Orélie Antoine de Tounens
Orelie-Antoine de Tounens (born May 12, 1825 in Chourgnac d'Ans , France , † September 19, 1878 in Tourtoirac , France) was a French lawyer and adventurer. From 1860 he called himself Orelie-Antoine I, King of Araucania and Patagonia . The Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia denoted its unsuccessful founding of a state in what is now Chile .
youth
Born and raised in the Dordogne , he traveled in 1858 to Chile and lived the first two years in Valparaíso and Santiago de Chile to Spanish to learn. In Valdivia he met two Frenchmen, Lachise and Desfontaines, whom he initiated in his plans to found a new French colony in southern Chile. The Araucania area is hardly inhabited and of no interest to Chile. In 1860 he made contact with the Mapuche people . Their Kazike Mañil finally allowed him to travel to the Bío-Bío region . The area south of the river of the same name, Río Bío Bío, was at that time virtually independent from Chile and only ruled by the Mapuche.
Attempt to found a state
However, Mañil had died on his arrival, so that he was warmly welcomed by his successor, Quilapán . He suggested that the Mapuche should found their own state south of the Bío-Bío river. With his knowledge as a lawyer, he had prepared a constitution and also designed a national anthem and a flag . He was obviously very influenced by the ideas of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the writer Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga ( La Araucana ).
On November 17, 1860, De Tounens signed the declaration of independence on the farm of the settler Desfontaines and, after a few talks, was elected monarch by a meeting of Mapuche chiefs from the Araucania region . Perhaps they believed that a European could represent the interests of the new state with the other nations better than either of them could. Desfontaines was appointed Foreign Minister.
A few days after the coronation, he followed the request of a chief from Patagonia to include his area in the kingdom . He sent the documents of the founding of the state to the Chilean press and El Mercurio published excerpts from them on December 29, 1860. But when he came to Valparaíso to wait for the government representatives of Chile, he was simply ignored. He was also unsuccessful with the French ambassador.
Next life
De Tounens returned to Araucania and traveled one after the other to the individual tribes that had already started to raise an Indian army against increasing military attacks by the Chileans. However, in 1862 his servant Juan Rosales Baptist betrayed him to the Chilean authorities, whereupon he was arrested, imprisoned in Los Ángeles (Chile) and sentenced to ten years in prison. The intervention of the French consulate, whose argument that he was not “in control of his senses” almost brought him to the madhouse, finally resulted in his deportation to France in 1863. There he wrote his memoirs.
In 1869 he finally managed to return to Araucania via Buenos Aires . The Mapuche were surprised. They had been told that he had been executed. De Tounens immediately started organizing his “kingdom” and quickly re-aroused the anger of the Chilean authorities. Colonel Cornelio Saavedra Rodríguez put a reward on his head. The Mapuche did not hand him over. In 1871, Tounens ran out of money, so he sailed back to France to publish a second edition of his memoirs.
When he tried to return to Chile undetected and with a false passport in 1874, he was intercepted by the Argentine police in Buenos Aires. In 1876 he made another attempt to reach his "kingdom", this time by force of arms. However, settlers in Patagonia handed him over to Chilean authorities, so that he was again deported to France.
His health was already badly damaged and he died on September 19, 1878 in Tourtoirac in France.
aftermath
Although de Tounens had no children, his relatives appropriated the title. Gustave-Achille Laviarde tried as Achille I to convince the US President Grover Cleveland to recognize the autonomy of Araucania. Neither Cleveland nor any other head of any other state has recognized the foundation to this day.
In 1995, the North American Araucanian Royalist Society (NAARS) was founded as a non-profit organization that claims to be committed to the care of the history and interests of the Mapuche nation independently of the self-appointed royal family and the states of Chile and Argentina.
literature
- Jutta Müther: Orelie-Antoine I, King of Araucania and Patagonia or Nouvelle France. Consolidation problems in Chile 1860-1870 , Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-631-42595-3 .
- Heinz-Siegfried Strelow: King of the Indians. The adventurous life of a French in Patagonia. Telesma-Verlag, Treuenbrietzen 2014, ISBN 978-3-941094-08-6 .
Web links
- North American Araucanian Royalist Society website
- Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia. Private website promoting the “Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia”
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Tounens, Orélie Antoine de |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Orelie-Antoine I (as king) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French lawyer, adventurer and self-proclaimed King of Araucaria and Patagonia |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 12, 1825 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Chourgnac d'Ans |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 19, 1878 |
| Place of death | Tourtoirac , France |