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Britain and the Paraguayan Dictatorship, c. 1820–1840
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2021
Abstract
Post-revolutionary Spanish America barely features in existing scholarship on nineteenth-century British political and social thought. But the region was widely discussed, and raised distinctive issues about republican government, the effects of colonial rule, and the operation of absolute power. This article examines how the British debated the autarchic dictatorship erected in newly independent Paraguay. Their attempts to make sense of this spectacular experiment in government, and its architect Dr Francia, helped to crystallize public attitudes towards the condition of Spanish America in the 1820s and 1830s. Francia's broader significance, however, was as a token in wider debates about the proper limits of republican and constitutional principles, and about the merits of arbitrary directive rule in less developed polities. For his admirers, he cast light on how other comparable regimes had gone wrong.
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References
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19 Morning Post, 13 Sept. 1825, [p. 4], reprinted from the Journal des débats.
20 A narrative of facts connected with…Paraguay, under the direction of Dr. Thomas Francia (London, 1826), pp. 18, 14–15, noticed in e.g. Times, 26 Nov. 1826, p. 2. I am grateful to one of the reviewers for pointing out that this was written by the Bolivian publicist Vicente Pazos Kanki. Some writers continued to refer to it long after it was debunked: e.g. Alfred Mallalieu, Rosas and his calumniators (London, 1845), pp. 98–9.
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33 Charles Darwin, Journal, 18 and 19 Oct. 1833, in Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman, eds., The works of Charles Darwin, II: Journal of Researches, I (London, 1992), p. 128.
34 Rengger, Reign of Francia, pp. xii–xiii.
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36 ‘Letters on Paraguay’, Dublin University Magazine, 12 (1838), pp. 474–84, at pp. 478–9; [W. D. Cooley], The history of maritime and inland discovery, III (London, 1831), p. 276. Others praised the Jesuits’ beneficence: e.g. ‘Notices of new works’, Metropolitan Magazine, 23 (1838), pp. 9–12.
37 Bolivia retaining a seaboard until 1884.
38 ‘Francia's reign of terror: sequel to Letters on Paraguay’, Athenaeum, 585 (1839), pp. 27–8, at p. 27; ‘The dictator of Paraguay’, Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, 337 (1838), pp. 193–5, at pp. 194–5.
39 ‘Dr. Francia's reign in Paraguay’, Monthly Review, 5 (1827), pp. 374–86, at p. 379.
40 ‘Letters on Paraguay’, Dublin University Magazine, 12 (1838), p. 481; ‘Letters on Paraguay’, British and Foreign Review, 7 (1838), p. 602. French writers also used the Napoleon analogy: e.g. Alcide D'Orbigny, Voyage pittoresque dans les deux Amériques (Paris, 1836), p. 219.
41 Robertsons, Letters on South America, I, pp. 19–20; ‘The reign of Dr Joseph Gaspard Roderick Francia in Paraguay’, Examiner, 1019 (1827), pp. 501–3, at p. 502.
42 ‘Francia's reign of terror’, Monthly Review, 1 (1839), p. 246; ‘Dr. Francia's reign in Paraguay’, p. 374; Robertsons, Letters on Paraguay, II, p. 300.
43 Caledonian Mercury, 11 June 1827, [p. 2], reprinted from the Constitutionel.
44 In the hands of British reviewers, Francia was by turns a ‘dictator’, a ‘despot’, an ‘autocrat’, a ‘tyrant’, and an ‘absolute ruler’, and the selection of terms rarely did much analytic work. Cf. Andreas Kalyvas, ‘The tyranny of dictatorship: when the Greek tyrant met the Roman dictator’, Political Theory, 35 (2007), pp. 412–42, and the historiography surveyed in n. 3 therein.
45 Melvin Richter, ‘A family of political concepts: tyranny, despotism, Bonapartism, Caesarism, dictatorship, 1750–1917’, European Journal of Political Theory, 4 (2005), pp. 221–48, at pp. 237–8. See also Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter, eds., Dictatorship in history and theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and totalitarianism (Cambridge, 2004).
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47 Jennifer Pitts, A turn to empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005), esp. ch. 5.
48 For this problem in imperial policy, see Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell, Ruling the world: freedom, civilisation and liberalism in the nineteenth-century British empire (Cambridge, 2020), esp. part I. Some Positivists made the case that autocratic rule was in general the best means of promoting ordered social progress: see John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800–1850 (Oxford, 1991), p. 421; and e.g. Richard Congreve, The Roman empire of the West (London, 1855), pp. 61–2.
49 For debates about absolute rule in British history, see J. W. Burrow, A liberal descent: Victorian historians and the English past (Cambridge, 1981).
50 Henry, Lord Brougham, Political philosophy (3 vols., London, 1842–4), I; George Cornewall Lewis, A treatise on the methods of observation and reasoning in politics (2 vols., London, 1852), II, pp. 50–60.
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54 ‘Letters on Paraguay’, Dublin University Magazine, 12 (1838), pp. 482–3; ‘Letters on Paraguay’, British and Foreign Review, 7 (1838), p. 605.
55 Cleave's Penny Gazette, 30 Oct. 1841; ‘Sketch of the progress and state of literature’, Le belle assemblée, 6 (1827), pp. 277–307, at p. 280.
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57 ‘Letters on Paraguay’, Dublin University Magazine, 12 (1838), p. 484; P. Campbell Scarlett, South America and the Pacific (2 vols., London, 1838), I, p. 138. In some versions, the key to Francia's rule was the ‘unlimited license’ he allowed his soldiers and officials: ‘The reign of Dr. Francia’, London Magazine, 9 (1827), pp. 11–25, at p. 20.
58 Literary Gazette, 551 (1827), p. 515.
59 By some distance the most widely extracted portions of both Rengger's and the Robertsons’ texts were those which dealt with Francia's personal habits and conversation.
60 Mrs Erskine Norton, ‘Francia, dictator of Paraguay’, New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, 43 (1835), pp. 331–46, at p. 341.
61 ‘Paraguay and the dictator Francia’, London Saturday Journal, 1 (1839), pp. 167–9, at p. 167; ‘Life of Dr. Francia, the late dictator of Paraguay’, p. 83.
62 J. A. B. Beaumont, Travels in Buenos Ayres, and the adjacent provinces of the Rio de la Plata (London, 1828), p. 91.
63 Parish, Buenos Ayres, p. 229; ‘Letters on Paraguay’, British and Foreign Review, 7 (1838), p. 606.
64 Alexander Caldcleugh, Travels in South America, during the years 1819–20–21 (2 vols., London, 1825), I, p. 135; cf. Rengger, Reign of Francia, pp. 41–2.
65 ‘The reign of Dr Joseph Gaspard Roderick Francia in Paraguay’, p. 503.
66 For these categories, see Jonathan Parry, The politics of patriotism: English liberalism, national identity, and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge, 2006); Alex Middleton, ‘Victorian politics and politics overseas’, Historical Journal (advance access).
67 R. Torrens, The principles and practical operation of Sir Robert Peel's bill of 1844 explained (London, 1848), p. 75; Spectator, 28 Mar. 1840, p. 10; Sir Harry Verney, Hansard's parliamentary debates, third series, 19:694, 16 July 1833; William Ferrand, ibid., 62:828–9, 19 Apr. 1842.
68 ‘Earl Spencer and the state of parties’, Westminster Review, 41 (1844), pp. 257–95, at p. 261; Captain F. B. Head, A few practical arguments against the theory of emigration (London, 1828), pp. 61–2.
69 Francia became the subject of an unsuccessful 1851 novel by the inventor E. Clarence Shepard, which gave him a long-lost son and put the pro- and contra-Francia arguments in the mouths of its two protagonists, but which ended in an inconclusive bloodbath: E. Clarence Shepard, Francia, a tale of the revolution of Paraguay (London, 1851).
70 Erskine Norton, ‘Francia, dictator of Paraguay’, p. 341.
71 Thomas Carlyle, Latter-day pamphlets. No. II. Model prisons (London, 1850), p. 25.
72 See Middleton, Alex, ‘Rajah Brooke and the Victorians’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), pp. 381–400CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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76 Editor [John Morley], ‘Carlyle’, Fortnightly Review, 8 (1870), pp. 1–22, at p. 21. On Morley's hesitancy about defending despotism under British authority as secretary of state for India, see Jon Wilson, ‘The silence of empire: imperialism and India’, in David Craig and James Thompson, eds., Languages of politics in nineteenth-century Britain (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 218–41, at pp. 233–4.
77 [Morley], ‘Carlyle’, p. 21.
78 ‘The dictator; or two scenes in Paraguay’, Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, 184 (1847), pp. 17–22, at p. 21.
79 ‘The public and state prisons at Paraguay’, Imperial Magazine, 11 (1829), pp. 127–31.
80 ‘Tea of Paraguay’, Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, 412 (1839), pp. 382–3, at p. 382.
81 Literary Gazette, 551 (1827), pp. 515–16.
82 Carlyle, ‘Francia’, p. 574. Cf. ‘Dr. Francia, the dictator of Paraguay’, p. 534.
83 Times, 9 Oct. 1841, p. 3.
84 J. M. R. Cameron, ‘John Barrow, the Quarterly Review's imperial reviewer’, in Jonathan Cutmore, ed., Conservatism and the Quarterly Review: a critical analysis (London, 2007), pp. 133–50.
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87 ‘Dr. Francia, the dictator of Paraguay’, p. 26.
88 ‘The reign of Dr. Francia’, p. 13.
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90 E.g. [Senior, Nassau], ‘King's Argentine Republic’, Edinburgh Review, 87 (1848), pp. 534–65Google Scholar, at p. 565.
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93 Times, 5 June 1867, p. 9; Captain Richard F. Burton, Letters from the battle-fields of Paraguay (London, 1870). See Hendrik Kraay and Thomas L. Whigham, eds., I die with my country: perspectives on the Paraguayan war, 1864–1870 (Lincoln, NB, 2004); James Schofield Saeger, Franciso Solano López and the ruination of Paraguay: honor and egocentrism (Lanham, MD, 2007).
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95 E.g. Thompson, George, The war in Paraguay (London, 1869), pp. 4–5Google Scholar; and for a more balanced account, George Frederick Masterman, Seven eventful years in Paraguay (London, 1869), pp. 29–32.
96 The supplement to the Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, I (London, 1851), p. 602; ‘Mansfield's Paraguay, Brazil, and the Plate’, Fraser's Magazine, 54 (1856), pp. 591–601, at p. 601; [P. W. Gifford], ‘From Montevideo to Paraguay’, Macmillan's Magazine, 52 (1885), pp. 96–111, at p. 107–8.
97 Lynch, Caudillos, p. 420.
98 Thomas Carlyle to John Forster, 23 June 1843, in Ian Campbell et al., eds., The collected letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (42 vols., Durham, NC, 1970– ), XVI, p. 216; Thomas Carlyle to John Forster, 10 June 1843, ibid., XVI, pp. 194–5.
99 Carlyle, ‘Francia’, p. 552.
100 Ibid., p. 551.
101 Beyond using Francia's dictatorship to support a few idiosyncratically Carlylean positions, not least an enthusiasm for the terrorization of shoemakers: Carlyle, ‘Francia’, pp. 584–5; cf. Thomas Carlyle to Margaret A. Carlyle, 12 May 1835, Campbell et al., eds., Carlyle letters, VIII, pp. 114–18.
102 Carlyle, ‘Francia’, p. 552.
103 Ibid., pp. 572–3.
104 Ibid., pp. 575–80, 585.
105 Ibid., pp. 575–85.
106 Ibid., p. 553.
107 E.g. ‘Letters on Paraguay’, British and Foreign Review, 7 (1838), p. 571.
108 This would be true also in other European countries, and in the United States. For US critiques of Francia, see e.g. Washburn, Charles A., The history of Paraguay (2 vols., Boston, MA, 1871), I, p. 167Google Scholar; Page, Thomas J., La Plata, the Argentine Confederation, and Paraguay (New York, NY, 1859), pp. 124–5, 204Google Scholar.