Francia The Dictator The Louis Xi Of Paraguay
Among the varied countries of South America the little republic of
Paraguay, clipped closely in between Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil,
presents the most singular history, this being due to the remarkable
career of the dictator Francia, who ruled over it for a quarter of a
century, and to the warlike energy of his successor Lopez. The tyranny of
Francia was one of the strangest which history records, no man ever ruling
Paraguay was completely cut off by him from the rest of the world, much as
Japan was until opened to civilization by Commodore Perry. Unlucky was the
stranger who then dared set foot on Paraguayan soil. Many years might pass
before he could see the outer world again. Such was the fate of Bonpland,
the celebrated botanist and companion of Humboldt, who rashly entered this
forbidden land and was forced to spend ten years within its locked
confines. Such is the country, and such was the singular policy of its
dictator, whose strange story we have here to tell.
In May, 1811, Paraguay joined the other countries of South America in the
general revolt against Spain. There was here no invasion and no
blood-shed; the armies of Spain were kept too busy elsewhere, and the
revolution was accomplished in peace. A governing committee was formed,
with Fulgincio Yegros for its chairman and Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de
Francia for its secretary. The first was a man of little ability; the
latter was a man whose powers will soon be seen.
The committee decreed the independence of Paraguay. Two years later a new
convention was held, which dissolved the committee and elected two
consuls, Yegros and Francia, to govern the country. Two chairs were made
for them, resembling the curule chairs of Rome, and called Caesar's and
Pompey's chairs. On entering office Francia coolly seated himself in
Caesar's chair, leaving that of Pompey for his associate. This action
showed the difference in force of character between the two men.
In fact, Francia quickly took possession of all the powers of government.
He was a true Caesar. He appointed a secretary of state, undertook to
reorganize the army and the finances, and deprived the Spaniards in the
country of all civil rights. This was done to gain the support of the
Indian population, who hated the Spaniards bitterly. He soon went farther.
Yegros was in his way and he got rid of him, making the simple-minded and
ignorant members of the congress believe that only a sovereign magistrate
could save the country, which was then threatened by its neighbors. In
consequence, on the 8th of October, 1814, Francia was made dictator for
three years. This was not enough to satisfy the ambitious ruler, and he
played his cards so shrewdly that, on the 1st of May, 1816, a new congress
proclaimed him supreme and perpetual dictator.
It was no common man who could thus induce the congress of a republic to
raise him to absolute power over its members and the people. Francia at
that time was fifty-nine years of age, a lean and vigorous man, of medium
stature, with piercing black eyes, but a countenance not otherwise marked.
The son of a Frenchman who had been a tobacco manufacturer in Paraguay, he
was at first intended for the church, but subsequently studied the law. In
this profession he had showed himself clever, eloquent, and honorable, and
always ready to defend the poor and weak against the rich. It was the
reputation thus gained which first made him prominent in political
affairs.
Once raised to absolute power for life, Francia quickly began to show his
innate qualities. Love of money was not one of his faults, and while
strictly economical with the public funds, he was free-handed and generous
with his own. Thus, of the nine thousand pesos of annual salary assigned
him, he would accept only three thousand, and made it a strict rule to
receive no present, either returning or paying for any sent him. At first
he went regularly every day to mass, but he soon gave up this show of
religious faith and dismissed his private chaplain. In fact, he grew to
despise religious forms, and took pleasure in ridiculing the priests,
saying that they talked about things and represented mysteries of which
they knew nothing. "The priests and religion," he said, "serve more to
make men believe in the devil than in God."
Of the leading principle of Francia's political system we have already
spoken. It had been the policy of the old Jesuit missions to isolate the
people and keep them in strict obedience to the priesthood, and Francia
adopted a similar policy. Anarchy prevailed without, he said, and might
penetrate into Paraguay. Brazil, he declared, was seeking to absorb the
country. With these excuses he forbade, under the severest penalties,
intercourse of any character between the people of Paraguay and those of
neighboring countries and the entry of any foreigner to the country under
his rule.
In 1826 he decreed that any one who, calling himself an envoy from Spain,
should dare to enter Paraguay without authority from himself should be put
to death and his body denied a burial. The same severe penalty was decreed
against any native who received a letter speaking of political affairs and
did not at once present it to the public tribunals. These rigid orders
were probably caused by some mysterious movements of that period, which
made him fear that Spain was laying plans to get possession of the
country.
In the same year the dictator made a new move in the game of politics. He
called into being a kind of national assembly, professed to submit to its
authority, and ratified a declaration of independence. Just why this was
done is not very clear. Certain negotiations were going on with the
Spanish government, and these may have had something to do with it. At any
rate, a timely military conspiracy was just then discovered or
manufactured, a colonel was condemned to death, and Francia was pressed by
the assembly to resume his power. He consented with a show of reluctance,
and only, as he said, till the Marquis de Guarini, his envoy to Spain,
should return, when he would yield up his rule to the marquis. All this,
however, was probably a mere dramatic move, and Francia had no idea of
yielding his power to any one.
The dictator had a policy of his own--in fact, a double policy, one devoted
to dealing with the land and its people; one to dealing with his enemies
or those who questioned his authority. The one was as arbitrary, the other
as cruel, as that of the tyrants of Rome.
The crops of Paraguay, whose wonderful soil yields two harvests annually,
were seized by the dictator and stored on account of the government. The
latter claimed ownership of two-thirds of the land, and a communal system
was adopted under which Francia disposed at will of the country and its
people. He fixed a system for the cultivation of the fields, and when
hands were needed for the harvest he enlisted them forcibly. Yet
agriculture made little progress under the primitive methods employed, a
broad board serving for a plough, while the wheat was ground in mortars,
and a piece of wood moved by oxen formed the sugar-mill. The cotton, as
soon as picked from the pods, was spun on the spinning-wheel, and then
woven by a travelling weaver, whose rude apparatus was carried on the back
of an ox or a mule, and, when in use, was hung from the branch of a tree.
Commerce was dealt with in the same way as agriculture. The market was
under Francia's control, and all exchange of goods was managed under rules
laid down by him. He found that he must open the country in a measure to
foreign goods, if he wanted to develop the resources of the country, and a
channel of commerce was opened on the frontier of Brazil. But soldiers
vigilantly watched all transactions, and no one could act as a merchant
without a license from him. He fixed a tariff on imports, kept them in a
bazaar under military guard, and sold them to the people, limiting the
amount of goods which any of his subjects could purchase.
As a result of all this Francia brought about a complete cessation of all
private action, the state being all, and he being the state. All dealing
for profit was paralyzed, and agriculture and commerce alike made no
progress. On the other hand, everything relating to war was developed. It
was his purpose to cut off Paraguay completely from foreign countries, and
to be fully prepared to defend it against warlike invasion.
INDIAN SPINNING AND WEAVING.
Of his books, the one he most frequently consulted was a French dictionary
of the arts and industries. From this he gained the idea of founding
public workshops, in which the workmen were stimulated to activity alike
by threats and money. At one time he condemned a blacksmith to hard labor
for awkwardness. At another, when he had erected a gallows, he proposed to
try it on a shoemaker if he did not do his work properly, while promising
to richly reward him if he did.
Military roads were laid out, the capital and other cities were fortified,
and a new city was built in the north as a military post to keep the
savage Indians under control. As for the semi-civilized Mission Indians,
they were gradually brought under the yoke, made to work on the land, and
enrolled in the army like other citizens. In this way a body of twenty
thousand militia and five thousand regular troops was formed, all being
well drilled and the army supplied with an excellent cavalry force. The
body-guard of the dictator was made up of picked troops on whose fidelity
he could rely.
Francia dwelt in the palace of the old Spanish governors, tearing down
adjoining houses to isolate it. Constantly fearful of death and danger, he
did not trust fully to his vigilant body-guard, but nightly slept in a
different room, so that his sleeping apartment should not be known. In
this he resembled the famous Louis XI., whom he also imitated in his
austerity and simplicity of manners, and the fact that his principal
confidant was his barber,--a mulatto inclined to drink. His other associate
was Patinos, his secretary, who made the public suffer for any
ill-treatment from his master. The remainder of the despot's household
consisted of four slaves, two men and two women. In dress he strove to
imitate Napoleon, whom he greatly admired, and when drilling his troops
was armed with a large sword and pistols.
There remains to tell the story of the cruelties of this Paraguayan Nero.
With his suspicious nature and his absolute power, his subjects had no
more security for their lives than those of old Rome. Plots against his
person--which he identified with the state--served him as a pretext for
seizing and shooting or imprisoning any one of whom he was suspicious. One
of his first victims was Yegros, his former associate in the consulate.
Accused of favoring an invasion of Paraguay, he and forty others were
condemned to death in 1819.
More than three hundred others were imprisoned on the same charge, and
were held captive for eighteen months, during which they were subjected by
the tyrant to daily tortures. The ferocious dictator took special pleasure
in the torment of these unfortunates, devising tortures of his own and
making a diversion out of his revenge. From his actions it has been
supposed that there were the seeds of madness in his mind, and it is
certain that it was in his frequent fits of hypochondria that he issued
his decrees of proscription and carried out his excesses of cruelty.
When in this condition, sad was it for the heedless wretch who omitted to
address him as "Your Excellence the Supreme, Most Excellent Lord and
Perpetual Dictator!" Equally sad was it for the man who, wishing to speak
with him, dared to approach too closely and did not keep his hands well in
view, to show that he had no concealed weapons. Treason, daggers, and
assassins seemed the perpetual tenants of Francia's thoughts. One
country-woman was seized for coming too near his office window to present
a petition; and he went so far, on one occasion, as to order his guard to
fire on any one who dared to look at his palace. Whenever he went abroad a
numerous escort attended him, and the moment he put his foot outside the
palace the bell of the Cathedral began to toll, as a warning to all the
inhabitants to go into their houses. Any one found abroad bowed his head
nearly to the ground, not daring to lift his eyes to the dictator's
dreaded face.
It is certainly extraordinary that in the nineteenth century, and in a
little state of South America, there should have arisen a tyrant equal in
cruelty, in his restricted sphere, to the Nero and Caligula of old or the
Louis XI. of mediaeval times. Death came to him in 1840, after twenty-six
years of this absolute rule and in his eighty-third year. It came after a
few days of illness, during which he attended to business, refused
assistance, and forbade any one not called by him to enter his room. Only
the quick coming of death prevented him from ending his life with a crime;
for in a fit of anger at the curandero, a sort of quack doctor who
attended him, he sprang from his bed, snatched up his sword, and rushed
furiously upon the trembling wretch. Before he could reach his intended
victim he fell down in a fit of apoplexy. No one dared to disregard his
orders and come to his aid, and death soon followed. His funeral was
splendid, and a grand mausoleum was erected to him, but this was thrown
down by the hands of some enemies unknown.
Thus ended the career of this extraordinary personage, one of the most
remarkable characters of the nineteenth century. Carlos Antonio Lopez, his
nephew, succeeded him, and in 1844 was chosen as president of the republic
for ten years, during which he was as absolute as his uncle. He continued
in power till his death in 1862, but put an end to the isolation of
Paraguay, opening it to the world's commerce.
He was succeeded by his son, Solano Lopez, whom we mention here simply
from the fact that the war which Francia had so diligently prepared for
came in his time. In 1864 the question of the true frontier of the state
brought on a war in which Brazil, the Argentine Republic, and Uruguay
combined to crush the little country in their midst. We need only say here
that Lopez displayed remarkable powers as a soldier, appeared again and
again in arms after seemingly crushing defeats, and fought off his
powerful opponents for five years. Then, on the 1st of May, 1870, he was
slain in a battle in which his small army was completely destroyed.
Paraguay, after a valorous and gigantic struggle, was at the mercy of the
allies. It was restored to national life again, but under penalty of the
great indemnity, for so small a state, of two hundred and thirty-six
million pesos.
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We have told the story of the Alamo. It needs to complete it the story of how Travis and his band of heroes were avenged. And this is also the story of how Texas won its independence, and took its place in the colony of nations as the "Lone Star Rep... How King Rolf Won His Bride
At one time very many centuries ago, we cannot say just when, for this was in the days of the early legends, there reigned over Upsala in Sweden a king named Erik. He had no son and only one daughter, but this girl was worth a dozen sons and daughte... How Lancelot Saw The Sangreal
The ship that bore the three knights and the maiden came ashore at length near a castle in Scotland, where they landed. From here they journeyed far, while many were their adventures, all of which tried their virtue and belonged to the quest of th... How Oglethorpe Saved Georgia From Spain
On the 5th day of July, in the year 1742, unwonted signs of activity might have been seen in the usually deserted St. Simon's harbor, on the coast of Georgia. Into that sequestered bay there sailed a powerful squadron of fifty-six well-armed war-ves... How Olaf The Slave-boy Won The Throne
Many sons had Harold the Fair-Haired, and of some of them the story has been told. One of them, Olaf by name, left a son named Tryggve, who in turn had a son to whom he gave his father's name of Olaf. Wonderful was the story of this Olaf in his yout...