Vicente Riva Palacio

Vicente Florencio Carlos Riva Palacio Guerrero better known as Vicente Riva Palacio (16 October 1832 in Mexico City – 22 November 1896 in Madrid) was a Mexican liberal politician, novelist, journalist, intellectual, historian, and military leader.

His father was Mariano Riva Palacio, a moderate liberal, and his mother was María de los Dolores Guerrero Hernández, daughter of independence hero and President of Mexico Vicente Guerrero and María de Guadalupe Hernández. Vicente's father worked for the Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico in Querétaro during the French intervention in Mexico, but Riva Palacio led forces in defense of the Mexican Republic against the French-backed empire.

He was a mild positivist as he was enthusiast of the nineteenth-century idea of a beneficent material Progress achieved through science. He had a linear conception of history where the ideologically and politically conservatists are equivalent to the forces of decadence and decay and the liberals are the promotors of the vigor and the progress of a country. In respect to the discipline of history he established that this was a philosophical and critical activity which studies the great changes and evolutions of the different human groups. Provided by Wikipedia