, Orélie-Antoine I, King of Araucanía and Patagonia. In 1858, Antoine de Tounens, a former lawyer in
Périgueux, France, who had read the book
La Araucana by
Alonso de Ercilla, decided to go to Araucanía, inspired to become its king after reading the book. He landed at the port of
Coquimbo in Chile and met some
loncos (Mapuche tribal leaders) after arriving South to the
Biobío. He promised them some guns and the help of France to maintain their independence from Chile. The Indians elected him Great
Toqui, Supreme Chieftain of the Mapuches, possibly in the belief that their cause might be better served with a European acting on their behalf. On November 17, 1860, and November 20, 1860, the self-proclaimed sovereign proclaimed via two decrees that the regions of
Araucanía and eastern
Patagonia did not need to depend on any other states and that the Kingdom of Araucanía is founded with himself as monarch under the name King Orélie-Antoine I. He declared
Perquenco capital of his kingdom, created a flag, and had coins minted for the nation under the name of
Nouvelle France. He writes in his Memoirs in 1863 "I took the title of king, by an ordinance of November 17, 1860, which established the bases of the hereditary constitutional government founded by me [...] On November 17, I returned to Araucanía to be publicly recognized as king, which took place on December 25, 26, 27 and 30. Weren't we, the Araucanians, free to bestow power on me, and I to accept it?" The supposed founding of the Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia led to the
Occupation of Araucanía by Chilean forces. Chilean president
José Joaquín Pérez authorized
Cornelio Saavedra Rodríguez, commander of the Chilean troops, to arrest Antoine de Tounens on January 5, 1862. Tounens was then imprisoned and declared insane on September 2, 1862, by the court of Santiago Upon hearing that his presence in Araucanía had been revealed Orélie-Antoine de Tounens fled to Argentina, having however promised
Quilapán to obtain arms. A French warship, ''d'Entrecasteaux'', that anchored in 1870 at
Corral, drew suspicions from Saavedra of some sort of French interference. On August 28, 1873, the Criminal Court of Paris ruled that Antoine de Tounens, first "king of Araucanía and Patagonia", did not justify his claim to the status of sovereignty. He died in poverty on September 17, 1878, in
Tourtoirac, France, after years of fruitlessly struggling to regain his kingdom. According to travel writer Bruce Chatwin, the later history of the "kingdom" belongs rather to "the obsessions of bourgeois France than to the politics of South America." A French champagne salesman, Gustave Laviarde, impressed by the story, decided to assume the vacant throne as Aquiles I. He was appointed heir to the throne by Orélie-Antoine. The pretenders to the throne of Araucanía and Patagonia have been called monarchs and sovereigns of fantasy, "having only fanciful claims to a kingdom without legal existence and having no international recognition". Therefore the "throne of Araucanía" is sometimes the subject of disputes between "pretenders", some journalists wrote : "The memory of the French adventurer Orélie-Antoine, self-proclaimed king in 1860, and the defense of the rights of the Mapuches guide the action of this strange symbolic monarchy" and "The intensification of the
Mapuche conflict in recent years has given a new purpose to the Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia, long considered an absurdity by French society." Mapuche writer
Pedro Cayuqueo considers the kingdom a lost opportunity and speculates that, in a French-ruled Araucanía, the Mapuche would have rights similar to that of the
Kanak people, who were given the possibility of independence from France in
a 2018 referendum. == Pretenders to the throne after Antoine de Tounens ==