Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay. Richard Francis Burton
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the Consul, Dictator, or President, who virtually chooses himself. It is said that the third de- liberative body at first preferred Yegros, but that Dr. Francia delayed the members at the capital till, fearing to offend him, and sorely wishing to return home, they voted for him on the third day with a large majority. In pre-
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sence of the crisis produced by the internal disorders of the Hispano- American States^ he persuaded them to choose after the fasliion of the Roman Republic^ a Dictator for three years, and to make him their Dictator. The troops under Yegros refused to acknowledge the civilian, but the storm was averted by the neglected triumvir Caballero, who went to the barracks and succeeded in appeasing the mutineers. Caballero, it is said, strangled himself in prison about 1821, and Yegros, according to the Robertsons, was afterwards shot or bayonetted by his successful rival.
Dictator Francia at once established himself in the palace of the ancient Spanish Governors, and began to govern in real earnest. The dark and mysterious figure, morally as well as physically, has excited abundant interest. Pen-and- ink portraits of him have been left by Rengger and Long- champs, by the Robertsons, and by D. Santiago Arcos (La Plata, Etude Historique, p. 295; Paris, 1865). He is alluded to by Sir Woodbine Parish, with whom he had an official correspondence touching some eighteen or nineteen British subjects; but he did not release them until 1826. The Pharoahnic practice of not letting the people go was found therefore, ready made in Paraguay by Marshal President Lopez, and in these days '^ circumstances ^^ do not much encourage the type of British naval officer represented in 1815 by the very gaUant Captain the Honourable Percy Jocelyn of H.M.s ship Hotspur, commanding H.B.M.^s ships in the river Plate.
England unfortunately derived her knowledge of Dr. Francia from the works supplied to the book-trade in an age when Negro Emancipation, Constitutional Government, the rule of the '^ Anglo-Saxon ^^ race, and the mercantile " Civis sum Romanus "'â– ' were rampant. " Dr. Francia^'s Reign of Terror"-' and Letters from Paraguay,'' by the brothers Robertson are still our staple. The brothers were well
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treated at first, but they imprudently, and perhaps purposely disappointed the Dictator, who, in exchange for his produce, wanted arms and arms only. They fell into disfavour, they prudently left the country, and, arrived in England, they wrote popular books about Paraguay. Hatred made them photograph their foe and produce a manner of biography amusing as that of Boswell. The latter was a fautor of the great master of the English language, the " Majestic Teacher of Moral and Religious Wisdom ; whereas the brothers, while holding up Dr. Francia as a vulgar tyrant to the execration of a civilized and commercial world, invested him with more than usual nobility and grandeur, with the faults of his age and race, and with virtues and merits all his own. Mr. Carlyle {Foreign Quarterly, No. 62, July, 1843), guided only by the light of intelligent despotism, easily under- stood through the running shrieks of constitutionalisms and other humbugs, that Francia was a " true man in a bewildered Guacho (Gaucho) world.""'
Yet we must be grateful for the popular and respectable volumes of the unsage brothers. We see the Dictator pacing about his ground-floor verandah in a dressing-gown of flowered cotton, deeply pondering, whilst he daintily takes his pinch of " Princeza,"" or smokes his cigarette-like cigar, made for him by the sister who acts as his Ama de Haves (housekeeper) . We hear him thunder forth the bruto, the barbaro, and the favourite " bribonazo " (blundering rascal). We behold him leading his cavalry charges with boyish glee, and we catch him handing out the three economical ball cartridges, with which, more Austriaco, crimi- nals were shot. His outburst against the English importer — so naively quoted, and so telling against the quoter — and his proverb " pan pan y vino vino," light up many a dark page of hysterical Anglomania. He appears as a lawyer strictly honest, as a statesman single-minded, as a patriot
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unde filed by lucre ; as a judge he spends the day over the smallest details of justice; as a student he reads through the night. Convinced that his Dictatorship is a protest of the Spirit of Order against the Spirit of Anarchy^ and believ- ing that the independence of his beloved country and perhaps his own existence depend upon an imposing military force, he organizes the imitation of a regular army, and after pe- rusing books he drills it liimself. The unwise brothers find in this measure only a pretext to deride his uniform and his word of command. Wishing to improve his capital, he applies vigorously to his self-imposed task of town architect. The Robertsons caricature him using a level. Like Ma- horamed Ali Pasha of Egypt, he is assiduous in his endeavours to establish a system of industry, to add agricul- ture and cattle breeding to the miserable trade in yerba and tobacco that characterized the still and silent shores of the mighty Paraguay. He accepts only a third of the $9000 voted to him by Congress, observing that the State wants more than he does — would the Messrs. Philistine Bull have done likewise?
Dr. Francia had one pet, the army, and one pet aversion, the Church. He severely disciplined his troops, but only when they were under arms : at other times they were free. Foreseeing probably what wild work Generals and Colonels would do for the Argentine Republic, he raised no officer above the rank of Captain. This precaution has been one of the fatalities of the present war, where the Paraguayan private, essentially unintelligent, looked to his commander and found none. He established in fact a stratocracy which placed the military element above the civil ; every citizen was compelled to doflf his hat to a sentinel. This was anciently the case in the Brazil, and perhaps in all the lands of the neo-Latin races, the soldier on guard being the symbol of his government. Duly weighing the unsatisfactory
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state of his relations with the Conterminal States^ especially with Buenos Aires, which could at any time have closed his only line of importation, he was eager to lay in that formidable store of arms and ammunition and military appa- ratus, which still accumulated by a second generation, have lasted through a five years^ war. Finally he was steel- cased at all points, and ever ready to fight ; hence, I presume, we even now read of the ^^ peaceful little Republic, Paraguay.^"*
With regard to the Church he evidently thought with the great Mii'abeau, " Yous ne ferez jamais rien de la Revo- lution si vous ne la dechristianisez pas.^^* He abolished the Inquisition ; he did away with the onerous diezmo or tithes ; he converted the idle monasteries into barracks, and he secularized the valuable gold and silver plate, the doubloons and the other property which lay useless in and around the religious houses and the Misiones. He shaved the heads of oflPending monks " in order to take the glory from their crowns."'^ He wished to be a Catholic, not a Roman Catholic. One of his favourite sayings was — ^' You see what priests are good for ; they make us believe more in the devil than in God." Again he would remark, pro- bably imitating the greatest Corsican, " Be Christians, Jews, or Mussulmans, anything but Atheists."^ The saying was latitudinarian in his day, before Anti-Theism had taken the place of Atheism. Finding that the Bishop of Asun- cion had fallen into a manner of aberration, the result of age and mental sufi'ering. Dictator Francia, determined to be governor spiritual as well as temporal, made him depute his powers to Pai Montiel, " Provisor'^ or Yicar- General. Through the latter he ruled the diocese, and made the Church the handmaid, as she should be, not the mistress of the State ; the moral Police, not the Sovereign. He suppressed night worship and processions, because they certainly led to dis-
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orders^ and they might lead to conspiracy. Finally, at the time of his death only fifty priests, all aged and mostly decrepit, survived in the land that had once been overrun by them.
" Por suas ideas religiosas/' says my learned friend Dr. D. Barros Arana, of Santiago de Chile, whose excellent school history of the New World deserves to be naturalized amongst us, " aquel mandatario no parecia nascide i educado en una Colonia espanola.'^ It is not generally known that the Francia family is of Paulista origin, and that the Fran9a e Horta house still exists at S. Paulo. The Dictator's father, Garcia Rodriguez rran9a, was established by the Governor of Paraguay, D. Jaime Sanjust, as Majordomo in the Yaguaron plantation of black tobacco, with which the Spaniards attempted to rival the Brazilians. Bengger declares that his father was born a Frenchman, yet owns that Paraguay believed him to be Portuguese. G. B.