The Map of New Paraguay: A Crisis in Jesuitism

Author(s): Alan Hager

Source: Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, Vol. 17
(1993), pp. 90-98
Published by: Michigan State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/42952256
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 The Map of New Paraguay:
A Crisis in Jesuitism

Alan Hager
University of Illinois, Chicago

This essay is part of a chapter of a planned book on lost worlds in

the literary consciousness - in a sense, a history of liberal issues in
Western literature. Chapters now include discussion of Sumer, Troy,
Atlantis, Carthage, Languedoc, Aztec and Mayan Mexico, the so-called
lost colony of Sir Walter Raleigh's Virginia on Roanoke Island in
present-day North Carolina, and the Jesuit Missions in South
America. These lost cities situated in Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil
have recently been the subject of special attention in book and film,
notably among the Jesuit fathers; most notably, perhaps, in the
award-winning film "The Mission" and in several documentaries; but
also in an attractive recent photographic essay to which I am indebted,
Lost Cities of Paraguay}
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the question of a new
version of one of history's anomalies, Old Paraguay, fanned the fires
of political unrest in North America in a most violent way. Whenever
the notion of a "New Paraguay" may have been coined, probably in the
early seventeenth century, it was a contributing factor to the papal
expulsion of the Jesuit order and a significant prelude to perhaps the
world's most revolutionary moment in the later seventeen hundreds.
New Paraguay, however, never existed, I argue, even in intention. Its
map is sumultaneously identical with a compendium of the maps of
New France, and it is blank. New Paraguay is everywhere and
nowhere, the locale of what the so-called defenders of the status quo
in the eighteenth century most feared and perhaps what the "new
thinkers" most revered. Yet it is ou topos, as Thomas More said about
another such version of the New World: not there.
In the minds of the Jesuits' formidable opponents - not all French
and Italian Jansenists - and some of its unfortunate allies, Jesuit

C J. McNaspy, Lost Cities of Paraguay: Art and Architecture n the Jesuit

Reductions: 1607-1767, photographs by Jos Blanch (Chicago: Loyola Univer-
sity Press, 1982).

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 Hager : New Paraguay 91

Paraguay had direct application to French Jesuit

America. The French connection was clear to all future combatants.
As a result of their enthusiasm, pro and con, the populace could picture
a huge alliance of model cities inhabited by hundreds of thousands of
Christianized Amerindians in Canada and all but the east coast of
what is now the continental United States. In each city no more than
two or three Jesuits trained in France, with the help of their corps of
native American novices, would supervise the indigenous population
and train them in the most advanced western crafts, notably printing.
They would educate them in the arts, notably music, in the sciences,
notably agriculture and medicine, and in the humanities, notably
theology. The mission of these imagined North American "reductions
was to protect the indigenous population from containment and an-
nihilation by slave-traders and land developers. But the Jesuit order
also meant to save the native peoples from cultural and physical
contamination "caught" from the colonial Frenchman or Englishman
by indoctrination or contagious disease. Finally they were to promote
the greater glory of the Roman Catholic religion in devout publications
and spectacular baroque churches.
That this set of communes was an impossible dream - wish fulfill-
ment or nightmare depending on your bias - had, I argue, an inflam-
matory effect on its notoriety in the world at large, especially in
literature of the period. Practically speaking, the native North
American population was too thin, tribal factionalism too great (even
among the Iroquois confederacy), and heterogeneous religious prac-
tices too ingrained for its initiation. And while the idea of a New
Paraguay provided inspiration for many French Jesuits, I have seen
no evidence that any single missionary in North America planned to
build such a city. Today aerial photographs of the huge territories
considered yield no traces on the land. One of our main sources of early
knowledge of New France, Relations des Jsuites , indeed, presents a
litany of deprivation, tribal warfare, and only intermittent diversion
of the tribes from supposedly objectionable aspects of their traditional
religions, much less full-fledged conversion.
New Paraguay, however, was an issue in Europe, and the very
rumor of a new set of reductions in the making, that might nearly
blanket North America, helped to identify the Jesuit order as a likely

From the Spanish reduccins , "communities," always a debated term,

because, in the eyes of its allies, they constituted no reduction but an expansion
of human social consciousness. See Lost Cities , 8-9. For another version see
Pierre de Charlevoix, The History of Paraguay, 2 vols. (London: Lockyer Davis,
1769), vol. 1, 247; Histoire du Paraguay , 3 vols. (Paris: Didot, GifTart, Nyon,
1756), vol. 1,229.

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92 Seventeenth Meeting Proceedings of the FCHS

sacrificial victim to imperial authority in the years before the French

Revolution. Whatever the all-hallowed and oft-proclaimed complexity
of the various expulsions of the Jesuits, it is clear that the order was
scapegoated during a time of world-wide anxiety, anticipation, and
strife.
A word about the Old Paraguay: thirty or so cities cut out of the
jungles of a section of Brazil, all of Paraguay, and a small sliver of
Argentina; from 1607 to 1767 their average population was one to five
thousand, known as the Jesuit reductions.3 Initially they provided
sanctuary for native South Americans of several tribes, largely the
Guaran,4 from abduction into slavery by Portuguese vigilante groups5
and from other forms of subjugation by Spanish colonists. In return
for surprisingly rapid conversion, the Guaran, formerly a nomadic
and cannibalistic people, settled in these urban protectorates under
their newly Christianized caciques or hereditary chieftains and
received liberal arts education and training in advanced European
trades. They had their experts in printing presses, glazers, stone
cutters and masons, silversmiths, masters of farming and animal
husbandry, rug-weavers, clock-makers, painters, sculptors, architects
and, above all, musicians and musical instrument

builders on the most
advanced levels of Western technology.
When the fourth Bourbon king of Spain, Charles III, expelled the
Jesuit order from his country and its colonies in 1767, the cities fell
into disuse and ruin as they remain for the most part today. By 1772,
when the Spanish authorities had rounded up and deported nearly all
Jesuits from Spanish holdings to Europe, the thirty or so Guaran
reductions, with a population of 80,000 to 120,000 people, were in
decline.7 A lost world in the making.
At that time, there were many testimonials in France - perhaps the
home of extremes of political theory, and the locale of the most violent
revolution and counterrevolution to follow - to the achievements of the
reductions, most notably in 1756 from a thinker who later comically
criticized the Jesuit order in Paraguay in Candide, ou l'Optimisme

3 See Lost Cities , 10.

4 "Guayrami" sometimes, perhaps the source etymologically, as Charlevoix
thought, of Paraguay.
These groups were called Paulistas thanks to their party origins in Sao
Paolo. They are, to a certain extent, glorified as benevolent vigilantes to this
day in Brazil, as the nineteenth-century mafia might be in a hill town like
Corleone in Sicily, but they are not fondly remembered in Paraguay, where the
two official languages remain to this day Guaran and Spanish.
Sometimes of such indigenous artifacts as the peculiar Guarani woodwind
pipe used with such effect in the early parts of the film "The Mission."
7 See Lost Cities , 151.

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 Hager : New Paraguay 93

(1759). There Voltaire pictured Jesuit mission-bu

obsessed military adventurers who created armie
tives to battle Spain itself, a warring band now r
joke, for native cannibalistic consumption. His va
time-honored notion of "missionary stew" no doubt
allegro Voltaire the dire results of incompetent Jes
the mysteries of holy communion. Purported ex-ca
misconstrue a shaky explanation of the eating o
avoid being eaten at the northern edge of a version
Candide must prove he is not a member of the ord
he leads up to the confines of El Dorado a parad
natives, "crying out, 'He is no Jesuit, he is no Jesu
reversal, the host will not be required to eat the gu
While the South American Jesuits of Candide
Voltaire's exquisite humor, however, we should rem
Dorado to which we move at this moment in the
Voltaire an occasion to paint Candide' s unique pa
Paraguayan colors. Voltaire's El Dorado celebrates th
of what the author apparently understood to be
Guaran Republic. His Golden World is a fusion o
opulence Sir Walter Raleigh so sorely missed in
political and social ideals of the missions in the sou
continent.
In chapter 154 of his massive universal history, Essai sur les
Moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations (1756), Voltaire had written,

The conquests of Mexico and of Peru are a prodigy of arrogance; the

cruelties exercized there, the total extermination of the people of Santo
Domingo and those of other islands, are excesses of horror. The estab-
lishment in Paraguay by Spanish Jesuits alone is, in several ways, the
triumph of humanity. It seems to expiate the cruelties of the first
conquerors. The Quakers in North America and the Jesuits in South
America gave a new spectacle to the world.9

8 Ren Pomeau edL Candide, ou l'Optimisme , vol. 48, Les Oevres Completes
deVoltaire (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1980),

In Ren Pomeau ed., Classiques Gamier, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier Frres,

1963), vol. 2, 387: "Les conqutes du Mexique et du Perou sont des prodiges
d'audaces; les cruauts qu'on y a excerces, l'extermination entire des
habitants de Saint-Domingue et de quelques autres les, sont des excs
d'horreur: mais l'tablissement dans le Paraguay par les seuls jsuites espag-
nols parat quelques gards le triomphe de l'humanit; il semble expier les
cruauts des premiers conqurants. Les quakers dans l'Amrique sep-
tentrionale, et les jsuites dans la mridionale, ont donn un nouveau spectacle
au monde."

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94 Seventeenth Meeting Proceedings of the FCHS

Voltaire's reference to the Quakers reflects their ill-fated and noble

efforts, by teaching and example, on behalf of the Iroquois and other
Amerindians in Pennsylvania. The notion of expiation in Old
Paraguay for the sins of the conquistadores , however, is far more
complex, indeed grandiose, because it suggests that the founding of an
indigenous Jesuitical republic in the face of powerful European inter-
ests constituted atonement for the destruction of the Aztec and Mayan
cultures in Mexico, and, above all, the Inca empire in Peru and
Equador, with its gold trinkets so valuable, when reduced to bullion,
to Spain. Voltaire suggests, in fact, that the Jesuit reductions in Old
Paraguay compensated for, indeed replaced, those other glorious lost
worlds of the native Americans. This voice did not go unheard.10
As interesting as Voltaire's equivocation is, perhaps the most
effective spokesman for the Guaran Republic, as it was also known,
was another Frenchman, Voltaire's older contemporary by twelve
years and one of his sources,11 the Jesuit Pierre de Charlevoix, who
visited North America twice for significant periods of time in the early
eighteenth century and wrote The History of Christianity in Japan
(1715), The History of Santo Domingo (1730), ADescription oftheLand
of the Natchez (1744), The History of New France (1744), and The
History of Paraguay (1756). Indeed, he planned to complete a history
of the New World on the scale of Raleigh, Gibbon, and Voltaire before
his death in 1761.
In the years before the sequence of expulsions of the Jesuits - the
Portuguese (1761), the French (1764), the Spanish (1767), and the
Papal expulsion (1773), 12 - there were three somewhat contradictory
charges against the order in reference to its Guaran reductions. First,
supposedly the cities in Old Paraguay were imperial political units in
no way Christianized. Charlevoix reported one fact that fed this
slander. The Guaran were easily converted, apparently in part be-
cause they already practiced a form of baptism in their rivers.13 They
also had a peculiar scapegoat ritual, as Charlevoix describes, of

10 See "Influence de l'Essai," in Pomeau, ed., Candide , lii-lxvi. Voltaire's

history was extremely influential from its publication to approximately 1825,
when it fell into neglect.
H The edition of Les Moeurs of 1761, following the publication of Candide ,
gives Charlevoix as a major source.
*2 The Jesuits survived in disguise and in Russia under the protection of
Catherine the Great, the empress sometimes addressed by Voltaire in his
intermittent correspondence as the "Se mir ami s of the North."
In History of Paraguay, vol. 1, 203. In the French version, Histoire du
Paraguay y vol. 1, 182. As McNaspy reminds us on several occasions, Guaran
hygiene, through bathing in the rivers, was considerably more advanced than
that practiced by their missionaries from Europe.

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 Hager: New Paraguay 95

making a prisoner of war cacique , or chieftain

sacrificing him and universally cannibalizing him
of pap infant broth - that seemed to predict c
explicit substitution of bread and wine for fle
14
munion.

In general, the lightning speed of the Guaran convers

to be suspect, but apparently it was profound. And with
charge, conversion was only the beginning of an ard
spiritual exercises and penances. It looks like these cit
theocracy of the reductions were fanatically Christian, fa
tian, the Guaran and their teachers were fond of say
Spanish colonizers. In fact, the first step in the Jesuit r
cises was to instill the notion that one cannot judge a rel
professed adherents (i.e. those colonizers).15
The second predictable charge against the order in
that the Jesuits were creating a new El Dorado, reaping
the abundant gold mined by Indians for trinkets whic
themselves did not value, as in the Incan Empire. By t
levoix wrote, I think very few thinking Europeans b
Paraguay had any natural resources of that sort. The
never had gold, and the one gem discussed at length
proved less valuable than moonstone on the Spanish m
The third charge was that the Jesuits were creatin
radical politics and conducting experiments with propert
tive states, which they were planning to revive after th
expulsion from Spain and their holdings in the French c
the north in so-called "New Paraguay." This accusation w
dispel, and while Charlevoix challenges it systematically
versions of his own book in other languages, oddly, seem
at least on the surface.
While the title page of the original version of Charlevoix's final
work, Histoire du Paraguay , merely mentions the approval of its
contents by the King of France,17 the title of the English version
proclaims, The History of Paraguay: A Full and Authentic Account of
the Establishments Formed There by the Jesuits from among the
Savage Natives in the Very Center of Barbarism, Establishments
Allowed to Have Realized the Sublime Ideas of Fnelon, Sir Thomas
More y and Plato . An implied notion of international communism,

^ History of Paraguay, vol. 1, 203-04. Histoire du Paraguay , vol. 1, 182.

History of Paraguay, vol. 1, 250ff. Histoire du Paraguay . vol. 1, 231 ff.
16 History of Paraguay, vol. 1, 11-12. Histoire du Paraguay/, vol. 1. 10-11.
^Histoire du Paraguay , "Avec Approbation & Privilege Du Roi."

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96 Seventeenth Meeting Proceedings of the FCHS

indeed. In his introduction, moreover, Charlevoix speaks of the Jesuit

"republicks, founded . . . upon a plan more perfect than that imagined
by Plato, Bacon, and the illustrious author of Telemachus ,"18
Enthusiasm for Archbishop Fnelon - and all radical thought that
opposed the property-mentality - linked to the idea of New Paraguay
would make Charlevoix's work so visible that his order, as we have
seen, might in turn be publicly sacrificed to what the autocratic side
of church and state no doubt saw as the coming revolution. The order
could come under the gun of both the new thinkers (the encyclopedists)
and the old (European court, army, and church), especially because of
the supposed threat of a boundless New Paraguay in New France.
Among the controversialists the verdict was unanimous. A reluctant
Clement XIV, after his predecessor Clement XIII had long refused to
do so, would suppress the order in 1773 by the brief Dominus ac
Redemptor.
The perceived loss of the educational benefits provided by the order
helped reinstate the Society of Jesus within 41 years, in 1814. But the
peculiar song of a communistic Old Paraguay has lived on in South
and Central America in a way that has direct effect on the radical
agenda of the so-called "liberation theologians" so recently scolded by
Pope John Paul II. And who knows what inspiration the idea has for
brother theologians to the north? The idea of New Paraguay provided
by no means the first North American communist scare, but it remains
one of the greatest, an enduring issue, I argue, without grounds.
Charlevoix, when he actually describes the thirty or so cities - two
or three Jesuit and all others Guaran - reminds us of their elaborate
hierarchical nature. The Jesuits are in charge of internal affairs, the
cacique of defence. A group of Indian novices functions as tribune, and
the various estates of the converted perform their functions, high and
low. Charlevoix carefully rejects the notion of the practice of universal
common property, saying, "several persons imagine, that, in this
republick, there is no private property; but," he adds, while "such
regulation might possibly have existed" in founding the city, individual
citizens own their own land and what it produces. If they share their
goods on occasion, it is for Christian charity and for the development
of common land to help in collection of tribute for the Spanish crown
and to defray the costs of man-made and natural disasters, including
invasion from Brazil and an alarming set of contagious epidemics. The
bishops always have ultimate control. Even Charlevoix's word

History of Paraguay, vol. 1, 3. Histoire du Paraguay, vol. 1, 4 reads,

"Rpubliques Chrtiennes . . . fondes sur un plan plus parfait que ceux de
Platon, du Chancelier Bacon & l'illustre Auteur du Telemaque . . ."
History of Paraguay, vol. 1, 267. Histoire du Paraguay, vol. 1, 244.

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 Hager : New Paraguay 97

"republic," according to his conservative tendency, sh

translated back into the Latin res publica , a common
necessarily implying communality nor an electoral
notion of radical Old and New Paraguay lived on an
Francis Parkman, in the later nineteenth centur
Pre Paul le Jeune commented in 1637, in referen
correspondent, "that if the one who wrote that letter,
of what is happening in Paraguay, he saw what wil
in New France."20 Of course in 1637 the idea of Ne
have been a general one, since the actual cities of O
yet to be completed. And although Parkman insists
continued to be driven by an "avowed purpose of
Paraguay on the borders of the Great Lakes," doomed
some satisfaction, to disappointment,21 actual traces o
reduction system, as I have said, remain to be seen. If
idea of New Paraguay was used as inspiration in s
never as a plan of action in the North American
Paraguay remains to this day everywhere and nowh
If a man of the nineteenth century, however,
somewhat prejudiced as Francis Parkman, could see
Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and far to the Canadi
nation of converted and domesticated savages, do
under the paternal and absolute rule of Jesuit father
them in industrial pursuits, the results of which wer
the profit of the producers, but to the building of church
of colleges, the establishment of warehouses and m

20 Francis Parkman, Works. 9 vols. (Boston: Little, Bro

1870-1884), vol. 5, The Jesuits in North America in the Sev
1871, orig. 1869, 153, fn. 1. The original text, accurately r
spelling changes by Parkman from La Relation de ce qu
Nouvelle France en l'Anne 1637 (Rouen: chez Jean le Boulle
reads "que si celuy qui a escrit cette lettre, a leu la Relation
au Paraquais, qu'il a veu ce qui se fera vn iour en la nouuell
le Jeune rues, the fact that in South America missionaries h
do their work, while the French Jesuits up north had only f
he marvels largely at the conversion of former cannibals at
he takes to be Portuguese missionaries. He displays no
elaborate, polyglot, Cordova-trained Jesuit system of seque
banization in the southern jungles. For recent overview on
Lucien Campeau, La Mission des Jsuites chez les Hurons (1634-1650)
(Montreal: Bellarmin, 1987). Parkman, as brilliant as he is as a narrative
historian, with social Darwinist leanings (see Jennings below)- and an insis-
tent advocacy of rugged individualism - seems to have had an investment in
limning a North American communist plot. For wry criticism of some of his
methods, see Francis Jennings, "Francis Parkman: A Brahmin among the
Untouchables," The William and Mary Quarterly 42 (1985):305-28.
The Jesuits in North America , 153.

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98 Seventeenth Meeting Proceedings of the FCHS

construction of works of defence - all controlled by Jesuits, and form-

ing a part of the vast possessions of the order,"22 with all his emphasis
on sequestering indigenous peoples and developing military power (a
model of Sparta without slaves, as Voltaire had suggested, and he
echoed23), what a reaction such a notion must have caused in the
courts and closets of Europe on the eve of the American, then the
French revolutions.

22 Works, vol. 4, The Discovery of the Great West: La Salle , 1871, orig. 1869,
97.

23 Essai sur les Moeurs u , vol. 2, 389. Somewhat paradoxically, Parkman refers
to the Old Paraguayan u esprit de corps , that extinction of selr as "no less strong
than the self-devoted patriotism or Sparta." Egotistical self-annihilation, in-
deed, or, rather loss of oneself in the cause of the order. Works , vol. 4, The
Discovery of the Great West : La Salle , 98.

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