Egaña Risco, Juan (1768–1836)

Egaña Risco Juan (b. 31 October 1768; d. 20 April 1836), Chilean patriot and intellectual. One of the most learned men of his time and place, Juan Egaña Risco was born in Lima, the son of a Chilean father. He studied at San Marcos University, Lima, from which he graduated in 1789, the year he moved to Chile. An active patriot after 1810, he was a member of the first national congress (1811), for which he was banished to Juan Fernández (an island prison for exile of political prisoners) during the Spanish reconquest (1814–1817). He served several times in the congresses of the 1820s, but his moment of greatest influence came in 1823, when he was the principal author of the idiosyncratically conservative constitution of that year. It proved unworkable and was swiftly abandoned. Egaña's cast of mind was conservative, moralistic, and steeped in admiration for classical antiquity, the Inca empire, and China. Several volumes of his writings were published in London in the 1820s, and another volume in Bordeaux in 1836.

See alsoChile: The Nineteenth Century; Chile: Constitutions; Incas, The.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Raúl Silva Castro, Egaña en la Patria Vieja, 1810–1814 (1959).

Simon Collier, Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence, 1808–1833 (1967), chap. 7.

Additional Bibliography

Ivulic Gómez, Jorge. Importancia del Partido Conservador en la evolución política chilena. [Chile]: Universidad Bernardo O'Higgins, Area de Ciencia Política, 1998.

                                            Simon Collier