Orélie-Antoine de Tounens
Orelie -Antoine de Tounens ( born May 12, 1825 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. Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia described his unsuccessful remaining state was founded on the territory of present-day Chile.
Youth
Born and raised in the Dordogne, he traveled to Chile in 1858 and lived to study Spanish the first two years in Valparaíso and Santiago de Chile. In Valdivia, he met two Frenchmen, Lachise and Desfontaines, whom he initiated into his plans to start a new French colony in southern Chile. The territory of Araucanía was hardly inhabited and uninteresting for Chile. In 1860 he made contact with the people of the Mapuche. Their cacique Manil finally allowed him a trip to the Bio-Bio region. The area south of the same river Río Bío Bío was actually dominates at this time of Chile independently and only by the Mapuche.
Attempt by the state foundation
Manil had died, however, on his arrival, so that he was warmly received by the successor Quilapán. This he proposed to create a separate state of the Mapuche south of the river Bio-Bio. With his knowledge as a lawyer, he had prepared a constitution and even designed a national anthem and a flag. He greatly from the ideas of the philosopher Rousseau and the writer Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (La Araucana ) was obviously influenced.
On November 17, 1860 De Tounens signed on the farm of the settler Desfontaines the Declaration of Independence and settled after a few calls by a meeting of Mapuche chiefs of the Araucanía region to choose their monarch. You may believe this, a European could the interests of the new state with the other nations are better represented than any of them would be possible. Desfontaines was appointed foreign minister.
A few days after his coronation he followed the request of a chief from Patagonia to include his territory in the kingdom. He sent the documents of the founding of the state to the Chilean press and excerpts she published El Mercurio on December 29, 1860. But when he came to Valparaiso to wait for the government representative of Chile, he was simply ignored. Also, the French ambassador, he had no success.
Later life
De Tounens returned to Araucaria and traveled successively to the tribes who had already begun to set up an Indian army against increasing military incursions by the Chileans. However, it revealed in 1862 his servant Juan Rosales Baptist to the Chilean authorities, whereupon he arrested, detained in Los Ángeles (Chile) and was sentenced to ten years in prison. The intervention of the French consulate, whose argument that he was not " master of his senses " had almost brought him to the madhouse, finally procured his 1863 deportation to France. There he wrote his memoirs.
In 1869, he finally managed to return about Buenos Aires to Araucanía. The Mapuche were surprised. You had told you, he would have been executed. De Tounens immediately began to organize his "kingdom" and quickly pulled back the anger of the Chilean authorities in coming. Colonel Cornelio Saavedra Rodríguez offered a reward on his head. The Mapuche but not delivered from him. 1871 went Tounens out of money, so he sailed back to France, to publish a second edition of his memoirs.
At his trial in 1874, return in secret and with a false passport to Chile, he was intercepted by the Argentine police in Buenos Aires. In 1876 he undertook a re -start, to reach his "kingdom", this time at gunpoint. However, settlers in Patagonia handed him over to Chilean authorities, so that it came to his deportation to France again.
His health was now already heavily attacked and he died on September 19, 1878 in Tourtoirac in France.
Aftermath
Although de Tounens had no children, his relationship appropriated the title. Gustave - Achille Laviarde tried as Achille I. the U.S. President Grover Cleveland to convince them to recognize the autonomy of Araucania. Neither Cleveland nor any other leader of another State has recognized the foundation until today.
In 1995, the North American Araucanian Royalist Society ( NAARS ), founded as a nonprofit organization that specifies independently of the self-proclaimed royal family and the countries of Chile and Argentina in order to use the care of the history and concerns of the Mapuche nation.