Resumo

SUAREZ ARGUELLO, Ana Rosa. Traveling as a Prisoner of War. Ernest Vigneaux and his Journey through the Mexico of Santa Anna. Estud. hist. mod. contemp. Mex [online]. 2004, n.27, pp.35-59. ISSN 0185-2620.

Mexico is traveled by the hand of a French man with liberal and republican ideas, who left his country in 1848, caught by the Californian fever and later, in 1854, attracted by the possibility of proclaiming an independent republic in the neighboring Sonora, he participates in the unsuccessful filibuster incursion of the count of Raousset-Boulbon. As a prisoner of war, and link of the human chain that is carried to Mexico City, he manages to separate from it in Guadalajara, to travel alone to the capital and then to leave by the port of Veracruz in 1855. The characteristics of his trip permit him to know the idiosyncrasy of the dictatorship of Santa Anna. Though he describes places and customs that are used to describe by other travelers, he is distinguished for his approximation to the wretched, which is expressed in a book analyzed in the second section of the article. The work of Vigneaux, published in 1863, intended to notify to his fellow citizens of what it could happen if the second French empire continued with its conquering plans: the Mexican people, to whom he knew very closely, was going to defend itself.

Palavras-chave : Ernest Vigneaux; Antonio López de Santa Anna; Napoleon III; California; filibuster; Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon; Sonora; Alphonse Dano; José María Yáñez; José María Ortega; France.