Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon

Who was Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon?

Charles Rene Gaston Gustave de Raousset-Boulbon was a French adventurer, filibuster and entrepreneur and, by some accounts a pirate, and a theoretician of colonialism. During his life in France he was a typical "rural nobleman." He inherited the title of count and, as happened to many members of French nobility after the French Revolution, he spent his fortune gambling and drinking in Paris. He moved to Algiers, where his first theories about colonialism were born; the French Revolution of 1848 killed his hopes of making a new fortune on Africa and he returned to Paris, where he failed to integrate into a society where aristocrats were fading and giving way to a new bourgeoisie.

Unable to survive in France, he boarded a ship sailing to the Americas as a third-class passenger, disembarking in a Colombian port. His impressions are typical of a 19th-century aristocrat: A letter to a friend describes Colombia as:

...the true America, the Spanish America. Ruins, mendicants, racial degradation, the haphazard mixture of all kins of blood, vagabonds playing guitar... naked children, little savages running everywhere amongst dogs... All of it in an admirable state of Nature.