Funes, Gregorio (1749–1829)

Gregorio Funes (b. 25 May 1749; d. 10 January 1829), Argentine priest and statesman. Funes was born in Córdoba, educated at the College of Montserrat, and continued his studies at the University of San Carlos, where he received his doctorate in 1774. He studied in Spain at the University of Alcalá de Henares, where he received a law degree in 1778. After returning to Córdoba, he became dean of the cathedral in 1804 and was elected rector of the University of Córdoba (1808). Having become familiar with and sympathetic to the ideas of the Spanish Enlightenment while in Spain, he declared his support for the May Revolution in 1810.

The cabildo of Córdoba elected him representative to the Congress of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, where he became an ardent spokesman for the interior provinces, which felt alienated from Buenos Aires. In 1811, he supported a freedom of the press law, and in 1816, following the uprising of José Gervasio Artigas's supporters in Córdoba, Funes became governor of the province. A staunch supporter of public education, he was elected senator in General Juan Gregorio de Las Heras's national congress in 1820. In 1823 he edited the periodical El Argos de Buenos Aires, and in October of that year the minister of Colombia named him agent of that country in Buenos Aires, a post linking him to Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre, through whom he was offered the deanship of the cathedral of La Paz, Bolivia. Funes accepted Bernardino Rivadavia's reforms but protested what he thought were his anticlerical excesses. The best-known of his scholarly works is Ensayo de la historia civil del Paraguay, Buenos Aires y Tucumán (1816–1817). In 1825 he published Examen crítico de la constitución religiosa para el clero. He was elected deputy to the Constitutional Assembly in 1826, participating in the deliberations and in the formulation of a new constitution. Funes died in Buenos Aires.

See alsoEducation: Overview; United Provinces of the Rió de la Plata.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Guillermo Furlong Cardiff, Bio-bibliografía del dean Funes (Córdoba, 1939).

Ricardo Levene, A History of Argentina (1963).

Additional Bibliography

Acevedo, Edberto Oscar. "La ruptura en la historia: España entre el deán Funes y Echeverría." Investigaciones y Ensayos 43 (January-December 1993): 147-166.

Sábato, Hilda, and Alberto Rodolfo Lettieri. La vida política en la Argentina del siglo XIX: Armas, votos y voces. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003.

                              Nicholas P. Cushner