Die Republick der Jesuiten oder Das umgestürzte Paraguay, welches eine richtige Erzehlung des Krieges enthält, den diese Geistliche gegen die Monarchen Spaniens und Portugalls in America zu führen gewaget. Nach den Secretariats-Aufsätzen der beiderseitigen königl. Commissarien und Bevollmächtigten der zweyen Kronen.
8vo (16.7 x 10.3 cm). 68, [1] pp. Disbound, with marbled wrapper strip reinforcing spine. Apart from inconsequential marginal foxing, excellent. German edition (see below) of this tract celebrating the departure of the Jesuits from Paraguay by the ultimate engineer of that departure, the powerful Portuguese statesman the Marqués de Pombal. The tract—a translation of La republique des Jésuites au Paraguay renversée (1758), itself a translation of the original Portuguese Relação abbreviada da republica, que os religiosos Jesuitas … estabelecerão nos dominios ultramarinos (1757)—blames the Jesuits for the Guarani War of 1756, which pitted joint Spanish-Portuguese troops against the Guaraní Indians living in seven of the Jesuit Reductions. The war took a heavy toll on the Guaraní, who suffered over 1500 casualties to a European death toll of just three. The Spanish-Portuguese forces were thus able to take possession of the territory and, on Pombal’s order, effect the expulsion of the Jesuits from the region. The Jesuits were in fact not to blame for the conflict. In 1750, a treaty between Spain and Portugal had established the boundary between their respective territorial possessions along the Uruguay River, necessitating the relocation of the Guaraní from one bank to the other. The Jesuits surrendered control of the missions in 1754, but the Guaraní refused to comply with the relocation order and, after Spanish attempts to remove them had failed, Pombal gave orders for the armed incursion. The present tract contends that the Jesuits had amassed so much wealth and power in Paraguay that they functioned as a sovereign entity, defying all external authority. According to the text, the Indigenous populations under their jurisdiction had essentially become vassals, taking up arms against Spanish and Portuguese forces at the behest of their Jesuit superiors. Among its many accusations, the tract alleges that the Jesuits enforced linguistic isolation by communicating with the Indigenous people solely in their native languages to prevent any meaningful interaction with other Europeans, and that they were providing local tribes with arms to encourage insurrection. By all accounts, however, the Jesuits’ Paraguayan missions were run as peaceful, self-sustaining communes where local tribes took refuge from European traders and gold prospectors keen to enslave them. Before being appointed to Portugal’s highest administrative post—Minister of the Kingdom—in 1750, Pombal (1699-1782) had served as his country’s ambassador to both Austria and Great Britain. Having seen Britain’s commercial and intellectual progress first-hand, he returned to Portugal convinced that the Jesuits, with their grip on science and education, were impeding a similar enlightenment in Portugal. He engaged the Jesuits in an intense propaganda war, famously blaming them for the 1758 assassination attempt on Joseph I and using it as a pretext for expelling them from the country. Less contentiously, Pombal is also remembered for his swift and successful rebuilding of Lisbon following the calamitous earthquake of 1755. The tract is widely accepted as being authored by Pombal (see Sabin and Weller). The present edition is one of two editions of this German translation published in 1758; the other was published under title Die in Paraguai zerstöhrte Republik der Jesuiten. OCLC records only four copies of the present edition in the U.S. (JCB, Columbia, NYPL and Kansas); there are none of the other 1758 German edition.
* Brown, J.C. Cat. 1493-1800, 3:1189; Sabin 63901; Streit, R. Bib. missionum 3:692; Weller, E.O. Falsche Druckorte 1:92.
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