Historiography of the Paraguayan War
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The historiography of the Paraguayan War has undergone profound changes since the outbreak of the conflict. During and after the war, the historiography of the countries involved, for many, was limited to explaining its causes as due only to the expansionist and excessive ambition of Paraguayan president Francisco Solano López. However, since the beginning of the war there was a strong movement pointing out the conflict as the responsibility of the Empire of Brazil and of Argentina led by president Bartolomé Mitre. In this reading, Argentine and Uruguayan federalist intellectuals, such as Juan Bautista Alberdi, are brazen.[1] In Uruguay, the criticism of Luis Alberto de Herrera stood out.[2]
In Paraguay, the response to liberal historiography, which resumed the alliance's theses about the Paraguayan War, was also precocious and very strong. This literature was inserted in a broader revisionist context about the country's history, with emphasis on the appreciation of the action of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia as the founder of independent Paraguay. Among the main revisionist historians are Cecilio Báez (1862–1941); Manuel Domínguez (1868–1935); Blas Garay (1873–1899) and, finally, Juan E. Leary (1879–1969), considered as the initiator of the "positive lopizta" historiography, that is, that positively explained the war from the action of Francisco Solano López.[3] This literature was and continues to be largely ignored in Brazil. It never embraced the thesis that Britain was responsible for the conflict.[4]
In the 1950s, in Argentina, important literature appeared with a Marxist, populist and revisionist influence on the Paraguayan War, with emphasis on authors such as José María Rosa; Enrique Rivera and Milcíades Peña; Adolfo Saldías, Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, also little studied and rarely mentioned in Brazil. In the 1960s, a second historiographic current, more committed to the contemporary ideological struggle of this decade between capitalism and communism, and right and left, presented an interpretation that the conflict was motivated by the interests of the British Empire, which sought to prevent the rise of a militarily and economically powerful Latin American nation.
From the 1980s, new studies proposed different reasons, revealing that the causes were due to the nation building processes of the countries involved. Many of these authors radically denied the thesis of Britain's guilt in the conflict, blaming the Empire of Brazil and Argentina, as in the case of Milcíades Peña and Enrique Rivera, in their classic work. Milcíades Peña was explicit: "Neither the Brazilian monarchy nor the Mitrist oligarchy waged the war in Paraguay on behalf of England".[5] Paradoxically, this historiography also remains unknown in Brazil. Currently, there is an effort to read the conflict that overcomes the mythologies of positive and negative lopizmo.[6]
The traditional historiography,[7] also called "official",[8] emerged immediately after the conflict and lasted until the end of the 1960s. It was a simplistic and exaggerated view of the causes of the Paraguayan War,[9] claiming that it took place thanks to the infinite ambitions of a supposedly megalomaniac and bloodthirsty Solano López who had the intention to create the "Greater Paraguay" through the conquest of territories of the neighboring countries. The Allies' reaction would then have occurred in a desperate attempt to make the "civilization" of constitutional and democratic countries prevail against the "tyrannical barbarism" of Paraguay ruled by López.[10]
The war's long duration was justified by emperor Pedro II's obstinacy in seeing López defeated for despising him by considering him another Latin American caudillo[10][11] and consequently, it would be necessary to wash the honor of Brazil. It has also been claimed that the emperor's irritation occurred after a proposal by López to marry princess Isabel, but this never occurred and is a later invention by an American author.[12] Later, the official cult of war heroes such as the Duke of Caxias, the Marquis of Tamandaré, the Marquis of Erval and Mitre emerged.[11] While in Paraguay, from the end of the war to the mid-1930s, López was also seen as a megalomaniac leader who destroyed the country in an unnecessary and futile war.[13][14]
This was the opinion, for example, of Gustavo Barroso:[15]
The documents clearly prove that the Paraguayan War did not arise from any of the causes that have been attributed to it until now, nor from the danger of Paraguay being absorbed by Brazil, nor from the Paraguayan interest in defending Uruguay invaded by the Empire, nor from its obligation to in maintaining the balance in the Platine basin, nor even the lying and ridiculous fable of a marriage planned by the despot with a daughter of Pedro II. It came straight from Solano López's secret thinking. He premeditated it, as is proven, which absolves the Brazilian Empire of any guilt. Either he wanted to give wings to his morbid vanity and enormous ambition with war, or he intended, at the expense of his neighbors, to extend the territorial domain of his homeland, taking it to the ocean. In this case, his thinking corresponded to the hidden desire of his nation. If that was not the case, not even that justification remains in the memory of El Supremo, as the author of the horrible tragedy.
