Abstract

MERBILHAA, Margarita. The Scholars, between Science and Nation: Lugones in his Revue Sud-Américaine (1914). Prismas [online]. 2017, vol.21, n.1, pp.53-73. ISSN 1852-0499.

In this paper I analyze Leopoldo Lugones’s intellectual intervention in the Revue Sud-Américaine directed by him in Paris in the first half of 1914, which has been little studied. I intend to establish connections with regard to his general strategy, which was to raise the review in an intercontinental mediating role between European and latin-american ruling elites (as such having a non-official diplomatic function), and the papers that Lugones published in the seven issues of the review. Both these papers and the publishing decisions reveal an informative function on politics and economy, as well as a divulgating one, on scientific and technologic new knowledges, to latin-american readers (on topography, pedagogy, military industry, mathematics, poetry). Simultaneously, Lugones addressed to french readers, in its own language, and to public figures, peer-to-peer, like the entomologist Fabre and the politician Clemenceau. He also developed topics as diverse as the didactics of sciences, the knowledge on botany or folklore music (that will integrate then El Payador), in a continuity of his interests on Theosophy. Finally, the article shows that these papers are the space where Lugones could instruct to the elites, as spreading self-portraits of wise intellectual and promoter of State politics, from the distance of his recent Parisian domicile.

Keywords : Leopoldo Lugones - Revue Sud-américaine - Latin american reviews in Europe in early XXth century - Cientificism and spiritualism.

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