The Lives of Eliza Lynch, by Michael Lillis and Ronan Fanning, Gill & Macmillan, €24.99, ISBN: 978-0717146116
The Priest of Paraguay, by Hugh O’Shaughnessy, Zed Books, 176 pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-1848133136
Since Helen of Troy, literature and popular history have delighted in blaming women for starting wars. In the case of South America’s bloodiest and most destructive conflict the guilty siren has long been the Cork beauty Eliza Lynch.
Even before the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) broke out, Lynch’s detractors had shunned her as an avaricious whore, a Parisian courtesan whose wiles had snared Francisco Solano López when the son of Paraguay’s wealthy dictator was in Paris visiting the court of Napoleon III in 1854. By the time Solano López inherited the presidency on the death of his father in 1862 she was his de facto first lady, though they never married. To the outrage of deeply conservative and xenophobic Paraguayan high society, Lynch already had a failed marriage behind her and had not obtained a divorce before leaving for Paraguay.
She never lived under the same roof as her president partner, but bore him seven children, including his first and favourite son, Panchito. This secured her an exalted position from where she could rain down humiliations on polite society, which was scandalised when she dressed up as Queen Elizabeth at a masked ball she threw to celebrate her lover’s inauguration as first magistrate. Solano López’s family never accepted Lynch and his sister Inocencia recalled with disgust years later how she would get drunk and dance in public plazas:
She endeavoured to make herself popular with the low class in this way, and she hostilized [sic] decent families, who did not wish to follow her example ... All this is public and notorious in Asunción, for there were always some ladies, Paraguayans and foreigners, who would have nothing to do with this adulterous woman.1
After war engulfed the countries along the La Plata river system in 1864 the enemy press in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay conducted a campaign of slander against the “Tyrant of Paraguay” and his woman La Lynch, who became a favourite of scurrilous cartoonists in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian officers would lead European visitors to the battlefields along the Paraguay River to view sites from where they said she had directed military operations. English adventurer Richard Burton was one such sightseer and wrote of her: “Madame Lynch must be somewhat ambitious. It is generally believed that she ... worked upon President López and persuaded him that he might easily become Master and Emperor of the Platine Regions.”2 Burton even recounts the scene where on his return to Buenos Aires the Argentine president, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, showed him the plaster model of a crown, apparently that of Napoleon Bonaparte, which had been sent out from Paris for any alterations that Solano López might suggest. He would never get to crown himself emperor, or Lynch his empress. Instead he lost the war, which in its final years saw his obstinacy combine with the brutality of his opponents to destroy his country.
As paranoid dementia gripped him, Solano López turned on his own circle. The wives of officers who surrendered in the field were executed if they did not renounce their husbands. Whole swathes of Paraguay’s administrative and military elite were tortured and killed for supposed treason. One López brother was executed, another died during his brutal imprisonment. Solano López even sentenced his mother to death. Lynch was blamed for this bloodletting too. Charles Washburn, the United States representative in Paraguay wrote:
To this bad, selfish, pitiless woman may be ascribed many of the numberless acts of cruelty of her paramour. That she was the direct cause of the arrest, torture, and execution of thousands of the best people of Paraguay there is no doubt, and it is equally certain that is was for her benefit and that of her children that so many hundreds were arrested and robbed of their property, and afterwards tortured as conspirators or traitors, and then executed, that they should never, by any contingency of war, survive to reclaim their own.3
In March 1870 Solano López was finally hunted down in the Paraguayan wilderness of Cerro Corá and killed by a Brazilian soldier. Panchito died with him and Lynch buried them both with her bare hands before being escorted first to Buenos Aires, then to Montevideo, from where she boarded the Royal Mail packet City of Limerick, which brought her back to Europe, fifteen momentous years after the start of her South American sojourn.
By July 1870 there was a salacious biography of her on sale in Buenos Aires. It was to be the first of many over the next one hundred and thirty years. In 1984 she was listed among The World’s Wickedest Women, and as recently as 2003 an English biographer wrote a new portrait of the rapacious Irish whore who, desiring a crown, led Paraguay to its destruction.4 In direct contrast to this demonisation of Lynch has been her rehabilitation in Paraguay itself. Such a development seemed unlikely in the immediate aftermath of war. A decree issued in May 1870 by the allied-installed government declared: “at the side of the tyrant [she] performed the most criminal and impure relations, which constituted her a monument of infamy and public scandal”5.. The early Buenos Aires biographies sold well in Asunción.
It was only when the country’s small intelligentsia, abetting the political class’s need for a glorious national myth centred on an authoritarian leader, started to re-examine the history of the war that Solano López was transformed from tyrant to national hero and Lynch underwent her own re-evaluation. One of the most influential panegyrists was Juan E O’Leary. His mother had suffered terribly under Solano López during the war, and O’Leary’s half-brothers from her first marriage died during a forced march into the wilderness ahead of the allied advance.
She survived the war and married O’Leary’s father, an Argentine of Irish descent. His first writings, inspired by his mother’s war experiences, were anti-lopista. But he went on to make his name with a series of histories that redefined Solano López as the great defender of Paraguay against the territorial designs of its expansionist neighbours. Far from being a despot the war leader was now identified as the embodiment of the valiant spirit that led Paraguay to defend itself at such devastating cost to its population. When near his end at Cerro Corá Solano López shouted “I die with my sword and with my country” he was almost speaking literally. At the end of the war, Paraguay’s pre-war population of an estimated 450,000 had been reduced by close to 70 per cent, with few adult men among the survivors.
It was thanks to the works of men like O’Leary that the way was cleared for the former dictator to be declared a national hero by 1936. During the near 35-year dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989) the memory of the marshal-president became a state cult, the sanctified memory of the dead dictator buttressing the rule of his thuggish, corrupt political descendant.
In Paraguay at least, Lynch’s reputation underwent a revival along with her former partner’s. She was no longer a gold-digging prostitute but instead Solano López’s loyal and loving companion who remained with him to the bitter end. Stroessner declared her Paraguay’s national heroine. In 1961 he had her bones brought back from Paris, where she had died in obscurity in 1886, to be borne on a gun-carriage to her final resting place in the national cemetery of La Recoleta in Asunción.
Now a new biography of Lynch tries to discover who was the actual woman who gave rise to such wildly contrasting versions of her life. The Lives of Eliza Lynch: Scandal and Courage by Michael Lillis and Ronan Fanning is the first serious historical examination of her career. For a start the authors, the first a former Irish diplomat his colleague Professor Emeritus of Modern History at University College Dublin, do the reader and its subject the basic courtesy of confirming her date and place of birth, something previous biographers did not bother themselves with.
She was born Eliza Lynch in Charleville, Co Cork in 1833 to John Lynch, a Catholic doctor, and his Protestant wife, Jane Lloyd. Little is known about her early life. Her younger brother was baptised in the town in 1839 but thereafter all trace of the family in Cork disappears. She re-enters the historical record in 1850 in Folkestone, Kent, when, aged just sixteen, she married Xavier Quatrefages, a pharmacist in the French army who was eighteen years her senior.
Under English law the union was legal, thanks to the consent of Lynch’s mother. But it was illegal under French military law, which explains the choice of English jurisdiction, given that by now the family was living in France. The clandestine nature of the wedding raises questions about Quatrefages’s intentions – but also those of her own mother. Did she marry off her daughter in this dubious manner because of straitened circumstances following the death of her husband? Lynch left no record of why she married so young or why the marriage failed, apart from her own “poor health”.6 The union lasted just three years, there were no children and the couple never divorced, though Quatrefages did sign a document renouncing any claim to whatever wealth Lynch and her children might inherit from her connection with Solano López. He married again in 1857, making him a bigamist, but Lynch kept their connection secret after her return to Europe in 1870, thus protecting his reputation, based on a successful career culminating in his appointment as chief pharmacist at the veterans’ hospital of Les Invalides in Paris.
After the end of the marriage Lynch was in Paris, where by early 1854 she became involved with Solano López. For over a century and a half most have believed that she did so while working as a prostitute. It is a central tenet of the Lynch legend: even recent academic works on the war that give short shrift to claims that it was sparked by Lynch’s ambition still refer to her as a courtesan. The 1850s was the great decade of les grandes horizontales, when men of position and wealth competed to lavish attention, gifts and money on the most celebrated courtesans of the age. These women of humble backgrounds, great beauty and social accomplishment came to occupy a central place in the social and sexual life of the Parisian elite and many became famous.
Lillis and Fanning, however, find no mention of Lynch in the copious history of the Parisian demimonde, a telling omission considering that her detractors claimed that among those who paid for her company, carriages and opulent apartment were men drawn from European royalty and the old Norman nobility. The authors asked David Kerr, an expert on nineteenth century Parisian society, to conduct a forensic trawl through the documentation for a trace of Lynch, not just among the records of the world of the high class courtesans, but even in the register of the city’s common brothels. Kerr concluded: “[I]t would be fair to assume that Eliza left no trace on the demi-monde Parisien. If she was indeed ever a courtesan, she was a low profile one. There is a manifest disparity between her absolute anonymity in the French sources and the notoriety attributed to her by her South American enemies. The French sources are not shy about naming names. Base commercial journalism [was] written by scandal-mongering hacks, often concerned to blacken reputations and the reputation of the regime, yet still there’s nothing on Eliza.”7.
Kerr did find a brothel owned by one Mme Quatrefages, a rare name in France, but demonstrates that its proprietor could not have been Lynch, since this Quatrefages was still its keeper when Lynch was in Paraguay. He concludes that the likeliest “origin of the rumour that attaches Eliza to Parisian prostitution [is] a simple coincidence of names combined with a good deal of malice”.8
The authors find just one straw in the wind – a letter addressed to Solano López from a certain Mademoiselle de Surville requesting money. Though the partially illegible note does not mention prostitution it does have the tone of the extortionist. De Surville mentions a debt unpaid by Lynch for some furniture which the writer asks him to settle, saying his new paramour “should not be ungrateful towards me”. The letter leaves no doubt that the writer knew Lynch, her new lover and her mother. Alone it is not enough to prove that Lynch had a short-lived career as a courtesan before meeting Solano López, but wisely the authors do not absolutely rule it out. The evidence for this part of her life is scant however, and evidence suggesting she may have been a courtesan or prostitute so scarce as to make it very unlikely.
It is after she meets Solano López that Lynch fully emerges in the historical record. He was twenty-six and in Europe to develop relations with the European Powers. He was also on an arms-buying spree, picking up as well the modern technology and expertise needed in his father’s efforts to modernise the wealthy but technologically backward nation of Paraguay. The value of the contracts he sought to sign opened diplomatic doors and he was received by Queen Victoria and Napoleon III, though he would have been a provincial hick in the courts of Europe. Lynch was nineteen, from an obscure family and with a failed marriage behind her. Her contemporaries thought her a beautiful young woman. It is impossible to say with certainty how they met, perhaps at a ball at the Tuileries on January 4th 1854. An attachment quickly formed and by that summer she was pregnant and Solano López was making plans for her to return with him to Paraguay. The seriousness of his intentions can be seen from the care with which he ensured Quatrefages renounced any claim to his wife’s future wealth.
For her, money must have been part of the attachment’s attraction. Solano López was fantastically wealthy by the standards of the day. His family did not so much rule Paraguay as own it. His father sent him to Europe not just with large sums to buy the best in European weaponry but with enough to make a splash in what was Paraguay’s coming out on the European stage. The ladies of Europe’s courts might have considered him a backwoodsman, stuffed into his glittering uniform, but for an obscure, recently separated young woman he would have been quite a catch.
Her family immediately benefited: Lynch was soon being whisked around Europe, while her mother’s straitened financial circumstances suddenly eased. She even managed to obtain for her wastrel brother a commission in the Paraguayan navy. But none of this is to deny that there was a deep connection between the two lovers. Solano López could have handsomely paid off her family in order to rid himself of the embarrassment of an indiscretion but instead, despite the disapproval of his own family and numerous affairs with other women, Lynch was to remain his lifelong companion.
It is fair to say that Lynch cut a dash in Paraguayan society after her arrival in 1855, though this would not have been difficult. Asunción was a small backwater, a riverside town where growing wealth based on trade in cattle, timber and yerba mate had not resulted in anything approaching social sophistication. It was provincial, deeply conservative and a society where historical fears of encroachment by Brazil and Argentina had created a climate of xenophobia. Lynch’s previous marriage and the rumours put about by Solano López’s own brother, his rival for power, that she was a woman of ill repute meant that the first family refused to acknowledge her.
Lynch does not seem to have sought to use her position as Solano López’s intimate to wreak revenge on her enemies in Asunción. Indeed she was often otherwise occupied, being pregnant for much of the next decade. What she did turn her attention to was becoming rich, or, as Lillis and Fanning rather coyly put it, “she immediately decided, no doubt with the approval and encouragement of López, to become a businesswoman”9.Though the López family ostracised her, nonetheless she went into the family business – milking the state for private gain. This was not a business per se, but rather kleptocracy. One can admire Lynch’s many accomplishments but her acumen in building her Paraguayan fortune would today be condemned as naked corruption.
She quickly became a millionaire and used her wealth to import luxuries from Europe the like of which Asunción had never seen. She also made a concerted effort to raise the cultural tone. This only served to further alienate many of the local elite, but she was much sought out by the growing number of foreigners hired to modernise the country’s military and economy. They found her a source of refinement in what was a lucrative but tedious posting.
After Solano López became president in 1862 Lynch’s social ostracism eased somewhat and she must have looked forward to many years of wealth, position and influence. After all, Paraguay’s two previous leaders had died in office, each after several decades in power. But her lover was a very different man from his predecessors and just two years after taking office his reckless ambition to be the region’s arbitrator plunged the country into a war that was fatal for him and his nation.
Today no serious historian of the War of the Triple Alliance, also known as the Paraguayan War, blames Lynch for starting it, though popular biographers persist in doing so. Lillis and Fanning provide a brisk background to the causes of the war, from which she is correctly absent. The conflict was a forceful attempt by Paraguay to settle to its advantage unresolved disputes with Brazil and Argentina, essentially over borders and the question of free transit along the Plata river system, which was centred on the great Paraná River and its Paraguay River tributary. These connected Paraguay and the isolated interior region of Mato Grosso in Brazil to the Atlantic Ocean.
These disputes had their origins in the frictions created where the Spanish and Portuguese empires had run up against each other and rumbled on into the first decades of independence as the successor states struggled to construct cohesive national units. Paraguay had largely stayed out of the resulting conflicts. It was a sideshow for Brazil compared to its far keener interest in Uruguay, while Argentina, after an abortive attempt to secure Paraguay as one of its provinces at independence in 1810, was thereafter too preoccupied with its own civil wars and countering Brazilian influence in Uruguay to pay it much attention.
But even after decades on the sidelines of the region’s interminable wars, Paraguay still had cause for concern. It did not have clearly defined borders with either of its two larger neighbours and disputed the rights of free transit on the Paraná system with both. On his deathbed López père had had a final word of advice for his eldest son and chosen successor. “There are many pending questions to ventilate; but do not try to solve them by the sword but by the pen, chiefly with Brazil.” These were his final words.10
But Solano López was already preparing for just such an eventuality. His father had made him minister for war on his return from Europe in 1855 and in this role he oversaw a massive military build up. By making all men eligible for conscription he militarised society in a manner the region had never seen before. He was able to do this because he inherited a coherent and compact state, a combination of attributes shared by neither Argentina nor Brazil, and which drew heavily on the country’s strong hispano-indigenous mestizo identity. He was also infected with notions of military grandeur. He was an admirer of the militaristic circus that was Napoleon III’s court and was tellingly the first leader of his country to glory in wearing a military uniform. If in Europe he had acquired arms, warships and military technicians who could provide him with the region’s most powerful fighting force, he had also picked up the concept of the balance of power which had kept the peace on the old continent since the Battle of Waterloo. Applying the doctrine to his own region he foresaw its breakdown in a manner that was prejudicial to Paraguay’s interests.
By 1864 both Argentina and Brazil were backing a rebellion in Uruguay against the government in Montevideo. To see the region’s two largest powers gang up on the government of the smallest was unacceptable to Solano López. He felt he had to act or else Paraguay could be next. He signed an agreement with the beleaguered government in Montevideo to support it in the event of Argentine or Brazilian intervention. His goal was to build a third regional force under Paraguayan leadership to balance the region’s big powers, Argentina and Brazil. This coalition would run from Paraguay down the Paraná system to Uruguay, with disaffected Argentine provinces in between, principally Entre Ríos, joining the two small nations.
After Brazil invaded Uruguay in October 1864, Solano López acted. In November he seized a Brazilian gunboat making its way up the Paraguay River to Mato Grosso. Disregarding his father’s deathbed advice, he told his officials: “If we do not have a war now with Brazil, we shall have one at a less convenient time for ourselves.”11 His reasoning was flawed, however. Uruguay was viewed by both Brazil and Argentina as within their spheres of influence, and both had meddled in it since their independence. In part they did so because they could, as Uruguay struggled to properly define itself as a nation state in the way Paraguay had since independence in 1811. Their interference in Uruguay’s civil war was simply a continuation of traditional River Plate politics, not the departure threatening Paraguay that Solano López saw.
This mistake grew out of another. He failed to understand the role his country and Bolivia played in Brazilian thinking. Brazil, at independence in 1822 the largest, most populous and richest nation on the continent always saw Argentina as its long-term competitor for influence in the southern cone of South America. It sought to delay the emergence of this rivalry in two ways. One was constant meddling in Argentina’s civil wars, with little objective other than to prolong them. The other was to minimise points of friction by maintaining Paraguay and Bolivia as buffer states. Brazil might claim some of Paraguay’s Northern Marshes, but it had no interest in swallowing it whole or seeing Argentina do so.
Electing to go to war on a false premise would not have mattered had Solano López the military means to accomplish his war aims. On paper he did. Brazil’s regular army was just 17,600 strong, though it did have the region’s best navy. But Paraguay could quickly mobilise up to 150,000 well-drilled men, thanks to Solano López’s careful preparations since 1855. The numbers, however, made him arrogant and blind to his military’s defects, most pertinently his weak officer corps. Because of his authoritarianism, the officers were almost completely incapable of initiative, knowing that independent thinking could result in court martial and execution. At the outbreak of the conflict, South America’s largest army had just one general, Solano López himself.
Early tactical victories were part of greater strategic blunders. Solano López attacked Brazil in the strategically less important north while his one ally in Montevideo, unaided, fell to the Brazilian invaders. His unprovoked strike at Argentina after it refused transit for his troops to attack southern Brazil brought it into the war. Potential allies in Entre Ríos and elsewhere shunned him. Despite early victories, within six months his only strategic achievement had been to create the Triple Alliance between Argentina, Brazil and their puppet government in Montevideo. His navy was destroyed in its first engagement with the Brazilians at Riachuelo and his armies proved less than the sum of their parts once they faced significant opposition on their march south. The need for commanders to stick to orders or else consult with him proved disastrous when it often took several days to get field reports back to headquarters asking for new instructions. By the end of 1865 the flower of his army, on which he had spent so much time and money, was destroyed. His country was blockaded from the outside world by an alliance whose manpower reserves were twenty times his own. By the end of the war’s first year his military advantage, on paper substantial at its outbreak, had been squandered and the allies were poised to invade from northern Argentina into Paraguay itself.
Lynch would later tell journalists that by this point Solano López knew the war was lost. But he would continue his doomed rearguard action for another four years. If he could do so this was in part because of the exceptional bravery of the ordinary Paraguayan soldier, in part because of the defensive works British mercenaries had constructed along the Paraguay River, the main allied route to Asunción. Allied commanders, especially Brazil’s admirals, proved themselves overly cautious when faced with these defences, when greater valour would have hastened the war’s end. Few allied commanders won much distinction in the disease-infested swamps where the main battles took place.
Lynch spent much of the conflict at headquarters with her partner. They lived in a comfort that mocked the squalor of the soldiery. When the defensive lines were finally broken and Solano López led the remnants of his army into the wilderness to escape the advancing allies, soldiers were detailed to haul Lynch’s piano. On at least two occasions Solano López was offered the chance to end the war and leave Paraguay. He refused, though by now he was reduced to fighting increasingly desperate defensive engagements with old men and young boys. In early 1869 the Brazilian commander, the Duke of Caxias, told his emperor that Paraguay’s military strength was destroyed and the war over and promptly returned home.
But in Rio de Janeiro the government refused to contemplate peace until the fugitive Solano López unconditionally surrendered. Having correctly dismissed the myth that Lynch’s own personal ambition provoked the war, Lillis and Fanning make a similarly unlikely claim that the Brazilian emperor, Dom Pedro II, prolonged it out of personal hatred of Solano López, insulted that this lowborn provincial had asked for the hand of his daughter Princess Isabel of the ancient Bragança royal family. It is more probable that after huge expenditure in blood and treasure the Brazilian leadership was unwilling to just fold its tents and leave Solano López at large in the Paraguayan wilderness, still able to threaten the river link with Mato Grosso. As the aggrieved party, the Brazilians felt their honour demanded his surrender.
Solano López had several times refused exile and four years of grim fighting had demonstrated his ability to command the loyalty of his countrymen despite the catastrophe into which he had led them. He was able to do so because they knew they were fighting for their country’s very survival. Secret articles of the alliance, published by the British, made clear that the allies intended to annex up to three-quarters of Paraguay.
By 1869 Paraguay was an inferno. Brazil’s armies, now continuing the war almost singlehandedly, devastated the Paraguayans whenever they could trap them in the field. Atrocities were commonplace. The Brazilian commander, the French Count d’Eu, son-in-law to the emperor after his marriage to Princess Isabel, personally ordered the cutting of prisoners’ throats. It was now that Solano López turned on all around him except for Lynch. All through the retreat his tribunals of blood conducted their grim work of interrogation and execution. Though the murderous paranoia ranged wide, many probably were indeed involved in failed conspiracies against their president. As Lillis and Fanning note, it was a pity that such plots failed.
Many witnesses to the deranged final months of Solano López’s reign, such as the US minister Washburn quoted above, blame Lynch for her lover’s worst excesses, having her rivals executed and taking their wealth for herself. It forms part of the unholy trinity of her crimes – low morals, overweening ambition, bloodthirsty greed. But there are counter-testimonies from those who later wrote that it was her intervention that saved them from her lover’s wrath. How to explain the discrepancy? Lynch always seems to have divided opinion among those who knew her. It is telling that Washburn was a dour Presbyterian moralist. His replacement, General Martin McMahon, an Irish-American Catholic, was a passionate defender of Lynch’s honour.
Lynch was probably the best judge of how to handle her increasingly demented lover as defeat closed in around him; she knew when she could intervene and when she could not. It is also fair to assume that amid the raging paranoia that now enveloped the ramshackle Paraguayan state on the run in the wilderness, Lynch was also afraid for her own life. Solano López, who executed his brother and sentenced his own mother to death, was a man who needed careful handling.
Solano López’s private secretary survived the war and on the question of Lynch’s influence wrote in 1906:
It is said of him that in everything the influence of La Lynch was dominant; but those such as I who during the war were close to his side – if they wish to be candid – would agree that this was not true ... No one can absolutely deny that La Lynch had influence, which was normal, given her position at his side; but on the other hand we have often witnessed him reproaching her severely for trying to use her influence with him.12
Finally, in March 1870, Solano López was caught and killed by the Brazilians in the war’s final engagement, which was little more than a last atrocity by men dehumanised by years of savage fighting. Lynch saved herself amid the carnage by waving a Union Jack and insisting on protection as a British subject. She got it, and within months was safely back in Europe.
It is a pity for her biographers that Lynch’s public career does not end here. This thoroughly researched – and now definitive – examination of her life reads like a defence, but only because it exposes so many of the lies that have hitherto passed themselves off as fact. Despite a clear sympathy for its subject, the book is judicious in its handling of the controversies that surround Lynch. Its criticism of Brazil’s conduct of the final stages of the war is partial but this does not impinge on the assessment of Lynch. And though the writers are clearly disgusted with Brazilian actions they do not repeat the error of many Paraguayans over the last century of using this to post-facto justify the behaviour of Solano López, a tyrant who chose for his country to die with him rather than suffer the ignominy of surrender.
Unfortunately Lynch spent most of the next five years trying to recover the vast wealth she had accumulated through her connection with Solano López and lost because of the war. The writers treat this effort sympathetically, calling her attempted return to Asunción in 1875 in the face of great personal danger to claim her property as “showing what a courageous and extraordinary woman she was”. Others might see it as brass neck.
Since arriving in Paraguay in 1855 Lynch had shown an eye for accumulating wealth, not through entrepreneurialism but through exploiting her connection with a corrupt and now overthrown dynasty. On paper it had made her a fantastically wealthy woman and after the war she sought to realise this wealth. Her defenders claim that much of the land she acquired was in territory eyed by Brazil and Argentina and subsequently annexed by them after the war. According to her supporters, Solano López transferred lands claimed by the allies into her name with the notion that this would somehow maintain a Paraguayan presence in them after the final defeat. But Lynch would first make claim on assets within Paraguay itself and it was only after this initiative failed that she and her surviving sons turned to the courts in Argentina and Brazil in a doomed attempt to exercise title in the annexed territories. It is hard to see this as a final act of patriotism towards her dead lover’s country. Considering how she acquired this wealth and the manner in which it was lost, the attempts to recover it only fuel suspicions that money was always an important factor in her calculations.
With the failure to recover her fortune her last years were ones of European anonymity in declining circumstances. We catch a final glimpse of her in the recollection of her daughter-in-law:
Madame Lynch was not the lurid, intriguing adventuress they make her out to be. Like most women living ‘without benefit of clergy’ she was the victim of circumstances. She was not even a clever woman. Brains she had none. She was a warm hearted, sentimental, early Victorian Irishwoman with a ready sympathy for anyone in trouble.13
But what of the nations whose epic bloodletting she was once held responsible for? Despite providing a formal excuse for hostilities, Uruguay played a minimal role in the war. It lacked the state apparatus to support a sustained military effort and anyway realised that it had no strategic interest at stake. Instead its caudillos quickly returned to their own civil wars. These would only end in 1904 when a proper modern nation state can finally be said to have emerged on the east bank of the River Plate. Argentina also reduced its level of commitment as the campaign dragged on, but the country’s elite in Buenos Aires can be said to have had a good war. As in early modern Europe, war accelerated the consolidation of the nascent nation state. The construction of a genuine national army under the control of the capital meant subsequent attempts to repeat the provincial rebellions that had plagued the country since independence were now easily crushed.
Having defeated “the Paraguayan Barbarian”14, Buenos Aires redirected its attentions south and carried its mission of liberal modernisation into the pampas and on to Patagonia, exterminating the native peoples there who stood in the way of their version of progress. Huge tracts of land were opened up and the economy was ready to turn them productive just in time for the coming global boom in agricultural commodities. Brazil borrowed heavily to finance the war effort and much of this was spent on provisions in Argentina, which hosted the allied rearguard. This stimulated the economy and provided the early seed capital for transforming the pampas into one of the world’s great foodbaskets. What followed was Argentina’s golden age, a period when it was second only to the United States as a destination for emigrants seeking a better life in the Americas. The Buenos Aires dream of leading a great power in the New World seemed realised.
Having paid for much of the war effort Brazil was burdened with deficits in the decades to come as it struggled to service this debt.15 This left the imperial regime weakened just as discontent radiated out from younger army officers radicalised by a drawn-out war they saw as having exposed the backwardness of Brazil’s slave economy. Many of the war generation saw the country’s path to modernisation blocked by an imperial elite wedded to maintaining one and a half million souls in bondage. The battle between the forces of modernisation and Brazil’s own barbarians would drag on until eventual emancipation in 1888, but by then the monarchy was fatally weakened. The next year Dom Pedro II, Princess Isabel and the Count d’Eu were sent into exile by a new republican government whose first president had been a captain in the war, while his vice-president reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. At the point of victory the Paraguayan war marked the empire’s zenith. It also marked the beginning of its end: Brazil’s army had definitively entered the political arena and would remain there for the next century.
For Paraguay the war was a cataclysm unlike that experienced by any other South American republic. Its pre-war population of around 450,000 was reduced by over two-thirds. Few of its men survived the war. Its economy was destroyed. Brazil enforced free transit on the rivers and definitively settled the northern border question in its favour. Argentina enforced its claim in the Misiones region to the southeast but failed in its bid to annex the Chaco, the barren region which stretches west of the Paraguay River to Bolivia. Under the terms of the Triple Alliance this was to go to Argentina. But Brazil reneged on the agreement as it reverted to its historic policy of maintaining Bolivia and Paraguay as buffer states against its future southern rival. It feared the loss of the whole Chaco would reduce Paraguay to an unviable rump state and dangerously extend to the west its frontier with Argentina. Paraguay did cede territory here to Argentina but Brazilian manoeuvring ensured it held on to most of the Chaco, a region which today constitutes two-thirds of its national territory.
Ever since the end of the occupation in 1876 Paraguay has caused few ripples on the international stage. In the 1930s it had to fight a bloody three-year war with Bolivia to hold the Chaco, but that victory has done little to alleviate the historical trauma caused by Solano López’s catastrophe. It has largely been an obscure satellite of its larger neighbours. Brazilian and Argentine influence in its internal affairs has alternated depending on their own varying ability and interest in projecting power in the region.
Since the 1970s Brazil has once again been the most important outside actor in Paraguayan affairs. Those affairs have been mainly grim. Destitute, the first postwar governments raised funds by selling off the state’s vast landholdings. In doing so they created one of the most unjust landholding systems in the world, which in turn produced one of the continent’s most unequal societies. It has been presided over by a political system characterised by authoritarianism, populism and corruption. This system reached its apogee under Stroessner, the general who ran the country from 1954 until 1989. He signed the agreement with Brazil to build the massive Itaipú hydroelectric plant on their shared border, the Paraná River, which on completion in 1984 was the world’s biggest. This huge undertaking resulted in a massive inflow of money into the country, which was cornered by Stroessner’s circle, utterly corrupting the elite. Smuggling was another boom industry under the general – marijuana, whiskey, cigarettes and electronics to Brazil and Argentina, cocaine and heroin to the United States.
Brazil tolerated such activities so long as Stroessner remained a loyal client. Once ousted from power in 1989 he settled into a comfortable exile in Brasília. He had been evicted from office by his own circle, in a coup headed by a drug-trafficking general. It was only in April 2008 that Paraguay witnessed power pass peacefully to the opposition for the first time in its history with the election of Fernando Lugo. A former Catholic bishop, he brought together an ideologically incoherent alliance around the goal of ending six decades of rule by the National Republican Association.
Founded by one of Solano López’s generals in 1887 this party was the vehicle through which the rural, more conservative, branch of the elite dominated Paraguayan politics and was Stroessner’s chosen political vehicle. By the time it was finally ousted by Lugo it was little more than a mafia. Stroessner’s malevolent rule and Lugo’s rise to power are recounted by British journalist Hugh O’Shaughnessy and his Paraguayan colleague Edgar Venerando Ruiz Díaz in The Priest of Paraguay: Fernando Lugo and the Making of a Nation. Unfortunately this short book fails to reveal much about the man charged with rebuilding a broken state or provide much guidance as to his chances of succeeding.
For a biography it is wholly uncritical and, even more damningly, uncurious about Lugo the man. His climb to power is treated in a cursory manner that conveys none of the drama involved in bringing down the world’s longest-serving ruling party. Though short, its narrative is fragmented and confused, scattered between a history of Lugo, the Catholic Church in Latin America and Paraguay itself. Factual errors – including the claim that Paraguay’s population before the War of the Triple Alliance was 1,300,000 – hint at a poorly researched and hastily produced effort.
Lugo still has four years of his mandate left but the odds have worsened in recent months on him completing his term. He has openly speculated about whether his vice-president is plotting to oust him as the internal contradictions of his coalition, allied to his own indecisiveness, made for a disastrous first year in power. He has already dismissed the chiefs of the armed forces three times. To do so once was certainly wise given the military’s history of criminality. But to have botched their replacement twice speaks of weakness. Lugo promises land reform but most productive land is in the hands of foreigners, mainly Brazilians, who will resist him. Radicals, unhappy with the slow progress on this central pillar of Lugo’s platform, have started kidnapping ranchers. A wider crisis in the agricultural sector would put at risk one of the very few legitimate productive sectors of the economy. Lugo did win concessions from Brazil over the distribution of income from the Itaipú dam but it was one small success in a trying year.
His capacity to confront these challenges has been hampered by the revelations in April this year that he had fathered several children with different women while in the priesthood. With its implications of promiscuity and personal irresponsibility this has undermined public support and provided an opportunity for ambitious men close to him, including his vice-president, who are daily said to be plotting his removal from power. As the first time in the country’s history the opposition has taken power peacefully, Lugo’s election victory last year marks an important advance for Paraguay. But it remains to be seen if in the future the same will be said of his presidency.
1. The Lives of Eliza Lynch, p 91.
2. Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay, by Sir Richard Francis Burton, Elibron Classics, p 74.
3. The Lives of Eliza Lynch, p 102.
4. The World’s Wickedest Women, by Margaret Nicholas, Bounty Books. The Empress of South America, by Nigel Cawthorne, William Heinemann.
5. The Lives of Eliza Lynch, p 168.
6. The Lives of Eliza Lynch, p 210.
7. The Lives of Eliza Lynch, page 43.
8. The Lives of Eliza Lynch, page 44.
9. The Lives of Eliza Lynch, page 73.
10. The Paraguayan War Vol I: Causes and Early Conduct, by Thomas L Whigham, University of Nebraska Press, p 92. This book is the definitive English-language history on the war’s causes and its first year. A second volume is to be published.
11. The Paraguayan War, p 160.
12. The Lives of Eliza Lynch, p 104
13. The Lives of Eliza Lynch, p 200.
14. The preface of Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay contains an interesting list of the descriptions contemporary defenders and detractors used to describe Solano López.
15. The definitive Brazilian history of the war is Maldita Guerra by Francisco Doratioto. It takes its title from a phrase by the Brazilian statesman the Baron of Cotegipe: “Damned war will hold us back for half a century.”