User:Lyonlamb~enwiki/Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon

Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon

Charles Rene Gaston Gustave de Raousset Boulbon was a French adventurer and entrepreneur, and one of the theoretician of Colonialism. He was born in Avignon, in 1817. During his life in France he was a typical "rural nobleman". He inherited the title of Count, and just as happened to many members of French nobility after the French Revolution he spent his fortune gambling and drinking in Paris. He moves to Algiers, where his first theories about Colonialism are born; the French Revolution of 1848 and the folowing Bourbon Restoration kill his hopes of making a new fortune on Africa and he returns to Paris, where he fails in his attempt to integrate into a society in which aristocrats were fading and giving way to a new bourgeoisie.

Unable to survive in France he boards a ship sailing to the Americas as a third-class passenger; once he disembarks in a Colombian port, his impressions are typical of a 19th Century aristocrat: A letter to a friend describes Colombia as:

...the true America, the Spanish America. Ruins, mendicants, racial degradation, the haphazard mixture of all kins of blood, vagabonds playing guitar... naked children, little savages running everywhere amongst dogs... All of it in an admirable state of Nature.

Gaston de Raousset in Mexico and the Battle of Guaymas

The flag of Sonora created by Raousset in 1853

He arrived at his destination in San Francisco and he feels deeply disillusioned after not receiving the treatment he thought was deserved for a Count.

After a series of failed enterprises as a gold prospector he became involved in a conflict in the Mexican state of Sonora. The Battle of Guaymas of 1853 was an act of war against Mexico by a group of mercenaries under the command of the Count Raousset-Boulbon.

The main objective of the invaders was to attain independence for the province of Sonora, in order to form a new country separate from Mexico, following the example of Texas, which had achieved the same thing in 1836. Gaston and his group achieved a small victory in the city of Hermosillo, capital of the State, but in the end he did not count with the support he needed and he was defeated in Guaymas by a small army.

The 12th of August of 1854 the Count Raousset-Boulbon was executed by a firing squad in Guaymas. He refused to wear a blinfold.

References

• Un folletín realizado: la aventura del conde de Raousset-Boulbon., Glantz, Margo, 1973.
• Un conquistador moderne : le comte de Raousset-Boulbon, Jacques Dyssord, Sorlot, 1943.
• El "Conde de Sonora". Pablo Condal. Revista, "Todo es historia, El ayer de los hechos de hoy. "Año II. Núm. 18. Marzo de 1977. Grupo Editorial, S. A. Cd. Satélite. México D.F.