Antoine de Tounens was a lawyer in Périgueux, in the southwest of France, when he read La Araucana, the sixteenth-century epic by Alonso de Ercilla celebrating Mapuche resistance to Spain. Something in it seized him. In 1858 he sailed for Chile, landed at Coquimbo, and spent two years learning Spanish before traveling south to the Biobío frontier, the edge of independent Mapuche country. There he met the lonkos, the Mapuche chiefs, and made his pitch: guns and French backing in exchange for their recognition. The chiefs, including the powerful Kilapan, named him Great Toqui, supreme war leader. They likely calculated that a European voice might be heard in Santiago and Paris where their own had been ignored for three centuries.

On the 17th and 20th of November, 1860, Tounens issued two decrees proclaiming the Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia, with himself as King Orélie-Antoine I. He named the village of Perquenco his capital, designed a blue, white, and green flag, and had coins struck for a nation he called Nouvelle France. He wrote out a constitution and mailed copies to Chilean newspapers; El Mercurio printed an excerpt that December. To Tounens it was a real state being born. To the Chilean government, watching an unrecognized monarchy declare sovereignty over territory it meant to conquer, it was a provocation, and the timing could not have been worse for the Mapuche.

Chile moved fast. President José Joaquín Pérez ordered Colonel Cornelio Saavedra to arrest the self-styled king, and on the 5th of January, 1862, soldiers took him. On the 2nd of September a Santiago court declared Antoine de Tounens insane, and on the 28th of October it shipped him back to France. He would not let go. Three more times he attempted to return and reclaim his throne, and three more times Chile captured and deported him. In 1873 a Paris court formally ruled that he had never been a sovereign at all. He died in poverty in the village of Tourtoirac in 1878, worn down by repeated deportations and failed expeditions, still insisting he was king of a land he would never see again.

For the Mapuche, the episode was no joke. Tounens's pretensions gave Chile a pretext, and the Occupation of Araucanía that followed ended Mapuche independence by force, opening their land to settlers and soldiers. The kingdom itself refused to die. A French champagne salesman named Gustave Laviarde claimed the vacant throne, and a line of self-appointed pretenders has carried the title in exile in France ever since, eight of them across a century and a half, down to the present claimant. Travel writer Bruce Chatwin judged the whole afterlife to belong more to the obsessions of bourgeois France than to South American politics. Yet the Mapuche writer Pedro Cayuqueo sees a darker what-if, wondering whether a French-protected Araucanía might have spared his people the dispossession that came instead, the kind of fanciful possibility that, in a story this strange, refuses to feel entirely absurd.