Arcos, Santiago (1822–1874)

Santiago Arcos (b. 25 July 1822; d. September 1874), Chilean radical. The son of a Spanish father and a Chilean mother, Arcos was born in Santiago but grew up in Paris, where in 1845 he met his friend Francisco Bilbao (1823–1865). In 1847 he traveled in the United States (part of the time with the Argentine writer and politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento [1811–1888]) and from there went to Chile (February 1848). With Bilbao and others he formed the radical Sociedad de la Igualdad (Society of Equality) in April 1850. When the society was suppressed in November 1850, he was deported to Peru, from where he set out to visit the California goldfields. Back in Chile in 1852, he wrote (in prison as a subversive) his classic Carta a Francisco Bilbao (first printed in Mendoza, Argentina), an acute analysis of the defects of Chilean society. For this, he was swiftly banished to Argentina. In the 1860s he settled in Paris, where he remained for the most part. With the onset of fatal illness, he committed suicide by throwing himself into the Seine.

See alsoChile, Organizations: Society of Equality .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gabriel Sanhueza, Santiago Arcos, communista, millonario y calavera (1956).

Cristián Gazmuri, "El pensamiento político y social de Santiago Arcos," in Historia 21 (1986): 249-274.

Additional Bibliography

Jobet, Juilio César. "Las ideas sociales y políticas de Santiago Arcos y Francisco Bilbao (Reprinted from Atenea no. 208, 1942)." Atenea 481-482 (2000): 275-298.

                                                Simon Collier