Resistant at 17 years old, peacemaker of the Indians Chavantes du Mato Grosso at 20, Raymond Maufrais is not a beginner when he leaves for what will be his last expedition, at the age of 24. In 1949, he landed in French Guyana, dreaming of crossing the jungle on foot, alone, passing through the tumuc-humac mountains which are said as mythical as the Bleus blond Amerindians who would live there.
But beyond legends, the Amazon jungle has an implacable reality, where improvisation is to be excluded. Poorly prepared but determined, resourceful without the penny, good heart scampered by all, Raymond Maufrais sinks, in January 1950, in one of the least games and the most hostile regions of the planet and then … he disappears. He leaves behind a road book, testimony to his fight against hunger, loneliness and wilderness, and announces that he will be carried by the current. For everyone, it is obvious that Raymond Maufrais is dead. But, by receiving the affairs of his son, found by chance by an Amerindian, Raymond’s father, Edgar Maufrais, a simple accountant in Toulon, refuses to believe in his death. He then left for a thirteen -year -old quest, also biting with hope and fabricators, denying the inevitable. Sick and ruined, he returned from South America to find his wife who has become crazy about so many absences.
The mystery of Raymond Maufrais still haunts Guyanese memory. To unravel him, we have the two overwhelming newspapers: that of the son, who reveals an idealistic young man, in love with the absolute, whose ultimate journey embodies the border between dream of adventure and tragedy; and that of the father, more succinct and less literary, which, like a dark novel on obstinacy, sounds like a tragic ode to filial love.
Antoine de Tounens: the Patagon dream
In 1857, Antoine de Tounens, lawyer for Périgueux, bored. To restore France to the prestige that it has lost by abandoning Louisiana and Canada – and to bring its fascination to life for the great epics -, it embarks a year later for South America, with the idea of founding a kingdom in Patagonia and Araucania, regions then not controlled by the Chilean and Argentine states.
An adventure that inspired Jean Raspail
In 1860, he obtained the support of some Mapuche chiefs, the indigenous people who live there, and, with the support of the caciques and the cheers of the patagons to whom he delivered arms and provisions, he proclaimed himself Orllie-Antoine I, king of Araucania and Patagonia. He writes a constitution, strikes money, dreams of international recognition, invents two ministers with the names of which he legislates by changing writing. But his reign does not last: arrested by the Chilean authorities in 1862, he was declared mad and expelled to France.
Despite several attempts to return, he never managed to reconquer his kingdom. In Paris, his dreams are taken for fantasies, one of his donors going so far as to usurp his throne … He died in Tourtoirac in 1878, ruined but faithful to his dream. His adventure, on the border of delirium and political utopia, inspired Jean Raspail notably, who had the noble idea of this magnificent loser lost, and, more recently, the director Niles Atallah. Baroque and whimsical figure, Antoine de Tounens also made it possible to draw attention to the fragility of the Mapuche people: his heirs, proclaimed or supposed, perpetuate his inheritance by defending the right to exist from the Mapuches.
Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier: self-proclaimed king of Easter Island
Born in 1834 in Vienne, Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier dreams of great horizons: he joined the Navy, participated in the Crimean War, then left the Royal to sail in the Pacific. Merchant and trafficker, he provides regular connections between Tahiti and South America. In 1866, he set foot on Easter Island, then isolated and not very coveted, to land missionaries who came to help the Fathers Eugène Eyraud and Hippolyte Roussel, who already directed a mission. He then acquired land and tried to transform the island off the coast of Chile, for the benefit of France, but especially from his own business: he brought in 8,400 sheep, 150 oxen and around twenty horses on this pebble of the Pacific.
Charismatic but brutal, he quickly imposed himself among the Rapa Nui, the inhabitants of the island, but he fails to obtain the support of France, who does not see this upstart. Dutrou-Bornier marries an native woman, whom he chooses for queen at the same time that he proclaims her own royalty on the island. Las, his authority is based on force: he eliminates his opponents, sells islanders as labor in Tahiti and confronts Catholic missionaries, who blame him for his violence.
In 1876, he was killed during a local uprising. His death puts an end to a brutal domination but leaves the island deeply transformed: because of its raids but also of the bacteriological shock, the population went from 900 to … 150 inhabitants. Dutrou-Bornier can be understood as a distorting mirror of the epic of Antoine de Tounens, closer to the domineering usurper than the romantic adventurer, although fascinating by his very excesses.
