complement the existing trade routes with new ones, entering South America through the Río de la Plata. The new system did not work as expected, as Spain soon diverted most of its resources to the Napoleonic Wars. Trade with the Americas was hampered, and when Britain got a clear naval supremacy after the battle of Trafalgar, it almost ended. The American and French Revolutions gave room to the Age of Enlightenment, a new era of ideas that rejected the absolute monarchies and favored liberalism instead. Spain