Luc Capdevila

Una guerra total: Paraguay, 1864-1870. Ensaio de historia del tiempo presente (A total war: Paraguay, 1864-1870. Essay in present time history)

Check up reviews by: Eduardo Gonzlez Calleja in: Mlanges de la Casa de Velzquez, 41-2 Confere resenhas de: Oriana Perugini in: Cuadernos de Marte, 2/2 Confere resenhas de: Jorge Verstringe in: El viejo topo

Ttulo: Each text of a historian is fruit of an encounter of a question, an argument, the archives and the writing. There are hundreds of works on the War of the Triple Alliance, written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English; the rare French books are from the 19th century. This book is different from the others. It discusses the event through the dissonance of its echoes until our days. [...] It starts commenting the autonomy of the conflict: an American war that was the first of modern wars. Here the stress is on the dynamics of the whole society that lead to the disappearing of more than half of Paraguays habitants, 80% of them being the male population under arms, which means, by the end of the conflict, the mass of the men between ten and twelve years of age, at the utmost. The problem is the model character or, to the contrary, the singularity of the Paraguayan case, and it provokes the question about historical comparison. To put it differently, can we say that the War of the Triple Alliance is an example of a totalization process undergone by the international wars in the industrial era, also observed in Europe and North America since the end of the 18th century XVIII until the beginning of the 20th? Or is it that the very particular post-colonial Latin-American environment in which it occurred prompted a singularization of the brutalization of the Paraguayan battlefield? Is there a specificity of the American wars or even of the South-Americans Ttulo: The second movement approaches the archaeology of memory and sheds light on the relation with a societys world through its history. The impact that the event had on the Paraguayan society was considerable. 130 ago, this country was at the edge of disappearing; and in spite of all the destroyed people reconstructed itself, regaining suzerainty, trying to understand what happened to them. We could think that in counterpart the knowledge of what was would be clarified by an abundant bibliography. Since one hundred years, the works are accumulaing, and the understanding of the event continues perturbed by passion, exaltation or pain in front of a history that continues alive. The neighbor republics historiography on the War of the Triple Alliance, also polemical and passionate until the 70ies, shows since some decades a generational renewal that implies in critical and more distanced researches. The Paraguayan historiography is only beginning to transit this way. (p. 28) Ttulo: The third movement of this work is reserved to the archives. We found the official correspondences dispatched by the three French consuls from Asuncin to Quai d'Orsay between 1863 and 1872. They are exceptional documents that allow to follow nearly the whole conflict until the post-war period, due to the fact that France under Napoleon III and the United States were the only countries that maintained a permanent representation in Paraguay in the years of 1864-1869. (p. 13-15)