The development of republican elites for nineteenth-century Colombia has been widely studied from different historiographical approaches, such as studies of state configuration, the history of ideas and, more recently, from the broad spectrum of cultural history. With the central purpose of overcoming the empirical divisions imposed by these different approaches, and adopting a methodological perspective given by the work of sociologist Nolbert Elias, this study aimed to analyze the configuration of the behavior patterns of the first two generations of the emerging elite national. This gives a special role to the phenomenon of urbanity manuals in the country, in order to understand the dynamics of interdependence between emotional structures, changes in behavior patterns and changes in the social structure. From this the study understood that, for the nineteenth-century Colombian elites, educating themselves in the norms of courtesy and good manners (an endogenous effort that appears with Rufino Cuervo Barreto's urban catechism for the first time in 1833), were forms of self-regulation that allowed the elite individuals, while forming a differentiated social circle, to radically distance themselves from the habits and customs that they considered to be barbaric and belonging only to the lower layers of society.