Qualla: Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia

Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A provincial French lawyer read an epic poem and decided to become a king. That sentence is where most versions of this story begin and end, played for laughs. But strip away the comedy and something more serious sits underneath: in 1860, the Mapuche nation was one of the last independent indigenous peoples in the Americas, holding a territory that Chile and Argentina both intended to seize. When Antoine de Tounens offered them an alliance with France, their leaders did not laugh. They were looking for any lever that might keep their homeland their own, and a strange Frenchman with promises was a lever worth pulling.

Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia: The Man Who Read Himself Into a Crown

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia: A Kingdom on Paper

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 h...

Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia: Declared Mad, Deported, Undeterred

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Kingdom of Araucanía and Patagonia: The Real Cost, and a Throne in Exile

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 nam...