Simon Bolivar

by John Lynch

  His solicitude for Hipólita was accompanied by concern about his own reputation as a youth. Stung perhaps by malicious rumours spread by his enemies and by the French traveller Gaspar Mollien that he was uneducated, he later wrote to his colleague Santander, ‘It is not true that my education was badly neglected, for my mother and tutors did all they could to ensure that I applied myself to study: they secured for me the leading teachers in my country. Robinson [Simón Rodríguez], whom you know, taught me reading and writing and grammar; geography and literature were taught by the famous Bello; Father Andújar, so much esteemed by Humboldt, set up an academy of mathematics especially for me…. Still in my youth I took lessons in fencing, dancing, and horsemanship.’38 For ‘academy’ perhaps we should read ‘classes’, given for a small number of pupils in Bolívar’s own home, but otherwise his claim that he was educated as well as any American child of good family could possibly have been under Spanish rule was more or less correct. It is later historians who have exaggerated the influence of Rodríguez, Venezuela’s star of the Enlightenment.

  In 1793 the ten–year–old Simón was enrolled in the Escuela Pública de Caracas, along with 113 other pupils, who were taught reading, writing and arithmetic, and religious doctrine. The young Rodríguez was a conscientious if dissatisfied teacher in this ramshackle institution, where education was rudimentary; pupils arrived at any hour, some paid, some did not.39 The boy came to hate both the school and the man appointed to be his guardian, his uncle Carlos Palacios, and in 1795, at the age of twelve, he fled from both to the house of his sister, María Antonia, and her husband. She received him with open arms, convinced that he needed protection not only against his uncle but also against his own inclination ‘to wander by himself through the streets of Caracas, on foot and on horseback, mixing with boys who are not of his class’. He showed an early determination to take command of his life, not only in mixing easily with other classes but in standing up to the audiencia, telling them they could do what they liked with his property but not with his person, and that if slaves had the freedom to choose their masters, so did he have the right to choose where he lived.40 But Carlos Palacios did not intend to allow this family asset to slip so easily from his grasp. After an ill–tempered lawsuit and spirited resistance by the boy he was propelled back to school and to the house of his teacher, Rodríguez; this was a motley ménage not apparently to his liking, which he soon abandoned for his guardian’s house. His education was subsequently advanced through the tuition of Father Andújar, a Capuchin missionary priest, who held his classes in Bolívar’s home, and the young Andrés Bello, who taught a few private pupils before entering the colonial bureaucracy and who later described Bolívar as a talented but restless young man, deficient in application.41

  It is often assumed that the most influential of Bolívar’s teachers was Simón Rodríguez, but whatever their subsequent relationship they had only brief contact in Caracas, and the boy’s resistance to authority in 1795 seems to have been directed against his teacher Rodríguez as well as his uncle. Already a dissident, the teacher left Caracas in 1797 and, taking the name of Samuel Robinson, spent the next years in the United States and Europe before he met Bolívar again. His contribution to the intellectual life of the time was that of a pedagogue rather than a philosopher, and his principal concern was securing education for citizens of the new republics, believing that without popular education there could be no true society and without society no republic. His conversion to Rousseau’s Emile could have had little influence in Caracas where he was teaching not one–to–one but in a school of over a hundred pupils.

  In the tradition of his family Bolívar enrolled at the age of fourteen as a cadet in the elite militia corps, the White Volunteers of the Valley of Aragua, which had been founded by his grandfather and commanded by his father. Here natural powers of leadership emerged, and he was promoted to second lieutenant after a year; he completed his military training, which was probably not extensive, with a good report. This was a typical step among the creole elite. So, too, was the decision of his guardian to send him to Spain, the American equivalent of the grand tour, there to continue his studies in a style appropriate for an upper–class creole. Carlos Palacios sent him to his uncle Esteban with a mean recommendation, warning that the boy had already spent extravagantly on the journey, so ‘it is necessary to control him, as I have said before, first because otherwise he will become accustomed to spending money without restraint or economy, and second because he is not as wealthy as he imagines…. You must talk to him firmly and put him in a college if he does not behave with the judgement and application he should.’42 The unstated conclusion of this letter was probably ‘otherwise he might waste the family fortune and we shall all suffer’.

  Old Spain, Young Love

  Bolívar left Caracas for Spain at the age of fifteen. Behind him lay an affluent if troubled childhood, a family life with its ups and downs, and only brief contact with his teachers, two of whom, Rodríguez and Bello, would return to his life in later years. Here was a youth deprived of strong family supports but not of his wealth and confidence. Self–pity he had none and the modern tendency to attribute a person’s later behaviour to a disturbed childhood was totally absent from his thinking. He was no rebel and knew when to back off, but he already showed signs of a strong will and power of decision, qualities enhanced by some military training and inclination, while freedom from close family control enabled him to socialize easily with lower–class people and to show an early trace of that noblesse oblige that became a hallmark of his character.

  He sailed from La Guaira on 19 January 1799 on the San Ildefonso, a Spanish warship that had to navigate warily; Spain was at war with England, and Havana, the port of rendezvous for convoys returning to Spain, was blockaded by the enemy, as he explained in a letter to his uncle Pedro Palacios Blanco, an early lesson for the boy in relative sea power.43 The delay in Veracruz, where the ship loaded Mexican silver, gave Bolívar time to make a quick visit to Mexico City before the Atlantic crossing; this was made without incident and the vessel docked at Santoña, Vizcaya, on 13 May 1799. From there he made his way to Madrid.

  Bourbon Madrid, a city of palaces, grand houses, historic squares and streets, with an active cultural and social life, presented a sensational contrast to the urban existence Bolívar had known in Caracas. Behind the façade, however, Spain was in deep recession, and had little to teach an American except the illusion of power. Since 1789 the entry of French revolutionary ideas and invasion by French armies would have tested any regime. But this was a special regime, headed by a king, Charles IV, whose vacant benevolence, depicted by Goya, was also characteristic of his political attitudes, and Godoy recalled how each night the king would ask him, ‘What have my subjects been doing today?’44 Queen María Luisa of Parma was a source of scandal in Spain and speculation abroad. Spaniards believed that she took lovers even before she met Manuel Godoy and was not averse to them thereafter. But she knew what she was doing in selecting Godoy and grooming him to be first minister, creature of the monarchs, their support and adviser. Godoy was expected to deal firmly with France, but he took Spain into a ruinous war with its neighbour and then, in 1796, to an expensive peace. The Spain that Bolívar entered in 1799, therefore, was not a metropolis to inspire confidence: what he observed was a satellite of France and an enemy of Britain, a costly dilemma from which the old regime would only escape after a decade of destruction.

  Bolívar lodged first with his two uncles, Esteban and Pedro Palacios, in a house belonging to Manuel Mallo, a minor South American courtier with Godoy–like pretensions and a lifestyle of doubtful propriety. As they were a family unit the three soon moved out to a house of their own, where being permanently short of money and observing the high–spending lifestyle of their nephew, the uncles were anxious for Bolívar to pay some of the bills. Esteban had a modest government sinecure that kept him alive while he lobbied unsuccessfully for a noble title for the family; lac
king top contacts, hovering on the fringes of court life, and always impecunious, he was no advertisement for the Bolívars. Fortunately for Simón he found a more serious patron in the marquis of Uztáriz, another Venezuelan who, after a good education in Caracas, had secured an official career in Spain; when Bolívar went to lodge with him in 1800 at 6 calle de Atocha, he was Minister of the War Council.

  Uztáriz was the first stable influence in Bolívar’s life, effectively his guardian and tutor in Madrid, a father figure always remembered with respect.45 Under his direction and in his extensive library, the young man studied philosophy, history, mathematics and languages, and in his circle he was able to develop his social skills, to listen and to learn. And there he met María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alayza, daughter of a Venezuelan father and Spanish mother, a nineteen–year–old, whose dark eyes, pale complexion and, above all, shy and gentle nature captivated Bolívar. Seventeen as he was, he quickly declared his love. Romance was accompanied by calculation. The entail bequeathed to him by Aristeguieta depended on his making a good marriage, so he began his campaign without delay, ‘to avoid’, he said, ‘the damage I would cause by failing to have an heir’.46 He was betrothed in August 1800 and became her novio. He was impatient when the widowed father took her off to their house in Bilbao, ‘lovable enchantress of my soul’, and at the same time seems to have suspected that his love was greater than hers. With Uztáriz’s departure from Madrid to a posting in Teruel, the capital suddenly became empty for Bolívar, and he experienced some obscure hostility from the authorities. So he moved to Bilbao in March 1801 and then made a quick visit to Paris in January–March 1802, where he came to the conclusion that ‘spain was a country of savages compared to France’.47 In April 1802 Bolívar was given leave to return to Spain and he rushed to Madrid to renew his pursuit of María Teresa and, on 5 May, to make a formal declaration of intent to marry, unimpeded by ‘any vow of chastity or other canonical impediment’. By now her father had relented, persuaded no doubt by the marriage agreement and a glance at the figure of 200,000 duros as the young man’s assets. Bolívar described María Teresa as ‘a jewel without a flaw, valuable beyond esteem’, but his lawyers helped him to place a value on her and he settled a handsome sum of money (100,000 reales, one tenth of his liquid assets) on the bride, ‘in consideration of her distinguished birth, her virginity, her spinsterhood, her personal qualities, and her readiness to leave Spain with her husband’.48 Immediate return to Venezuela, in fact, was Bolívar’s next priority. They were married in the church of San Sebastián on 26 May 1802; he was eighteen, she twenty–one. They left promptly for La Coruña and took ship for Caracas on 15 June. Since the Peace of Amiens in March the Atlantic was a peaceful sea and they made a good crossing to La Guaira, arriving on 12 July. Their home in Venezuela, however, was not to be a haven.

  Bolívar owned various properties, a town house on the corner of Las Gradillas, south–east of the main square of Caracas, an estate in the valley of Seuse on the southern edge of the city, the hacienda of Yare, where he established extensive indigo plantations, and the San Mateo estate in the Aragua valley, the historic seat of the family. It was here that Bolívar took his young wife, who began to set up home while he supervised the work of the estate and took exercise on foot and horseback.49 His joy was brief. María Teresa contracted a malignant fever, weakened rapidly, and on 22 January 1803 died, just eight months after her wedding. Bolívar was distraught, overcome by immense grief and the loss of young love.

  The next months were ones of unrelieved sadness. Everywhere he looked in Caracas there were problems, and the emptiness he felt at home was filled by a series of trying frustrations in his affairs. He had to rebuke his uncle Carlos Palacios for sharp practice in the accounting of his inheritance; he was forced to complain to the authorities against his neighbours at Seuse who were encroaching on his estate; investments had to be made in his coffee and indigo plantations and arrangements for the export of their products; and negotiations for transfer of funds to Europe were proving difficult. All these troubles strengthened his decision that it was time to get out. Years later he unburdened himself.

  I loved my wife dearly, and her death caused me to vow that I would never marry again; I have kept my word. See how things have turned out: had I not been widowed perhaps my life would have been different; I would not be General Bolívar, nor the Liberator, though I agree I was not made to be the mayor of San Mateo…. But when I arrived in Caracas from Europe with my bride in 1801 [1802], let me say at once that my mind was filled only with the emotions of passionate love and not with political ideas, for these had not yet taken hold of my imagination. When my wife died and I was left desolate from that premature and unexpected loss, I returned to Spain, and from Madrid I went to France and then to Italy. It was then that I began to take an interest in public affairs, politics began to concern me, and I followed the different changes then emerging…. Without the death of my wife I would not have made my second journey to Europe, and it is probable that the ideas I acquired on my travels would not have taken root in Caracas or San Mateo, nor would I have gained in America the experience and knowledge of the world, of men, and of things that have been so valuable to me in the course of my political career. The death of my wife propelled me early on the road to politics.50

  Personal tragedy not only sent him back to Europe to study and learn; he there acquired the knowledge and experience to equip him for a political role. When he returned there was no one to equal him.

  Chapter 2

  LESSONS FROM THE AGE OF REASON

  Life in Paris

  Once he had ordered his affairs and secured his finances in Caracas, Bolívar set sail for Spain in October 1803 and reached Cadiz by the end of the year. But, as he planned his life anew, Spain did not satisfy his interests. He paused in Madrid, long enough to see his father–in–law and share his grief, and by mid August 1804 he was in Paris.

  At the age of twenty–one Bolívar’s looks, though restrained, were those of a young man somewhat arrogant and pleased with himself, fresh–faced, if the surviving miniature is correct, with regular features and frank eyes already questioning. Other sightings of those years remain elusive, though we know that he was of medium height, about five foot six, slim and narrow–chested. Fifteen years later his appearance had changed and he had become the Simón Bolívar known in the classic portraits. Daniel Florencio o’Leary, his loyal aide who saw him most days, recorded in his private notes a recognizable description:

  Gl B’s forehead was very high, but not unusually broad. It had many wrinkles. His eyebrows were thick, but well shaped; his eyes were dark and keen; his nose rather long and handsome…. His cheek bones were salient, his cheeks sunken ever since I first knew him (May 1818). His mouth was ugly, his lips being thick, the upper one long. His teeth were regular, white and beautiful. He took particular care of them. His jaw bones and chin were long. His ears were large. His hair, which he wore long (until it began to turn gray, 1822), was extremely black and curly…. His skin was dark and rough, his hands and feet remarkably small and pretty1

  In 1804 the days of youth were his glory, wrinkles and grey hairs unimagined.

  In Paris he rented a house in the rue Vivienne and took up with other exiles from South America. If the gossip can be believed, he passed with unseemly haste from grieving widower to profligate playboy, plunging into a crazed life of gambling and sex, feeding legends that he did nothing to dispel. Did he have countless women? Perhaps. There was certainly a favourite. Among the parties he attended were those of Fanny Dervieu du Villars, who presided over one of the more liberal salons of the time much frequented by the chattering classes and fringe elements of the demi–mondaine.

  In 1804 Fanny du Villars was a young woman, not yet thirty, married to a man, Count Dervieu du Villars, almost twice her age. Fair of face, with large blue eyes, smooth voice and languid movements, she immediately attracted Bolívar, who became a frequent visitor to her house. Was she th
e lover who assuaged his grief, unlocked his heart, released his spirit and satisfied his desires?2 In letters written years later she insists that he had loved her ‘sincerely’ and reminds him that he gave her a ring which she still wore; he had confided in her and shared ‘great plans’, while she had wept tears to prevent him leaving. Her looks may have gone with the years, but she was the same woman. Could he come to her assistance and enable her to buy the house in Paris where he had known her? She calls him ‘cousin’, asks him to look after their godson, Simón Briffard, and slyly hopes that he is ‘the only godson you have in Europe’.3 Were these fanciful recollections or calculating appeals? The letters were written between 1820 and 1826 and she seems to have been hoping to revive their relationship in times of hardship when she had three sons and a seventy–six–year–old husband to look after, and Bolívar had gone on to glory. Bolívar left Paris in 1806 and they never met again. He ignored her appeals and maintained a discreet silence.