In 1808, events in Europe took a dramatic turn as Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the Iberian Peninsula. Napoleon forced the Spanish king, Charles IV, to abdicate , and installed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the throne. These events had massive repercussions in the Latin American colonies, and ushered in a period of over a decade of upheaval in the viceroyalty.

A new viceroy, Viscount Balthasar de Cisneros arrived to replace the disgraced Sobremonte and relieve the pressure on Liniers. Cisneros scrapped most of the free-trade initiatives Liniers had issued in the interim, and the ban on trading in silver was reinstated. The Spanish administration still failed to grasp the importance of this issue and it was then that free-trade activists such as Belgrano began to plan a revolution. In 1810, news of the French capture of the last Spanish outpost, Seville, led to an extraordinary meeting of Buenos Aires notables. On May 25, the people of Buenos Aires gathered in front of the cabildo, proudly wearing rosettes made from sky-blue and white ribbons, the colours that were later to make up the Argentine flag. Inside, the Viceroy Cisneros was ousted after it was agreed that the Spanish administration in the motherland had effectively ceased to exist and the Primera Junta was sworn in to become the first independent government of the region. However, deposition of the Viceroy and the establishment of self-government did not necessarily mean advocating republicanism, and many proclaimed loyalty to Ferdinand VII, imprisoned heir to Charles IV. This heralded two decades of turbulence, involving independence struggles with Spain (led by the River Plate region - the first to declare its independence from the motherland - and supported by foreign powers like Britain) and civil war between Buenos Aires and the interior provinces of the old viceroyalty in the attempt to develop a new order to replace the old. It was not until the late 1820s, with the break-up of the viceroyalty, that the confederation that provided the nucleus of modern Argentina began to stabilize.