Barbarism and civilization

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Scan of an edition from 1874

Barbarism and civilization. The life of Facundo Quiroga is a book published in Santiago de Chile in 1845 , which was published in many languages ​​up to the first edition in Germany in 2007. The author, the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento , lived there in exile . The original title is: Civilización i barbarie. Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga, i aspecto físico, costumbres i hábitos de la República Arjentina . The work is regarded as a classic of Latin American liberalism or as “ a founding book of the Argentine nation and all of Latin America ”. Sarmiento favors a centralized nation-building of Argentina, mainly oriented towards France and starting from Buenos Aires , by accusing his contemporaries Juan Facundo Quiroga and Juan Manuel de Rosas , who forced him into exile, of betraying the European civilization mission, because they had the rural area - playing off “ barbarism ” against the urban civilization for which European Buenos Aires stands.

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The book first appeared in several episodes in 1845 in the Chilean daily El Progreso before it was printed there as a book. Sarmiento summarized it within two months as a " political signal against the dictatorship of Juan Manuel Rosas then ruling ". It is both a biography of Juan Facundo Quiroga, who is seen as the forerunner of Rosas, and an analysis of the political, economic, social and cultural development of Argentina in the first half of the 19th century.

introduction

Sarmiento measures himself against Alexis de Tocqueville and his work " On Democracy in America " (1835/1840) because he considers it essential that Argentina deserve an explorer who approaches the country " armed with social theories" and above all else " The Europeans and especially the French " showed the way of existence of the Argentine Republic (p. 11). His goal is to work to open Argentina to European immigration. For him there is no American people like the Argentine who would be called to “ immediately take in the people of Europe that overflows like a full glass ”, because he sees America as a “ deserted world ” (p. 16). Facundo Quiroga is the focus of his interest because he sees in him an embodiment of the two tendencies that divide Argentina. He does not regard it as a coincidence, but as a result of the Argentine way of life, as it was formed through colonization and which finds its mirror in the shape of the caudillo in this social phase (p. 19), but has to be overcome.

First through fourth chapter

These chapters outline the state of the country and give an outline of the historical background against which a figure like Facundo Quiroga is to be understood in the eyes of Sarmiento. They include the years from the May Revolution in 1810, the founding date of the Argentine nation, and the civil war-like battles that followed it up to 1840.
The character of the Argentine territory is characterized by " vast stretches of land " that are " completely uninhabited "; the navigable rivers would not be navigated; everything is immeasurable. " In the south and north the savages lurk , waiting for the moonlit nights to attack the cattle in the pastures and the defenseless settlements like a pack of hyenas " (pp. 27-28). Sarmiento speaks consistently of " desert " when he describes the vast country. He does not mean the arid Llanos , but the areas populated by Indians, " the land that is still waiting to be commissioned to produce plants and all kinds of seeds " (p. 29) (see desert campaign ). For him, the Indians become “ American Bedouins ” who “ gouge ” their victims (Spanish: degollar = to behead, to kill ) (p. 34). But the shepherding life on the pastures beyond the cities also reminds Sarmiento of Asia. Everything civilized is frowned upon there, especially since the Spaniards mixed with the natives there (p. 34). Anyone who dresses in urban clothing there becomes the object of ridicule and rough fights among the rural population. This is how progress stifles, “ for there cannot be progress without permanent possession of the land, without the city, which in turn develops man's commercial skills and allows him to expand his acquisitions ” (p. 39).
The gauchos with their thickly bearded faces resemble the “ Asian Arabs ” and despise the sedentary townspeople who read books but would not be able to survive in the country (p. 44). On the other hand, the settlements of the Germans or Scots in the south of the province of Buenos Aires are exemplary: pretty, neat and decorated " and the residents are always in motion and activity " (p. 35).
Sarmiento introduces four characters as typical of Argentine country life: the " rastreador " - the "trace seeker "; the " baqueano " - the "guide", the " gaucho malo " - the "evil gaucho"; the " cantor " - a figure similar to the bard of the Middle Ages. They all stand for the barbaric, American, " almost indigenous " side of the Argentine civilization, which existed before 1810 and which in Sarmiento's presence is putting urban civilization under pressure. The shape of the “ gaucho malo ” is particularly important to him because it reflects characteristics for caudillo figures such as Facundo Quiroga and Rosas: He is an outlaw , a squatter , a misanthrope of a special kind, who becomes mysterious in the songs of the “ cantor ” " Desert heroes " could become. Stealing horses and kidnapping girls are just as much a part of it (pp. 60–62). As with all gauchos, the knife is his own accessory, not just a weapon, but a tool. For him it is " like the trunk of the elephant: his arm, his hand, his finger, everything " (p. 69).
Since the May Revolution of 1810, like North America , was oriented towards the European and above all the French legacy of the Enlightenment , a “ barbaric milieu ” emerged in the counter-reaction, moving from the inland to the cities with Buenos Aires at the fore force overreaching and " excellent " citizens to emigrate. But the last shot of the Argentine revolution has not yet been fired (p. 82).

Chapters 5 to 13

Juan Facundo Quiroga

These chapters contain the biography of Juan Facundo Quiroga from his childhood until his murder. The author starts off with a story in which Facundo Quiroga is initially exposed to a jaguar , but in the company of a friend brings him down with a lasso and knife, which has given him the nickname “ Tigre de Los Llanos ” (p. 95– 96). His face, overgrown with brush, and " his black, fiery eyes, shaded by bushy eyelashes, instilled an involuntary horror in whoever they accidentally attached themselves to " (p. 96). Born in 1788 in the province of La Rioja , Facundo Quirogas had already shown himself to be “ arrogant, harsh, unsociable ” and rebellious character in school (p. 97). During puberty, a passion for gambling took hold of him, which would have led his wealthy rancher parents to part with him, so that he had to earn a living as a peon . Again and again he was noticed because he gave or had given hundreds of lashes to unpopular people around him. In 1810 he was drafted into Buenos Aires as a recruit, but was unable to submit to barracks life and returned to his homeland. " He felt called to command, to appear suddenly and all alone, in spite of civilized society and as its enemy, to create a career according to his taste, combining bravery with crime, order with disruption " (p. 101).
Facundo Quiroga owed its public entry to an incident in a prison in the western province of La Rioja, when Spanish officers who were imprisoned who fought against South American independence tried to free themselves, but Quiroga, even because of his membership in a " Montonera " in prison , killed fourteen of them and received a letter of recognition from the fatherland (pp. 103-104). In the city of La Rioja he was called to help in a dispute by one of the two leading families and was appointed captain of the Los Llanos militias, which meant the authority of a land commander (p. 112 f.). Facundo Quiroga eliminated both families and became the most powerful lord in the province:

“The traditional methods of government disappeared, the forms withered, the laws became the plaything of nefarious hands; and in the midst of this devastated, horse-hoofed land, nothing was replaced, nothing was built. Comfort, leisure, and carelessness are the gaucho's greatest good. If La Rioja had had statues, as it once had doctors, they would have been used to peg the horses ”(p. 118).

Bernardino Rivadavia , admired by Sarmiento , the embodiment of a " poetic, great spirit that dominates all society " and the ideals of the May Revolution, has to leave his work in the hands of Caudillos, who lead everything begun back into barbarism:

“He brought European scholars into the country for the press and for the professorships, settlers for the deserts, ships for the rivers, recognition and freedom for all faiths; Development of the credit system and national bank to promote industry; all the great social theories of the time to shape his government work: in short, he brought Europe to cast it in a new shape on the American continent at one stroke and to accomplish in ten years the work that would have taken centuries earlier "( P. 137 f.).

Sarmiento sees Rivadavia's opponent in Facundo Quiroga. If Rivadavia was striving for a centralized republic starting from Buenos Aires, Facundo Quiroga became the representative of the federalist provinces that were anxious for their independence, and the federalist party became a link to the arbitrary barbarism (p. 143), which is also Buenos Aires in the form of Rosas 'seized. Thus, after Sarmiento, a unified work also took place, as if Providence were directing, although only one gaucho malo “went from one province to another, built mud walls and handed out knife wounds ” (p. 144). Quiroga initially triumphed over the Unitarian troops and their leader Gregorio Aráoz de La Madrid , but had to admit defeat to José Maria Paz , who fought according to the rules of European martial arts (p. 195). He went to Buenos Aires and from 1830 cooperated with Rosas. In 1831, as the leader of the federal army, he again defeated the Unitarian troops and then went with Rosas on a “ comprehensive hunt ” of the Indians to the “ frontier ” in the southern provinces. This expedition earned Rosas the title " Héroe del Desierto " (= " Hero of the Desert "). Sarmiento, however, denies the justification of this title and the success of the company because the two caudillos only went on a " warlike walk " and tore down some negligible Indian tents instead of putting an end to the " indomitable barbarian tribes " and the devastation they caused (p. 238 f.).

Assault on Facundo Quiroga's carriage

In 1835 Facundo Quiroga was sent on a peace mission to Cordoba , but suspected that a riding courier had been sent ahead of him and his carriage, which would serve as a link to a murder plot. As the signs of doom intensified, Facundo Quiroga kept his calm, but was ambushed and shot by a well-known Montonera gaucho. Rosas had him and his helpers searched and executed in Buenos Aires. However, Sarmiento indicates that he considers Rosas to be the person responsible for the murder of Facundo Quiroga (p. 256).

Chapters 14 and 15

Chapter 14 contains an account of Rosas and his dictatorial methods. Sarmiento compares him with Muhammad Ali Pascha and Abd el-Kader (p. 286) because of his emphatic striving for independence vis-à-vis Europe , whereby he at the same time presents his methods of domination as barbaric. For Sarmiento, the rule of Rosas was based on his secret police, the mazorca , whose method of execution consisted of gobbling, just as gobbling had become a public method of execution (p. 271). In addition, he had a method developed to record the attitudes of the population statistically, " to mark them according to their importance and with the help of this register to pursue the task of getting rid of all opposed elements for ten years " (p. 267). He found his most loyal supporters in the black population of Buenos Aires, " thousands of former slaves ", whose male part " fortunately " has " meanwhile been wiped out " by the constant wars . To intimidate the rural population, he had settled some wild Indian tribes in the south, whose chiefs were devoted to him (pp. 281–283).

The final chapter, headed “ Present and Future ”, paints a confident picture of the country's young people who are studying abroad, especially in France, but also in Chile, Brazil, North America and England, and who are starting an upswing on their return will be put. To this end, societies are to be founded to attract European populations and to settle in the country so that in twenty years what happened in North America in the same period of time will happen: as if by magic, cities, provinces and states have risen from the deserts where just before herds of bison were still grazing ”(p. 311 f.).

“The engineers of the republic will draw the layout of towns and villages in all suitable places, which they will build for the immigrants, and allocate them the fertile pieces of land; and in ten years all rivers will be lined with cities, and the republic will double its population with hardworking, decent, and inventive people ”(p. 319).

reception

Berthold Zilly as translator and commentator emphasizes in his afterword that the book was translated into French (1853), English (1868) and Italian (1881) during Sarmiento's lifetime. Excerpts were published in German in a publication for emigrants in 1848. The French audience was of particular importance for Sarmiento, and was familiarized with commented parts in 1846 and in a second episode in 1852 in the Revue des Deux Mondes . In addition, several chapters appeared in Paris in 1850 and 1851.

Zilly states that the texts suggested by the Facundo or entered into dialogue with it are innumerable. After-effects can be seen, for example, in Euclides da Cunha , Ezequiel Martínez Estrada , Octavio Paz , José Mármol , Rómulo Gallegos , Alejo Carpentier , Augusto Roa Bastos , Gabriel García Márquez or Mario Vargas Llosa . The whole nation mourned Sarmiento's death in 1888. At the La Recoleta cemetery he rested “ in peaceful proximity to his deeply hated enemies Juan Facundo Quiroga and Juan Manuel Rosas, and today not far from Eva Perón . Numerous plaques of homage by educational institutions and student groups on Sarmiento's tomb attest to his unbroken popularity as the author of the 'Facundo' and as a teacher of the nation ”.

Sarmiento's legacy continues to have an impact on César Aira when he paints the opposite picture to Sarmiento's ideas in his novel Die Mestizin (1978/1981). For him it is the Indians who live on the other side of the southwestern Argentine border in a highly complex civilization, to which the Argentine side in the not yet colonized border country with soldiers who are predominantly forced recruits or prisoners, appears barbaric.

On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the May Revolution 2010 and the birthday of Argentina as a nation-state, there was another reason to deal with Sarmiento. In a television broadcast on May 6, 2010, José Pablo Feinmann said the following about the legacy of Facundo :

“The extraordinary thing about the Facundo of Sarmiento is that it is a book with the ideology of the conqueror, but written by a member of the elite of the conquered land. The problem is that what is developing is Western civilization. Western civilization must take over the world. Because in the process it civilizes the world, brings it on the path of progress, of culture. This is where Western power comes into play ... for example: the English in China, the English in India, the English in Ireland - especially the English ... because England was the great power that almost all countries of the 19th century included - but also the French in Algeria, with a General Bugeaud appearing in Algeria by burning 500 Algerians alive to prove how French rationality worked when resisted.
What Sarmiento does is internalize this concept of civilization. Where Europe appears, civilization appears. We as people of Buenos Aires, educated people who we formed according to European ideas, are civilization. And against it stands barbarism: the gauchos, the people in the country, the people who do not know the European ideas.
What is the barbarism? Barbarism is the other. Barbarism is that which cannot be integrated into civilization. "

literature

  • Domingo Faustino Sarmiento: Barbarism and Civilization. The life of Facundo Quiroga . Translated into German and commented by Berthold Zilly, Eichborn: Frankfurt am Main 2007, Die Andere Bibliothek series , ISBN 978-3-8218-4580-7 .
  • Domingo Faustino Sarmiento: Facundo . Prólogo: Noé Jitrik. Notes and cronología: Susana Zanetti and Nora Dottori. Biblioteca Ayacucho , Caracas (Venezuela) 1993, ISBN 980-276-274-1 . (Current Spanish edition with extensive annotations)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Riekenberg : Little History of Argentina , CH Beck: Munich 2009, p. 80.
  2. ^ Berthold Zilly in the afterword (p. 421) to the German translation: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento: Barbarei und Zivilisation. The life of Facundo Quiroga . Translated into German and commented by Berthold Zilly, Eichborn: Frankfurt am Main 2007. - The following references to the book relate to this edition.
  3. ↑ Berthold Zilly in the afterword (p. 421) to the German translation of “ Barbarei und Zivilisation ”.
  4. ↑ Ricardo Piglia writes that Sarmiento uses comparisons with Asia, the Orient, Africa and Algeria to explain the known from South America with the unknown, which, however, has already been judged and defined through European eyes. These are areas that can be "civilized" from Europe (R. Piglia, Sarmiento's Vision, p. 74, in: Joseph T. Criscenti [ed.], Sarmiento and his Argentina, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder / Colorado - London 1993, pp. 71-76.).
  5. ^ Sarmiento as a recruiter for German emigrants in 1846
  6. ↑ The " Montonera " is an armed private army of powerful landowners who fought in the independence and civil wars with guerrilla tactics alongside the often poorly equipped government troops. Their followers, the Montoneros , were named after them in the 1970s for an Argentine guerrilla group (Berthold Zilly in the notes on barbarism and civilization , p. 390).
  7. ↑ Land commanders were appointed by the provincial governments. They played a role in the wars of independence, the civil wars that followed and in the extermination of the Indians (Berthold Zilly in the comments on barbarism and civilization , p. 384 f.).
  8. ↑ On p. 233 it says that Facundo Quiroga's victory over the Unitarians in 1831 brought about " the most complete Unitarian amalgamation in the interior of the republic " and that the unification sought by Rivadavia resulted from the inland.
  9. ↑ See also the chapter “Der rosismo ” in Michael Riekenberg (2009), pp. 72–78.
  10. ↑ It tells how Sarmiento pursued the French conquest and colonization of Algeria. In 1846 he made a trip to Europe and North Africa, where he was familiarized with the French methods of fighting the Arabs from Thomas Robert Bugeaud de la Piconnerie , Governor General of Algeria between 1841 and 1847 (see Acquaintance with Bugeaud, pp. 137, 147 , 151 f .; PDF; 7.2 MB), while in the Arabs he recognized the same “barbarians” that had to be fought in Argentina.
  11. ↑ See Astrid Windus: Afroargentinier und Nation. Construction methods of Afro-Argentinian identity in Buenos Aires of the 19th century. Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3-86583-004-8 .
  12. ^ Domingo Faustino Sarmiento: Facundo . Prólogo: Noé Jitrik. Notes and cronología: Susana Zanetti and Nora Dottori. Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas (Venezuela) 1993, ISBN 980-276-274-1 , S. LIV.
  13. ↑ Berthold Zilly in the afterword to barbarism a. Civilization (p. 422).
  14. ↑ Berthold Zilly in the afterword to barbarism a. Civilization (p. 431).
  15. ↑ See colonizing and exterminating.
  16. ↑ JP Feinmann on May 6, 2010 on Argentine television about Sarmiento (Spanish)

See also