Who were the volunteers? A Spanish Revolutionary and Wanderer in Argentina, 1857-1860

Abstract

The history of revolutionary volunteerism begins with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and continues with the Latin American and Greek Wars of Independence, the French invasion of Algeria, and the civil wars of the Iberian Peninsula and the Río de la Plata. In the aftermath of the European revolutions of 1848 and the Spain’s Progressive Biennium (1854-‍1856), many ex-revolutionaries, exiles, demobilized soldiers, and ordinary immigrants continued this tradition. They volunteered for wars in favor of democracy and national unification, and for liberal campaigns of conquest in the name of civilization. A blossoming academic literature has analyzed this phenomenon. All the same, little is known about ordinary volunteers who did not write memoirs or become the protagonists of romanticized biographies. This microhistory traces the wanderings of Claudio Feliu, a struggling artisan and militiaman from Barcelona who participated in the failed revolution of 1856 and then traveled to Argentina for political and personal reasons where he volunteered for a campaign against the Indians (1857-‍58) and then a naval attack in what was then called the “War of National Unification” (1859). In addition to helping understand the ordinary experiences of volunteers, his life offers a window into analyzing the interconnections between the Río de la Plata and the Mediterranean, and popular democratic internationalism in the mid nineteenth century.