Why the Lost Kingdom of Patagonia Is a Live Issue for Chile's Mapuche People

By Mat Youkee, Guardian UK

22 March 18

The Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia was dismissed as the 19th century folly of a quixotic Frenchman but it left a powerful legacy of indigenous sovereignty

n the walls of Tourtoirac Abbey in southern France hangs a map that portrays a very different vision of Latin American history. A reproduction of a 19th century original, it shows a huge swath of southern Chile and Argentina as the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia.

For a brief period in the early 1860s the Mapuche tribes of southern Chile were united under a French king in what was – to their minds at least – an independent and sovereign state.

On Thursday, the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia’s enduring government-in-exile will choose a new king with a mandate to raise international awareness of the Mapuche people’s continuing conflict with the Chilean state.

The election comes at a time when Mapuche historians are reconsidering the legacy of the kingdom’s first monarch.

In 1860, Orélie de Tounens, a quixotic lawyer from Tourtoirac, crossed south of Chile’s Biobío river into lands uncolonized by the Spanish empire.

De Tounens donned a poncho, learned the local language and gained acceptance from his hosts. And then, with the consent of Mapuche tribal leaders, he established himself as King Antoine, ruling over a territory stretching to the southern tip of the continent.

Chile was displeased, and in 1862 he was captured, convicted of sedition, and only spared the death penalty due to his perceived insanity.

Since then, de Tounens has been seen as a bizarre footnote in Chilean history, but that version of events is now being challenged by Mapuche authors.

“Chile’s official historiography caricatures de Tounens as a madman, but he was anything but,” says Pedro Cayuqueo, author of The Secret Mapuche History, a 2017 bestseller. “His example feeds the current debate with new and powerful arguments in favour of Mapuche sovereignty.”

De Tounens’s strategy was to show that Mapuches controlled southern Chile – they had signed a 1641 treaty with the Spanish establishing the Biobío as their frontier – and that to annex a people ruled by a European Christian monarch would have been an infraction of international law of the period.

“He was a visionary,” says Reynaldo Mariqueo, the kingdom’s current chargé d’affaires, who lives in Bristol. “He created a constitution that was advanced for the period: a parliamentary monarchy based on the coyag, the traditional Mapuche assembly.”

Mariqueo, a Mapuche socialist, left Chile in 1973 after Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état, and worked as an advocate for Mapuche rights before taking a position with the government-in-exile.

De Tounens had less luck in Europe. Banished from Chile, he returned to Paris but was lampooned for his attempts to recruit settlers by handing out medals, minting coins and commissioning an anthem for “Nouvelle France”.

He made several failed attempts to return to Patagonia, but died in poverty in 1878.

By that time, major Argentinian and Chilean military campaigns to “pacify” the southern lands were well under way. Historians estimate that the Mapuche population of southern Chile fell by 90% as a result.

The kingdom was swallowed by Chile, and de Tounens died childless, but he chose a friend as his successor, setting a precedent for how the crown is passed on to this day. In December, Antoine IV – a French social worker – became the eighth king to die in Europe.

De Tounens’s successors shared his passion for pomp and chivalry, and the kingdom earned a reputation as a quirky irrelevance. In his 1977 travel classic In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin dismissed it as belonging “more to the obsessions of bourgeois France than to the politics of South America”.

That perception has changed in recent years.

“The kingdom has a great symbolic relevance,” says Cayuqueo. “It has become a potent tool of international diplomacy for the Mapuche, which over the decades has allowed it to become a sort of Mapuche embassy in exile.”

By 1883, Chilean forces had seized all of the Mapuche lands, and today an estimated 1.5m members of the group live in Chile, and 200,000 in Argentina.

In both countries, the Mapuche people continue to fight for the restitution of their ancestral lands and have often resorted to arson attacks on farms and forestry equipment. Amnesty International’s 2017-2018 report accuses the Chilean government of abusing anti-terrorism laws and heavy-handed policing of Mapuche dissent.

But today’s supporters of King Antoine say that the existence of the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia undermines Chile’s official narrative.

“The constitutions of Chile and Argentina say they inherited Spanish territories, but this did not include Araucania and Patagonia,” says Mariqueo. “My grandparents remembered the times before their land was illegally usurped through massacres and colonization 130 years ago.”