Alberdi: an integrative look at a controversial hero

Inspirer of the National Constitution, lawyer, economist, musician, controversial intellectual, more mentioned than known, Juan Bautista Alberdi is revisited by the historian Maria Victoria Baratta in a book that bears the name of the hero (Criticism), an updated vision of his life and his ideas. The doctor Barattaresearcher at CONICET, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (UBA), author of “The Paraguayan war and the construction of national identity”. We dialogue with her

María Victoria Baratta: I find it interesting that Milei has claimed in the new banknote a historical figure who had a hard time being valued. He had problems with liberal heroes. He was at enmity with Miter and Sarmiento. Miter, in his History of Argentina, does not recognize his work. Peronism appreciates him for his defense of Paraguay in the War of the Triple Alliance, but discards him as liberal. The left won’t stop discussing it. That led him to not be highlighted. The fact is that everyone can find an Alberdi to claim, comfortable, functional, and another to hide. One reason: his work is varied and extensive, and he changed his mind many times.

MVB: Unlike other figures of the 19th century, he was not involved in military events, nor did he hold successive political positions. San Martín, Mitre, Sarmiento were soldiers and politicians. Alberdi is an intellectual who spent more than half of his life outside Argentina. He was introverted, melancholic, depressed. He would settle in a place and stay there, still, it was not enough for a narration of his life. And it was unfair to fictionalize him when his most notable actions were his ideas, his writings and what they caused. That led me to add another essayistic profile to a biographical profile.

P.: He was reserved, but at the same time a womanizer, a party animal.

MVB: He provoked interest in women because of his appearance, his features, and how he played the piano. “Stop getting their hopes up,” his friends wrote to him, “they all fall in love and cry.” He didn’t commit to any. I don’t know if he was a textbook ladies’ man, I think his mysterious romantic demeanor added to it. Going to parties was a medical recommendation.

Q.: “He said to govern is to populate and he remained single,” stated Ignacio B. Anzoátegui…

MVB: Because he had not married, because of his manners, because he had published the newspaper “La Moda”, Sebreli speculated that he had been homosexual. I found no proof of that, no allusions or mockery. With Patrona Abadía, one of his many romances, he had a son, Manuel, whom he never took care of. He had an intense relationship with his friends, from the Generation of ’37. They said that he had become obsessed with the death of his mother who died when she gave birth to him.

Q.: You wanted to be the advisor, the ideologue of a government: you tried with Rosas, with Urquiza, did you achieve it with Roca?

MVB: He achieved this with Urquiza because he sent him “Bases and starting points for the organization”, which had an influence on the Constitution of 1853. Avellaneda and Roca convinced him to leave Paris and return. He was a remote advisor. Although he no longer had intellectual capacity, he was sick, close to death. They took from Alberdi the ideas of selective immigration, opening the country to the world market, the conservative model.

Q.: Aren’t your foundations of how immigration should be raised in “Governing is populating” racist?

MVB: In the mid-19th century, liberal intellectuals had a racist vision, more or less moderate. Sarmiento has it against the aborigines. A first Alberdi maintains that people must be taken for their abilities, not for their origin or race. Then, in “Bases” he says that an indigenous person does not make up the world and that the solution is to bring population from northern Europe. It’s kind of racist, but not purely racial. I will be anachronistic, yours has something of Max Weber when he links the work ethic with the Protestant religion, which values ​​profit, without having guilt, unlike the cult of poverty of Catholicism, of the Spanish colonial tradition.

Q.: José María Rosa says that Alberdi wrote according to his sympathies at the time.

MVB: It is true, during the time of Rosas he tried to be liked by whoever governed, later with Urquiza, but not when in the War of the Triple Alliance he defended Paraguay, he went against what Miter proposed. That costs him dearly, they accuse him of being a traitor to the country. Many friends stopped talking to him, they did not understand that he opposed the war.

Q.: Is it the pacifist side of Alberdi, the one who talks about “The crime of war”?

MVB: It is an advanced attitude. In a century dominated by war he wrote a treatise on pacifism, something not common then. That trait, which is little known, stood out. His text was used by the most important pacifist organizations. If for Miter and Sarmiento his attitude was cowardice, for him it was a political ideology, not that he was a coward. He maintained that the war was unjust.

Q: Did you want to end up having a place at Pere Lachaise?

MVB: Yes, but it didn’t work out. He acquired a space to have his grave, his tombstone, in the famous cemetery of France, but he died in a hospice in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the qualified district of Paris, and was buried in the Neully cemetery. Roca, through Miguel Juárez Celman, has his remains repatriated. which are transferred to the Recoleta cemetery. He was in a vault until his mausoleum was inaugurated in 1902. His body remained there until 1991 when, under the Menem Government, it was transferred to Tucumán, his hometown.

Q: What are you working on now?

MVB: I have just finished a text for a collective book about women in independence in different places in the Río de la Plata. It is about women in Paraguay. As you will see, I am still working on the Paraguayan War, the center of my doctoral thesis, on that conflict and the emotions it aroused.