Malolos Constitution

The constitution written and debated by the congress that convened at Malolos on 15 September 1898, approved on 20 January 1899 and promulgated the following day. It established a republic with an elected assembly, a bill of rights, and the separation of church and state.

Its significance for this course is procedural rather than symbolic. It was drafted and ratified by a partially elected congress, which is what makes the qualified claim about Asia’s first constitutional republic hold up when the flat version does not.

Read alongside the Propaganda Movement’s demands, it is the second piece of evidence for the same point: whatever explains the country now, it is not that the capability to build institutions was missing.

Source: Compiled from the standard account at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Philippine_Republic and the dated spine in this course’s history research map. The constitutional text itself is public domain.

First used in: 1.3 · What Filipinos built the moment they could