Lastarria, José Victorino (1817–1888)

José Victorino Lastarria (b. 22 March 1817; d. 14 June 1888), intellectual and politician, the most active and brilliant mid-nineteenth-century Chilean Liberal. Lastarria had more than a touch of vanity. "Tengo talento y lo luzco" (I have talent, and it shows), he once told the Chilean congress. He did have talent. As a politician, his finest moments were in 1849–1850, when he was congressional leader of the resurgent Liberal opposition to the Conservative regime, a role for which he was arrested in November 1850 and briefly exiled to Peru. In 1851 he was expelled from congress. Later he held the office of minister of finance (1862) and minister of the interior (1876–1877). He was elected six times to the Chamber of Deputies (1849, 1855, 1858, 1864, 1867, 1870) and was a senator from 1876 to 1882. His many public services included diplomatic missions to Peru (1863), Argentina (1864), and Brazil (1879), and membership on the supreme court (1882–1887).

Lastarria's talent for active politics and diplomacy was limited. His true interests were intellectual and literary. He contributed to numerous newspapers and journals, serving as editor of El Siglo (1844–1845) and helping to found La Revista de Santiago (1848). An indefatigable "cultural entrepreneur," he was instrumental in founding the Sociedad Literaria (Literary Society) of 1842, an event regarded as the first real stirring of cultural life in postcolonial Chile. In a notable opening address to this society, Lastarria pleaded for an authentic national literature within the canons of modern romanticism. His own fiction, for example, Don Guillermo (1860), does not read well today, but his promotion of literature was tireless, and the several circles and academies he sponsored are vividly described in his Recuerdos literarios (1878), a remarkable intellectual autobiography. At his death, he left unfinished a prologue he had promised Rubén Darío (1867–1916) for his pathbreaking Azul (1888).

Lastarria urged a "philosophical" approach to historical writing and engaged in a famous polemic on the subject with Andrés Bello (1781–1865), whose ideas proved more enduring. Of greater positive influence was Lastarria's political-constitutional thought. Consistently liberal and democratic, it is best represented in his books Elementos de derecho constitucional (Elements of Constitutional Law, 1846), Bosquejo histórico de la Constitución chilena (Historical Outline of the Chilean Constitution, 1847), Historia constitucional de medio siglo (Constitutional History of Half a Century, 1853), and Lecciones de política positiva (Lessons in Positive Philosophy, 1874), the last of which reflects positivist influence, Lastarria having assimilated the thought of Auguste Comte (though not uncritically) in the 1860s.

See alsoBello, Andrés; Chile, Political Parties: Liberal Party.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bernardo Subercaseaux, Cultura y sociedad liberal en el siglo XIX: Lastarria, ideología y literatura (1981).

José Victorino Lastarria, Obras completas, 14 vols. (1906–1934).

Allen Woll, A Functional Past: The Uses of History in Nineteenth-Century Chile (1982), chaps. 1-2.

Additional Bibliography

Meléndez, Mariselle. "Miedo, raza y nación: Bello, Lastarria y la revisión del pasado colonial." Revista Chilena de Literatura 52 (April 1998): 17-30.

Subercaseaux, Bernardo. Historia de las ideas y de la cultura en Chile. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1997.

Troncoso Araos, Ximena. "El retrato sospechoso: Bello, Lastarria y nuestra ambigua relación con los mapuche." Atenea 488 (2003): 153-176.

                                                Simon Collier