On the 25th of May, 1810, a revolutionary movement in Buenos Aires overthrew the Spanish Viceroy. Its leaders were young Creole liberals, natives of Buenos Aires, and a junta was formed from their number which undertook the supreme direction of affairs. Prompt measures were taken to overthrow the Spanish provincial authorities and to secure the co-operation and obedience of all the subdivisions of the Viceroyalty. Manuel Belgrano, one of the enthusiastic leaders of the movement, was sent up the river to take possession of Entre Rios and Corrientes for the junta, and to attack the Spanish governor of Paraguay. He was accompanied by only a few hundred troops, but he counted on the sympathy and help of the people among whom he was going.

In Entre Rios and Corrientes, which were mere administrative divisions of the province of Buenos Aires, he encountered no difficulty. The gauchos, who formed almost the whole population, hated outside control and cared little who claimed to be supreme at Buenos Aires. Belgrano marched through the centre of these districts and reached the ParanÁ at the old Jesuit capital of Candelaria. Once across the river he found a different atmosphere. The home-loving Indian population regarded Belgrano's band as invaders and responded promptly to the call of the Spanish governor, old Velasco, to take up arms and repel the aggression. The Paraguayans hated the Buenos Aireans with an intensity born of ignorance and isolation, and a considerable force of militia assembled for the defence of Asuncion. Among its most popular leaders was a native Paraguayan named Yegros. Belgrano was not opposed until he approached within sixty miles of Asuncion, but on the 19th of January, 1811, the Paraguayans turned and crushed his little army. He retreated to the south and on March 9th was captured with his whole force.

This repulse ended, once for all, the hope cherished by the Buenos Aires liberals of persuading or compelling the submission of Paraguay. The battle of the 19th of January, and the hostile attitude of the whole Paraguayan people, definitely assured Paraguay's independence from Buenos Aires. It soon became evident that independence from Spain had been secured as well. In contact with their Argentine prisoners, the more intelligent Paraguayan leaders were quickly convinced of the advantages which home rule would bring to Paraguay, and that they themselves ought to control the government until affairs in Spain should be settled. The governor had no Spanish troops nor any hope of receiving help, either from the distracted mother-country or from the governors of other parts of South America. Each of them had enough to do in taking care of himself. Velasco's secretary was an educated Buenos Airean, a liberal, and an autonomist. He plotted the overthrow of his chief in connection with a Paraguayan officer who was popular with the troops in Asuncion.

Two months after Belgrano's surrender, a bloodless revolution occurred. The governor offered no resistance; he simply stepped to one side and became a private citizen, while the patriots took possession of the barracks and began casting about blindly for a solid basis for a new government. After a good deal of confusion the prominent citizens of the province were called together in a sort of rude Constituent Congress, and a junta was formed. General Yegros and Dr. Francia were the two most prominent and popular men in the country, and they were naturally and inevitably selected as chief members. Yegros had been the principal leader of the militia, and Francia was considered the most learned and able man in the community. He was a lawyer who had become a sort of demigod to the lower classes by his fearless advocacy of their rights, and inspired almost superstitious reverence by his reputation for learning and disinterestedness. He was selected as secretary, while Yegros, an ignorant soldier, became president of the junta. Francia's abilities and courage immediately made him the dominating figure. Jealousies arose and he stepped out for a while, but the weaker men who succeeded him could not control the situation. Two years later a popular assembly met which was ready to submit to his advice in everything. The junta was dismissed and he and Yegros were invested with supreme power under the title of Consuls. A year later he forced Yegros out and with general consent assumed the position of sole executive, and in 1816 he was formally declared supreme and perpetual dictator.

For the next twenty-five years he was the Government of Paraguay. History does not record another instance in which a single man so dominated and controlled a people. A solitary, mysterious figure, of whose thoughts, purposes, and real character little is known, the worst acts of his life were the most picturesque and alone have been recorded. Although the great Carlyle includes him among the heroes whose memory mankind should worship, the opinion of his detractors is likely to triumph. Francia will go down to history as a bloody-minded, implacable despot, whose influence and purposes were wholly evil. After reading all that has been written about this singular character, my mind inclines more to the judgment of Carlyle. I feel that the vivid imagination of the great Scotchman has pierced the clouds which enshrouded the spirit of a great and lonely man and has seen the soul of Francia as he was. Cruel, suspicious, ruthless, and heartless as he undeniably became, his acts will not bear the interpretation that his purposes were selfish or that he was animated by mere vulgar ambition.

The population over which he ruled had for centuries been trained to obedience by the Jesuits and the Creole landowners. The Creoles were few and the Spaniards still fewer. Francia based his power upon the Indian population and not on the little aristocracy whose members boasted of white blood. Convinced that the Indians were not fit for self-government, he also believed that it would be disastrous to permit the white oligarchy to rule. He proposed to save Paraguay from the civil disturbances that distracted the rest of South America. He therefore absorbed all power in his own hands and ruthlessly repressed any indications of insubordination among those of Spanish blood. The Indians blindly obeyed him, and he relentlessly pursued the Creoles and the priests, seeming to regard them only as dangerous firebrands who might at any time start up a conflagration in the peaceful body politic, and not as citizens entitled to the protection of the State.

He absorbed in his own person all the functions of government; he had no confidants and no assistants; he allowed no Paraguayan to approach him on terms of equality. When he died, a careful search failed to reveal any records of the immense amount of governmental business which he had transacted during thirty years. The orders for executions were simply messages signed by him and returned, to be destroyed as soon as they had been carried out. The longer he lived the more completely did he apply his system of absolutism, and the more confident he became that he alone could govern his people for his people's good. He adopted a policy of commercial isolation, and intercourse with the outside world was absolutely forbidden. Foreigners were not permitted to enter the country without a special permit, and once there were rarely allowed to leave.

He neither sent nor received consuls nor ministers to foreign nations. Foreign vessels were excluded from the Paraguay River and allowed to visit only one port in the south-eastern corner of the country. He was the sole foreign merchant. The communistic system inherited from the Jesuits was developed and extended to the secular parts of the country. The government owned two-thirds of the land and conducted great farms and ranches in various parts of the territory. If labour was needed in gathering crops, Francia had recourse to forced enlistment. Those Indian missions which remained free he brought gradually under his own control and followed the old Jesuit policy of compelling the wild Indians to work like other citizens. Dreading interference by Spain, Brazil, or Buenos Aires, he improved the military forces and began the organisation of the whole population into a militia. His policy, however, was peaceful, and the difficulty of getting arms up the river, past the forces of the Argentine warring factions, prevented his organising an army fit for offensive operations even if he had desired to have one.

As he grew older he became more solitary and ferocious. Always a gloomy and peculiar man, absorbed in his studies and making no account of the ordinary pleasures and interests of mankind, he had reached the age of fifty-five and assumed supreme power, without marrying. His public labours still further cut him off from thoughts of family and friends; and, although it has been asserted that he married a young Frenchwoman when he was past seventy, nothing is known about her. It is certain that he left no children and died attended only by servants. His severities against the educated classes increased; he suffered from frequent fits of hypochondria; he ordered wholesale executions, and seven hundred political prisoners filled the jails when he died. His moroseness increased year by year. He feared assassination and occupied several houses, letting no one know where he was going to sleep from one night to another, and when walking the streets kept his guards at a distance before and behind him. Woe to the enemy or suspect who attracted his attention! Such was the terror inspired by this dreadful old man that the news that he was out would clear the streets. A white Paraguayan literally dared not utter his name; during his lifetime he was "El Supremo," and after he was dead for generations he was referred to simply as "El Defunto." For years when men spoke of him they looked behind them and crossed themselves, as if dreading that the mighty old man could send devils to spy upon them,—at least this is the story of Francia's enemies who have made it their business to hand his name down to execration. The real reason may have been that Francia's successors regarded defamation of "El Defunto" as an indication of unfriendliness to themselves.

Devil or saint, hypochondriac or hero, actuated by morbid vanity or by the purest altruism, there is no difficulty in estimating the results of Francia's work and the extent of his abilities. That he had a will of iron and a capacity beyond the ordinary is proven by his life before he became dictator, as well as his successes afterwards. All authorities agree that he had acquired as a lawyer a remarkable ascendancy over the common people by his fearlessness in maintaining their causes before the courts and corrupt officials. He did not rise by any sycophant arts; indeed, he never veiled the contempt he felt for the party schemers and officials around him. When he had supreme power in his hands he used it for no selfish indulgences. His life was austere and abstemious; parsimonious for himself, he was lavish for the public. He would accept no present, and either returned those sent him, or sent back their value in money. Though he had been educated for the priesthood and had never been out of South America he had absorbed liberal religious principles from his reading. Nothing could have been more likely to offend the Catholic Indians, upon whose good will his power rested, than his refusal to attend mass, but he was honest enough with himself and with them not to simulate a sentiment which he did not feel. In his manners and life he was absolutely modest; he received any who chose to see him; if he was terrible it was to the wealthy and the powerful; the humblest Indian received a hearing and justice. During his reign Paraguay remained undisturbed, wrapped in a profound peace; the population rapidly increased, and though commerce and manufactures did not flourish, nor the new ideas which were transforming the face of the civilised world penetrate within his barriers, food and clothing were plenty and cheap, and the Paraguayans prospered in their own humble fashion. Though they might not sell their delicious matte, there was no limitation on its domestic use, and although money was not plentiful and foreign goods were a rarity, a fat steer could be bought for a dollar, and want was unknown.

The old man lived until 1840 in the full possession of unquestioned supreme power, dying at the age of eighty-three years. His final illness lasted only a few days, and he went on attending to business to the very end. When asked to appoint a successor he refused, bitterly saying that there would be no lack of heirs. His legitimate and natural successor could only be that man who could raise himself through the mass by his force of character and prove himself capable of dominating the disorganising elements of Creole society.