Eliza Lynch

Eliza Lynch (3 June1835 - 27 July1886) was the mistress of Francisco Solano López, the president of Paraguay.

Early Life

She was born Eliza Alicia Lynch in Cork, Ireland. She emigrated at the age of ten with her family to Paris to escape the Great Irish Famine. In the year 1850, she married Xavier Quatrefages, a French officer who was shortly afterwards posted to Algeria. His young wife accompanied him. At eighteen years of age, tired of the remote desert outpost, Eliza returned to Paris, and courtesy of a few fortuitous introductions, entered the elite circle surrounding Princess Mathilde Bonaparte and quickly set herself up as a courtesan. [Margaret Nichols"The World's Wickedest Women".pgs34-34]

Paraguay

She was described as possessing a Junoesque figure, golden blonde hair and a provocative smile. It was perhaps those very qualities that appealed to a visiting South American a year after her return to France. It was 1854 whenEliza Lynch met Francisco Solano López, son of Carlos Antonio López, the president of Paraguay, one the wealthiest small southern nations in continental America. The young general Lopez in training with the Napoleonic army, kept his country's interests above all as fundamental reasons for his European journey. However, to his surprise closely surrounded by potential mistresses, some of royal blood, whom he reciprocated courtesies, to became smitten with the seductive Eliza and thus when he returned to Paraguay in 1855, she was decidedly by his side. Eliza Lynch would spend the next 15 years as the most powerful woman in the country.

When Solano López became president in 1862, she became "de facto" first lady as they never actually married. She supported him in his disastrous wars which led to the deaths of over three hundred thousand Paraguayans. Despised and reviled, she was expelled from the country in 1870, following the murder by ambush of Lopez on 1 March. Eliza died in obscurity in Paris on 27 July 1886. Over one hundred years later, her body was exhumed and brought back to Paraguay where the dictator General Alfredo Stroessner proclaimed her a national heroine.

Some people believe that Eliza Lynch was responsible in inducing Francisco Solano López to start the War of the Triple Alliance and that she provoked him to carry on the futile and bloody war against Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil.

Fiction

Eliza Lynch is often noted as the Paraguayan predecessor to the Argentine Evita (without the change of heart from aristocratic elitism to champion of the downtrodden). Due to the melodramatic appeal of her story, many fictionalized accounts of her life were written at the time and up to the present day, but the historical record is somewhat ignored and liberties are taken to maximize dramatic effect. Novels include:
*William Edmund Barrett, "Woman on Horseback" (1938)
* Graham Shelby, "Demand the World" (1990)
* Anne Enright, "The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch" (2003)
* Lily Tuck, "The News from Paraguay" (2004), which won the National Book Award for that year. See also "The Shadows of Eliza Lynch" by Sian Rees (Headline Review (6 January 2003)) and "The Empress of South America" by Nigel Cawthorne (William Heinemann, London 2003).

The play "Visions" (1978) by Louis Nowra depicts Lynch and López leading Paraguay to disaster in the War of the Triple Alliance.

Sources

#Margaret Nichols "The World's Wickedest Women".pps 34-35

References

External links

* [http://www.irlandeses.org/beautybeast.htm Murray, Edmundo "Beauty and the Beast: A Beautiful Irish Courtesan and a Beastly Latin American Dictator"]
* [http://www.irlandeses.org/elizalynchbiblio.htm Murray, Edmundo "Eliza Lynch (1835-1886): A Bibliography"]
* [http://tsc.com.ar/notacomp.php?id=632 Murray, Edmundo "¿Santa o cortesana?" in "The Southern Cross" (Buenos Aires) Vol. 133 No. 5933, February 2008 (in Spanish)]