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| 1 | JUAN BAUTISTA ALBERDI The Argentine Republic, Thirty-seven Years after the May Revolution (1847) * |
Toutes les aristocraties, anglaise, russe, allemande, n’ont besoin que de montrer une chose en témoignage contre la France:—Les tableaux qu’elle fait d’elle-même par la main de ses grands écrivains, amis la plupart du peuple et partisans du progrès. …
Nul peuple ne résisterait à une telle épreuve. Cette manie singulière de se dénigrer soi-même, d’étaler ses plaies, et comme d’aller chercher la honte, serait mortelle à la longue.
—J. Michelet1
Today more than ever, anyone who was born in the beautiful country between the Andes mountain range and the River Plate has the right to cry out with pride, “I am an Argentine.”
On the foreign soil on which I reside, not as a political exile, having left my home country legally, of my own free choice, just as an Englishman or a Frenchman can reside outside his country as it suits him; in the lovely country that receives me as a guest and provides so many pleasures to foreigners, without offending its flag, I lovingly kiss the Argentine colors and take pride in seeing them prouder and more honorable than ever before.
The truth be told to the discredit of none: the colors of the River
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Plate have known neither defeat nor defection. In the hands of Rosas2 or Lavalle,3 when they have not sponsored victory, they have presided over liberty. If they have ever fallen into the dust, it has been against their own; at war with their own family, never at the feet of the foreigner.
Save your tears, then, those generously sobbing over our misfortunes. In spite of them, no people on this part of the continent is entitled to feel pity for us.
In its life as a nation, the Argentine Republic does not have one man, one deed, one defeat, one victory, one success, one loss to be ashamed of. All reproaches, save that of villainy. Our right comes from the blood that runs in our veins. It is Castilian blood. It is the blood of El Cid, the blood of Pelagius.4
Full of patriotic warmth, and possessed of that impartiality that comes from the pure sentiment of one’s own nationalism, I wish to embrace them all and enclose them in a painting. Blinded sometimes by partisan spirit, I have said things that might have flattered the ear of zealous rivals: may they hear me now with less flattering words. Will there be no excuses for the selfishness of my local patriotism, when partiality in favor of one’s own land is everyone’s right?
Besides this I am led by a serious idea, namely, the need of every man in my country to reflect today on where our national family now stands: what political means do we, its sons, possess; what are our duties; what needs and desires are the order of the day of the famous Argentine Republic?
It would not be strange for someone to find this pamphlet Argentine, as I shall write it in blue-and-white ink.
If I say that the Argentine Republic is prosperous in the midst of upheaval, I recognize a fact that everyone can sense: and if I add that it has the means to be more prosperous than all, I am writing no paradox.
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There can be no man alive who would deny that it is in a respectable state and has nothing to be ashamed of. Why not say it once and for all with our heads held high? The Argentine Republic has moved foreign sensibilities with the images of its civil war. It has seemed barbarous, cruel. But it has never been the butt of anyone’s ridicule. And misfortune that does not reach the point of mockery is far from being the ultimate misfortune.
At all times, the Argentine Republic has appeared at the forefront of the movement of this America. For right and for wrong, its power to take the initiative is the same: when it does not imitate its liberators, it mimics its tyrants.
In the revolution, Moreno’s5 plan encompassed our continent.
In the war, San Martín6 showed Bolívar the road to Ayacucho.7
Rivadavia8 gave the Americas his plan of progressive improvements and innovations. What statesman before him put on the order of the day the question of roads, canals, banks, public education, staging posts, religious freedom, abolition of privileges, religious and military reform, colonization, trade and shipping treaties, administrative and political centralization, organization of the representative system, electoral system, customs, taxation, rural laws, useful associations, European imports of unheard-of industries? The sum of decrees from his day is a perfect administrative code, just as the decrees of Rosas contain the catechism of the art of subjugating despotically and teaching obeisance with blood.
Twenty years from now, many states of the Americas will deem themselves advanced because they will be doing what Buenos Aires did thirty years ago: and forty years will elapse before they have their own Rosas. I say their Rosas, because they will have him. Not in vain is he today called
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Man of the Americas. He truly is, for he is a political type who will be seen around America as a logical product of that which produced him in Buenos Aires and which exists in sister states. In all places the orange tree, when it gets to a certain age, gives oranges. Where there are Spanish republics, formed from former colonies, there will be dictators once development reaches a certain level.
They should not be upset by this idea. This means that they will advance as much as the Argentine Republic has advanced today, regardless of the means. Rosas is at once a sickness and a cure: America says this of Buenos Aires, and I repeat it as true of the future America.
This is not a malignant and vengeful omen of a desired evil. Although I oppose Rosas, as a party man, I have said that I write this with Argentine colors.
Rosas is not a simple tyrant in my eyes. If in his hand there is a bloody rod of iron, I also see on his head the rosette of Belgrano.9 I am not so blinded by love of my party as not to recognize what Rosas is, in certain respects.
I know, for example, that Simón Bolívar did not occupy the world so much with his name as the current governor of Buenos Aires does.
I know that the name of Washington is worshipped in the world but is no better known than that of Rosas.
The United States, despite its fame, does not today have a public figure held in higher esteem than General Rosas.—The people speak of him from one end of America to the other, although he has not done as much as Christopher Columbus. He is as well known in Europe as a man in the public eye in England or France. And there is no place in the world where his name is not known, because there is no place outside the reach of the English or French press, which for the last ten years have repeated his name day after day. What orator, what celebrated writer of the nineteenth century has not named him, has not spoken of him on many occasions? Guizot, Thiers, O’Connell, Lamartine, Palmerston, Aberdeen.10 What celebrated parliamentarian of this era has not
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mentioned him, speaking to the face of Europe. Shortly he will be a romantic hero: the stage is set for a young genius, remembering what Chateaubriand, Byron,11 and Lamartine gained from their journeys, to set sail across the Atlantic, in search of an immense and virginal territory ripe for poetry, offered by the most beautiful country, the most esteemed and the most abundant in remarkable traits of the New World.
Byron, who once thought of visiting Venezuela and was so eager to cross the line of the equinox, would have been attracted to the banks of the immense River Plate, if the man who could have offered the most colors through his life and character to the pictures from his diabolical and sublime brush had lived in his day. Byron was the predestined poet of Rosas, the poet of The Corsair, The Pirate, Mazeppa, and Marino Faliero. It would be fitting if the hero, like the singer, were defined as angel or demon, as Lamartine called the author of Childe Harold.
It would be necessary not to be an Argentine to be unaware of the truth of these facts, and be proud of them, without getting involved in examining the legitimacy of the right with which they cede in honor of the Argentine Republic. It is enough to see that glory is independent sometimes of justice, of usefulness, and even of good common sense.
So I will say in all sincerity something I consider consistent with what I have expressed here:—if Rosas’ rights to Argentine nationality were lost, I would contribute with no small sacrifice to bringing about their rescue. It is easier for me to declare than to explain the motive, because it pleases me to think that Rosas belongs to the River Plate.
But, when speaking thus someone names Rosas, he speaks of an Argentine general, he speaks of a man of the Plate, or rather he speaks of the Argentine Republic. To speak of the esteem in which Rosas is held is to speak of the esteem in which Rosas’ country is held. Rosas is not an entity that can be conceived in abstract terms without relation to the people he governs. Like all notable men, the extraordinary development
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of his character presupposes that of the society to which he belongs. Rosas and the Argentine Republic are two entities implicated in each other. He is what he is because he is Argentine: his elevation implies that of his country; the spirit of his will, the firmness of his nature, the power of his intelligence are not traits of his own, but traits of the people, which he reflects in his person. The idea of a Bolivian or Ecuadorian Rosas is absurd. Only the Plate could today produce a man who has done what Rosas has done. A strong man always implies many others of the same spirit around him. With an army of sheep, a lion at its head would be taken prisoner by a single hunter.
Suppress Buenos Aires, and its masses and its innumerable able men, and you will have no Rosas.
The leadership of the Argentine Republic is attributed to him alone. What a great error! He is reasonable enough to listen when he appears to be leading; like his country, he is very capable of ordering when he seems to obey.
Rosas is no Peter the Great.12 The greatness of Argentina is older than he. Rosas is forty years later than Liniers;13 thirty years later than Moreno, Belgrano, San Martín; twenty years later than Rivadavia. Under his leadership, Buenos Aires sent a haughty no to the allied English and French. In 1807 it did more than that, without having Rosas at its head. In its streets, it tore apart fifteen thousand soldiers of the flower of the British armies, and snatched the one hundred standards that today adorn its temples.
In 1810, without Rosas at its head, it cast to the ground the crown that Christopher Columbus led to the New World.
On July 9, 1816, the Argentine Republic wrote the golden page of its independence, and the name of Rosas is not at the foot of that document.
In that same year, the Argentine armies climbed with cannons and
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cavalry mountains twice as high as those of Mont-Cenis and St. Bernard, to help Chile to do what had been achieved on the other side. But it was not Rosas who signed the victorious bulletins from Chacabuco and Maypo,14 but the Argentine José de San Martín.
All the glory of Rosas, to the square of four and multiplied ten times by itself, does not form a trophy comparable in esteem with Pizarro’s15 standard, obtained by San Martín in his campaign in Peru in 1821.
This is not to diminish Rosas’ merit. This is to increase the merit of the Argentine Republic. This is to say that it is not Rosas who has taught it to be brave and heroic.
From this there follows a very logical and natural conclusion, namely, that as soon as Rosas ceases to be at the head of the Argentine Republic, another man as notable as he with other scenes as memorable as his will be attracting the world’s attention to the Republic, which from the first days of this century has never ceased to be esteemed for its men and for its deeds.
But today, are Rosas and his party perhaps the only things that Argentina has to offer that are extraordinary and worthy of admiration?
That would be to see a half-truth, not the whole truth.
No one is great unless measured against other great men. There is much praise for Rosas’ heroic perseverance. But does not the perseverance of his action imply the perseverance of the resistance that he seeks to snuff out? If the persistence with which Rosas has pursued his enemies for the last twenty years shows that interest in a never-changing will, no less admirable is the invariable tenacity with which they have reacted to his power in the same space of time.
It is not my intention here to strike a comparative parallel of the merits of the two parties into which the Argentine Republic is divided. Halves of my country, equally loved, one and the other, I want the heroism that lies in both of them to be seen. In both can be observed the characters of a great political party. South America has not seen in the
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history of its civil wars two parties more tenacious in their action, more committed to their dominant idea, better organized, more loyal to their flag, clearer in their aims, more logical and consistent in their progress.
These qualities do not hold as much importance in the Unitario Party16 because it has not been embodied in a single man. It has not had that man because oppositions never have him, for they declare and organize themselves into militias in the heart of the popular masses: it has had infinite heads instead of one, and that is why its action has been divided and disturbed, which has made its results sterile.
But is not the consistency of Rosas and his men as admirable as the consistency of those men who at home and abroad and everywhere have fought for the past twenty years, braving with the fortitude of heroes all the setbacks and sufferings of foreign life, never yielding, never deserting their flag, never changing sides under cover of those weak amalgams celebrated in the name of parliamentary law?
There have been mutual reproaches, sometimes deserved, though usually unfair. The antagonist having to fight with undisciplined masses, with makeshift soldiers, chiefs, arrangements, and resources, has been the object of unpleasant accusations. But what opposition has not included excesses of this kind? Did not the holy war of independence from Spain have innumerable such traits that the glow of success and justice have left in silence? Can one not hear even today secret murmurings against the great names of San Martín and Bolívar, Carrera and O’Higgins,17 Monteagudo18 and La Mar,19 for unnoticed acts which in the labyrinth of a great war were practiced by the masses under their command?
Reveal, let us see, justly or not, some act of cowardice, some behavior of dissolute indignity that stains the life of Rivadavia, Agüero, Pico, Alsina,
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Varela, Lavalle, Las Heras, Olavarria, Suárez,20 and so many others enrolled as chiefs in the noble ranks of the Unitario Party!
This praise is not a feature of that routine declamation of the parties. It is the just vindication of one-half of the Argentine Republic.
Both sides accuse each other of faults and offenses. Perhaps they have these faults, perhaps they committed such offenses, and the first of them is having taken up arms to tear each other apart. But once they have gone to war—the last aberration of passion and fervor—should it seem strange that they should then incur other offenses? To what else could the fever of a bloody contest lead, in which are at stake honor, political faith, and the interest for a cause considered that of the homeland itself?
The Federal Party made use of tyranny: the Unitario Party made use of alliances with foreign powers. Both did wrong. But why have those who have looked on this alliance as a crime of treason forgotten that the crime of tyranny is no less a crime? There are, then, two offenses that account for each other. I say offenses, and not crimes, because it is absurd to claim that the Argentine parties have been criminal in the abuse of their means.
Rosas has people who understand his perspective because he is the victor. The Unitarios have not, because they have been defeated. Thus is the world in its judgment. They call Lavalle a traitor because he died defeated in Jujuy. If he had entered Buenos Aires victorious, they would have called him libertador. If O’Higgins or San Martín had been defeated at Maypo, captured and hanged the next day in the square in Santiago; if the same had happened to the September revolutionaries and the domination of the Spanish had subsisted until today, those great men of the highest rank would be forgotten as obscure rebels worthy of the gallows, where they would atone for their treason.
Passion, in its language of lies and hyperbole, has been able to give the name of treason only to the simple military alliance that the Unitarios made with the forces of England and France.
Treason is a crime, but there is no crime when there is no intention to do evil. It is, then, something more than hasty procedure; it is an act of imbecility to presume that men of sincerity, of fervor, of patriotism such as Lavalle, Suárez, Olavarría, etc., could have harbored the intention of dishonoring the colors that they had defended since childhood
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in a hundred glorious, honorable combats, risking their lives to foreign bullets! If other men had done it, without the precedents of those men, the sophism would be less manifest. But to accuse of treason to their country those who created and founded the homeland with their swords and their blood! Lavalle, Paz, Rodríguez, who had no fortune but their glorious trophies obtained in the war of South American independence, must have had the intention to fight so that after their triumph they would hand over to a foreign power the homeland, its independence, its insignia, and even their personal honor and freedom! The tyrants have worn out the meaning of the word treason in their abuse of it, to the extent that it is rare that anytime, especially in young and warring countries, it is applied justly. But when it is used against the Unitarios of the Argentine Republic, one commits something more than a common error: one commits, as I have said, an act of inexcusable imbecility. Tiberius, the dark and bloody Tiberius, once saw the crime of treason even in a poem, in an indiscreet and confidential word, in a tear, in a smile, in the most insignificant things.21 Dionysius the tyrant condemned to death a man who dreamed he had murdered him. Alter a little the meaning of the word treason, said Montesquieu, and a legal government will become an arbitrary one.
“A grave reproach,” says Chateaubriand, “will be tied to the memory of Bonaparte. Toward the end of his reign his yoke became so heavy that the hostile feelings toward the foreigner softened; and an invasion, today a painful memory, took on at the time it occurred, the air of a campaign of freedom. … The Lafayettes, the Lanjuinais, the Camilo Jordans, the Ducis, the Lemerciers, the Cheniers, the Benjamin Constants, standing erect among the impetuous crowd, dared to spurn the victory and protest against the tyranny” … “Let us abstain, then, from saying that those who are led by fate to fight against a power that belongs to their country must be villains: in all times and countries, from the Greeks to our day, all opinions have backed the forces that could ensure them victory. One day it will be read in our Memoirs the ideas of M. de Malesherbes on the emigration. We do not know in France a single party that has not had men on foreign soil, merging with enemies and marching against France. Benjamin Constant, Bernadotte’s aide-de-camp, served
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in the allied army that entered Paris, and Carrel was caught, arms in hand, in the Spanish ranks.”22
It is needless to say that Lafayette, Chénier, Constant,23 Carrel are names that all the parties in France take pride in counting among their celebrated men. From where does this way of seeing them arise, in spite of those actions, which a sophist would dub treason? From the universal conviction that their intentions in executing them were entirely French and patriotic; and that only a totally exceptional situation could have placed them in the position of seeking the good of the country by means of such a course.
The Unitarios of Buenos Aires have done less than Constant, Carrel,24 and Lafayette in France: they have never marched against anything that could be said to be their country. They have marched with their flag, with their cockade, with their chiefs, along their path, toward their separate and particular ends; after demanding and obtaining solemn written statements, protecting the honor and integrity of the Republic, against all pernicious eyes of the foreigner. It was impossible to use this delicate means of reaction with more discretion, reserve, and prudence than they did. The documents that prove it are well known, as is the justification born from its results.
Other high and noble intentions also explain the conduct of the Argentines who in 1840 joined the French forces to attack the power of General Rosas. That coalition had more farsighted intentions than a simple change of governor in Buenos Aires.—I will mention them with the same sincerity and frankness with which they were manifested then. They may be erroneous: that depends on each man’s way of thinking. But deceit was never in play at their conception. They belonged generally
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to the young men of the opposing party; and they owed them to their political studies at school. To suspect that treason could have mixed with them is to suppose that there were people foolish enough to initiate public law students in the mysteries of that dark diplomacy, which according to some, seeks to change the political principle of government in the Americas.
The transcendent idea of the young defenders of that alliance was to introduce, reconciling it with the perfect nationality of the country, the influence of the civilizing action of Europe by honorable means admitted by the law of nations, in order to establish a feasible political order in the Americas, in which the most advanced and liberal ideas would be supported by a majority of the enlightened population, developed under the influence of laws and institutions that protected such a trend. They wanted, in short, to find a formula that would solve the problem of the establishment of political freedom in the Americas, a problem still unsolved, since the solution does not lie in those written constitutions, which are inadequate and impracticable, and whose only use is frequently to encourage the hypocrisy of freedom, at odds with genuine freedom. Is there anyone unaware that South America, ever since the proclamation of unlimited democracy, is in a false position? That the order practiced until now is transitory because it is inadequate, and that it is necessary to bring things to more normal and genuine bases? Can anyone who sincerely ponders on what our current constitutions are fail to understand the importance and difficulty of this matter and the profound need to deal with it?
So: those young men tackling this question, which concerns the very life of this part of the New World, thought that while the numerical advantage of the ignorant, proletarian multitude prevailed, clothed in the revolution of popular sovereignty, freedom would always be replaced by the despotic military regime of just one man. And that the only means to ensure the preponderance of the enlightened minorities of these countries was to enlarge it with ties and connections with civilized influences from abroad, UNDER CONDITIONS COMPATIBLE WITH AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND DEMOCRACY, IRREVOCABLY PROCLAIMED BY THE REVOLUTION.
Absurd or wise, this was the thought of those who in that period supported the alliance with European forces to subjugate the party of the
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plebeian multitude captained and organized militarily by General Rosas. The supporters of those ideas maintained them publicly and openly in the press, with the candor and disinterest inherent in the character of youth.
That question is so grave, affecting in such a way the political existence of the new states of America, so uncertain and dark, and so few steps have been taken toward its solution, that one would have to be very backward in experience and good political sense to qualify one or another attempted solution as strange. That point has attracted the attention of all men who have given serious thought to the political fate of the New World, and errors of thinking therein have been committed by Bolívar, San Martín, Monteagudo, Rivadavia, Alvear, Gómez,25 and other men no less esteemed for their merit and American patriotism. A thousand others will err behind them in solving this problem, and they will not be the lower or less distinguished heads, since the only ones for whom the question is already solved are the demagogues who deceive the multitude and the limited spirits who deceive themselves.
If, then, the Argentine parties have fallen into error in the adoption of their means, it has not been due to vice nor to cowardice of the spirit, but to passion that, while still noble and pure in its intentions, is almost always blind to the use of its means, and the lack of experience that the new states of this continent suffer from as regards the path along which they must take their steps in public life.
No, the Argentine Republic is not a depraved country, as is supposed by those who judge it by the precepts she has given herself in the delirium of revolutionary fever. It is her political parties who have defamed her abroad, mutually exaggerating their faults in the heat of the fight and implying others as a vulgar means of attack and destruction. To judge the Argentine Republic by what her parties at arms write in the press is to judge France by the lugubrious portraits made by the impatient misanthropy of some of her great writers who, living in the perfection of the future, see in the present only vices, disorder, iniquity, and lies.
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Every party has taken care to hide or disfigure the advantages and merits of its rival. According to the Rosas press, the more educated half of the Argentine Republic is equal to the southern hordes of Pehuenches and Pampas.26 It is made up of savage Unitarios (as if to say the progressive savages, union being the most advanced term, the highest ideal of political science). The Unitarios, for their part, have often seen in their rivals the Carib Indians of the Orinoco. When one day they share the peaceful embrace in which the most enflamed struggles end, how different will be the picture of the Argentine Republic painted by the sons of both camps.
What noble confessions will not be heard sometime from the mouths of the frenetic Federales! And the Unitarios, with what pleasure will they not see men of honor and great hearts come out from beneath that frightful mask under which their rivals today disguise themselves, giving way to the tyrannical demands of the situation!
In the meantime, it is not necessary to make felons of the writers who involuntarily damage the country, damaging themselves also, even though Michelet says that it diminishes their luster in the eyes of the foreigner. The representative peoples must live today like the Roman who wanted to dwell in a glass house to show off the transparency of his private life. It is necessary to live a life of truth and show it to the world as it is, with its faults and its merits. To right the wrong it is necessary to say it out loud: society and power are deaf: for them to hear, one must speak with the trumpet of the press and from the rostrum. But it is impossible to raise one’s voice at home without the neighbor hearing. There is nothing else for it than to take shelter under the comforting axiom that says—I am a man and I consider myself alien to nothing. If some peoples have no errors to lament, it is because they have not begun to live. The great nations have left their stains behind. The backward peoples have them in their future. In the people, as in the man, disease is an abnormal and transitory state: our country is nearing the end of its maladies.
One hears also that the Argentine Republic suffers a general backwardness as a consequence of its long and bloody war. This error, generally accepted outside its frontiers, also comes from the same causes as the
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other. Doubtless war is less fecund in certain advances than peace: but it brings with it certain others that are peculiar to war, and the Argentine parties have obtained them with an effectiveness equal to the intensity of their suffering.
The Argentine Republic has more experience than all her brethren of the south, for the simple reason that she has suffered more than any other. She has traveled a road that the others are about to begin.
As she is closer to Europe, she has received sooner the influx of her progressive ideas, which were put into practice by the revolution of May 1810, and sooner than all others she reaped the good and bad fruits of her development: being for this reason at all times, future for the states further from the trans-Atlantic spring of American progress, which constitutes the past of the states of the Plate. Thus, even in what today is taken as a signal of backwardness in the neighboring republic, it is more advanced than those who claim to be exempt from these setbacks, because they have not yet begun to experience them.
A noteworthy fact, a part of the definitive organization of the Argentine Republic has prospered through her wars, receiving important services even from her adversaries. That fact is the centralization of national power. Rivadavia proclaimed the idea of unity: Rosas has achieved it. Among Federales and Unitarios, the Republic has been centralized, which means that the issue is only about voices that merely harbor the high spirits of young peoples; and which ultimately, both one and the other, have served their homeland, promoting its national unity. The Unitarios have lost, but unity has triumphed. The Federales have conquered, but federation has succumbed. The fact is that from the heart of this war of names, power has emerged fully formed, without which society is unachievable and freedom itself impossible.
Power implies the habit of obedience as the basis of its firm existence. That habit has put down roots in both parties. Within the country, Rosas has taught his supporters and his enemies to obey; outside the country, his absent enemies, without the right to govern, have spent their lives in obedience, and one way or another, both have reached the same goal.
In this regard, no country of South America has more powerful means of inner order than the Argentine Republic.
There is no country in the Americas that brings together greater practical knowledge of the Spanish American states than that Republic, because
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it is the country that has had the greatest number of capable men scattered outside its territory, and living regularly inserted in the acts of public life of the states where they reside. The day when those men return to their country and meet at deliberative assemblies, what useful applications, comparative terms, practical knowledge, and curious allusions will they bring from their memories of their past lives abroad!
If men learn and gain with their travels, what won’t happen to the people? It can be said that one-half of the Argentine Republic has been traveling in the world for ten or twenty years. Made up especially of young men, who are the homeland of tomorrow, when they return to their native soil after a life wandering, they will come in possession of foreign languages, legislation, industries, habits, which are then ties of brotherhood with the other peoples of the world. And how many, as well as knowledge, will bring capital to the national wealth! The Argentine Republic will not gain less if it leaves some of its sons scattered around the world, connected forever to foreign countries, because those very sons will extend the source of attachment to the country that gave them the life that they pass on to their children.
The Argentine Republic had the arrogance of youth. Half of its inhabitants have become modest, suffering from the despotism that commands without right to reply: and the other half, carrying out the instructive existence of the foreigner.
The plebeian masses, elevated into power, have softened their ferocity in that atmosphere of culture that the others left behind, to descend in search of the warmth of the soul, which in morals as in geology is greater the further one descends. This transitory change of roles must have been advantageous for the general progress of the country. One learns to govern by obeying; and vice versa.
While the Republic has not advanced in glory, it has done so at least in fame and renown; and on this point it owes such results to the two parties in equal measure. While Rosas deserved admiration for having repelled the foreign powers, his enemies have merited no less for having moved those powers to their advantage. The first party in the Americas to have repelled the states of Europe is that of Rosas; and the first to have been capable of moving them to take an active part in supporting them is the Unitario Party. The Argentine Republic is, then, the South American state that has most strongly made its action felt in its relations with the great powers of Europe.
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The affairs of the Plate have for many years attracted the attention of the French Chambers and the English Parliament.
The Times of London—the world’s leading newspaper—has concerned itself with Rosas five hundred times, no matter in what regard. The Revue des Deux Mondes, Le Constitutionnel, La Presse, Le Journal des Debats, and all the political newspapers of Paris have for the last eight years shown as much interest in the Plate as in any other European state.
The greatest orators of this century have brought their fervor into play one hundred times when dealing with the River Plate, and they are familiar with its affairs.
Argentine gold is the first to have been used by any state of the Americas to pay foreign writers, in Europe and on this continent, to write favorably and systematically about Rosas.
There is no press better known in all of South America than that of Buenos Aires, and in the neighboring states unlimited numbers of newspapers have existed destined to live in thrall to the affairs of the River Plate, in favor of either one party or the other. Those foreign newspapers, when not Unitarios, have been Rosistas, but always Argentine. Dealing with something from the neighboring country, they have paid tribute to it with courtesy and respect. Le gouvernement espagnol se fait journaliste,27 as Girardin once said: for a long time now, that of Buenos Aires has become Gaceta, British Packet, and Archivo Americano.
All this is all the more likely to flatter the Argentine Republic, all the more so given that it is the smallest state of all Hispanic America by population, with the exception of the Republic of Uruguay. It is difficult to find a smaller and more boisterous family in the world than the Argentine family. It would be rightly called a loud-mouthed charlatan if it were not the Spanish American state that has produced the most numerous and extraordinary things. It is the only one in which an entire respectable European army has been overcome without a single man escaping, nor a single standard. It is the only one where the reaction against the Spanish government was not defeated, not even for a single day, after the day it started, May 25, 1810. It is the only one to have defeated the empire of Brazil, beating it in battles and taking from it a whole fleet, an infinity of flags, and forcing it to relinquish, by means
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of glorious treaties, rights that it expected to hold onto all its life. It is the only one that possesses the standard of the Spanish conquest on this continent, the country that today receives greater spontaneous signals of something more than respect and consideration from the American states that surround it; the only one that in its recent wars, within and without, has aroused the amazement of all, for its constancy, its heroism, its ability, and its strength, whether this is judged in the person of one party or another.
In thinking of all this, any Argentine, wherever he is in the world, may see the light of May shine, with no regret for belonging to the nation of his birth.
However, all this is not enough. All this does not satisfy the true fate of the Argentine Republic. All this is extraordinary, lucid, surprising. But the Argentine Republic, in order to be a happy people in itself, has a need for more modest, useful, and real cases than all that brilliance of military triumphs and intelligent splendor. She has dazzled the world with the precociousness of her ideas. She has martial glories that peoples who have lived ten times more than she do not possess. She has so many flags taken in victorious combat that she could decorate her forehead with a turban made up of all the colors of the rainbow, or fly a flag as high as the Colonne de Vendôme, and more radiant than the bronze of Austerlitz.—What is the use of this, without other advantages, which, the poor thing, are still necessary in such number?
She has already done more than enough for fame; and very little for happiness.
She possesses immense glories; but, alas! She does not have a single liberty. May they be eternal, thank heavens, the laurels that she succeeded in winning, as she swore not to live without them. But remember that the first words of her revolutionary genesis were those three that form together a holy code and a sublime verse, saying: liberty, liberty, liberty.
Fortunately, she knows already, at the cost of blood and tears, that the enjoyment of that benefit is subject to difficult and gradual conditions that it is necessary to fulfill. Thus, if in the early days she was eager for liberty, today she will be happy with a more than moderate liberty.
In her first songs of victory she forgot a word less resonant than that of liberty, but which represents a counterweight that helps liberty to stay on her feet: order.
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One order, one rule, one law: this is the supreme need of her political situation.
She needs this because she does not have it.
She can possess it because she has the necessary means.
There is no law that rules the inner government of the Argentine Republic and the exercise of private guarantees. This is the most public fact that that country may offer.
It does not have a political constitution, and in this is the only exception on the whole continent.
There is no question now as to whether it should be centralist or federal. If it is federal, so be it, but let there be a law that regulates that federation; let there be a federal constitution. Although the written charter or constitution is not the law or the pact, nevertheless, she proves it, she fixes it and keeps it invariable. The written word is a need of order and harmony. The stability of any important contract is guaranteed in writing: what contract could be more important than the great constitutional contract?
Nor is there a question as to whether it should be liberal. Let it be despotic, let it be tyrannical, if it wishes, that law; but let there be a law. That at least is progress, that tyranny is practiced by law instead of by the will of one man. The worst of despotism is not its harshness but its inconsequence. The written law is as immutable as faith.
To say that the Argentine Republic is not capable of governing itself under a constitution, even if it is despotic or monarchical, is to imply that the Argentine Republic is not in the same league as any of the states of South America, but below them all; it is to imply that she is less capable than Bolivia, than Ecuador, than Paraguay, which good or bad possess a written constitution that is passably observed.
This is absurd.
The Argentine Republic has more means of organization than any other state of South America. What it needs is to coordinate these means.
Which of them possesses the most real, effective, and recognized power? He who claims to have the power, to have the foundation stone of the political edifice.
That power needs a law because it does not have it. It is objected, that with it the fact of its existence would be impossible.—In such a case, make it as despotic as one wishes; but give it a law. Without that law of internal subordination, the Argentine Republic may have a beautiful exterior,
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but it will be nothing within but a tomb of the living. Otherwise it is better to be Argentine from afar, to receive the honorable reflection of the glory without feeling the hero’s feet on one’s shoulders.
What state of South America possesses a respectively higher number of enlightened inhabitants willing to occupy themselves with industry and work, as a result of the tiredness and weariness of the previous disturbances?
There are those who see a germ of disorder in the return of the émigrés. But that is to fear the conduct of the sinner precisely because he emerges from education. Emigration is the richest school for teaching: Chateaubriand, Lafayette, Mme. Staël, King Louis Philippe28 are illustrious disciples educated by her. Argentine emigration is the instrument prepared to serve the organization of the country, perhaps in the hands of Rosas himself. His current men are soldiers because up until now they have done nothing but fight: for peace, people of industry are needed; and Argentina’s emigrants have had to cultivate this in order to survive abroad.
What today is emigration was the most skilled portion of the country, as it was the richest; it was the most educated, as it asked for institutions and understood them. If it is agreed that Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, where they have mainly resided, are countries that have much good in terms of examples, one must admit that the emigrants who have settled there have had to learn, at least to lead a quiet and busy life.
How could they leave and take dangerous habits with them? He who is less willing to emigrate is he who has emigrated once before. One does not emigrate twice in life. The first is enough to make one circumspect.
Moreover, have not those émigrés, almost all of whom were young when they left, grown in age, in habits of restfulness, in experience? It is indubitably so. But one makes the mistake of supposing them still as restless, fervent, demanding, zealous, with all the qualities they had when they left the country.
In this regard, what happens in Buenos Aires is reproduced in all the provinces.—In all of them there are today abundant materials of order: as they have all suffered, in all of them the spirit of moderation and tolerance
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has taken root. The longing to change things radically has already disappeared. Many influences have been accepted that before were rejected, and in which today normal things are seen that it is necessary to have if one is to establish order and power.
Those who before were repelled with the dictate of caciques are today accepted in the bosom of society in which they have made themselves worthy, acquiring more educated habits, more civilized sentiments. Those chiefs, once coarse and rustic, have cultivated their spirit and character in the school of leadership, where many times inferior men are ennobled and enlightened. To govern ten years is to take a course in politics and administration. Each of those men is today one of the means to reach in the interior a stable and advantageous arrangement.
There is no one better than Rosas himself and the circle of important men who surround him to lead the country to the execution of a general arrangement at this time.
What has Rosas done thus far to the advantage of the country, speaking impartially and in good faith?—Nothing:—A great noise, and a great accumulation of power. That is to say, he has laid the foundations of something that does not yet exist and is about to be created. Making noise and accumulating power for the sole pleasure of appearances and authority is frivolous and puerile. These things are obtained in order to operate other real things of genuine importance to the country. Napoleon triumphed in Jena, in Marengo, in Austerlitz, in order to be emperor and to enact the five codes, found the university, the École Normale, and other establishments, by which he endures longer in the memory of the world than by the laurel wreath and the bronze.
Rosas has not yet done anything useful for his country; until now he has been making preparations. He has more power than anyone to do good: just as steam drives the progress of industry, so his arm could propel Argentine progress.
So far he is not a great man: he is only an extraordinary man. Only he who does great things of durable and evident use to the nation deserves the title of great. To obtain fame one need only do surprising things, no matter how extravagant and sterile they are. If Rosas were to disappear today, what would remain that had been created by his hand? What could rouse the sincere gratitude of his homeland? Having temporarily repelled the claims of England and France?
That may have a vain splendor, but it does not amount to a real benefit,
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because the repelled pretensions do not compromise an interest in any way grave for the Argentine republic.
Having created power? Not even this. Power is not that useful institution, suitable for freedom itself, when it is not an institution organized on invariable bases. Until now, it is an accident: it is the mortal person of Rosas.
It is inconceivable that neither he nor his circle concern themselves with this question, nor work so that the terrible things done until now give at least some fruit of benefit that could justify those things in the eyes of posterity, whose first ranks are only one step from those men!
What are they waiting for, then, to make a start on their work?
The establishment of a general peace, they respond.
This is an error! Peace can come only via the path of law. The constitution is the most powerful means of pacification of internal order. The dictatorship is a constant provocation to fight: it is sarcasm, it is an insult to those who obey it without reservations, without limits. The dictatorship is anarchy formed and converted into a permanent institution. Chile owes its peace to its constitution, and there is no durable peace in the world that does not originate in an explicit agreement that ensures the balance of all public and personal interests.
The reputation of Rosas is so incomplete, it is so exposed to turning into smoke and nothingness. There is so much ambiguity in the value of his titles, so much contrast in the colors under which it is offered, that even those who out of blindness, envy, or some bad sentiment praise his glory when they judge the conduct of his foreign policy, turn mute and consider themselves beaten when the picture is turned over and they are shown the domestic situation.
On this point there is no worthwhile sophism or deception. There is no written constitution in the Argentine Republic; there are no individual, fundamental laws that could take its place. The exercise of the laws that did exist in Argentina has been suspended, while General Rosas is the indefinite trustee of the sum of political power.
This is a fact. Here there is no calumny, fervor, or partisan spirit. I acknowledge, I accept all that General Rosas may wish to claim of himself as noble and worthy of respect. But he is a dictator. He is a leader invested with despotic and arbitrary powers whose exercise recognizes no counterweight. This is a fact. It matters little that he uses a power
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conferred legally. This does not detract from the fact that he is a dictator: the fact is the same, even if the origin is different.
To live in Buenos Aires is to live under the regime of the military dictatorship. One may praise all one likes the moderation of that power: it may at best be a noble dictatorship. In the times in which we live, the ideas have reached a point at which there is more appetite for stingy constitutions than generous dictatorships.
To live under despotism, even if it is legal, is a real misfortune.
This misfortune weighs on the noble and glorious Argentine Republic.
This misfortune has come to be unnecessary and sterile.
Such is the state of the question of its political and social life: the Argentine Republic is the first in glories, the first in fame, the first in power, the first in culture, the first in means to be happy; and the most unfortunate of all, in spite of that.
But her misfortune is not one of destitution. She is unfortunate in the manner of those opulent families, who amid outer pomp and luster, cry out under domestic despotism and discontent.
Forty years ago, afflicted by a less brilliant oppression, Argentina had the fortune to shake it off, and the fruits of her victorious courage were the laurels of her May Revolution.
She has gone on to make greater efforts to rid herself of the adversary who shelters in her entrails: but she has achieved nothing, for between foreign despotism and national despotism there is a difference in favor of the latter, of the magical influence that adds to any cause, the flag of the people. How could you destroy a power that has the astuteness to shelter behind national glory and raise in its battlements the beloved colors of the homeland? What would you do in the presence of such a happy strategy? Invincible by the vanity of the country itself, there is no other way than to capitulate to it, if it has enough honor to lay down in good faith his arbitrary weapons in the religious hands of the Law.
Rosas kneeling, by a spontaneous movement of his will, before the altars of the law is a picture that leaves behind in glory the lion of Castile, submissive at the feet of the Republic crowned in laurels.
But if the picture is more beautiful, it is also less plausible; as it sometimes takes less to defeat a monarchy of three centuries than to crush a proud aberration of personal self-love.
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In short: who, if not Rosas, who has gained such unexpected triumphs, is fit to obtain the no less unexpected triumph over himself?
The problem is difficult, though; and it is no small difficulty.
But whatever the solution may be, there is one thing that is true by any reckoning: and it is that the Argentine Republic has before it its most beautiful period of good fortune and prosperity. The rising sun that is seen on her coat of arms is a historic symbol of her destiny: for her, all is future, future greatness and outstanding hope.
Valparaíso, May 25, 1847
